Teaching Kits may be borrowed for three weeks or purchased for $30. We ask that you return the kits promptly so other borrowers may use them. If borrowed materials are not returned within one week of the return date, the Museum will invoice your school. All Portland Museum of Art Classroom Kits are provided for educational use only. Teaching Kits have been supported by the Madelyn Busker Cohen Fund at the Portland Museum of Art. 

To order a Teaching Kit, please contact the Coordinator of School Programs at 775-6148, ext. 3226 or email srodenberger@portlandmuseum.org.

Teaching Kits are listed thematically, with the format (either slides or posters) at the end of each title. Full descriptions of the kits follow the thematic list.  

Maine Artists

 

American Art and History         

 

Modern and Contemorary Art

 

 

 

Photography       

 

Printmaking        

 

World Arts         

 

Maine Artists

The Allure of the Maine Coast: Robert Henri & His Circle, 1903-1918 – 20 slides

Since the 19th century, Maine has been an escape and inspiration to America’s artists. Robert Henri came to Maine and then encouraged his students, Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, and George Bellows, to follow in his footsteps. This kit includes landscapes and seascapes by these important American artists.  

A Solitude of Space: The Paintings of Thomas Crotty – 10 posters

This kit compares Crotty’s intensely realistic paintings of the Maine landscape with other representations from the Museum’s collection. Crotty's precise realism and dramatic effects of light bring the Maine landscape to life, and make for interesting comparisons to artists like Winslow Homer, Richard Estes, and Neil Welliver.  

Winslow Homer: Facing Nature – 20 slides

Winslow Homer is considered one of America’s finest painters. This kit concentrates on Homer’s landscapes and seascapes. One of his techniques was to paint en plein air, the act of painting directly from nature. Many of the paintings depict his favorite Maine locations.  

Dahlov Ipcar: Seven Decades of Creativity – 10 posters

The daughter of Marguerite and William Zorach, Ipcar has had a long and successful career as an artist. Trained only by her parents, Ipcar's work shows both their influence and her departure from their styles. This kit features her early regionalist style, her love and fascination with animals, her collage-like paintings, and soft sculpture. Her joyful, colorful works speak to students of all ages.  

Rockwell Kent: The Mythic and the Modern – 10 posters

Kent was among the first generation of American modernist painters, and this kit explores the evolution of his artistry and his engagement with modern art and ideas. His paintings of elemental nature—glaciers, mountains, and restless seas—and his illustrated memoirs of adventure resonated with the 20th-century American public. This kit includes images of paintings as well as Kent’s commercial work.  

Bernard Langlais: Independent Spirit – 10 posters

Bernard Langlais was, in many ways, the quintessential Maine artist. His powerful personality, connection to the Maine woods, and accessible style of sculpture make him a favorite among Maine art lovers. This collection of work offers a chance to see some of his little known abstract work, his well-loved large-scale wooden collages, and charming freestanding sculpture of animals.   

Louise Nevelson: Structures Evolving – 20 slides

Louise Nevelson is considered one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. Nevelson was raised in Rockland, Maine where her father owned a lumber business. Because of this, wood was a part of her life and became the primary material in her sculpture. These slides explore her large scale, dynamic sculptures that were painted in solid colors of black, white, and gold.  

Andrew Wyeth at 80: A Celebration – 20 slides

This kit of Andrew Wyeth's work shows the progression and maturation of his lengthy career and the seemingly universal style so connected with the state of Maine. Slides include examples of his work from the loose, colorful watercolors of his early career to the more controlled, detailed tempera compositions and light-infused canvases of subsequent decades.   

N. C. Wyeth: Precious Time – 19 slides

N. C. Wyeth is best known for his work as an illustrator, commissioned to tell other people’s stories. While his professional career consisted of illustration, on his personal time Wyeth created wonderful paintings of grandeur, subtlety and beauty.  

Marguerite and William Zorach: Harmonies and Contrasts – 10 posters

This husband and wife duo helped pioneer American modern art with sculpture, painting, textile art, and drawing. From their home in Robinhood Cove, Maine, the Zorachs influenced a generation of artists. This collection of work may inspire conversation about the history of art and the history of Maine and America in the early 20th century.  

American Art and History

A Look Inside: 19th-century American Art and Architecture at the Portland Museum of Art – 15 posters

This teaching kit features the Museum's McLellan House (1801) and its 19th-century American art collection. It includes 15 posters showing interior and exteriors views of the McLellan House, decorative arts, landscape paintings, and portraits. Discussions and activity ideas address local and national history as well as style in art, architecture, and furniture.   

Becoming a Nation: Americana from the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State – 11 posters

The Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the Department of State contain one of the most extraordinary collections of Americana in the world. Connect to your American History curriculum through some of the finest examples of American paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, and furniture of the Colonial and Federal periods.  

American ABC: Childhood in 19th-Century America – 10 posters

The American ABC exhibition demonstrates how portrayals of the nation’s youngest citizens took on an important symbolic role in the United States’ long journey toward maturity, and it provides a window into the everyday life of the period—the world of families, children’s pastimes, and the routines of the schoolhouse. Artists featured in this kit include Winslow Homer, George Catlin, and Lilly Martin Spencer.  

Calico and Chintz: Early American Quilts from the Smithsonian – 10 posters

Celebrate early American creativity in these functional and beautiful works of art. Learn about domestic life in 18th- and 19th- century America as you explore the wonderful colors, patterns, and textures of these quilts.  

In Search of the Promised Land: Paintings by Frederic Edwin Church – 20 slides

The life and work of Frederic Church, painter and world-traveler, is an important story in the history of American art. As the most popular landscape painter of the mid-19th century, Church’s images helped to define American character and identity. This kit includes images by his teacher, Thomas Cole, and his contemporaries, Winslow Homer and Albert Bierstadt that place Church in the broader context of American art.  

Modern and Contemporary Art

Rodin: Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collection – 14 slides

Rodin's bronze sculptures changed the direction of twentieth century sculpture. He moved away from sculpture that mirrored realistic form to explore impressionism and the role of the sculptor.  To Rodin, sculpture, like painting, could be the expression of an idea and the personal interpretation of vision. 

Impressions of the Riviera: Monet, Renoir, Matisse and their Contemporaries – 20 slides

From 1880 to 1940 artists like Monet, Cézanne, Braque, and many others flocked to the French Riviera to capture the essence of this unique region known for its breathtaking landscapes and intense light. They worked together and alone, in studios and outdoors, creating dramatic and beautiful impressions of the landscape.  

Neo-Impressionism: Artists on the Edge – 10 posters

Students are forever fascinated by the complexity of Pointillism. Georges Seurat, his fellow pointillists, and other neo-impressionists are the subject of this resource kit. Their attempt to keep color separate on the canvas so the eye could blend it was essential to a generation of painters to follow. Works in this resource kit are a wonderful entry into conversations about the scientific research that influenced the movement, color theory and the mechanics of the human eye, and French history and language. 

Paris and the Countryside: Modern Life in Late-19th-Century France – 11 posters

This kit features works by Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and others who found inspiration in the modern life of France as subject matter for their paintings. Impressionism and Realism were styles used by artists to portray the bustling modern city and the bucolic countryside of Paris and its surroundings, and these works explore what the very notion of a modern life, in its many facets, meant in France in the late 1800s.

Picasso, Braque, Léger & the Cubist Spirit 1919-1939 – 20 slides

Cubism is the art movement that liberated artists from stylistic rules and regulations. The forerunners of the Cubist movement—Picasso, Braque, and Léger—each explored flat space, arbitrary color, and unnatural representations of their subjects. This kit examines the work of important Cubist artists during the period between the world wars, when the art movement became a worldwide phenomenon. 

Monet to Matisse, Homer to Hartley: American Masters and Their European Muses – 10 posters

Explore pairings of European and American art to examine the rich exchange of ideas between Europe and America from 1870 to 1950, including a variety of art movements such as Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Realism. Artists include Homer, Courbet, Calder, Miro, Kuhn, and Cézanne.  

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Würth Museum Collection – 10 posters

Famous for their fabric installations involving urban and rural sites, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have created some of the most controversial and compelling public artworks of the 20th century. Their installations have been captured in photography, giving permanence to these temporary artworks.  

Photography

Making it Real – 20 slides

This contemporary photography kit features the work of 31 artists who question the "realness" of photographs in a time when digital images can be manipulated and deceptive. Rather than use the digital technology, these photographers use low-tech means to unveil the illusions created by the camera and the photograph. Artists include Cindy Sherman and Sandy Skoglund.  

In Praise of Nature: Ansel Adams and Photographers of the American West – 20 slides

Ansel Adams is synonymous with 20th-century photography and the American landscape.  Rather than create his style in a vacuum, this artist and activist was inspired by those who preceded him and fueled by artists who worked at his side. This is an excellent selection for a discussion of the history of photography and its impact on our perceptions of the environment. 

Robert Doisneau’s Paris – 10 posters

Robert Doisneau’s famous photograph The Kiss captured the spirit of the city of love. This image of a young couple kissing on the streets of Paris is one of the many important works featured in this kit, which discusses the challenges of documentary photography, the culture of Paris in the mid-20th century, and connects to studies of the French language.  

Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-36 – 6 posters

Before she began traveling throughout the world to document current events, Bourke-White created evocative abstract photographs of American industry and architecture. This exhibition examines the works produced during this preeminent photographer's critical early years. 

Sebastiao Salgado: Migrations—Humanity in Transition and The Children – 5 posters

In this powerful series of photographs from the 1990s, Salgado documents the effects of globalization and migration around the world. This kit features five posters of immigrants in Asia and shows the striking contrasts between old and new, rich and poor. 

In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers – 10 posters

Celebrating 50 years of Magnum Photos, Inc., one of the world's most renowned photographic agencies, this kit features images of some of the most momentous events of the recent past from the Second World War to Vietnam to the Civil Rights Movement as well as pictures of the quieter side of human existence with scenes of family life, religion, cityscapes, and landscapes around the world. 

Printmaking

Lasting Impressions: Contemporary Prints from the Bruce Brown Collection – 20 slides

Lasting Impressions is an eclectic assortment of contemporary prints selected from the extensive collection of long-time high school teacher Bruce Brown. The prints Brown has acquired represent many different kinds of printmaking such as etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs, and include important Maine and American artists, many of whom are well known for their work in other media such as painting and sculpture. Artists include Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Richard Diebenkorn, Alex Katz, Donald Judd, and Kiki Smith. 

In Print: Contemporary Artists at the Vinalhaven Press – 20 slides

The Vinalhaven Press was founded in 1984 on the island of Vinalhaven, Maine. The artists at Vinalhaven use traditional printing techniques such as woodcuts, etching, and lithography while experimenting with new technologies like computer graphics and the Internet. Artists represented include Mel Chin and Robert Indiana. 

World Arts

Maps, Myths, & Monsters: Images of Fantasy and History on Early Maps – 20 slides

Maps offer historical insights; a wealth of knowledge on political, cultural, religious, and scientific issues; and overt and hidden symbolism. Maps are also fabulously imaginative works of art. These early maps can be used in a variety of interdisciplinary approaches and contain fantastic imagery for students of all ages. 

Affinities of Form: Arts of Africa, Oceania & the Americas from the Raymond and Laura Wielgus Collection – 20 slides

This kit showcases an outstanding collection of artifacts and rare objects that reflect the spiritual, political, and social systems of a variety of cultures. The exhibition includes South Pacific objects for personal adornment, household use, and ceremonies; Edo masks; and an African Lulua figure. 

Spirit of the Mask – 20 slides

Mask making is a part of every culture in the world. From theatrical productions and holidays to fertility rituals and harvest events, masks play a part in representing, describing, and illustrating the cultures that create them. This exhibition is a wonderful way to explore world culture, world religion, and mixed media.