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.
Maine 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.
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.
American 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.
Modern and Contemporary Art
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.
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
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.
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.