To date, schools in Pennsylvania, Florida and Delaware have been
involved. The project provides teachers with a lesson plan and other
resources, including oil sticks and a black light. A recent session was
held in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, at the end of May, with Daulton helping
in that Pittsburgh-area school.
At the Campus Community School, a charter elementary school in Dover,
Delaware, art teacher Jennifer Boland used the toolkit’s resources in a
lesson with her seventh graders. Boland, also an art history professor
at Delaware Technical Community College, was already a fan of Basquiat’s
work when she heard about the K-12 outreach and jumped at the chance to
share it with her students.
“They [the conservators] shared this amazing research they had done,
with the history of the images, and a great PowerPoint they created to
explain it,” Boland said. “As classroom teachers, we don’t always have
time to do this kind of presentation, so it was wonderful to be able to
use the one they developed.”
Over three days, her students learned about Basquiat’s work and about
how conservators use science to study art. They created their own
paintings, with a theme of “creatures,” and used oil sticks to hide
images that could be revealed under black light.
The students were creative and enthusiastic about the project, Boland
said. She described a painting of a dinosaur-like creature with staring
eyes; black light showed tears behind those eyes. Another creature
featured alarmingly big teeth; under the black light, viewers could see
tiny creatures he had eaten.
“It was a good chance to combine science and art,” Boland said. “And
the kids were really engaged. Weeks later, they were still talking to me
every day about this lesson.”