EYES OF THE CITY

Ellis Island/ Library of Congress

The Eyes of the City

THE SITUATION: The turn-of-the-century city fascinated artists. In this activity, you are an art critic drafting an essay for a catalogue accompanying an exhibition, Eyes of The City, that includes paintings and photographs from the early 1900s.

OBJECTIVES:

RESOURCES:

 
THE ACTIVITY: (60 min.)  

Step 1:  Skim the excerpt from Who Built America to get background on the birth of the modern American city, circa 1900-1915. (Ten minutes).

Step 2: Studying the Ashcan School (20 minutes). Working with a partner, examine the work of a group of painters known as the Ashcan School, through an exhibition at the National Museum of American Art web site, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York.


Navigating directions: On the opening page of the exhibition, click on the painting to get an introductory screen.. When that screen opens, you'll see a set of categories in the upper left hand corner, and clicking on them will take you to various parts of the exhibition. Explore the collection, reading the curator's notes and examining images. (To blow up images, click on them.)

After you have scanned through the collection, pick one or two paintings to focus on. Look carefully at the image and take some notes. What do you see in this painting? What feeling do you get from it? What information can you glean about the nature of life in the changing city? What can you tell about the attitudes of the artist?
  
Step 3: Urban Documentary Photographers of the 1900s (15 min): Now consider some photographs taken in New York City in the early twentieth century.


Read "Seeing Is Believing" a brief discussion of social documentary photography (in "The Story" section) of the Heaven Will Protect The Working Girl web site.

Examine the photographs available on the Heaven web site by clicking below:

If you want, you can  examine more photographs and images available on the Title 3 website in three galleries beginning at: http://socrates.bmcc.cuny.edu/title3/photos1.htm   (Focus on the photos, although there are other images to give you a sense of how turn-of-the-century city life was portrayed).

Pick one or two to examine in detail.  

Step 3: Preparing Your Essay: (15 minutes). Sketch the outline of an essay comparing the painters of the Ashcan school and the early 20th century social documentary photographers. How are they similar and different. What subjects did they focus on? What feelings does their work convey? What can you tell about the attitude of the artist towards their subject? How does the different medium used by these artists affect the nature of their work?
 
 
SMALL GROUP DISCUSSION: (45 minutes total). Meet and talk with other teams doing this activity:

Share your thoughts about the images you examined closely, and your draft outlines. Discuss what was occurring in New York at the time these artists were at work. In what ways are these images accurate reflections of urban life at that time? What can we learn from them? What aspects of urban life do they omit or overlook?

Reflect on your experience doing this research and participating in this activity. What different types of learning took place in the course of this activity? How did the different types of materials complement each other? Was it valuable to combine video, web-based primary documents, and other kinds of text resources? How did that affect your learning?

How might this activity, or a variation of it, play in your classroom? How would you reshape it for students? Where could it fit into your courses?

If you were creating a larger unit, what other kinds of materials would you add to the resources you used? Would they be digital materials? Literature? Academic or scholarly texts? What kinds of additional activities would you design? How would you structure the activities into a cohesive, integrated unit?