I am just beginning a Charlotte Mason education with my son who is 6. In my research of various offerings for music and artist study, it seems many are lacking in diversity and tend to focus only on one particular demographic (white males). I have a music background and feel confident I can pull from my own resources for music study, but my knowledge is limited when it comes to artist study. Does anyone know of resources that would offer a broader representation, including African American artists, female artists, and representation from other cultures? I’m curious why the focus often seems so narrow? I think it would be great if Simply Charlotte Mason could explore this, too!
Here are a few that come to mind that are either not European or may be European but are female.
Katsushika Hokusai 1760-1849 (Japanese)
Berthe Morisot 1841-1895
Frida Kahla 1910-1954 (Mexican)
Georgia O’Keeffe 1887-1986
Nam Paik 1932 – present (Korean)
Faith Ringgold 1930-present (African American)
I think the issue is that when you look for artist studies often you see the classic art periods studied in colleges and during those time periods generally men were the only people accepted as artists. You may want to consider looking for art that represents specific cultures, such as Aboriginal art for Australia, to get a different cross section, but you may not get individual famous artists for each of those.
We just started Spike Jones. (High brow musicians wouldn’t consider him important — but he was, in his own way.) I’m using some CDs that I own and finding the original versions of the songs on Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime also has a documentary of his life. My girls are protesting watching that — but I’m enjoying it! *L*
For composer study — it doesn’t have to be more than reading a wikipedia article about their lives and listening to their music.
classics for kids (dot) com has nice 5 minute biographies of various composers and sometimes you can find notebooking pages by googling the composers.
For African American composers, try some of these:
William Grant Still
Scott Joplin
Olly Wilson
Duke Ellington
Louis Moreau Gottschalk
Shirley DuBois
William Dawson
If you can find a copy of The Music Teacher’s Book of Lists, there are tons of women composers listed. And listings of composers by country. And lots of other lists.
Thanks for asking this question! My boys aren’t yet old enough for any formal homeschooling, but this is an issue that has been on my mind. Here are a two links that I have used to gather info about women artist and painters, I’m putting my own artist studies together.</p> http://nosmokingmedia.com/features/art-herstory-christa-zaat/
Thank you all so much! I really appreciate your ideas and recommendations and have made note of them. The names and links are very helpful. Karen, I have actually referred to classicsforkids.com quite a bit. I love that site!
It’s funny you posted this question, because I was looking for an American artist for study. Someone closely affiliated with the birth of our nation. I picked Gilbert Stuart,and James john Audubon which led into a bird study. I used the bird book by Marguerite Henry to trace a picture out of it of birds commonly found in our area. Then our children and I colored them in with pencils, and crayons and put them in a decorative binder in a central location, so guests like friends and family could see our pictures. Our youngest ds7 did a great job and they were encouraged also, to fill the pictures in in the backgrounds so they would truly be different, but similar. Also ds 14 and dd 10 participated. When were studied birds, I read the burgess bird book about the specific type of bird while they added color. Also, ben west is another study for this year. Ben west and his cat grimalkin maybe a good read aloud with the study, maybe too hard for 6, although I read it when youngest was 6.