Super honored to be presenting License to Cull: Art History, Media Literacy, Ethics and Photoshop with my stellar art colleagues, Yoshiko Maruiwa and Katelin O’Hare from the The School at Columbia University.
We’ll share an integrated unit that examines fine art and the fine print. Students learn about ownership, copyright, licensing, media literacy, fair use, Creative Commons, Wikimedia and Photoshop.
See our slides full of links and resources below:
As part of the 6th grade integrated study of the Renaissance in English, Social Studies, Science, Art, Music, and Wellness, we designed a Photoshop unit where students locate a Renaissance painting and layer themselves into it as either the main character or an additional character. While we teach the basics of Photoshop, we also facilitate rich discussions about a variety of topics including ownership, copyright, licensing, fair use, and the public domain. Our students use their assigned laptops to research, collaborate, and create throughout the unit. We discuss the Mona Lisa’s various owners and examine a variety of copyrightable contributions that have been made to Leonardo da Vinci’s original art from multiple artists over the years. We read the fine print and Terms of Use for Google Art Project and Artstor. We talk about how Photoshop is utilized to manipulate most images on advertisements and in magazines and how that affects body image and society’s standard of beauty. We discuss ways to locate fair-use art and dissect licenses from Creative Commons to encourage respectful and ethical use of others’ artistic creations. Further, we discuss the lawsuit between the Associated Press and Shepard Fairey over Fairey’s Barack Obama Hope poster. After completing their Photoshop collage, the students added their images to a shared online album. Additionally, students included their work on their digital art portfolios where they were expected to write an “artist statement” for their piece and comment on their classmates’ creations.
Karen Blumberg 