News » Thousand Words Project

Museum's language-arts initiative launches educational website, video

Bates News — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:02:05 +0000

For more than a decade, the Thousand Words Project has been the flagship educational outreach program of the Bates College Museum of Art.

Now the museum has launched an educational website for the program, complete with instructional video.

Designed for middle-school language arts teachers and students, but adaptable to all grades, the TWP uses artworks from the College Museum of Art collection to explore the creative processes in writing and the making of visual art. The new website centers on specifics of this process, including research, editing and revising, ideas, symbols and metaphors, lines and more.

“Creativity is at the heart of the TWP,” says Anthony Shostak, curator of education for the museum and originator of the TWP. “By giving students a long look into the creative process, we show them clear connections between communication and their studies across the disciplines, from art to history, to science and math — all while they are improving their writing and speaking skills.”

Lessons, along with ideas for going deeper, accompany the video, affording a valuable curriculum resource for teachers and homeschooling parents. By focusing on process, students gain skills through direct practice. Sequential sets of exercises build upon each other to allow students to write complete essays, enabling them to see the creative process through to fruition.

The development of the curriculum resources and website was made possible by generous support from private foundations. “Teachers who saw the video at a stakeholders’ meeting last fall were simply ecstatic over the quality and potential,” says Shostak. “The newest evolution of our program caught the attention of educators statewide, and we hadn’t even formally launched the video yet.”

The video was produced by Leighton Images of Durham. “This was a great project,” says co-producer Geoffrey Leighton. “Not only did we get to explore how writers and artists work, but we were able to use our skills as filmmakers and animators to convey the intangibles of the creative process.”

Adds co-producer Anita Clearfield, “What was exciting to me was the development of the online curriculum that supports the video. I loved knowing that we are giving teachers tools to really make this video work in the classroom.”

“The TWP has traditionally been offered as a museum tour or school visit, with me as the presenter,” says Shostak. “Now, using interviews with artists, animations and links to computer tools, the website is a vastly more powerful resource available to teachers right in the classroom.”

To learn more about the TWP, visit the website or contact Shostak by e-mail or at 207-786-8302.

Grant supports middle-school outreach at Museum of Art

Bates News — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 14:49:54 +0000

The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation of New York City has granted $150,000 to support the Thousand Words Project, a middle-school outreach program at the Bates College Museum of Art.

The program helps students better comprehend parallels between writing and making art. Using museum visits and the museum’s Web site, classes write criticism, essays, poetry and other materials that reflect their responses to the art or link the art with their studies in various fields.

“It’s a collaboration with local teachers where we provide resources and a framework for them to use our exhibitions and collections,” said museum education coordinator Anthony Shostak. “We believe that it’s a way that students can understand the interconnectedness not just between writing and art, but between all disciplines.”

Launched in 1996, the initiative is the museum’s flagship outreach project. About 100 students from the Lewiston-Auburn region took part in the program during the 2004-05 academic year.

The Sharp grant will provide four years of operating funds for the program, at $25,000 per year. The remaining $50,000 will be used to start an endowment for the program, but is contingent on the museum’s raising an equal amount in matching funds by Dec. 1.

An endowment will give the Thousand Words Project “a permanence that it might not otherwise have,” Shostak explained. That means that the community “can feel confident that we can build these connections and they won’t fall apart in a few years because of lack of funding.”

In fact, building connections is integral to the Thousand Words Project — connections between art and writing, between students and the arts, between the college and the schools, and between the college and other community organizations.

The local arts agency L/A Arts has acted as a liaison between Bates and local schools and made the project part of its pioneering work with the schools in visual literacy. “The work with L/A Arts is really crucial,” Shostak said. “Their very long relationship with our community puts even more weight behind this offering.”

“For many students, visiting an art museum for the first time can be pretty intimidating,” said Jen Ryan, the agency’s arts-in-education coordinator. “The Bates-L/A Arts program offers them the tools they need for a meaningful and fun museum experience. Our partnership with Bates introduces them to a free local resource that, we hope, they’ll continue to use throughout their lives.”

A Lewiston native, Shostak has worked at the museum since 1993. “I’m personally very dedicated to making connections with the public schools because I grew up here, and I know what it was like before the museum was here,” he said. “I really wanted something like this. It’s so gratifying to have a student tell me that they never knew this museum was here, but now they’re going to visit every show that we have.”

By establishing enduring relationships with local educators, he added, “we see the museum as a way the college can really make lasting contributions to its community.”

The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation was established in 1984 to extend its founder’s interests in education and the arts, primarily but not exclusively in New York City. It has supported education, the performing and visual arts, medical research and environmental efforts. Reflecting Peter Sharp’s own approach to business and philanthropy, the foundation aims to support cutting-edge initiatives while honoring tradition.

Founded in 1955 as the Treat Gallery, the Bates College Museum of Art occupied its present quarters in the new Olin Arts Center in 1986. Now reflecting artists of widespread significance from Maine and increasingly the world, its collection began with a donation of priceless materials representing the prominent American modernist Marsden Hartley, a Lewiston native.

The museum is a laboratory for the visual arts. Its goal is to create synergy with the campus, the community and the art world through exhibitions, scholarly programs, educational outreach and involvement across the Bates curriculum.

The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and is closed major holidays. For exhibition and other information, please visit the museum Web site.

Education coordinator Anthony Shostak works with local students visiting the art museum.

The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation of New York City has granted $150,000 to support the Thousand Words Project, a middle-school outreach program at the Bates College Museum of Art.

Grant supports public school programming at Bates museum

Bates News — Mon, 20 Jan 2003 17:50:06 +0000

A two-year, $50,000 grant recently received by the Museum of Art will support educational programming for 400 local middle school students at the museum.

The grant supports the museum’s Thousand Words Project. Launched in 1996, the project enhances not only students’ grasp of the visual arts but their writing skills. The museum’s key educational outreach program, the project integrates the museum into the middle schoolers’ curriculum — making it, in effect, an extension of the students’ own classrooms.

“The Thousand Words Project is very fulfilling, because students react so positively to it,” says education coordinator Anthony Shostak, who has overseen the the program since its inception. “They are simply excited to see original works of art in a museum setting, and they appreciate the challenge we give them to look at and think critically about the images.”

He says, “What we do is opposite to the spoon-feeding of images they are used to from TV and advertising.”

Through the project, students from middle schools in the Lewiston-Auburn region each make 10 visits to the museum. Working with Shostak, student interns and professional writers-in-residence, the visitors learn to look actively at the art on display, developing their critical responses and examining their emotional reactions to it.

Then they articulate these thoughts through writing assignments that progress from simple descriptions to more layered and creative work such as fiction, poetry or journalistic writing.

“With this program we underscore the importance of cultural and visual literacy by linking them to standard literacy,” explains Shostak. “Students experience the cross-fertilization that has historically occurred between the arts and other disciplines.”

“Part of the success of the Thousand Words Project stems from the fact that students are truly hungry for all of the art and art history training they can get,” Shostak adds. “Moreover, we don’t just offer something schools don’t provide, like some kind of field trip. The project is collaborative — fully integrated into the curricula of the schools — and thus assists in achieving Maine Learning Results standards.”

The Museum of Art was founded to preserve the nation’s largest repository of Marsden Hartley drawings and other items relating to this important American artist, a Lewiston native. Its other holdings include a robust print collection and notable works by Maine artists of national significance, such as Dahlov Ipcar, the late William Thon, Neil Welliver and Charles Hewitt.

The flagship museum for the Maine Art Museum Trail, the Museum of Art is located in the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. Admission is free. The museum is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1 p.m.-5 p.m. Sunday (closed major holidays). For additional information, please call 207-786-6158.