Studio Activities

Narrative Collection Collage

Students will learn the fundamentals of storytelling, including plot, setting, and character development, and interpret and present these concepts in their own collages. They will also take part in an inclusive theatrical presentation their artwork. An optional activity asks students to title their works and write an accompanying story.

Curator for a Day

Working independently or in small groups, students will curate their own mini exhibition using a variety of artworks from the NBMAA’s collection that relate to a predetermined theme or question. Collectively students then analyze and reflect upon their curatorial decisions and interpretations.

Poetry Workshop

Working independently or in groups, students will explore different types of poetry, including haiku, couplet, or acrostic that are directly inspired by works of art in the collection at the NBMAA. The session concludes with a student poetry reading.

Landscape Postcards

Looking at and responding to a range of landscape painting in the NBMAA’s collection, students will discover and analyze a variety of techniques that artists use to create the illusion of space. Students will also investigate how the relationship of people and the environment is portrayed over time. Students will then create their own landscape drawings using key elements of art to structure their composition and add watercolor to explore texture, depth, and mark making skills. An optional message can be written on the back of the students’ postcard-sized landscape using descriptive writing full of sensory details about the landscape depicted.

Cityscape Collage

What makes a community successful? After considering the many ways artists in the NBMAA collection depict city and country life, students will visit the art studio to further their discussion of the sights and sounds of the city and create an original three-dimensional, pop-up "cityscape" collages out of construction paper, color sticks, and crayons.

Exquisite Corpse

Students will have fun working together to create an artwork in the classic “exquisite corpse” tradition, using written prompts, creative problem solving, and team building to make one image out of a collection of images and words gathered by the group.

Benches

What are the similarities between the work of artists and engineers? Join Museum Educators for an interactive tour and studio experience, during which students will learn to become creative problem solvers by looking at various artworks from a technical standpoint. This program will emphasize the NBMAA’s impressive collection of unique works of “touchable” art in the galleries—our artist-designed bench collection—and students will respond to this remarkable experience by reflecting and translating their favorite works of art from the tour into miniature paper benches using a variety of materials.

Puppet Self Portraits

Students will create individual puppet self-portraits that reflect what they learned on their docent-led tour through the NBMAA galleries, focusing on color, texture, and the beautiful seasons of New England.