Grade 10 · secular
This is a course in looking hard at art and arguing about it with evidence, not a course where your kid paints or draws. Over a full year they'll learn the specific words for how a picture or sculpture is built — line, shape, color, composition, medium — and then use those words to figure out why a Greek statue, a stained-glass window, a Monet, and a Picasso each look the way they do, given who made them and who paid for them. Every single work they study is a real object in a real museum's online collection, so they're always looking at an actual high-resolution image, not a textbook thumbnail. By the end, they should be able to walk into any museum, stop in front of something they've never seen before, and write or say something specific and defensible about it — not "I like it" but "here's what's happening in this piece and here's why."
The whole year, in plain English. Tap any unit to see every skill inside, nothing is hidden.
This is where your child learns the actual words for how art is built — line, shape, color, composition, medium, scale — before they're allowed to say what anything means. For the first two weeks they'll look at images with almost no context (no title, no artist, no date) and just describe what's physically there. The habit being installed is catching themselves the moment they slide from 'the arm makes a diagonal line' into 'the figure looks sad' — that slide is the single most common mistake in student art writing, and this unit exists to interrupt it before it becomes automatic.
Given an unfamiliar image, the student identifies and labels instances of line, shape, form, space, and texture using correct terminology.
The student distinguishes hue, value, and saturation as three independent properties of color and correctly classifies a change in a given swatch or image detail as a change in one, two, or all three.
The student explains how a specific compositional choice (placement, diagonal, framing, use of negative space) creates visual balance or imbalance in a given work.
Given a written description of a work, the student determines which statements are description (verifiable in the object) and which are interpretation (a claim about meaning, mood, or intent) by identifying the evidentiary basis of each claim.
The student compares two works of substantially different medium and scale (e.g., a fresco and a small bronze) and infers what constraints of that medium and scale plausibly shaped the visible formal choices.
Given a museum-collection image never discussed in class, the student produces a written analysis that describes formal properties before advancing any interpretive claim, using at least eight vocabulary terms correctly and marking the boundary between description and interpretation explicitly.
The student generalizes the description-before-interpretation principle to a non-art domain (e.g., a photograph in a news article, an advertisement, a data visualization) and explains why the same discipline of separating observation from claim applies there.
The student recalls the standard definitions of patron, provenance, attribution, iconography, workshop, and commission when given the term or a one-sentence description.
Your child compares Greek and Roman sculpture with Nok and Ife sculpture from West Africa — two different traditions that solved the same problems (how do you carve a standing human body, how do you tell a sacred story in stone or bronze) in very different, equally deliberate ways. The point isn't which one is 'better' — the course actively fights that framing — it's what each solution reveals about the culture that chose it.
Given an unlabeled photograph of a standing Greco-Roman figural sculpture, students identify whether contrapposto is present and point to the specific formal evidence (hip shift, weight distribution, S-curve of the spine) that supports the claim.
Students explain why Classical Greek sculptors idealized the human body (proportion systems, civic/religious ideals of arete and divine perfection) rather than recording an individual's actual appearance, citing at least two functions the idealized body served in Greek civic or religious life.
Students classify an unfamiliar relief sculpture fragment as using register (banded/horizontal) composition or continuous narrative composition, based on how figures and ground lines are organized.
Students summarize the documented ritual and civic functions of Nok and Ife terracotta and bronze figures (ancestor commemoration, shrine use, kingship/ritual authority) using at least three pieces of textual or archaeological evidence from assigned sources.
Given one Greco-Roman sculpture and one West African terracotta or bronze figure that neither addressed the same problem in class discussion, students infer what formal problem each artist/workshop was solving (representing weight-bearing stance, representing status, representing narrative sequence) by comparing the two side by side.
Students critique the claim, found in some older museum labels and textbooks, that Greek sculpture is "more advanced" than West African sculpture of the same period, by identifying the unstated assumption about what counts as artistic progress that the claim relies on.
Given a completely new, previously unseen pair of ancient sculptural traditions from outside the Mediterranean/West Africa case studies (for example, Olmec and early Chinese Shang bronze figures), students generate a comparative argument about what formal problem each tradition solved, applying the same comparative method without being told to do so.
Given a museum wall label describing a work from a sculptural tradition never named in this course (for example, an Andean Moche stirrup-spout ceramic figure or an Aboriginal Australian carved memorial pole), students critique whether the label's language relies on a single-hierarchy assumption about artistic progress, without being told the label contains such language or being cued to look for it.
Students plan the structure of a paired-image comparative essay by selecting one Greco-Roman and one West African work, identifying the shared formal problem each solves, and outlining the evidence they will use for each of three required claims (formal description, cultural function, comparative insight).
Students recall the definitions of contrapposto, idealization, register composition, patron, and workshop when given the term in isolation.
Your child learns to read a stained-glass window, altarpiece, or manuscript page the way a historian reads a legal document — as evidence of who paid for it and what they wanted it to do — while also learning that this reading is different from (and doesn't replace) how a medieval worshipper actually experienced the same image.
Given an unfamiliar Gothic stained-glass or altarpiece image, students identify at least three iconographic conventions (e.g., halo, specific color coding, attribute objects, scale hierarchy) and state the standard meaning each convention carried for a medieval viewer.
Students explain how a typological pairing (an Old Testament scene positioned to visually predict or comment on a New Testament scene, e.g., Jonah/Resurrection) creates an argument about Christian history that neither scene makes alone.
Given a commissioned work's donor portrait, inscription, or placement within a building, students infer what the patron most likely wanted communicated to the original audience, distinguishing patron intent from artist's personal expression.
Students compare a historian's evidentiary reading of a reliquary or altarpiece with a devotional/ritual reading of the same object, articulating what each reading can and cannot claim about the object's meaning.
Students classify a set of unfamiliar medieval commissioned objects (a psalter page, a civic tapestry, a reliquary, a rood screen) by primary function (teaching, devotion, civic display) using evidence from scale, placement, and imagery rather than object category alone.
Given two commissioned medieval images and a short period text (e.g., a donor's will or church record) that the student has not seen before, students construct a written argument for what a specific patron wanted communicated to a specific original audience, citing specific visual evidence and the text.
Students critique a museum wall label's claim about a work's attribution or patron by identifying what evidence the label omits or overstates, given the same evidentiary standards taught in this unit.
Students recall the definitions of iconography, typology, patron, commission, workshop, and provenance without reference to a specific image, using each correctly in a sentence about a medieval example from class.
Your child learns linear perspective and chiaroscuro as constructed technical systems — invented tools built inside a specific business of commissions and workshops — not as a neutral, automatic way of showing what the eye sees. They'll actually construct a one-point perspective drawing themselves, then move into attribution puzzles (whose hand painted this, really?) using real commission contracts.
Given an unlabeled Renaissance-era painting, identify the vanishing point and trace at least three orthogonal lines that converge on it.
Construct an original one-point perspective drawing of a simple interior space using a ruler, a marked vanishing point, and at least four orthogonals.
Distinguish chiaroscuro from sfumato in an unfamiliar painting by identifying whether edge transitions are hard/high-contrast or soft/blended.
Explain how a documented Renaissance commission contract's specific demands (size, materials, prominence of donor portrait) reveal patron interests beyond religious devotion.
Construct an attribution argument for a disputed workshop painting, citing specific physical/stylistic evidence to support a claim about master-hand versus workshop-hand passages.
Compare how Renaissance linear perspective and a contemporaneous non-European spatial tradition (e.g., Chinese scroll painting's shifting-viewpoint space, or Persian miniature's hierarchical/multi-perspectival space) each solve the problem of representing depth on a flat surface.
Evaluate whether linear perspective should be characterized as a discovery of a true fact about vision or an invention of a persuasive convention, using evidence from at least two artists' varying uses of perspective.
Generalize the 'discovery vs. invention' argument structure used for linear perspective to a different representational system encountered in a prior or future unit (e.g., contrapposto in Unit 2, or academic realism referenced in Unit 5's preview) that the student was not shown analyzed this way.
Recall the definitions of vanishing point, orthogonal, chiaroscuro, sfumato, workshop, and attribution when shown the term in isolation.
Interpret a museum wall label's attribution claim about a Renaissance workshop painting as a simplified summary of an ongoing scholarly argument rather than a settled fact.
Your child sees Impressionism the way its first audiences did — as an insult to serious painting, not a pleasant decoration. This only works because they now know, from Unit 4, exactly what 'finished' and 'serious' meant to a Salon jury in 1860s Paris. The unit walks through the institutions that enforced the old rule (Academy, Salon, jury) and then the specific technical break (visible brushwork, optical color, painting outdoors) that provoked real outrage.
Given a Salon-era painting and an Impressionist painting of a comparable subject, identify which specific academic convention from Unit 4 (linear perspective, chiaroscuro modeling, or invisible finish) is absent or altered in the Impressionist work.
Recall the institutional role of the Academy, the Salon jury, and the Salon des Refusés in controlling which paintings the French public could see as legitimate art.
Explain why optical color theory (juxtaposed unmixed strokes read as blended color at a distance) produces a different visual and physiological effect than academic layered glazing.
Given an unfamiliar 1870s-1880s painting of modern leisure or labor, classify whether its subject matter would have been considered acceptable or transgressive by Salon hierarchy-of-genres standards, and justify using the genre hierarchy learned in class.
Using a period review or critical response as a primary source, infer what specific formal choice provoked the critic's negative reaction and distinguish the critic's stated complaint from the critic's underlying assumption about what art should do.
Compare two critics' reviews of the same 1874 or 1877 Impressionist exhibition for which details each emphasizes and what that emphasis reveals about each critic's standard of judgment.
Given a painting and a critical excerpt neither seen in class, construct a written argument identifying the specific Unit 4 convention broken, the formal evidence for the break, and the reception evidence explaining contemporary outrage, without being told which convention applies.
Given a 20th or 21st century avant-garde movement never discussed in class (e.g., Fluxus, Dogme 95 filmmaking), argue whether the historical logic of 'avant-garde as rejection of an institutional standard' developed in this unit applies, and identify what would have to be true of the institutional context for the label to fit.
This is the hardest unit in the course, and it's worth knowing that going in. Your child moves from Cubism fragmenting a still-recognizable subject to abstraction dropping a recognizable subject entirely, landing on the real question: can a painting mean something if there's nothing to look at except shapes and color? The unit deliberately lets them wrestle with a nonobjective work before giving them any theory to lean on, then turns to how dealers, critics, and markets shape reputation — directly against the assumption that fame just tracks quality.
Given an unlabeled Cubist work, students identify at least three facets/planes that represent the same object from physically incompatible viewpoints and state which rule of linear perspective each violates.
Students recall the definition and one identifying visual feature each of collage, mixed media, and papier collé as introduced in this unit.
Given a Cubist work that has NOT been used as a worked example, and a distractor image containing modeled volume and a single vanishing point, students correctly classify whether the target image exhibits Cubist fragmentation or conventional linear perspective, and name the one visual feature that rules out the other category.
Given a specific papier collé's pasted material (e.g., a dated newspaper fragment) and its real-world referent, students construct an argument connecting that specific material choice to a claim about the work's meaning.
Students compare two Cubist works by different artists (e.g., Picasso and Braque, same period) and name the shared structural principle of multiple simultaneous viewpoints that both works embody, independent of their surface subject matter.
Presented with a nonobjective work never discussed in class, students produce a formal-evidence-based claim about whether the work communicates meaning, with no access to the artist's own statements or critical commentary about that specific work.
Given a documented case (e.g., Kahnweiler's contracts with Picasso and Braque, or a comparable dealer/critic case) plus at least one timeline where the causal story is genuinely ambiguous or where promotion did not clearly precede the price/reputation change, students sequence the events of a work's creation, critical promotion, market price change, and museum acquisition, and infer which causal relationships the sequence does and does not support, including recognizing when the evidence is insufficient to support either a merit-only or a market-only claim.
Students identify the specific claim, warrant, and evidence structure used in a short excerpt of published art criticism about a nonobjective work, distinguishing the critic's factual observations about the work from the critic's evaluative judgments.
Students select a nonobjective work from a provided museum-collection list never analyzed in class, take a position on whether it communicates meaning, and defend that position in a written position paper using formal evidence, at least one critical source, and an explicit rebuttal of the strongest counterargument.
Your child turns the composition vocabulary from Unit 1 and the perspective vocabulary from Unit 4 onto photographs — something they look at constantly but have never formally picked apart. The unit exists to complicate one specific belief: that a photograph is more objective than a painting because a machine made it. They'll test that against everything a person actually controls — framing, cropping, staging, captions, what gets published or collected.
Students will define indexicality as the physical/causal trace relationship between a photograph and the light reflected off its subject at the moment of exposure, and distinguish it from resemblance.
Given an unfamiliar photograph, students will identify the specific framing and cropping choices (what is included, excluded, and centered) using the composition vocabulary from Unit 1 (balance, scale, framing).
Students will compare a staged/posed documentary photograph and a candid documentary photograph on a related historical subject, explaining what each can and cannot reliably support as historical evidence.
Students will explain why early photography's claim to status as fine art was contested by critics and academies in terms parallel to the avant-garde/academy debate studied in Unit 5.
Students will analyze how a photograph organizes pictorial space (depth cues, vanishing point behavior, flattening) in comparison to a Renaissance linear-perspective painting studied in Unit 4, identifying where the analogy holds and where it breaks down.
Given two never-before-seen museum-collection photographs on a related but unannounced subject, students will construct a written argument, with cited visual evidence, about what each photograph can and cannot reliably tell a historian.
Students will infer, from internal photographic evidence alone (lighting consistency, pose rigidity, subject gaze, arrangement of background elements), whether an unfamiliar photograph is more likely staged or candid, and justify the inference.
Students will generalize the unit's central claim (mechanical production does not guarantee objectivity) to a self-selected non-photographic mechanical or digital medium (e.g., satellite imagery, an algorithmic recommendation feed, a security camera still) not studied in this course, identifying an analogous point of authored selection.
Students will recall the definitions of documentary and staged image as used in this unit's case studies.
This is the last unit and it doesn't teach anything new — it makes your child use everything at once. They'll study contemporary artists from outside Western Europe who deliberately quote, borrow, or push back against conventions from earlier in the year (perspective, iconography, idealization, Cubist fragmentation, photographic truth-claims). Then each student picks one contemporary museum work, pairs it with any earlier work from the whole year, and argues the specific connection or break between them — in writing and out loud, answering real questions.
Given two works separated by centuries or cultures, restate the four-part comparative method from Unit 2 (shared formal problem, each culture's/artist's solution, what the solution reveals about context, what the comparison cannot claim) and apply it to a new pair.
Explain how a specific contemporary artist's use of a historical convention (e.g., citing devotional iconography, appropriating a readymade gesture, restaging a colonial-era photographic pose) functions as commentary on that convention rather than as ignorance or coincidence of it.
Given a museum wall label and the museum's own acquisition/display history for a contemporary work that critiques museums (e.g., work addressing looted objects, colonial collecting, or exclusion of non-Western artists from historical canon), analyze the tension between the institution's stated position and its function as gatekeeper of meaning.
Identify the formal elements (line, shape, color, composition, medium, scale) present in an unfamiliar contemporary work using the Unit 1 vocabulary set without teacher prompting of which terms apply.
Recall the definition of provenance and attribution as used across the year (Unit 1 vocabulary, Unit 3's patronage extension) when reading a museum object record for a contemporary acquisition.
Select one contemporary museum-collection work and one work from any prior unit and construct a written argument, using the comparative method, that specifies a precise formal and historical connection or deliberate rupture between them, citing vocabulary from at least three prior units.
During the oral defense, respond to a question that challenges a weak point in the written argument (e.g., 'you claim influence — what evidence would show it's coincidence instead?') by distinguishing which of the argument's claims are well-evidenced and which are speculative.
Given two contemporary works new to the student, one that cites a Renaissance perspectival convention and one that cites a non-Western sculptural convention studied in Unit 2, determine which historical unit's vocabulary correctly applies to each without being told which unit is relevant.
From the parent guide
This is a course in looking hard at art and arguing about it with evidence, not a course where your kid paints or draws. Over a full year they'll learn the specific words for how a picture or sculpture is built — line, shape, color, composition, medium — and then use those words to figure out why a Greek statue, a stained-glass window, a Monet, and a Picasso each look the way they do, given who made them and who paid for them. Every single work they study is a real object in a real museum's online collection, so they're always looking at an actual high-resolution image, not a textbook thumbnail. By the end, they should be able to walk into any museum, stop in front of something they've never seen before, and write or say something specific and defensible about it — not "I like it" but "here's what's happening in this piece and here's why."
Unit 1 · what to expect
This is where your child learns the actual words for how art is built — line, shape, color, composition, medium, scale — before they're allowed to say what anything means. For the first two weeks they'll look at images with almost no context (no title, no artist, no date) and just describe what's physically there. The habit being installed is catching themselves the moment they slide from 'the arm makes a diagonal line' into 'the figure looks sad' — that slide is the single most common mistake in student art writing, and this unit exists to interrupt it before it becomes automatic.
The full guide covers all 8 units: where kids get stuck, what to say, and how to tell it's working. Included with the course.
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