Art Media Types
The nine units in this section represent a wide variety of forms and media used by contemporary artists, ranging from painting and installation art to performance and architecture. These units are designed to familiarize students with the tools, techniques, and rationale for using specific media, a range of ideas they can be used to express, and the impacts different art forms can have on viewers.
Use these units in any order and/or in combination with the Guide’s thematic units to prepare for MOCA exhibition visits and to connect to additional classroom learning goals.
What makes a painting a painting? It used to be simple—wet pigment applied to a flat surface. This unit explores how contemporary painters continue this tradition, but also push its boundaries by using not just brushes, but also tools like ladles, rollers, and buckets. They use paints that range from traditional tubes to industrial paint gallons, and see nearly everything as a potential painting surface.
Everybody draws, whether it’s dragging a stick in the sand at the beach, etching a heart in wet cement, or simply doodling while talking on the phone. But many artists rely on drawing as a way to communicate ideas and explore problems. This unit examines a variety of materials and methods artists employ to play, imagine, invent, plan, remember, or describe things.
Throughout most of history, sculpture was a process of taking raw materials and making likenesses of things in the real world. This unit explores how many contemporary sculptors have taken the opposite approach, using objects from the real world as the raw material for their art.
Photography in the 21st century is as common and accessible as the click of a cellphone button, so most students are very familiar with the medium. This unit explores the careful looking and decision-making processes that make a photograph a work of art.
Many contemporary artists believe that art should be active and dynamic, like life itself. Performance artists take art off the walls and put it where anyone can come across it. This unit explores how performance art shifts the question from “What is art?” to “What is the meaning of life?”
In every age, there have been artists who eagerly embraced technological advances, either as new tools for making art, or as a fresh medium for communicating their ideas. This unit explores how artists experiment with video cameras, computers, and keyboards to add the dimensions of time, sound, and movement to images.
Some artists create environments or installations that break away from traditional painting and sculpture by creating three-dimensional spaces that viewers can enter and be surrounded by an artist’s processes and visions. This unit explores environments created by arranging objects in space, and environments that change or enhance the space itself.
For thousands of years, architecture was a homemade art form. With the rise of cities, people found that they needed different types of buildings tailored to urban life--and so architecture was born. This unit explores architecture as a discipline that combines art, science, aesthetics, and function.
It’s easy to forget that everyday objects like pens, sweaters, video games, and kitchen chairs once lived on the drafting board or computer screen of a designer. Design is a noun, a verb, a process, and a way of thinking. This unit explores how design is used to solve problems, communicate messages and ideas, and persuade us.