Korea Through Art

Details

Category: In-Service Courses

July 21-25, 2008

Sixteen educators from the New York metropolitan area were introduced to Korean art—and through it, Korean history and culture—at a five-day teachers' institute held at The Korea Society's office in Manhattan. Experts delivered lectures on the aesthetics and cultural significance of painting, music, literature and pottery from every major era of Korean history. Cheeyun Kwon, curator of Korean art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, provided an overview of Korean art from the Bronze Age to the Three Kingdoms period while Kumja Paik Kim, the Asian Art Museum's Korean art curator emerita, spoke on the ceramics of the Koryo period and the ornate art items found in tombs from the Silla kingdom. Elizabeth Brotherton, assistant professor of art history at the State University of New York at New Paltz, discussed the reciprocal artistic influences that have long existed between China and Korea. Soyoung Lee, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Korea Gallery, presented a talk on the art of the Choson kingdom. The institute's lecture program was complemented by a slate of hands-on activities and field trips. The educators visited the Kang Collection of Korean Art and the Korean Art Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the art they had been learning about up close. They were also able to try Korean painting and calligraphy techniques for themselves at workshop sessions led by Anne Drillick, an art teacher at the Anna Scott School in Leonia, New Jersey, and Grace Park, a traditional Korean calligrapher from Potomac, Maryland.

Transforming the course's subject matter into lessons that would be relevant in primary and secondary classrooms was a constant focus of the institute. The educators had multiple sessions with Patricia Rosof, a social studies teacher retired from Hunter College High School in New York and a curriculum adviser to The Korea Society. Guided by Rosof, each teacher developed lesson plans that used Korean art as a way to teach history, social studies and literature. Participant Jennifer Suker developed a lesson plan that used a painting of Korean courtesans to teach high school students about social class in history and literature. At the end of the institute course, the teachers were given an afternoon to present and explain their lesson plans to one another.