Learning Resources

FWM has a long history of challenging our Artists-in-Residence and our staff to use innovative materials, methods, and artmaking practices. Inspired by our time at home during quarantine, FWM has created this series of activities for teachers and caregivers.

These exercises can be adjusted to suit the age and abilities of your students and/or family members. Use these projects to imagine new materials, tools, and possibilities. Visit our YouTube channel for how-to videos created by FWM staff.

Quarantine Prints Playlist

Activity PDF downloads:

Reflections of Spring Triptych

Illuminated Photo Prints

Tonal Studies

Mirror Monoprint Journal

Sun Prints

Multiple Object Press Print

Leaf Tracings

Safety is important to us. We recommend adult supervision for children and those needing assistance. When using a sharp tool remember to always cut away—not towards—your fingers and body. Please use your art tools responsibly!

Online Curriculum

Art is a valuable tool for developing and nurturing creativity, imagination, and critical thinking—elements integral to learning. Art helps us explore and connect science, math, history, and literature. It reflects our unique histories, encourages us to contemplate the human condition, raises important questions about society, and provides innovative suggestions for our future.

The Fabric Workshop and Museum’s Online Curriculum utilizes the museum’s collection as a vehicle for exploring interdisciplinary ideas and concepts. Designed for K-12 use, these lessons offer an array of interdisciplinary suggestions that will enliven and enrich your curriculum.

Please note that each lesson includes the following tools:

Learning strategies based on National Education Standards
Themes that connect art, language arts, math, science, and social studies
Age and grade appropriate concepts
Vocabulary

Online Curriculum Lessons

Pattern and Rhythm: Pattern Collages

Designed for students in grades K–6, this lesson uses the Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi’s Grandmother fabric design as inspiration to teach about shape, color motifs, and screen-printed patterns. Students will work together to create organic and geometric shape collage artworks of their own.

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Art from New Materials: Create a Landscape Installation

This lesson intended for use with students in grades 4-8 uses Jim Hodges’ work entitled, You, which is created entirely from deconstructed silk flowers sewn together to form a sculptural floral veil. The activities focus on how artists use new materials in their work, often recycling from found objects or untraditional materials.

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Performance and Participation: Design a Performance Space

This lesson is designed for students in grades 2-8, and takes inspiration from Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s Cardoso Flea Circus, which simulates a real flea circus and incorporates research from these nineteenth century novelty performances. The accompanying activities investigate ways that artists may use performance to create environments and engage their viewers in the action.

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Installation view of Mise en Scene: Commemorative Toile by Renee Green.

Art and Society: Social Critique Design

This lesson designed for high school students looks at how artists have critiqued their societies. It focuses on Reneé Green’s Mise-en-Scène: Commemorative Toile, an installation of an upper class, French parlor, in which the artist has subtly altered a toile upholstery design to deconstruct the institutional discourses of history. Students will create written responses to Green’s work and develop their own designs for toile patterns that combine imagery in order to communicate concern about a social issue.

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