What separates a great photograph from a snapshot?

In our online Art of Photography course, students learn that good design doesn’t just happen. A snapshot captures a moment, whereas a great photograph captures it beautifully by being composed. All of the elements are chosen and arranged to fit together. Elements such as line, texture, and pattern can add visual interest and heighten a photograph’s drama.

The students discussed examples from photographers Pamela Pecchio and Aaron Siskind, whose work is in our permanent collection, exploring how actual and implied texture can create a visually engaging image, and also created photographs of their own.

Examine these images and consider students’ choices in composing each photograph. Whether you notice the skewed worm’s-eye view of brightly patterned ribbons or the rhythmic patterns of leaves growing between pipes, your eye is drawn through the composition.

The students’ work will be on display in the Museum’s Education Lobby from January 11 through April 14. Pecchio’s work is featured in the exhibition Dwelling: Interiors by Page H. Laughlin and Pamela Pecchio, opening February 10 in the adjacent North Carolina Gallery.

Art of Photography is one of five online semester courses offered through the Museum that students can take for high school credit.

“The submerged bit of the museum is much more of an iceberg than [a] picture gallery.”—Neil MacGregor, director, British Museum

Would you believe that work on our exhibitions often starts years before you see the works on the wall? At the NCMA, as at the British Museum, there is more going on behind the scenes than you might expect. Our fall college exhibition, A Life, Still, offered one group of college students an opportunity to dive under the iceberg to see what happens behind an exhibition.

Months before the opening of the college exhibition (planned to complement the special exhibition Still-Life Masterpieces), Museum educators started collaborating with students and faculty at East Carolina University through “Under the Iceberg,” a program designed to give students a hands-on experience of planning and curating an exhibition. The development of A Life, Still included large- and small-scale projects, from deciding on the exhibition theme and marketing the call for submissions to selecting the final works and arranging them in a thoughtful visual narrative.

ECU senior Anna Hajjar took away a better understanding of the resources required to put on an exhibition, noting that she had never before considered spatial limitations and obstacles, museum aesthetics, and promotion when imagining the exhibition process. She noted, “It’s not just about finding artwork and nailing it on the wall.”

For artist Kendall Temotio, a senior at ECU, the best part of the experience was “being on the other side of the table.” Temotio said, “Usually I’m the one submitting my work and waiting at home to hear the results. It was interesting to see how decisions are ultimately made. Now I can look at my own work when it is declined or accepted and better understand why or how the selections may have occurred.”

ECU senior Abigail Jones noted the importance of their cumulative decisions: “Everything from writing the wall texts to judging the works of art to understanding the layout of the show affects how well and smoothly the exhibition process will run.”

Collaborating with the Museum, these students helped recruit over 180 submissions from across the globe (172 two-dimensional, 12 video). The resulting collection represents college students from 21 universities, 13 states, and two continents. Visit the exhibition blog or see the show in person at the Museum through January 13.

—Michelle Harrell is coordinator of teen and college programs at the NCMA.

The thought processes behind designing games, as well as the development of games throughout history, are elements of a new online high school course, The Art of Game Design, that the Museum created in partnership with the North Carolina Virtual Public Schools, funded by the Wells Fargo Foundation. The multimedia course uses two works of art at the Museum to teach about one of the earliest known sports, referred to as “the ball game.”

Artist: Unknown, Ball Court Marker, circa 550-850

The game, which resembled soccer, was played by the ancient Mayans and may have been the earliest team sport. But this was anything but a friendly Saturday competition. The players’ survival depended upon the outcome—the captain of the losing team was sacrificed. It sounds like something out of The Hunger Games rather than our history books! Read this article from the Ball State University Museum of Art for more about the ancient Mayan game.

To learn more about the ball game, listen to the story behind the Ceremonial Ball Game Yoke in this video that accompanies the audio tour in the Museum. You can also visit this interactive Web site created by the Mint Museum. My inner soccer mom finds plenty food for thought in our Museum’s Ancient American Gallery and invites you to join me on your next visit in contemplating the power of games throughout history.

North Carolina Museum of Art Teen Event 2011 from The North Carolina Museum of Art on Vimeo.

In January 2011 a group of Museum educators presented a charge to our new Teen Advisory Council: create a renaissance of teen programs at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

What does “a renaissance” mean? Well, it is all in the capitalization. A renaissance with a lowercase r refers to a renewal or revival. The Renaissance with a capital R was the rebirth of classic Roman and Greek art, literature, and philosophy in Europe between 1400 and 1600. Learning and innovation were celebrated, which led to new discoveries, inventions, and great advances in technology.

The past 20 years have also been a time of tremendous change, as the information age unfolds a steady stream of technological advances that enable us to communicate with thousands instantaneously. With support from the Wells Fargo Foundation, for example, the NCMA is offering a new series of online courses in collaboration with North Carolina Virtual Public Schools. The renaissance theme presented to the Teen Advisory Council was an outgrowth of the first course in this series: Videography with a Renaissance Twist. Regardless of geographic barriers, students have the opportunity to take these courses that foster critical inquiry and thinking skills for the 21^st century. The Museum’s first Teen Event introduced this course along with other exciting programs for high school students.

Considering both the capital R of the Renaissance’s artistic innovation and the lowercase r of the renaissance of vibrant teen programs, our Teen Advisory Council brainstormed about what high school students want from their state art museum. Over the course of five months, these students planned an evening to celebrate the newly resurrected teen art competition and the Museum’s first online course.  Thanks to a gift from Tekelec, the Teen Event was preceded by a symposium including a talk by Michael Gelb, author of How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci. Students and teachers explored the mind of Renaissance genius through the galleries of our permanent collection and returned to the studio for hands-on exercises in creativity.

Our new series of inventive course-related programs is just the beginning; we are piloting our second course, The Art of Game Design, and planning a third, Art of Persuasion, in the fall of 2012.

Watch the video to see how the NCMA Teen Advisory Council began this renaissance for teens at the Museum. And save May 19, 2012, on your calendar for the Spring Teen Event, and see what this passionate group of teens will plan. Finally, come visit the new Teens Inspired site to learn more.

Teenagers tend to see the world a little differently—but that’s not a bad thing! A distinct point of view can be an asset to a photographer. The Museum’s recent Digital Photography Workshop encouraged high schoolers to express their creativity in a variety of media.

The workshop combined a photo shoot in the Museum Park with computer manipulation and hands-on art projects. First the teens took a look at our current photography exhibition, Landscape Sublime, and saw how North Carolina artist John Menapace transformed ordinary daily spaces into extraordinary arrangements of light and form. They took their cameras into the Park to capture worm’s-eye views of oaks covered with kudzu and the geometric angles of the amphitheater stage.

Back inside, they got their hands on computer software to manipulate photographs, distorting and enhancing their own photos for a dramatic and sometimes humorous effect. The students experimented with printing on unusual surfaces and combining photos of themselves with works of art for mixed-media projects.

They drew inspiration from Anthony Goicolea’s Sea Wall, a sculptural installation of photos, glass bottles, and glass blocks, to print photographs of each other on acetate for a group installation, which they then photographed. They looked at vanitas paintings in the Dutch collection—still lifes that symbolize the emptiness and transience of earthly things—and then created another three-dimensional installation using still-life objects. Their work graced the Blue Ridge patio for just a short time, but the images live on in students’ photographs.

We invite you to peer behind the lens for a new perspective of the Museum.