Adventures in Lower Elementary: First Field Trip of the Year! 🎨
Lower Elementary officially has its first field trip of the year in the books! We spent our morning at the Mint Museum Uptown exploring its galleries through an aptly named tour: “Every Picture Tells a Story.”
For many of our first graders, this was also their first DGS field trip without a parent accompanying them (a big step in independence)! They rose beautifully to the occasion. Our students listened attentively, followed museum guidelines, asked thoughtful questions, shared their observations and interpretations, and represented our school community with kindness and curiosity. Best of all, when we asked afterward, the verdict was clear: they really enjoyed their morning!
Our tour centered around a wonderfully philosophical question: How does an artist tell a story?
As the children discovered, sometimes the answer is much more interesting than simply painting a recognizable scene.
One memorable stop was Jeffrey Gibson’s I’M TAKING TIME AWAY TO DREAM, a vibrant contemporary work bursting with geometric shapes, the full spectrum of the rainbow, and beaded elements. Gibson, an artist of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, brings together painting, pattern, color, text, beadwork, and references to Indigenous artistic traditions. For our young artists and mathematicians, it offered a wonderful reminder that geometry, craftsmanship, identity, color, and storytelling can all coexist in a single work of art.
We also encountered storytelling through fiber. Diedrick Brackens’s enormous woven work survival is a shrine, not the small space near the limit of life depicts two figures connected by a bright gold chain. Rather than explaining exactly what viewers are supposed to see, the imagery invites questions: What might be happening? Are these people pulling against one another? What could the chain represent? What clues did the artist give us? It was a terrific opportunity to practice an important habit of mind: we can develop an interpretation without assuming there is only one correct answer.
Photography offered yet another kind of storytelling. Sharon Core’s Overtoom Squatters photographs were created in Amsterdam and draw inspiration from the visual language of historic Dutch group portraits. Core photographed contemporary squatters while deliberately incorporating compositions and details that recall paintings from centuries earlier. It gave us plenty to wonder about: Can a photograph document real people while also be carefully constructed by an artist? Can one image tell a story about both the present and the past?
Finally, Elaine de Kooning’s 1958 painting Farol showed us that a picture can tell a story without looking like a picture of anything at all. De Kooning was inspired by the movement and energy of bullfighting, translating that experience into sweeping gestures, color, and abstraction rather than simply illustrating what she saw. Suddenly the question became: Can a painting show us what something feels like instead of what it looks like?
Perhaps most beautifully, the children didn't only look at art. They responded to it creatively themselves! During the tour, our guides invited students to write poetry inspired by the artwork they observed. Some small groups were provided with paper and pencils to compose their own poems, while groups with emerging readers and writers collaborated to create poems together: sharing observations, choosing words, and building their ideas as a team. A painting, photograph, or tapestry told one story; then our children looked closely, wondered about it, and created another.
That is exactly the kind of learning we love: observation becoming curiosity, curiosity becoming interpretation, and interpretation becoming creation.
For our first adventure beyond campus this year, we couldn't have asked for a better morning. We are so proud of our Lower Elementary museum-goers for their independence, curiosity, creativity, and care for the space around them, and we're already looking forward to seeing where our next adventure takes us! 🎨✨
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