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Artists are often particularly keen observers and precise recorders of the physical conditions of the natural world. As a result, paintings can be good resources for learning about ecology. Teachers can use this lesson to examine with students the interrelationship of geography, natural resources, and climate and their effects on daily life. It also addresses the roles students can take in caring for the environment. Students will look at paintings that represent cool temperate, warm temperate, and tropical climates. An activity addressing the other climate categories can be found in the Activities section of the lesson.

If you enjoy this lesson, there's more! This lesson is one in a series of four which are adapted from the Gallery's free-loan teaching packet "Art &." The four lessons share a similar format, but focus on different areas of curriculum. Other topics include origin myths, heroes and heroines, and 19th-century America.


In this lesson students will

To support River EcoJourneys, a visual arts residency program. Professional artists will work with classroom teachers at two elementary schools in St. Paul to integrate visual arts and science studies to increase students' knowledge about the intersections between art and nature.

To support steel pan music residency programs. Components will include 25 weeks of in-school and after-school steel pan classes given by professional teaching artists, student ensemble performances, and family events at each of the participating schools.

John Updike's discerning eye has made him an acute observer of American culture and art," said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. "His fiction, prose, essays, and poetry over the years have provided invaluable insights into the human condition and into the humanities. The Endowment is proud to have one of the nation's most distinguished authors as our 37th Jefferson Lecturer.

John Updike is the author of more than fifty books including collections of short stories, poems, and criticism and is one of our nation's leading literary critics. He has published several books of art history and criticism including Just Looking: Essays on Art (1989) and Still Looking: Essays on American Art (2005). Recently, Updike has extended his views on art into his fictional work, chronicling the rise of American Expressionism after World War II in Seek My Face (2002). His new novel, The Widows of Eastwick, will be published this fall.

Updike's well-known series of novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom have brought him international acclaim and national recognition. Rabbit is Rich (1981) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 and Rabbit at Rest (1990) received that same honor in 1991. His novels also have won the National Book Award (1964, 1982), the American Book Award (1995), the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction (1981, 1990), the Rosenthal Award (1960), the Howells Medal (1995), and the Campion Medal (1997). Updike received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2004 for The Early Stories 1953-1975 and the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2006 for significant contribution to the short story form.

From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker and has since served as a regular contributor. His reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books and his poems in the Oxford American. Time magazine featured Updike on its cover in 1968 and 1982.

In recognition for his literary and critical work, John Updike was presented the National Humanities Medal by President Bush in 2003. Updike is one of the few Americans to receive both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts, which he received in 1989.

One of the key things to the story is that I am a dropout from grad school in English literature. I was a semiotics major at Brown, and then I went to Columbia for grad school, where I was working on the nineteenth-century novel. I spent my early twenties sitting around reading Dickens, George Eliot, and Balzac and Flaubert, and a little bit of American literature.

At the same time, the computer world was starting to explode. The Internet was starting to appear, and some of these games were coming out: SimCity, the first iteration of that, came out in 1989.

I was following the world of humanities and at the same time the computer world. To use your phrasing, I became Steven Johnson around 1995, when the Web first appeared. I realized that those two worlds could live together in a beautiful, intellectual way.

I started putting together the idea for my first book, Interface Culture, which was about the world of computer interfaces and the world of culture. At the same time I started on Feed, which was the first general-interest Web magazine before Salon or Slate came along.

I dropped out of grad school I did everything but my dissertation and went off and started writing about these things. One of the underlying drives for all this was to write about the technological world through the lens of the cultural critic.

Arts on Radio and Television grants support projects for radio and television arts programs that are intended for national broadcast. The NEA will fund 66 grants in this category out of 156 eligible applications, for a total federal investment of $3,700,000.

Examples of projects supported by Arts on Radio and Television grants include:

Support to Bowery Arts and Science for a documentary film by Robert Levi about NEA Jazz Master Hank Jones.

Support to Minnesota Public Radio for the production of arts features for the weekly radio magazine program Weekend America.

Support to the University of Iowa for a documentary on visual artist Grant Wood's iconic painting American Gothic.

Learning in the Arts for Children and Youth grants support projects that help children and youth acquire knowledge and understanding of and skills in the arts. Projects must provide participatory learning and engage students with skilled artists, teachers, and excellent art. Funded projects also must apply national or state arts education standards. The NEA will fund 171 projects in this category out of 553 eligible applications, for a total federal investment of $5,291,000.

Examples of projects supported by Learning in the Arts for Children and Youth grants include:

Support to the AjA Project for a series of after-school photography workshops targeted to refugee youth, ages 12 to 17, living in the San Diego area.

Support to the Grand Canyon Chamber Music Festival for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project for youth.

Support to the Snow City Arts Foundation to provide creative writing, music, and visual arts workshops with professional artists for hospitalized children.

Raphael was a realized artist, a superb artist in my view, but he died comparatively young. Leonardo was a flawed artist of great originality, but he couldn't finish things. Hardly anything of his is finished, or very few, or sometimes he made a mess of it like The Last Supper. And Michelangelo, who was another flawed genius. Michelangelo was a very great sculptor. His Pietà is arguably the greatest piece of sculpture ever, though personally my favorite is Donatello's David, which I have, incidently, a Florentine replica made of crushed marble, about 1800, in my garden.

Michelangelo was a very great sculptor and in some ways a magnificent architect--I think the Medici Library is one of the greatest works of art--but as a painter, he had very, very serious limitations. I think the Sistine Chapel is rather overrated.

Incidentally, the last time I saw that it was during the closure hours. Margaret Thatcher and I were in Rome to see the pope, but the pope said he was busy writing an encyclical and he couldn't see us that morning so would we like a private visit to the Sistine Chapel instead? But I think it was an over-ambitious failure myself and I'm not sure that the restoration has improved it.