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Connect with students about their opinions and experiences during this tumultuous and historic time.

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Thinking about a dive into TAB? Here are some recommendations for you to consider before getting your feet wet. Getting Started

A comprehensive list of available books, articles and websites to help guide you through your TAB journey. Resources

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What is Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB)?

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Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB) is a nationally recognized choice-based art education approach to teaching art. In a TAB classroom: Students are regarded as artist, students choose what to work on, classes begin with a short demo or discussion to ins

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What can we learn about the artistic process from Clyfford Still? 

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What can we learn about the artistic process from Clyfford Still? 

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Clyfford Still was always honing his skills in observation, sketching, color, and representation. Look through the images in this folder while considering:
-What do you think were the purposes of these sketches?
-What do you think Clyfford Still learned as an artist by making these?
-How might these sketches have affected Clyfford Still's larger, publicly shown artworks?
-Is anything surprising about these sketches?
-What ideas do you have for your own work?

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Letter to Gordon Smith, by Clyfford Still for the catalog; Paintings by Clyfford Still

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Not-cheesy virtual community building ideas for high schoolers!

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In CSM's Art in Times of Change Live inStill lesson, students consider why artists create even during times of change, crisis, and upheaval. Students will examine primary sources from one of the times of change during Still's life (The Great Depression or WWII) and consider what people may have been experiencing and considering during that time, and what purposes art may have served. Then, students will create and share about their own work created in the context of their current experiences.

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Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the Museum's enhanced safety protocols, we will not be able to welcome school groups to visit the Museum this fall. Instead, we are creating two new offerings for students in grades 4-12: inStill Live and inStill On Demand.

inStill Live

inStill Live is a live, virtual program facilitated by our talented educators via video conferencing. As with inStill at the Museum, this experience is hands-on, interactive, and allows students to be in control of their learning. inStill Live explores the theme Art in Times of Change by taking a closer look at the ways previous crises like The Great Depression and WWII may have impacted Clyfford Still and his work. Students will also consider how they can use art to process or respond to the crises and changes they are experiencing today.

What makes inStill Live unique?

It's not a presentation: Students take the lead in doing the talking, reading, writing, and thinking in workshop-model lessons.

Every student has a voice: Small groups and a high student-to-teacher ratio allow for every student to be heard and have their ideas valued.

We turn your classroom or home into a gallery: Our expert museum educators are trained in virtual engagement strategies that fuel curiosity and ignite students' imaginations.

Students will:

Do the reading, writing, talking, and thinking.

Have opportunities to look closely at Clyfford Still's artwork.

Examine primary resources.

Work collaboratively to share ideas and interpretations.

Find evidence for their interpretations and defend their opinions.

Reflect on their thinking.

Have fun!

inStill Live Request

inStill On Demand

inStill On Demand is a downloadable, ready-to-go lesson for teachers to use in the classroom at any time. This lesson allows students to feel the power of their own ideas through the theme Your Voice Matters. Students will explore Clyfford Still's artwork to become more comfortable with looking at art, to develop confidence in their ideas, and to use their voices to speak their minds.
This resource is still in development, but will be available soon!

Virtual Self-Guided School Visits

The Museum recently launched an interactive virtual gallery experience on our website. The same software the curatorial team uses to curate the Museum's exhibitions, Virtual Gallerie, is now available for teachers to experience the galleries online anytime on the Virtual Exhibitions page on the CSM website.

Teacher Resources

The Museum is committed to excellence in teaching in its core programs, as well as to service of the teaching community at large. CSM teacher programs focus on critical reflection on practice, skill building, and practical applications of teaching tools. For districts, active teachers, and teachers in training, we offer learning labs, professional development, and enrichment opportunities.
Learn More
Virtual Teacher Open House

5-7 p.m.
September 10, 2020
Learn More

Instill is supported by:

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Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the Museum's enhanced safety protocols, we will not be able to welcome school groups to visit the Museum this fall. Instead, we are creating two new offerings for students in grades 4-12: inStill Live and inStill On Demand.

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Color Memoranda

"If the color is wrong, everything is wrong...do not let the thought of form hamper you in the least, when you begin to make colored memoranda. If you want the form of the subject, draw it in black and white. If you want its color, take its color, and be sure you have it, and not a spurious treacherous, half-measured piece of mutual concession, with the colors all wrong and the forms still anything but right." -John Ruskin

In his early years, Clyfford Still experimented with making color memoranda as described above by John Ruskin. In these studies, Still's goal was to achieve the correct color of his subject and nothing else.

Materials:

Paper

Colored pencils, crayons, or other colored drawing supplies

Instructions:

Choose a subject.

Instead of focusing on the form or details, just look at the colors.

Experiment with different colors to match the tone of your subject.

Mix colors or materials if necessary.

Consider:

How do the colors of your subject make you feel?

Are the colors different than you thought they would be?

Try making a more detailed drawing of your subject using the colors you sketched. Is your drawing more lifelike?

Look at some of Clyfford Still's color memoranda from the exhibition The Early Years: Clyfford Still in Canada, 1920-33 like PPX-4, 1930; and PP-842, 1923 below.

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CSM at Home Activities: Color Memoranda - Clyfford Still Museum

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"If the color is wrong, everything is wrong...do not let the thought of form hamper you in the least, when you begin to make colored memoranda. If you want the form of the subject, draw it in black and white.

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Writing Poetry about a Painting (Ekphrastic Poetry)

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Writing Poetry about a Painting (Ekphrastic Poetry)

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Using the Clyfford Still Museum's Online Collection, pick a painting that speaks to you, then write a poem about it.

Your poem could end up extremely long; it could be short; it could be a poem about how you feel when you look at the art; it could be a poem about how you think Still felt as he painted, or even what it's like to be a shape, color, or stroke inside that piece of art. It could be a poem that rhymes or has the same number of syllables on every line. It could be a poem that uses the first letter of each line to spell out a word of your choice. There are no wrong answers to the structure of the poem. Still wanted viewers to make meaning for themselves when looking at the art, and you have total freedom to write your poem however you want. Share your poem online by posting a picture of the art you chose, your poem, or a video of yourself reading it. Make sure to include the #StillInspired so that way other folks can enjoy what you've come up with.

Kids! Try your hand at writing a lune about a Clyfford Still painting. Have you ever written a poem about a painting before? Poets often choose to write about how art makes them feel: excited, happy, or even confused. Sometimes, poets look at the art, pick out their favorite part, and write about what it would feel like to be that cloud or this yellow shape. For your poem, try a structure to keep it simple, like a lune. A lune poem has 3 words on the first line, 5 on the next, and 3 again on the last. A lune might look like this:

This yellow painting
looks stranger than the others.
So many shapes!

It can help us to use a structure for our poems, the same way it helps painters to decide how big their canvas should be before they start to paint. Just like Clyfford Still wanted us to come up with our own ideas about his paintings, we get to come up with our own ideas when we make art. Any poem you write is exciting, true, and worth sharing! Maybe you even write more than one! Get your parent's permission to post your poem on social media using the hashtag #StillInspired.

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Writing Poetry about Clyfford Still - Clyfford Still Museum

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Using the Clyfford Still Museum's Online Collection, pick a painting that speaks to you, then write a poem about it. Your poem could end up extremely long; it could be short; it could be a poem about how you feel when you look at the art; it could be a poem about how you think Still felt as he painted, or even what it's like to be a shape, color, or stroke inside that piece of art.

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Virtual Art Making for Relaxation Workshop

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Virtual Art Making for Relaxation Workshop

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Looking for a way to decompress and channel your creativity? Enjoy this virtual Artmaking for Relaxation workshop. Artist and Clyfford Still Museum educator, Quána Madison, leads a guided meditation inspired by a Clyfford Still painting, followed by an expressive artmaking activity with materials from around your home.

About Quána Madison Quána Madison is an artist, consultant and personal stylist. Expressive arts revived her soul after enduring cancer previvor treatments and developing disruptive life-changing chronic illnesses. She believes art nourishes well-being. Art-making, expressive writing, creative personal expression, community arts engagement, self-care, self-compassion, mindfulness, self-esteem and self-confidence practices helped Quána recover and transform. Creative expression combined with inner wellness practices can promote physical, emotional, mental and energetic well-being. Quána strives to inspire, educate, empower and uplift people through her work as an artist, consultant and personal stylist. She is passionate about promoting inner wellness, body positivity and personal creative expression.

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Virtual Art Making for Relaxation Workshop with Quána Madison - Clyfford Still Museum

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Looking for a way to decompress and channel your creativity? Enjoy this virtual Artmaking for Relaxation workshop. Artist and Clyfford Still Museum educator, Quána Madison, leads a guided meditation inspired by a Clyfford Still painting, followed by an expressive artmaking activity with materials from around your home.

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Co-hosted by Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board members Kinette Richards, Ph.D., school psychologist, and Barbie Garayúa Tudryn, school counselor, this webinar will help you gain a common understanding of trauma and how it affects both learning and relationships at school-for students and educators alike. It will also examine ways to recognize trauma in students and address it, both virtually and in person. Finally, you'll learn about tools to build strong relationships and address trauma in your school. Join us!

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Co-hosted by Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board members Kinette Richards, Ph.D., school psychologist, and Barbie Garayúa Tudryn, school counselor, this webinar will help you gain a common understanding of trauma and how it affects both learning and relationships at school-for students and educators alike.

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Explore the CSM Archives full of primary sources

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Explore the CSM Archives full of primary sources

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Use an accordion book as a poetry notebook, an artwork response journal, a glossary, etc.

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Learn about the architecture of the Clyfford Still Museum. Invite students to design their own museums/galleries to display their artwork using Sketchup or another modeling tool.

https://clyffordstillmuseum.org/about-us/architecture/

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The Clyfford Still Museum is a dense, cantilevered two-story building of richly worked concrete deriving its presence from the earth.

Architect's Statement

The Clyfford Still Museum is conceived as a solid, a mass of concrete, crushed granite and quartz-a single construction that is opened up by natural light. The body of the building becomes the source of light for the art. Light is amplified, diffused and obscured by each surface of the building. The exterior façade merges with the stark intensity of the sky. The entrance, beneath a canopy of trees, presses the visitor to the earth. The darkness of the lobby provides an interval, a place of transition, before rising to the galleries. In the upper level galleries, the visitors move through a series of luminous rooms where they encounter the work of Clyfford Still. The galleries respond to the art, changing its scales and proportions, varying the intensity of light. - Brad Cloepfil

Architect

Brad Cloepfil, Allied Works Architecture, Portland, OR and New York, NY

Materials

Cast-in-place concrete with a variety of specialized wood formed finishes, stained western red cedar, and stained white oak.

By the Numbers

9

Exhibition Galleries

22

Months of building construction

44.5

Height in feet of the exterior walls

4,600

Cubic yards of concrete in foundation, walls, and decks

9,140

Square feet of gallery space

28,500

Total square feet

Light and Dark

Light is an important aspect of the Museum experience. The design highlights this by creating a transition space at the Museum entrance, which is far from direct sunlight. Visitors walk from the bright outside to the dark reception area where they immediately become sensitive to the quality of light.

Terraces

Terraces on the southwest and northeast sides of the upper level offer places for quiet contemplation and repose. Succulents, mosses, ground covers, and grasses create starkly different planting patterns.

Skylights

Glass skylights with a UV filtering system cover the roof of the Museum above the concrete ceiling. A complex system monitors the light levels and adjusts the lighting and skylight shades to ensure appropriate protection for the works on view.

Concrete Ceiling

The architect developed a poured-in-place concrete screen for the gallery-level ceilings that is structurally tied back to the adjacent concrete walls. This thin plane features a pattern of elongated ovals, biased toward the north, that run diagonally across the surface, creating openings that distribute sunlight evenly.

Concrete Walls

Concrete oozed between rough-sawn fir planks placed on the surface of the cast-in-place concrete walls, forming fins that broke when the planks were removed. This created craggy, vertical lines that reference Still's paintings. The deepest ridges face the western sun, creating a strong pattern along the street.

In 2006, the newly formed Clyfford Still Museum secured a parcel of land within Denver's Civic Center Cultural Complex immediately west of the Denver Art Museum's then-under-construction Frederic C. Hamilton Building, designed by Daniel Libeskind. Later that year, the board selected Allied Works Architecture, led by Brad Cloepfil, for the museum's design.

From the start, Cloepfil focused his attention not strictly on Still's art but moreover on an understanding of "where these paintings came from." Still spent the first 40 years of his life in the Northwest-the extraordinary topographies of Washington State, the Columbia River Gorge, Alberta, Canada, and other regions where Still resided until 1941 (and places he would revisit often).

In the years since Still's death in 1980, the proportions for museum galleries have swelled. Many new museum designs were boasting soaring ceiling heights over expansive (and sometimes irregular) spaces. This would have seemed unusual to artists showing their works in the 1950s.

Installation photographs of the rooms within the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where Still, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko first showed their classic works, suggest these artists were accustomed to having their paintings dominate the viewer's field of vision. In this way their art works, particularly when seen in groups, could create environments in which viewers no longer "peeked" into their paintings but, rather, became a part of them.

These ideas about directness, intimacy, and proportion (all of which deal with questions of ideal viewing conditions) became driving concerns behind the design of the Clyfford Still Museum, whose largest gallery measures about 1,200 square feet, with a ceiling placed, by today's standards, at a modest twelve to sixteen feet above the floor.

The Clyfford Still Museum broke ground on its new home in December 2009 and opened its doors to the public on November 18, 2011, reintroducing the life and work of one of America's most significant yet least understood artists.

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The Clyfford Still Museum is a dense, cantilevered two-story building of richly worked concrete deriving its presence from the earth. The Clyfford Still Museum is conceived as a solid, a mass of concrete, crushed granite and quartz-a single construction that is opened up by natural light.

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strategies to "fill the well" for my students and for myself.

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strategies to "fill the well" for my students and for myself.

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Connecting Clyfford Still's work to a conversation about persuasive rhetoric.  How do Still's paintings "make an argument"? Do I (the viewer) respond to the ethos, pathos, or logos of the painting?  What might I infer about Still's audience and his purpose?

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Connecting Clyfford Still's work to a conversation about persuasive rhetoric.  How do Still's paintings "make an argument"? Do I (the viewer) respond to the ethos, pathos, or logos of the painting?  What might I infer about Still's audience and his purpose?