Art Masterpiece Parodies

Mackenzie H.

  

    In fifth grade, I wanted to do some kind of a lesson about art history that would still seem fresh and exciting to the kids.  We started out by looking at seven famous masterpieces and discussing why they were successful and what has contributed to them becoming famous works of art.  We looked at Mona Lisa (da Vinci), American Gothic (Grant), Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (Kahlo), The Boating Party (Cassatt), A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Seurat), Starry Night (van Gogh), and The Scream (Munch).  We then looked some parodies of these artworks with cartoon characters, Star Wars characters, extra that I found doing a few Google searches.

     We also watched some music parodies of popular songs from YouTube.  This helped us to understand that listeners/viewers would not recognize the original work if it were not very famous or if too many alterations had been made.

     The kids chose a masterpiece to work with and created visual parodies based on them.  They had various forms of dry and wet mediums to choose from to complete their work.  I had both a dry and wet media station with different media options and varying levels of opaqueness (watercolors vs. tempera cakes).

Breakfast Delight by Sam L. 

Flowers In the Night by Boston S.

Olivia S.

The Nerda-Lisa by Emma K.

Tractor Invasion by Tyler R.

Starry Night Cat by Jacob K.

Mona Alien by Jacob M.

"Moona Lisa" by Matt K.

Blocky Night by Ryan P.