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Stories & Art: Making Connections Between Picture Books and Art
I am frequently asked how we make connections between books and art in the Brooklyn Museum of Art's weekly family series Stories & Art. These
programs, held Saturdays at 4 p.m. in the museum galleries, take several different forms. Professional storytellers, dancers, and musicians present programs with narrative content. Children's book authors and illustrators
read from their books and frequently do simple activities to illustrate how books are made, what kinds of ideas are inspirational to them, and how they make the illustrations in the books. About half of the forty-nine programs
per year are story-reading or storytelling programs given by museum staff. Over the five years of the series, at about thirty-six staff and author/illustrator programs per year (that's one hundred eighty different programs!),
we've developed a familiarity with picture books and many ways to make connections to art and to teach about art from the books as well as the objects in our collections. It is worth knowing that our perspective as museum educators always leads us to look for books that will help us with our goal of getting the audience to look closely, make observations, and think about the connections among what they see, what they know, and the story they hear.
Basic Connections
Because we work in a museum context, the easiest place for us to start is with the work of art itself. First we ask ourselves if the work of art itself tells a
story. Books like Amy Littlesugar's Jonkonnu, A Story from the Sketchbook of Winslow Homer or Jacob Lawrence's The Great Migration are picture-book versions of those stories, terrific to read with the work itself, with other works by that artist, or even with other works depicting similar stories.
Another simple connection is to look for stories or books that will bring a particular historical time period, place, or season to life. For example, Edith
Tarbescu's Annushka's Voyage has served as an effective introduction to immigration in the early twentieth century as well as some of the precious objects brought to the United States with families, examples of which are now in a number of museum collections. There are many books to help bring a place to life, inspiring themes such as city and country, on the high seas, at the fair, in the mountains, at the beach, etc. William Low's Chinatown is a great example of a simple story that evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of a particular part of the city. His images lend themselves to easy comparisons with other paintings or photographs of city life, and provide many connections to our audience's lives. We have also connected works of art depicting or suggesting each season to stories of the same, such as Margaret Bateson-Hill's Lao
Lao of Dragon Mountain.
Naturally, we also present real or fictional stories about artists. Jeanette Winter's picture book, My Name is Georgia, about Georgia O'Keeffe, has
been used to great effect in our galleries, where after a reading of the book, viewers returned to illustrations suggesting different parts of O'Keeffe's life and then identified paintings hanging in the galleries to
correspond to the book's illustrations (this activity could be done equally well with posters or postcards of O'Keeffe's work). When we use books about fictional artists, for example Valeri Gorbachev's bunny artist
Peter in Peter's Picture, we look for experiences that relate to those of children in the museum—sketching, hanging work in a student art show, etc. These are some of our most charming programs because of the many
experiences our audience share as part of the storytelling experience.
Pushing to Find Specialized Connections
The longer we produce programs connecting books and art, the more interested we are in new directions. Again, we take our clues from the art. So rather than,
say, doing general nineteenth-century stories with nineteenth-century paintings, we will look at a detail of a work of art and use that as our catalyst. We've done programs about plants and trees, various articles of clothing
(hats and shoes especially), modes of transportation (cars, trains), and more species of the animal kingdom than we would have imagined, including many different types of reptiles and insects. One of my favorite recent programs
was about clouds, featuring Charles G. Shaw's classic It Looked Like Spilt Milk, paired with David Wiesner's Sector 7, complementing an exploration of the clouds in a number of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century paintings in our American collections and the clouds outside that day. In another program, we focused on the calligraphy found in the corners of Chinese scrolls and introduced our audiences to characters and
writing through Huy Voun Lee's innovative picture books, such as In the Park, in which a young boy learns characters during various outings with his mother.
Imaginative connections also include stories that help a listener visualize what it would be like to be in a particular place at a particular time, handling
objects like the ones they see in the galleries. What better way to make a silver teapot interesting than to read Lindsey Tate's Teatime with Emma Buttersnap, full of facts about the history and making of tea? Or
perhaps imagining, as Steven Guarnaccia does, Goldilocks and the Three Bearsliving in a 1950s split-level furnished with classics of twentieth-century furniture that happen to surround us in the galleries? Or perhaps
traveling to Africa, dressed in bright textiles and visiting places full of traditional African objects, with Maya Angelou's Kofi and His Magic? Each of these books allows the reader and audience to imagine handling
objects in context, which helps make links among the story, the objects, the audience, and the audience's everyday lives.
As with most early childhood educators, we have found that links to other senses (sound, taste, smell, touch) have proven to be very popular with our audiences,
young and old alike. With music, sometimes the words of the book itself provide the musical basis, as with This Land Is Your Land, illustrated by Kathy Jakobsen with landscapes that we then compared to others in our
galleries. We have also linked specific musical instruments or images of people playing instruments with stories and music featuring the same. Books that feature food (such as Yoshi's Feast by Kimiko Kajikawa, presented in the Japanese galleries), drinks, and/or spices (such as Kirsten Balouch's The King and the Three Thieves,
presented in our Islamic galleries) inspire us to make great connections to plates, cups, silverware, and other table objects found in the Museum and in our audience's homes. When possible, we sniff or handle non-spillable
comestibles or handle the types of table objects they would be served on or in as part of the narrative experience.
Another recent favorite is to invoke a child's imagination by asking them to transform themselves in shape, time, or space. For example, what would it be like
to be one-inch tall and crawl inside a work of art? We visualized this kind of exploration and how it changes our perception of size, texture, color, and shape, inspired by Sadie Rose Weilerstein's The Best of K'tonton:
The Greatest Adventures in the Life of the Jewish Thumbling and Ed Young's Seven Blind Mice. Another popular question is, "What would it be like if the characters in the painting came alive?" We have one
terrific answer with Ewa Zadrzynska's The Peaceable Kingdom, featuring a painting that can be found in a number of museum collections.
Picture books are also terrific sources to help explain or illustrate a particular artistic style or the fine points of an artistic technique. For example, we
have used Nancy Carpenter's illustrations in Loud Emily, by Alexis O'Neill, to talk about certain features of early nineteenth-century and folk painting. Many of Thomas Locker's books beautifully reveal eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century oil painting techniques. Prints, always a difficult medium to explain, are featured in Patricia MacLachlan's What You Know First (illustrated by Barry Moser with woodcuts) and Arthur Geisert in The Etcher's Studio.
Photography and its many aspects can be discussed with Nina Crews' You Are Here (also a favorite with the "let's imagine we're one-inch tall" program) and Christopher Myers' Black Cat—noting that
each artist in these books has manipulated their images using computers, paint, or other techniques. Books such as Tamara Bower's The Shipwrecked Sailor and Venantius Pinto's Aani and the Tree Huggers are wonderful for introducing the style of ancient Egyptian reliefs and Indian miniature painting, respectively. The list of beautifully illustrated books that could be used in this category go on and on—it's just a matter of looking carefully at the illustrations in addition to the book's compelling story to see how they tell us something about art as well as the story.
One final category of books that has given us great pleasure in recent years are the books that allow us to look at the built environment and to think of those
buildings as art. Keith DuQuette's The House Book is a favorite to use with our historic period rooms. Nina Laden's Roberto, The Insect Architect, invites us to take our audience on a tour of the museum
looking at the art of the building and the process that created it. Stefan Czernecki's The Cricket's Cage takes us on that same creative journey in China several centuries ago to encourage us to look at Chinese art featuring buildings in a new way.
I encourage all who share our passion for picture books to experiment as we have with connections to the visual world around us. Teachers and librarians have
shared with us some of their favorite ways to make those connections. They include exploring and discussing the illustrations in a particular book. Some stop while reading a story and ask their audience to sketch what they have
in their minds, or use one or several picture books to inspire a sketching session. Others report efforts to experience a picture with other senses—what might an image sound like, smell like, or feel like if you went inside
it? Still others revel in presenting the work of an author or illustrator in depth, looking at all of the different ways images work together with words. And ours, clearly, is to present stories by and connected to a nearby
work of art.
Selected Bibliography
Angelou, Maya. Kofi and His Magic. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996.
Atkins, Jeannine. Aani and the Tree Huggers, illustrated by Venantius J. Pinto. New York: Lee and Low, 2000.
Balouch, Kirsten. The King and the Three Thieves: A Persian Tale. New York: Viking, 2000.
Bateson-Hill, Margaret. Lao Lao of Dragon Mountain. London, New York: De Agostini Editions, distributed in the U.S. by Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1996.
Bower, Tamara. The Shipwrecked Sailor: An Egyptian Tale with Hieroglyphs. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2000.
Crews, Nina. You Are Here. New York: Greenwillow, 1998.
Czernecki, Stefan. The Cricket's Cage: A Chinese Folktale. New York: Hyperion Books for
Children, 1997.
DuQuette, Keith. The House Book. New York: Putnam, 1999.
Geisert, Arthur. The Etcher's Studio. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997.
Gorbachev, Valeri. Peter's Picture. New York: North South Books, 2000.
Guarnaccia, Steven. Goldilocks and the Three Bears: A Tale Moderne. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000.
Guthrie, Woody. This Land Is YourLand, illustrated by Kathy Jakobsen. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1998.
Kajikawa, Kimiko. Yoshi's Feast, illustrated by Yumi Heo. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2000.
Laden, Nina. Roberto, The Insect Architect. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2000.
Lawrence, Jacob. The Great Migration. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
Lee, Huy Voun. In the Park. New York: Henry Holt, 1998.
Littlesugar, Amy. Jonkonnu, A Story fromthe Sketchbook of Winslow Homer, illustrated by Ian Schoenherr. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1997.
Locker, Thomas. The Boy Who Held Back the Sea. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1993.
Low, William. Chinatown. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1997.
MacLachlan, Patricia. What You Know First, illustrated by Barry Moser. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
Myers, Christopher. Black Cat. New York: Scholastic, 1999.
O'Neill, Alexis. Loud Emily, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Shaw, Charles G. It Looked Like Spilt Milk. New York: HarperCollins, 1947.
Tarbescu, Edith. Annushka's Voyage, illustrated by Lydia Dabcovich. New York: Clarion Books, 1998.
Tate, Lindsey. Teatime with Emma Buttersnap, illustrated by Linda Bronson. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.
Weilerstein, Sadie Rose. The Best of K'tonton: The Greatest Adventures in the Life of the Jewish Thumbling. New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1988.
Wiesner, David. Sector 7. New York: Clarion Books, 1999.
Winter, Jeanette. My Name Is Georgia: A Portrait. Orlando: Silver Whistle (Harcourt), 1998.
Young, Ed. Seven Blind Mice. New York: Philomel Books, 1992.
Zadrzynska, Ewa. The Peaceable Kingdom, illustrated by Tomek Olbinski. New York: M. M. Art Books, Inc., 1993.
For more ideas, see:
The Art Institute of Chicago. Telling Images: Stories in Art, Teacher Manual (1996) and CD-ROM (1997).
Kiefer, Barbara A. The Potential of Picture Books: From Visual Literacy to Aesthetic Understanding. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1994.
Saccardi, Marianne. Art in Story: Teaching Art History to Elementary School Children. North Haven, CT.: The Shoe String Press, Inc., 1997.
Allison Day is Youth and Family Programs Manager at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (BMA). She holds a B.A. in art history from Yale University and an M.A. in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A lifelong lover of stories, she has been telling and reading stories to families in museums since the BMA series Stories & Art began in 1997. She is grateful to the children's librarians at the Brooklyn Public Library, and to her colleagues at the BMA, who constantly give her new ideas.
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