Unmasking the Story: Masquerades as Social Lessons

This unit was created by Olivia Miller, a visual arts educator at East Kentwood High School in Kentwood, Michigan, as part of the 2023-2024 Pulitzer Center Teacher Fellowship program. It is designed for facilitation across three weeks or 50-minute periods, 5x per week. For more units created by Pulitzer Center Teacher Fellows in this cohort, click here.

Objectives:

Students will:

• Examine articles from the Pulitzer database and use them as inspiration for their own social justice masquerade
• Create a three-dimensional mask utilizing various art design principles
• Accompany their artwork with an artist statement explaining their mask, how it is used contextually (performance and communal elements), and what social justice lesson it is teaching a community
• Understand how art and journalism can be used as forms of activism to uplift marginalized communities

Unit Overview:

How do Pulitzer journalists elevate voices that have been historically marginalized? How do Pulitzer Center stories make complex issues relevant and inspire action?

Students will examine Pulitzer Center articles relating to social activism and change in communities as well as the elements of masquerades (performance, social lessons, communal involvement, ancestral veneration, vehicles of transformation). Students will then create a mask responding to either a social issue they discovered by reading news stories from the Pulitzer Center website or their own culture/community. Along with the masks, students will craft artist statements describing how the masks should be used at a masquerade event (i.e. what kind of music will be playing, what community involvement/interaction, what setting is the masquerade performed, what is the costume design).

Performance Task:

Students create three-dimensional mixed media masks that visually respond to a marginalized community. Students will create these masks with performance/masquerade in mind.

Assessment:

Students use brainstorming packets with mind maps, there will be a rubric for the mask itself and a template for the artist statement that will accompany the mask when displayed. 

Masquerade Grading Rubric [.docx][.pdf]

Artist Statement Template [canva][.jpg][.pdf]

Three week unit plan for teachers, including pacing, texts and multimedia resources, guiding questions for group discussions, performance task instructions, and a grading rubric for the unit.

Michigan Visual Arts Standards

ART.VA.III.1.1 Explore and discuss reasons behind personal artwork. 

ART.VA.III.1.2 Identify the purpose of community art.

ART.VA.V.1.3 Identify similarities between the visual arts and other arts disciplines.ART.VA.IV.2.2 Discuss the subject matter of artwork from particular cultures at specific times.

Learning Process

On their journey through this unit, Ms. Miller's 10-12th grade Advanced Ceramics and Sculpture class discovered the nuanced symbolism and power of masks in global contexts, connected with a journalist, designed their own masks and prepared for a masquerade.

Final Artwork and Artist Statements

After reading a range of reporting and learning about the communal and social power of masks around the world, students created three-dimensional mixed media masks that visually responded to a marginalized community. Students created these masks with performance/masquerade in mind.