Visual Arts

They say it all the time: We live in a visual culture, and whether that's right or wrong, good or bad, art has the power to educate and inform, even entertain, and the audience that may well benefit the most is the nation's youngest citizens.

Courtesy photo

Dr. Bruce Cole

"Our young people don't know enough about their history," says Dr. Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. "They don't know enough about their democracy. That's proven by polls and studies and tests."

So, Dr. Cole and the agency he heads would like to do something about it. Part of that effort is "Picturing America," a new NEH program that seeks, in the agency's words, "to teach American history and culture by bringing some of the country's great art directly to classrooms and libraries."

Dr. Cole came to Dallas on Wednesday to announce the program's kickoff. All 227 schools in the Dallas Independent School District are among those scheduled to receive "Picturing America" in August. More than 30,000 schools and public libraries across the country submitted applications to be a part of the program, which enjoyed what Dr. Cole called phenomenal results in a pilot initiative in January 2007.

"Picturing America" consists of 40 "large extremely high-quality images of American art from the very beginning of the republic to contemporary times," says Dr. Cole. They cover the gamut of visual arts, from painting to sculpture to architecture to photography.

They include a 1768 portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley, an 1862 sculpture of Benjamin Franklin by Hiram Powers, the 1851 painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze and a memorable photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken weeks before his assassination, by Alexander Gardner.

One of Dr. Cole's favorites is a 1965 photograph by James Karales that depicts the Selma-to-Montgomery, Ala., march for voting rights.

"We want to reach all sorts of people, not only people who know something about art but also people who have never seen a museum or are unlikely to visit one," says Dr. Cole. "We believe that reading a book is one thing or hearing a lecture is another, but looking at a picture is something else. It really is true that a picture is worth a thousand words."