Visual Arts

The Des Moines Public Schools offer a comprehensive, hands-on approach to learning and mastering skills in visual arts.

Goals for the district’s visual arts curriculum include:

• Students should be able to communicate at a basic level in the visual arts. This includes knowledge and skills in the use of basic vocabularies, materials, tools, techniques, and intellectual methods of the discipline.
• Students should be able to communicate proficiently in at least one art form, including the ability to define and solve artistic problems with insight, reason and technical proficiency.
• Students should be able to develop basic analyses of works of art from structural, historical, and cultural perspectives, and from combinations of those perspectives. This includes the ability to understand and evaluate works in the visual arts.
• Students should have an informed acquaintance with exemplary works of art from a variety of cultures and historical periods, and a basic understanding of historical development in the arts disciplines across the arts as a whole, and within various cultures.