ABSTRACT
The national core art standards describes connecting within all the arts as relating artistic ideas and work with personal meaning and external context. The connecting processes, therefore, are paramount in helping students gain literacy in the visual arts as meanings from external contexts are related or connected to individuals. Within the visual arts, the connecting process is further developed through two significant aspects of literacy. To learn how visual artists, educators, historians, critics, and theorists not only make meaning from visual art texts but how those texts are connected through artistic discourse, including artistic production, takes time and experience with numerous works and cultural narratives. One way to increase one's literacy in the seemingly overwhelming process is by learning how different artists connect media, processes, and concepts with various sociocultural narratives and then playing with, perhaps through emulation or adaptation, such processes to explore germane personal and larger contextual connections.
