Art Explainer Videos: Three Themes

Using three artworks from the Art Institute’s collection, these videos unpack a central theme and use innovative visual storytelling to highlight the choices artists made to shape form and meaning in their works.

Art Explainer videos empower you to look at and understand art from any historical period or culture. Designed for students as well as adults, this video series is produced for the web and usable in a wide range of learning environments, from mobile devices to formal school classrooms.

Video 1: The Power to Look

How does what you see in an artwork tell you how to look? Using three artworks from the Art Institute’s collection, this video unpacks a central theme and uses innovative visual storytelling to highlight the choices artists made to shape form and meaning in their works.

Learn more about the artworks featured in the video.

Featured artworks

A work made of glass beads, fabric, thread, and copper alloy. — Crown (Ade), Late 19th to mid-20th century

Yoruba

Life-size painting of an urban scene in Paris. A man in a top hat holding an umbrella and a woman in a long fashionable dark dress walk arm in arm toward the viewer as other city dwellers with umbrellas walk in various directions across cobblestone roads and sidewalks. — Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877

Gustave Caillebotte

Color photograph of a light-skinned woman with short blond hair in dress that evokes a school uniform, crouched on the floor with wet hair, looking up with a distressed expression. — Untitled #92, 1981

Cindy Sherman

Video 2: Surface and Depth

What makes paintings feel as deep as the view from a window or as flat as a wall?Using three artworks from the Art Institute’s collection, this video unpacks a central theme and uses innovative visual storytelling to highlight the choices artists made to shape form and meaning in their works.

Learn more about the artworks featured in the video.

Featured artworks

Painting of Greek landscape, classical architecture, yellow, red robed man reading. — Landscape with Saint John on Patmos, 1640

Nicolas Poussin

A plucked chicken, a few stray feathers remaining, hangs upside-down by one foot, illuminated. Behind it the metal hinges and wood panels of a door are visible. — For Sunday’s Dinner, 1888

William Michael Harnett

A square white tile, rotated 90 degrees, crossed by black lines intersecting at 90-degree angles. A few of the shapes thus formed—some partial squares, some rectangles—are colored in a single shade of yellow, blue, black, or red. — Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray, 1921

Piet Mondrian

Video 3: Light and Shadow

How does an artist use light to help keep us out of the dark? Using three artworks from the Art Institute’s collection, this video unpacks a central theme and uses innovative visual storytelling to highlight the choices artists made to shape form and meaning in their works.