Asian Art Museum - Museum from Home

[Jaclyn Wall]

When it came to my website review, I knew I wanted to look into something that would teach me more about East Asian history; along with keep my attention. If I'm being honest, historic events tend to bore me; but as a visual person I gravitate towards art. When I first ventured to asianart.org, I found the home page to be extremely user friendly, but more importantly, became captivated by the images. As soon as you scroll over one, it zooms in as your mouse hovers really making you feel like you're getting a closer look at the highlighted exhbit. 

From there, I ventured onto the virtual events page and eventually ended up at https://asianart.org/museumfromhome/. Once there, I navigated towards virtual experiences you could encounter from the comfort of your own home. As I stated before, I am an art fanatic (I even have an art history minor from my undergraduate degree,) so I went to the Art Activties for Families link thinking I may find something to do with my students. As I scrolled down I selected my grade level (3-5) and immediately became interested in the wide variety of activities they had for families to participate in. These included creating your own illustrated Haiku poem, mix and match mythical creature game, creating Balinese shadow puppets, and so many more. However, the one that immediately grabbed my attention was creating a floating mandala. 

Upon opening the link at https://education.asianart.org/resources/create-a-floating-mandala/, it explains how mandala's are used as meditation tools for Buddhists - especially Buddhist monks. Prior to becoming a teacher, I was an entertainment publicist and had the good fortune of working His Holiness the Dalai Lama's 80th Birthday celebrtation in Orange County, CA. While working the event, I watched Buddhist monks spend days curating a sand mandala to honor His Holiness (see picture attached.) It was quite the experience and by perusing this website it brought back a lot of happy memories. I can totally see using one (or more!) of these virtual art activites with my class for an upcoming fun art project. I highly recommend this website and will definitely be using it in the future! 

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