Lesson 1 - LearningThroughMuseums

English Language Learner Standards
Standard 1 Reading: Arrange information on topics gathered from reading.
Standard 2 Communication: Edit and revise own writing to produce final drafts.
Objectives
• Students will analyze how visual art can communicate ideas.
• Students will infer motives based on an analysis of a painting and its context.
• Students will infer the main idea of a painting.
• Students will use maps to imagine their own potential migration and the reasons behind these desires.
• Students will locate and organize information about the Great Migration.
• Students will explain migration in terms of resources and quality of life.
• Students will create art based on their research and personal choices.
Background Information
The artwork: Train Station, 1935
The artist: Walter Ellison (American, 1899–1977)
The topic: Choices
Relevant Information:
• Walter Ellison’s painting Train Station shows African American and white travelers at a station
bound for different cities.
• Between 1910 and 1970 more than six million African Americans moved from the South to cities
in the North to find better jobs and opportunities. This large movement of people is called the Great
Migration.
• Many came to live and work in Chicago, including Walter Ellison, who came to Chicago from
Georgia in the 1920s. In fact, the station in the painting may be based on the station in Macon, from
which Ellison likely departed for the North.
• Train Station is divided into three sections by two large columns located in the foreground, or area
closest to the viewer. These columns prevent African American and white passengers from
mingling. Ellison used them to visually represent one of the themes of the painting, which is
the impact of the segregation.
• In the middle ground of the painting to the right, we see an African American woman enter an area
labeled “Colored.” In the South, under segregation, blacks and whites were not able to use the same
public facilities like water fountains, bathrooms, and restaurants and did not have equal access to
educational and professional opportunities. Discriminatory laws called Jim Crow laws severely
restricted opportunities for African Americans.
• On the left, white passengers board trains traveling to vacation destinations in the South such as
Miami and West Palm Beach. On the right, African American passengers wait for trains going north
to cities like Chicago, New York, and Detroit.
• The center section shows African American porters, or railroad employees who carry travelers’
bags, assisting white passengers and directing an African American passenger to the trains heading
north.
Art Institute of Chicago • 81