About This Book

This book was created as a companion resource for students enrolled in ART105 at Pima Community College, which explores the dynamic worlds of art appreciation, art history, and visual culture. While these materials are integrated into the online course’s module lessons, we also wanted to offer students something lasting—an accessible resource to revisit and reflect on beyond the end of the term.

The content in this book is adapted from several outstanding open educational resources that have helped shape how art is studied and understood. In particular, we gratefully acknowledge the following sources:

• Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning by Pamela Sachant, Peggy Blood, Jeffery LeMieux, and Rita Tekippe (2016), published through the University System of Georgia’s GALILEO Open Learning Materials. This text (https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/arts-textbooks/3) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 and provided a strong foundation for many of our discussions about the elements of art, cultural context, and artistic meaning.

• Boundless Art History (https://www.collegesidekick.com/study-guides/boundless-arthistory), an open-source reference that offered structured overviews and helpful summaries of key periods and movements in art history.

• Smarthistory (https://smarthistory.org), a leading open educational resource for art history, which provided rich, accessible content on global art traditions and deepened our approach to contextualizing works of art across time and culture.

These resources have been thoughtfully adapted and supplemented to support the unique goals of our course and to create a cohesive, student-friendly learning experience. Together, they make up a flexible and engaging guide designed to support both classroom learning and lifelong curiosity about art.

We hope you enjoy the learning journey!