Spanish 4 Honors and CP classes will spend May 11 surrounded by famous pieces of art to learn about how the Spanish culture influences art. Students will leave early Thursday morning and get back around 3:15pm.

“I think that it will give us a really cool opportunity to see the art in person because we have studied a lot of it on the overhead and we have seen it in the power points, but we haven’t gotten to see it in person, like the exact brushstrokes the artists used, or the collection of art all in one place,” Jessie Houghton, junior, said. “I have been to the Art Institute a couples of times, but I never really had background in the Spanish art. I think you can appreciate the artwork more once you have a background of the artists.”

To get a background of the artists, Spanish students have been learning about a different artist each week throughout their unit.

“We are studying Hispanic artists, so a lot of artists from Spain and artists that have had a lot of influence on Spanish culture,” Houghton said. “We are looking at really famous artists like Pablo Picasso and lesser known ones like Diego Vasquez, Santiago Calatrava, and a few other ones.”

To see theses artists’ work, students will start at the Picasso at the Daley Plaza in the Chicago Loop. Then students will go to the Art Institute of Chicago to look at more Spanish artwork and then have tapas after, which is traditional Spanish cuisine, Houghton said.

“This unit is ‘el arte’, so ‘the art,’” Houghton said. “Before we started learning about the specific artists we learned terms to describe art and terms to describe different types of artworks, like how to say portrait or the contrast between light and dark. Now that we know a lot of words to describe art, we are learning about specific artists and their artwork.”

After learning the vocabulary to talk about art and learning about these artists, Spanish students now can view the art from a different perspective.

“I am so excited,” Haley Wold, junior, said. “It sounds like it is a really fun trip [and] it is a cool way to interact and see the actually stuff, it sort of brings it to life rather than looking at it on a iPad, which is what we do now. I think it is just a cool way of closing out the unit.”