Clear, simple, good writing about art is rare, and the more recent and complicated the art, the more this seems true. This workshop will offer the opportunity for interested individuals to practice the craft of elucidating art and ideas in writing. Part of our time will be spent thinking about the nature of the audience for wall texts, brochures, and other museum publications. We will also consider the arena of journalism for examples of writing that successfully communicate issues of complexity to a general public, and to think about how we might best write within various media contexts. Participants are strongly urged to bring laptop computers, as well as computer files of images you want to write about, or a notebook to write in and reproductions of artworks. We will also use images on view in PAAM’s galleries and from the permanent collection. If you have any favorite, brief examples of writing, bring a number of copies of them with you so that we might analyze them. Reference materials by the workshop leader, Philip Yenawine, will be provided in advance by Internet, and participants are encouraged to read them as preparation and follow up. For examples of Yenawine's writing, please see two of his books, How to Look at Modern Art and Key Art Terms for Beginners. Philip Yenawine is the author of How to Look at Modern Art, and Key Art Terms for Beginners. He has published six children's books about art: Stories, Colors, Lines, Shapes, People and Places. He was Director of Education at the Museum of Modern Art (1983-1993), has served as a consulting curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and during the academic year 1993-94, he was Visiting Professor of Art Education at the Massachusetts College of Art. Yenawine is cofounder (with cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen) of Visual Understanding in Education (VUE), a nonprofit educational research organization that develops and studies ways of teaching visual literacy and of using art to teach critical thinking and communication skills. VUE’s curriculum, Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), is in use in schools across the US, as well as in seven countries of the former Soviet Union. He is currently working on a book based on the work of Abigail Housen, and a series of biographies for young people, as well as consulting on a variety of projects in the United States and abroad