With his fingertips, eight-year-old Emilio Tarango presses on the ruler. He carefully places his pencil at one end and draws a perfectly straight line to the other. He lifts the ruler and gently blows on the fresh line. Tiny shreds of pencil dust slide across the table. He lays the ruler down again, making sure it’s precisely where he wants it. The columns on the front of the capital building he’s drawing have be just right.

A third-grader at Cumberland Trace Elementary School, Emilio is a new addition to teacher Teresa Christmas’ gifted and talented art class. As part of the class, Emilio is using images supplied by the National Endowment for the Humanities initiative Picturing America as inspiration for his own works of art.

“I’ve always wanted to see a capital,” Tarango said, not even looking up from his work.

While Emilio carefully renders the capital building in Columbus, Ohio, his classmates are using the Picturing America prints to study other famous works of American art. Nearby, a young girl is up to her elbows in pink paint, engrossed in recreating Audubon’s flamingoes, and a trio of passionate boys argues over the best way to reconstruct the Chrysler building using glue and popsicle sticks.

Nearly 20 schools in the Bowling Green area have received the Picturing America kit, which includes 40 high-quality prints of famous American works of art, a teacher’s resource manual, and access to additional teaching resources online. Christmas and an art education colleague at Western Kentucky University, Miwon Choe, are in the process of writing a grant that would fund a professional development opportunity to instruct Kentucky teachers on how to make better use of Picturing America in the classroom.

“It’s a great project to integrate across the curriculum,” Christmas said. “In music, literature, costuming and drama.”

As her art students study the images, they also delve into the lives and minds of the artists and their subjects. Haylee White holds up a painting she has done of Martin Puryear’s Ladder for Booker T. Washington.

“Mrs. Christmas and I have been talking about why he might need a ladder. Maybe to climb toward dreams?” White said.

As her students pack up their paints and put away their aprons, they chatter about their work. One little girl remarks on how excited she is to be drawing the Brooklyn bridge, even though it looks really hard. Another tells a friend that she thinks Audubon was likely a very good artist. Christmas smiles and shares with the class that Audubon lived in Kentucky for a time.

“These prints,” she said, after her bustling art room is finally quiet, “really bring something out that inspires them. And that’s really just so cool.”

— For more information on Picturing America, visit picturing america.neh.gov.