If you’ve kept an eye on my blog posts over the months, you know I’m very interested in art books for children. Learning to look with an open mind is a crucial skill in developing real multicultural consciousness, and exposure to art can be great training for kids.

No One Saw (2002) was the first in Bob Raczka’s Adventures in Art series (8 books to date), published by Lerner Publishing. “No one saw flowers like Georgia O’Keeffe,” begins his beautiful exploration of how artists bring us vision through their work. Spare rhyming lines are illustrated by signature works of mostly impressionist-era art. “No one saw music like Marc Chagall. No one saw soup like Andy Warhol,” one double page goes, and indeed we never saw either the same way after those artists gave us their views. Short artist bios follow Raczka’s personal, tender concluding message: “Artists express their own point of view. And nobody sees the world like you.”

Bob Raczka’s endearing text and wise curatorship of the art works he presents make all his books classics. Art-loving parents will long be grateful for his skillful aid in embuing a love of art in their offspring. I’m a big fan of Raczka’s; click here for more posts about his books for kids.

Regular readers of this blog know I’m a big fan of Bob Raczka’s art books for kids, and his newest one is a special treat–a book of paintings of readers! Artful Reading (Lerner Books) continues Raczka’s winning formula of rhyming lines, great reproductions, and generous author’s notes. His selection of paintings spans five centuries, with subjects of all ages and circumstances caught in the act of reading. The cover art, Picasso’s “Two Girls Reading,” (scroll down at the link for the image) is followed by 22 more paintings, all wonderfully evoking the joys of the printed word. Vermeer’s famous “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” is here, along with Carl Spitzweg’s charming “The Bookworm” (a man high on a library ladder–and engrossed in a book) and Harlem artist Jacob Lawrence’s “The Library,” packed with readers. Notes on the paintings include such details as books the artists liked to read and obscure factoids about the painters. (Did you know Picasso created almost 34,000 book illustrations?)

“Read while you work. Read while you ride. Read what you want. It’s for you to decide,” Raczka advises, each tip illustrated with a suitable painting. (Edward Hopper’s “Compartment C, Car 293” accompanies “Read while you ride.”) Bob Raczka is a curator extraordinaire who clearly loves children and paintings, and now we know how much he loves reading and books as well. While avid young readers and fledgling artists will doubtless love Artful Reading, I suspect even reluctant readers and artists will be cajoled by the enticing images and rhymes of Rackza’s exhibition-in-a-book. For more from me about Raczka’s books, click here. And here’s another blogger’s take on Artful Reading.

In Where in the World?, Bob Raczka takes young readers on an artist’s tour of six continents “without leaving your chair.” Beginning in Japan (one of Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mt. Fuji) and on to Australia (Christo’s Wrapped Coast), Raczka introduces works by Diego Rivera, Gaugin, Klee, Canaletto and six others. Each gets a double page spread with several paragraphs of text explaining the art and the geographical influence on the artist: Tunesia on Klee, for example.

On the cover and in the back of the book, a map of the world wraps up the tour. One of several tapestries designed by Alighiero e Boetti and woven in the 1980′s by Afghani women using traditional rug-making techniques, the map indicates each country with a portion of its flag and “shows us that people from completely different countries and cultures… can ignore artificial borders and work together to create beautiful works of art.” Another map of the world in the book traces Raczka’s armchair route and gives real mileage between destinations.

Where in the World?, aimed for middle school kids, is packed with fascinating details about the art and how it was made. As always, Raczka presents significant works of art without pretense. Kids experience the work for themselves while enjoying the geography along the way. And for more travel (plus art) books for children, click here.

If you’re making plans to visit another culture with children, here’s a multi-genre multitude of resources, from guides for family travel to a pre-teen’s memoir of moving to Africa. Books, sites, lists… something to inspire and ease your travel with children and enrich their multicultural upbringing in the best possible way: experiencing new territory for themselves. Happy travels!

David Elliot Cohen’s One Year Off: Leaving It All Behind for a Round-the-World Journey With Our Children, in the Traveler’s Tales series, provides an ambitious starting point. Annotated travel-related children’s book lists, organized by country, await you at Travel for Kids. Along with books for young travelers, the Goodlittletraveler website suggests helpful advice about traveling with children. The Pennywhistle Traveling with Kids Book offers vehicular orientation for parents and kids traveling by car, plane, train or boat.

In Alison Lester’s Are We There Yet? 8-year-old Gracie narrates a family vacation all around Australia. Headed to the Caribbean? Here’s a book list. Along with many Fodors guides for kids traveling in Europe and U.S., Madallie: A Children’s Travel Store stocks an around-the-world adventure guide. Exploring Chinatown: A Children’s Guide to Chinese Culture is a great guide to any Chinatown, wherever in the world you’re headed. Four Corners Publishing puts out YA novels for and about young travelers, including guides to Sydney, Mexico, and Israel. In Learning to Swim in Swaziland by Nila K. Leigh, an American 11-year-old describes her life in Africa, where she moved when she was 8.

Introducing young children to international art classics in preparation for travel? Art Up Close makes helpful suggestions. And Bob Raczka’s Where in the World? takes Alighiero e Boetti’s tapestry map of the world as starting point for a world tour of great art–good fun for armchair and hit-the-road young travelers alike.

What I like about art is how it comes into your consciousness sideways while you’re thinking about something else. Bob Raczka’s recent alphabet picture book, 3-D ABC: A Sculptural Alphabet, (search at Lerner Publishing) is quirky in exactly this way. His minimal text never refers directly to the letters the images supposedly illustrate. The letters K and L, for example, are represented in a 2-page spread of Brancusi’s “The Kiss” and Robert Indiana’s “Love.” The text reads simply “Sometimes, two completely different sculptures… can say exactly the same thing.” The cover art, Rauschenberg’s Spoonbridge and Cherry at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, is a captivating image for any kid. (“I want to go there,” I overheard a preschooler at the library say to his mom, pointing to the cover photo.)

3-D ABC introduces images of significant 20th century sculpture by artists from Giocometti and Picasso to Jeff Koons, installed from Munich to New York to Tokyo (links are to images of works in the book). Raczka gives kids a solid sense of the range of sculptural materials, scale and subject matter. With delightful juxtaposition of images and respectfully fine reproduction quality, 3-D ABC introduces young readers to shapes that are iconic across cultures, ideas that make the world very small in a very good way.

Who am I and how do I look to others? Bob Raczka‘s Here’s Looking at Me: How Artists See Themselves, an American Library Association Notable Book for middle readers, stimulates children to explore these two fascinating and important human questions. Fourteen artists’ self portraits, from Velasquez to Harlem painter Jacob Lawrence, introduce children to the many ways that visual artists portray themselves.

Parents and teachers who want kids to explore art on its own terms will find this primer on self-portraits much to their liking. In addition, check out Just Like Me, a multicultural collection of artist self portraits–along with artists’ statements and their childhood photographs–and this art workshop, based on Just Like Me. For some great online ideas about kids’ self-portraits, click here.

Finally, following up on my series of posts on spiritual literacy, here‘s Concord Magazine’s gallery of spiritual self portraits by children.

Buddhists add a sixth sense to the five we ordinarily think of, and it’s thinking itself; to the Buddhist, thoughts impinge on the mind just the way sights, for example, impress the eye. It’s the vibrant interplay of sense organ, sense object, and consciousness that make up our experience of self.

The concept of Bob Raczka‘s More Than Meets the Eye, part of his Adventures in Art picture book series, treats only the five conventional senses, but he engages the mind as a sixth sense in the process. “Have you ever tasted a painting?” he asks, illustrating with Vermeer’s milk jug, Cassatt’s cup of tea, and of course Thiebaud’s frosted cakes. Hockney’s splashing diver, Jamie Wyeth’s stinky pig and Rivera’s tortillas, among others, point out sound, smell, and touch respectively. Works by Vasarely and Chuck Close demonstrate the art of really looking at pictures.

We don’t get Raczka’s charming rhymes in this book, but there is plenty of art food for thought for children and parents alike. Raczka understands that art is an experience, and he serves it up deliciously. In crossing senses, he also crosses cultures. The images and the senses he evokes and inspires are universal.

Patricia Stohr-Hunt’s blog, The Miss Rumphius Effect (where she’s known as Tricia) has a wonderful list of sense-evoking books for kids.

Art is an especially direct path to multicultural consciousness: the stretch an artist challenges us with is very like the stretch of seeing another culture afresh. Yet while there are wonderful art project books and books that present ideas about art, surprisingly few present actual works of art in a way that children can relate to directly. Bob Raczka’s Adventures in Art series, published by Lerner Publishing’s Millbrook Press imprint, does a great job of this, presenting real works of art with simple, often rhyming text. “Art is draped, art is chiseled, art is pasted, art is drizzled,” he explains in his 2002 Art Is. It features 27 works of art spanning the spectrum of time and genre from Bridget Riley and Christo to the Lascaux cave paintings and a mask from the Cameroon and concludes, “Art is an island surrounded by pink. Art is how artists get you to think.” Brief notes on each artist follow.

Raczka goes well beyond depicting famous works of art in an accessible context; his imagination and respect for kids make his series a work of art itself. Tune in again soon for more on good art books for kids, including more Bob Raczka books.