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For as long as art has been made, artists have experimented with new materials. For thousands of years, however, the invention of art materials advanced very slowly, and artists only had a few choices unless wealthy patrons gave them costly materials to work with such as gold, silver or precious stones.

When people first made art, they drew with burnt sticks and soft rocks, and constructed works with natural materials such as shells, animal skins and feathers. Colors came from materials such as soot, colored earth, and minerals found in the ground. They also used dyes made from plants. They wove baskets from reeds and willows and cloth from plant fibers or animal hair. The discovery of pottery made from clay dug from the ground was followed by the discovery of making pots permanent by heating them to a high temperature in a fire (kiln).

As time went by, the invention of glass made jewelry less expensive and glazes became possible that made pottery waterproof. When mixtures of metals (alloys) were discovered, they were also used by artists. Some of the more important metal alloys were gold, brass, bronze and pewter.

Artists cast and hammered metals into sculptures, and used them to make much-improved weapons as well as tools for carving wood and stone. Today, of course, other metals are available for artists to use such as stainless steel and aluminum.

Several centuries ago, paints were invented that dried hard. Not only could these oil paints be used to protect houses from weather, but artists were able to paint pictures that would last a very long time. As a result, many of the very first oil paintings are still in perfect condition. These paints were immediately popular with the Indians of the Northwest Coast of America and the Maoris of New Zealand because their paint never dried hard. More recently, artists have also been able to choose among paints made with rubber and liquid plastics.

Goldsmiths eventually learned to hammer gold so thinly that they called it "gold leaf." Gold leaf was then used to enrich the surfaces of paintings, sculptures, buildings, pottery and manuscripts. The earliest beads, made of wood shells and seeds, were used to hold clothing together and also as decoration. Later, beads were made of precious metals and pottery. Even later, artists learned that they could be made of glass and iron. Today, large numbers of beads are made of plastic, and all of them now appear in the work of artists and designers.

Perhaps the most powerful invention to affect art is photography, because nothing like it existed before. Photography altered art forever. Black-and-white photographs came first, followed by color photography. Still-photography was followed by motion pictures, which further transformed art for everyone. For example, were it not for photography, the reproductions in this magazine would not be possible.

Although over the centuries many new materials were invented that could be used in art, the greatest revolution in new materials began about 200 years ago as a result of the massive growth of all kinds of industries and technologies. This revolution enabled artists to work with materials they could not have imagined earlier.

Instead of sculptors being restricted to materials such as stone, bronze, iron, wood and clay, they are now able to use new materials such as aluminum, stainless steel, solid plastics and neon--all of which result in quite different kinds of art. These new materials can be made to take on forms that are quite unlike more traditional materials. Not least, the invention of electricity permitted lighter-weight works of art to be made to move using electric motors, while other kinds of controls could turn lights on and off or make them brighter or dimmer.

The newest technology--computers--increasingly affect everyone's lives, including the creative work of artists and designers. An artist sitting at a computer can paint pictures, design automobiles, draw advertisements or create animated movies. And, architects can now use computers to show how buildings will look--inside and out--before they are built, instead of having to rely on drawings and models. Computer calculations also make it possible for architects to bend and twist materials in ways that earlier would have been thought impossible.

To illustrate a few of the changes that have occurred as a result of unusual uses of materials by present day artists, the Clip & Save Art Prints this year will feature 10 very different artistic works that focus on innovative uses of materials that have come about during the last century or so. This selection indicates something of the tremendous diversity that exists and will hopefully encourage students to search for others on their own, while also experimenting with new materials in their own art.

THE CLIP & SAVE ART PRINT FORMAT Each Art Print and related text continues to be organized, as in preceding years, so that readers will know what to expect and be able to find information that could be useful to them. As usual, the centerfold will be occupied with a large, full-color reproduction of an artwork suitable for classroom display. Because many of the more recent art materials are three-dimensional, the works reproduced in this series are all three-dimensional.

The page before the centerfold includes information and ideas about how to use the Art Print in the classroom. The opening section has to do with information that students can learn about the artist.

The next section, "Things to Do in School," offers suggestions for classroom activities based on the artwork. Lastly, "Building a Picture File," is intended to help teachers and students make full instructional use of the print. A method for helping teachers organize Art Print images efficiently in a teaching file is available on request.

The page following the reproduction includes notes expressly about the work illustrated in the centerfold that, once again, teachers may find useful in their teaching.

USING CLIP & SAVE PRINTS The single most important thing a teacher can do with the prints is display them on the classroom wall and direct student attention to them. Students might be asked questions about the meanings of the images with answers derived from the accompanying notes. After some preparatory thought, teachers can also encourage students to participate in discussions about the artworks and help make them more confident when defending their opinions in public.

To help achieve the above goals, teachers are encouraged to laminate the reproductions to extend their useful life. This is especially important if students are to handle the prints. Other teachers may prefer to mat the prints for wall display and place photocopies of the notes beside them for students to read. Alternatively, the monthly prints may be used to form a nucleus of images to which students may add other prints and, in so doing, extend their knowledge and appreciation of the kinds of art represented.

LIKE THIS RELIEF SCULPTURE, ALL OF Alfonso Ossorio's works comprise colorful scrap materials that he had collected. He searched for interesting things anywhere he could find them, especially secondhand stores and junkyards. He then selected objects from his collection for an artwork. Some of the pieces in this assemblage, for example, include African carvings, part of an animal skeleton, letters of the alphabet and costume jewelry. From this artwork we can see that he especially liked circular shapes.

LUCAS SAMARAS HAS ALWAYS MADE art that shocks people. His work is usually full of surprises. Sometimes they consist of surprising textures and surfaces, and sometimes he uses equally surprising photographs.

Whenever we see a box, it seems natural to want to see what is inside. Soft lengths of string hang down the sides of this black wooden box that seem pleasant enough. In stark contrast, the lid is a two-level mass of pins, making the idea of removing the lid a painful experience. These textural contradictions make viewers uncertain about what to do with the box. Most people would probably not want to prick their fingers by trying to remove the lid, so they just look at it.

SIMON RODIA WAS AN ITALIAN TILE setter who came to live in the Watts section of Los Angeles. He built these towers over many years by welding together iron reinforcing bars of the kind used inside concrete on buildings and highways to make them strong. The result is a series of web-like steeples, the tallest of which is 125 feet high. Because of their height, the towers stand out prominently and make a distinctive addition to the skyline.

Rodia decorated his towers with ceramic clay in which he embedded pieces of broken file and broken dishes. Some of the decoration is so dense that it fills the spaces to create mosaics.

• Nancy Graves once wrote that titles were necessary for her sculptures only as a way of identifying them. She'd prefer people just to look at her work and not bother with titles. But, since she has produced over 240 sculptures, she has to do something to identify them and names are probably better than numbers.

• The artist first studied to be a painter in Paris, France, and Florence, Italy, although she eventually discovered an interest in sculpture after seeing some 18th century Italian wax figures.

• Having grown up in the countryside, she enjoyed studying Nature. And, it is this love of natural objects that sparked her creativity. Her art shows this through the unusual mixtures of both natural and man-made objects she uses to build her sculpture.

The uniqueness of her work, however, is that the objects she assembles to create her sculpture are not the original objects, but metal castings of them. The original objects she collects are usually very lightweight and easily breakable, while the metal castings she uses in her finished sculpture are composed of exactly the same forms, but made in metal and are extremely strong and very heavy.

• The objects she collects come from all kinds of sources. Some are from botanical gardens while others, such as lengths of rope, old fans, lampshades and even pretzels, might be thought of as trash. She also uses old bones and houseplants. Unusual objects such as vegetables, cucumbers and crayfish are not what most people would think of as sculpture materials; yet, she often sees in them the kinds of forms she wants to include in her work. Her sculpture is unique because she has transformed all of the parts into metal before assembling them into sculptures. She doesn't have to worry about them drying out and breaking or going rotten and starting to smell.

• Anyone can tell her work from that of other artists by the way it is made. Nevertheless, she learned a lot from metal sculptors who were working before she became an artist, such as Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder and David Smith.

• Her way of creating sculpture is first to collect objects she likes and thinks she might be able to use in her work. She then has these objects cast in metal to make them permanent. She then stores these small objects in her studio until she is ready to use them.

When she begins a piece of sculpture, she chooses cast objects from her collection that she thinks would make an interesting piece of sculpture. She then starts to weld them together. Her sculptures develop through trial and error. She does not make a model or make drawings in advance. Instead she trusts her artistic eye and goes ahead and builds her sculpture spontaneously. If an idea is no good, she tears it apart and starts again. Her method of working is to walk around the sculpture as she builds it to make sure that it looks good from all positions.

• While the objects she assembles are mostly casts of parts of natural objects, she never attempts to duplicate real objects when she makes her sculpture. All of them are composed of objects that once had other uses but in her hands become parts of original works of art.

• The first thing that students might do when studying the sculpture of Nancy Graves is to make a list of the individual objects she chose to cast in metal and assemble into sculpture. The most obvious starting point for this kind of experience is the sculpture, Cantileve, reproduced with this article.

• While students in school will not be able to make metal castings like those used by this artist, they can collect natural and other kinds of materials, as she did, and construct their own sculptures using glue rather than welding. Student sculptures may not be permanent; but in building them, they will share some of the same kinds of experiences that are important in the art of Nancy Graves. These include collecting objects that interest them, selecting objects from a collection for use in their own sculpture, and actually constructing a piece of sculpture in the spontaneous way used by Graves. Students may also be able to paint their finished sculptures either in ways that are similar to those by Nancy Graves or in ways that are their own.

• Nancy Graves' sculpture is unique. No other artists work is quite like it. With some practice, students will be able to identify her work even when her name is not on it and also be able to describe the way most of it looks. The more they get to know her sculpture, the more they will be able to identify differences between her works as well as giving their reasons why they prefer some of them over others. In this way they will have advanced their understanding of Nancy Graves' sculpture and also sharpened their own abilities as art critics.

• A related task to the one above would be to study work by students who have built assemblages of collected objects to create their own sculpture. Everyone benefits when students describe each other's work, make comparisons between artworks to show their differences and, only lastly, give reasons for liking some of them more than others.

• Students may use this sculpture to learn about how castings are made and perhaps make simple casts for themselves from clay models using plaster. The method of casting done for Nancy Graves is called direct casting and results in an exact copy of an object being cast in metal. In the course of casting the object, however, the original object is burned away completely. So only one cast can be made of any object.

With other kinds of casting there is no limit to the number of casts that can be made from a single mold. For example, castings are often made in factories by pressing objects into wet sand to form a mold. Metal is then poured into the mold. Other types of castings are made with molds made of plastic, plaster and even stiff rubber, where the finished casting may be metal, plaster or plastic. Many everyday plastic objects are cast in factories by filling molds under very high pressure.

This sculpture may be used to illustrate various art-teaching needs. Potentially useful picture-file categories include: "American Sculptors Nancy Graves"; "Metal Sculpture"; and "Casting: Direct Casting.

For ideas about collecting and retrieving pictures to help in teaching art and other subjects, readers are invited to write to: Guy Hubbard c/o Arts & Activities, 591 Camino de la Reina, Suite 200, San Diego, CA 92108. E-mail: hubbard@indiana.edu.

At first glance, Nancy Graves' sculptures look delicate and flimsy, as though they might easily break. It's only when we realize that they are actually constructed out of bronze metal that we can think of them as strong. In fact, if it were possible to try and lift one of them up, students would soon discover that not only were they almost unbreakable, but that they were very heavy. All this is a contradiction to what our eyes tell us when we first see her work. So one of Nancy Graves' unique contributions to art is the difference between the way we first see her sculpture and what is learned from knowing about it either from reading or handling it.

This visual appearance is further enhanced by her use of bright, cheerful colors that add to the feeling of lightness and airiness of her sculptures. If she had painted them in dark, solid colors, we would probably have begun to realize that they were solid and heavy. But by painting them brightly and spontaneously they seem happier, more relaxed and lightweight.

Lying at the heart of this artist's work is the process she constantly goes through when making her sculpture. At all times she is looking out for objects she thinks might be useful in future sculptures. Most of what she collects are natural objects, such as parts of plants, the bodies of small animals (fish and animal bones), and such common objects as lampshades and pretzels.

Without thought for any particular sculpture, the next stage for Nancy Graves is to have the pieces in her collection cast in metal--usually bronze. Bronze is a mixture (alloy) of copper and zinc that is very strong and will not rust. Bronze was discovered 5,000 years ago, long before iron and steel. Bronze enabled people to make better tools and weapons, as well as make beautiful jewelry and sculpture.

While the artist understands how to cast objects in bronze, she has skilled workers in a foundry to make the bronze castings she needs. The process of direct casting or one-of-a-kind casting is done by first covering an object with shellac to seal it. Wax rods are inserted that, when melted, will make two tubes. One tube is to allow molten metal to enter the space where the object is, while the other rod will melt to allow gases from inside to escape. If a mold is not vented, it will explode.

The prepared object is then dipped into a liquid that makes a hard shell over it. It is then placed in a furnace where the object to be cast, as well as the wax rods, are vaporized. The empty mold is then cooled down and any ash from the original object is blown out, leaving a clean mold. The mold is then filled with molten bronze and allowed to cool.

When cool, the shell of the mold is broken and all the rough parts are filed away leaving a perfect copy of whatever the original object happened to be. The finished castings are then stored in the artist's studio in readiness for the final phase when she begins to join them together to create a piece of sculpture.

In view of the numbers of different objects used by Nancy Graves in her sculptures, students may want to try and identify what she used in this particular sculpture. To help do this, they may like to know that she used some spiral-shaped fern plants as well as dried fern leaves. She also used two fans made originally of raffia as feet, together with several pointed castings that were originally leaf stems. Near the bottom is a chunk that originally was a piece of soundproofing material. Near the top, she used some castings of lotus leaves and lotus flowers, together with castings from scraps of bubble wrap.

A study of this sculpture would be incomplete if it was only about the way it was constructed. When we look at the reproduction of the sculpture, the important thing is to notice how elegant and feathery it is, even though we know it is solid bronze and is very heavy. It stands on very small points and curves upward lace-like to a top that looks very much like the head of a palm tree. Because of the way it curves back over the feet of the sculpture, before spreading out like the top of a tree, it is visually well balanced. The bright, splashy paint work further adds to the idea of the sculpture being cheerful and full of fun.

Any article about the work of Nancy Graves would be incomplete without some mention of her broad interest in the sciences and how they have continually influenced her art. This interest is clearly present in this sculpture. In other works, she has made prints by embossing food and then printing with natural juices squeezed from those foods. Her interest in animal camouflage also led to paintings about sea animals, reptiles and insects, while her interest in animal movement is present in motion-picture films she has made.

PHOTO (COLOR): Alfonso Ossorio, Empty Chair or The Last Colonial. Glass, wood, plastic, bone, shell, stone, metal, plastic sheeting mounted on wood; 433/8" x 39 1/4" x 15 7/8". Gift of the Artist. Digital image(c) The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, N.Y.

PHOTO (COLOR): Simon Rodia, Watts Towers. © Nik Wheeler/CORBIS.

PHOTO (COLOR): Nancy Graves (1940-1995). Cantileve, 1983. Bronze with polychrome patina. Overall: 98" x 68" x 54". Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 83.39. Art(c) Nancy Graves Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. Photograph by Geoffrey Clements.