Know Your Neighbor
Interview a partner and create a portrait

a. View and discuss Aliza Nisenbaum’s painting with your students. Ask them to describe what they see in this work—especially the details of the figures’ surroundings. Can they identify any of the objects in the painting?

b. Ask students to find a partner and interview each other using the following questions based on Nisenbaum’s painting. Have them make notes about their partner’s answers.

How do you spend your Sunday morning?

Where do you like to hang out?

Who do you enjoy hanging out with?

What is your favorite thing to wear?

What do you like to read?

Ask students to come up with additional questions for their interview.

c. Ask students to draw a portrait of their partner and include information from their interview. 

d. Display and discuss students’ portraits. In what ways are their portraits similar? How are they different? Ask students to identify something new that they learned about their classmates by looking at their portraits.

A painting of two people lounging on a couch and reading the newspaper with a colorfully patterned background.
A painting of two people lounging on a couch and reading the newspaper with a colorfully patterned background.

Aliza Nisenbaum, La Talaverita, Sunday Morning NY Times, 2016. Oil on linen, 68 x 88 in. (172.7 x 223.5 cm). Collection of the artist; courtesy T293 Gallery, Rome and Mary Mary, Glasgow

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.