Meet the Masters

Meet the Masters is a forty-year-old K-8 art-history-and-studio curriculum built on a single architectural idea: that a child who has sat with Van Gogh for a week, and made something in his medium, carries something away that a museum tour does not deliver. The program is the closest thing the homeschool market has to a proper classroom art course.

Last updated: 2026-04-24 · Every Homeschool Editorial Team

At a glance

Method	Subject specialist / literature- and image-based / studio
Worldview	Secular
Grades	K-8 (on a three-year rotation through 35 artists)
Formats	Streaming video, printable lesson guides, hands-on studio materials
Cost tier	Premium (for schools); Standard (for the homeschool version)
Parent intensity	3 (the parent runs the studio portion)
ESA-common	Yes, as a fine-arts line item in most marketplaces
Accredited	No (supplemental subject curriculum)
Established	1985
Website	meetthemasters.com · homeschool: mtmhomeschool4art.com

Our scoreboard (1-5)

Criterion	Score	One-line reason
Academic rigor	4	Real art history paired with real studio technique, not just coloring sheets
Ease of teaching	3	The parent has to run the studio; the video handles the biographical side
Content quality	5	Forty years of iteration has produced one of the cleanest elementary art programs in print
Flexibility	4	Drops into any weekly schedule; no sequencing lock-in
Value for money	3	Not cheap, but the materials and video are genuinely used
Worldview scope	5	Secular and usable by any family without friction
Visual/design	4	The art is the art; the framing is clean rather than cluttered
Support resources	4	Implementation guides, supply lists, step-by-step project sheets, teacher videos

Who the publisher is

Meet the Masters was founded in 1985 by Bonnie Steele, a credentialed teacher and exhibited artist in Mission Viejo, California, after art education was cut from her daughter's sixth-grade class at Del Lago School. Steele's original program was a volunteer assembly-and-studio model, a parent would come into the school, run a biographical assembly about a master artist, and then lead the class through a hands-on project in that artist's medium. The program grew through word of mouth in Orange County schools and, over four decades, expanded to a company that reports serving over three million students across more than a thousand schools and districts in all fifty states. The staff numbers roughly 45 credentialed teachers.

The homeschool version is a direct adaptation. Where the school version trains parent volunteers to run an in-classroom assembly, the homeschool version (mtmhomeschool4art.com) delivers the biographical content through streaming video and hands the studio direction to the parent. The curriculum is the same 35-artist roster; the delivery model is compressed to a single-family workflow.

Meet the Masters is secular. The artist roster, which spans Giotto through Andy Warhol, and includes Frida Kahlo, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold, Katsushika Hokusai, Rosa Bonheur, Maria Martinez, and Michelangelo, is organized by aesthetic era and technique rather than by religious frame. Religious subject matter appears where the artist's work required it (Michelangelo and Rembrandt both treat biblical scenes extensively), and is presented as art history. The program is used comfortably by Christian, Catholic, Jewish, secular, and classical-eclectic families without adjustment.

The core pedagogy

The program's pedagogical spine is a two-part weekly unit: a biographical introduction to a master artist (delivered as short video, paired with a printable guide and a handful of the artist's key works), followed by a studio project in the artist's medium. A week on Van Gogh ends with an oil-pastel landscape; a week on Mondrian ends with a grid composition in tempera; a week on Calder ends with a wire mobile. This is not a "draw the artist's self-portrait" program, the studio work is designed around the technique and material the artist actually used, and the materials are sold as a correlated kit.

The scope is a three-year rotation. Thirty-five artists are distributed across seven tracks of five artists each, and a family typically works through two or three tracks a year across K-8. A child who stays with the program from kindergarten through eighth grade will meet every artist roughly twice, once at an early level (where the project simplifies) and once at an older level (where technique gets real). The level bands are built in: each project has Kinder, Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced variants within the same artist unit, which is what allows a multi-age household to run the same artist on the same day.

Signature mechanics: (1) Biography by video, studio by parent. The video does the lift of teaching the art history. The parent's job is to set up the studio, pass out materials, and guide the project. A parent with zero background in visual art can do this; the provided implementation guide tells them exactly how. (2) Medium fidelity. When the week is about Hokusai, the child makes a relief print. When the week is about Calder, the child bends wire. Project fidelity is the program's signature, the parent buys real oil pastels, real wire, real clay, not craft-store approximations. (3) Three-year rotation with leveled difficulty. The same artist returns at an older age with a harder project, which is how the program scales from kindergarten into upper middle school without changing curriculum. (4) Separate school and homeschool products. The School Program and the Homeschool Program cover the same content but with different delivery expectations; families should not assume pricing parity.

A day in the life

A family running Meet the Masters as weekly enrichment typically reserves one ninety-minute block per week. Friday mornings are traditional. The first thirty minutes is the video biography and artwork review: a parent and two or three children sit together and watch the streaming segment on, say, Mary Cassatt, pausing occasionally to look closely at one of her mother-and-child pastels. The middle thirty minutes is project setup and demonstration: the parent reads the step-by-step sheet from the implementation guide, distributes materials, and narrates the first step of the project. The last thirty minutes is the children working, with the parent circulating to help.

For families who run art as a daily short block rather than a weekly long block, the program divides cleanly into five days: Monday video-and-discussion, Tuesday sketching and planning, Wednesday and Thursday studio work, Friday finishing and reflection. Either rhythm is supported by the implementation guide; neither is mandatory. Families who only have time for one artist a month instead of one a week slow the rotation and finish fewer than 35 artists over elementary school, which the publisher explicitly allows.

What they do exceptionally well

The artist roster. Thirty-five artists, eleven countries, eight female artists, and a conscious inclusion of non-European traditions (Hokusai, Kahlo, Ringgold, Martinez, Lawrence). This is not a check-the-box diversity roster; the artists are chosen for the actual teachability of their technique at an elementary level. A child finishing the program has sat with Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, De Stijl, Abstract Expressionism, Ukiyo-e, Mexican Modernism, and Harlem Renaissance painting, not as vocabulary but as hands-on work.

Medium fidelity in the studio. The homeschool program specifies real oil pastels, real tempera, real modeling clay, real foil, real wire. Families who have run art-appreciation programs that replace the studio with coloring sheets immediately notice the difference. The hands-on materials are the point, not the frame around the point.

Forty years of classroom iteration. Because the main business is the School Program, the homeschool materials have been tested, and revised, by credentialed teachers running the same projects with hundreds of thousands of elementary students. That feedback loop produces implementation guides that are specific about what goes wrong (this is the project where first-graders lose the oil pastel caps; this is the project where the clay dries too fast) in a way that homeschool-first art programs typically cannot match.

Secular without sterility. The program is secular in the straightforward sense, no religious claims, no liturgical framing, no explicit worldview, but the art is not stripped of its subject matter. Rembrandt's biblical etchings are presented as biblical etchings; Michelangelo's Pietà is presented as a Pietà. Families who want art history that does not sanitize the Christian heritage of Western art will find this one of the more honest secular programs on the market.

What they do poorly

Pricing opacity on the homeschool side. As of April 2026 the homeschool pricing page does not list a single, clear per-family or per-year number; prices are quoted on request and vary by how many artists the family licenses at once. The School Program pricing is published, roughly $2,800 per seven-artist track for curriculum plus ~$783 for a classroom supply kit and $30 per artist for training video, but the homeschool number requires a quote. Families trying to budget for the school year are frustrated by this.

Studio time is real time. The program will not run itself. A parent who wants an art curriculum their child can do alone at the kitchen table without supervision should look elsewhere. The biographical video is self-running; the studio project is not. The parent has to buy and set out materials, demonstrate the first step, and manage the cleanup. This is a feature for families who want actual studio time and a drawback for families who need an entirely parent-free art slot.

Supply cost accumulates quietly. Oil pastels, tempera, wire, clay, foil, printmaking ink, the program's material list over a full year is not trivial, and the homeschool version sells the materials as an optional add-on rather than bundling them. Families who source independently can save money; families who source from Meet the Masters pay retail. Either way, an elementary art year with real studio materials runs about $100-$200 in supplies above the curriculum cost.

Who it fits / who it doesn't

• Pick Meet the Masters if: you want a real art-history-and-studio program rather than coloring sheets or craft kits; you have ninety minutes a week to give to art and a parent willing to run the studio; you value the secular, ecumenical approach that makes the program usable in any household; you have multiple children in the K-8 band and want a program that levels within a single artist unit.

• Skip Meet the Masters if: you want a self-contained art curriculum the child does alone; you want confession-specific iconography or religious art curriculum (look at Memoria Press Art Cards or CHC Art of Contemplation instead); you cannot budget another $100-$200 in materials on top of curriculum; your child has already covered the major Western art canon elsewhere and you want a non-Western or specialist focus.

Cost honest assessment

The School Program price as of April 2026 is approximately $2,800 for a seven-artist curriculum track (seven of the 35 artists), plus $783 for the correlated classroom supply kit, plus $30 per artist for the teacher-training videos. That is the institutional price and it buys materials for up to 750 projects per artist, classroom scale. The Homeschool Program is not published at the same structure; Meet the Masters directs homeschool families to a separate site and quotes via email inquiry. Anecdotal reports from the Cathy Duffy homeschool community place the homeschool version at roughly $150-$350 per artist track for a single-family license, but this is the published price.

Compared to Masterpiece Society (roughly $200-$300 per year for a streaming art studio program) and to Artistic Pursuits (roughly $50-$80 per book for a self-contained studio curriculum), Meet the Masters sits at the top of the homeschool fine-arts budget when the supply and training costs are added. The trade is that you are buying a forty-year-old classroom-grade program rather than a homeschool-native production.

A realistic family budget for a year of Meet the Masters at home, covering seven to ten artists with materials, runs roughly $400-$700 depending on license and supply source. That is a real line item in a family's art budget, not a rounding error.

ESA eligibility notes

Meet the Masters is typically accepted as a fine-arts line item on ESA marketplaces that permit specialist enrichment purchases. Arizona ESA, Florida Step Up For Students, and Utah Fits All all reimburse fine-arts curricula in principle; Meet the Masters' position in each specific marketplace vendor list varies and changes as the publisher renews vendor agreements. Families with ESA funds should confirm vendor status before enrolling, since the homeschool-side purchase runs through a separate storefront (mtmhomeschool4art.com) that some state marketplaces have not yet formally approved. The program is secular, which eliminates the worldview-restriction friction that some states apply to Christian or religious art programs.

Alternatives

• Masterpiece Society, a family that wants an art curriculum the child can stream and work through independently, without the parent running studio, would choose Masterpiece Society over Meet the Masters.
• Artistic Pursuits, a family that wants a book-based, self-contained art program with technique instruction but lighter biographical scaffolding would choose Artistic Pursuits.
• How Great Thou Art, a family that wants an explicitly Christian art curriculum with biblical framing around the same technique-based studio approach would choose How Great Thou Art.

How we verified this

Our editorial team reviewed the Meet the Masters About page, the published pricing and overview documentation, and the full 35-artist track listing on the homeschool storefront. We cross-referenced founding history with the company's own public timeline and corroborated scale claims through the publisher's self-reported classroom reach. Prices and program details verified April 2026.