An art curriculum is not a mere container of aesthetic and cultural content; a curriculum is itself an aesthetic and cultural structure. Students should be able to sense, examine, and explain the structure of the art curriculum; these explanations should emphasize important ideas and themes associated with traditional and contemporary artmaking practices. The author's goal for this article is not to create a new canonical list of art education principles. She wants to provide a framework that teachers can use as an outline of the sorts of meaning making experiences that should be included in a curriculum that engages and empowers today's students. (Contains 10 endnotes.)