This article describes a culture-based art curriculum for preservice elementary education majors which incorporates activities through which they can explore, cultivate, and foster creativity, aesthetic awareness and self-expression through cultural awareness, understanding, representation, and identity. The author utilizes visual culture theory in the classroom, encouraging students to become more engaged in art by bringing their lives and cultural identities into their art. This curriculum uses students' familiarity with their experiences and cultures to mitigate their fears about engaging in artful expression; this provides art teachers with practical art teaching experience, actual cross-cultural teaching resources, and examples of students' artwork that emphasize cultural representation, critique, and self-reflection.