Place-based education incorporates local communities into school curriculum, recognizing the importance of local traditions, communities, and ecosystems, and emphasizing content that has reference to community life and local ecology. One elementary art teacher worked to connect place to her own artistic identity and to her work teaching elementary art. She wondered if her students might use art as a method of inquiry to explore how place contributed to their sense of identity. She experimented with blurring the lines between teacher and artist. As she discussed her own artwork and how her artistic investigations connected to her identity and sense of place, she learned that her students had many similar experiences. To develop ideas about place and its connection with identity, she and her 5th graders collaborated on four paintings that functioned as a study of community and place. After six months of students' classroom experiences and discussions of the conceptual aspects of artmaking, identity, and connections to the places they lived, their investigation of place and identity culminated in an art show and permanent installation in the school hallways and an exhibit at the teacher's university.