AT A HIGH SCHOOL SOMEWHERE IN LOS ANGELES , a teacher takes students to a Web page featuring a painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Beneath the image is the question: "Am I the subject of my own life or the object of others?"

With this examination of a captivating painting linked to a provocative question, art becomes more than illustration. It offers students a window into another time period and into the mind of the artist, encouraging students to think critically, searching for the personal meaning of the painting and how it relates to the individual students' culture. Welcome to Art Resources for Teachers and Students Online, or ARTS Online, a joint project of AT&T and the Los Angeles Educational Partnership.

For one week this summer, high school humanities teachers can learn how they can use these online arts resources and related cultural materials for integration into their curriculum. From August 23-27, 1999, Venice High School will host the inaugural ARTS Online Academy, a hands-on, instructional workshop designed to tie into national standards.

Workshop activities will include a discussions of standards alignment and assessment practices and how to use art to support interdisciplinary teaching. Hands-on activities will include the use of digital cameras and scanners, how to edit digital images and how to build Web pages.

The teacher teams who developed ARTS Online posed two questions for themselves, said Barbara Golding, director of the Los Angeles Educational Partnership's Humanitas program. "How can we use the visual image as a departure point for inquiry into art, literature, and social context in which it is created?" and "What are the ways in which electronic media can add value to an iquiry-based approach to learning?"

As five teacher teams met and worked together throughout a 10-month period, they responded to these questions in different ways, Golding said. Each team selected images for their focal point that they knew would elicit interest from high school humanities students. Teams discussed issues of gender, ethnic identity, stereotypes, political protest, subconscious hopes and fears -- each of which is represented in the explorations the teams developed, all starting with a representation of provacative art work that leads to opportunities to take different paths to discovery about history and literature.

The ARTS Online Web site at www.laep.org/artsonline features a comprehensive which identifies and provides links to Web sites containing artists' work and related materials; an "Online Teachers Guide" to facilitate the curriculum's use; interactive features, such as listserv technology to facilitate discussions with other teachers, artists, professors and museum experts; and an exhibition area to showcase student art, poetry and other forms of expression.