The Western modern canon I learned throughout my youth impacted my beliefs and played a role in limiting my students’ learning. Chicago Moms Art is a unique group of students. My lesson plans were catered to this uniqueness as I developed and reconstructed my own from personal experiences over time. Thus, it is astonishing that the artists taught in art classrooms are so similar, not only in the US but also in Korea and Dubai (S. Park, personal communication, October 26, 2022), (J. Kim, personal communication, November 12, 2022). A typical canon might have included Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O’Keefe and similar “modern masters” (Marshall et al., 2021). The narrow canon of art emphasized the stories of white genius artists who defied the restraints and rules of the academies in order to express deep insight from their soul (Gaudelius & Speirs, 2002, as cited in Marshall et al., 2021). Doubtlessly, the Chicago Moms Art students painted and copied works of these artists more than a couple times. Each of these master painting projects was initiated with requests from students who grew up seeing the paintings of the modern artists numerous times in textbooks and commercial advertisements. One student remembered seeing a copy of Dessert by Henri Matisse hanging in a restaurant and she wanted to purchase a poster of the painting to hang in her kitchen. She suggested that I create a lesson plan to paint a copy of the Matisse’s painting as a group. In her mind, exhibiting her own artwork would be more meaningful than hanging a printed poster. After I agreed, I found an image of the painting online and enlarged it to fit a canvas of 16 by 18 inches. After I printed out the image, I traced the outline of the subject in the painting by placing a transparent paper over it. I created a finished outlined drawing to be used as a stencil. Then I reproduced it for each student to trace the drawing onto their canvases. The students were able to transfer the image by sliding a sheet of graphite transfer paper underneath the stenciled drawing. I picked out acrylic colors to match the look of Matisse's painting and mixed some colors in advance. The premixed colors helped the students to be more efficient with the class time. There were not many thought processes that went into these painting projects for the students. I let them simply follow my step by step guidance and only focused on capturing the “look” of the original artwork. The goal of this lesson was to reproduce Matisse’s painting as close as to the original. My students enjoyed the process and they were excited to have their own Matisse painting hanging in their houses. The familiar work of famous artists generated the aesthetic the students admired. The students believed the iconic styles of famous paintings were the ultimate form of excellence and duplicating their forms is considered good art. There was a time when the students painted Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh. While copying the artwork, my students tried hard to mimic the iconic brush strokes and were disappointed they were not able to capture the exact shape of flower petals. The effort to try to follow the canonical works made the students feel frustrated by not being “good” enough. More importantly, the students lacked opportunities to think about what kind of story the artist was trying to tell through the painting and why the students were drawn to the artwork.