IB Visual Arts 2025 explained for first teaching in September 2025 and first assessment in May 2027
IB Visual Arts 2025 Explained: A Comprehensive Guide for Students and Teachers
The International Baccalaureate Organization has launched a redesigned Visual Arts curriculum that will begin teaching in September 2025 with the first assessments in May 2027. This transformation represents a fundamental shift in how visual arts is taught and assessed in the Diploma Programme. The new approach centers on art making as inquiry rather than isolated tasks, placing creativity, critical thinking, and authentic artistic practice at the core of learning. This guide breaks down the new curriculum structure, assessment model, and key changes to help both students and teachers navigate this exciting transformation without confusion.
Digital submission, inquiry driven learning, clearer SL and HL differentiationArt making as inquiry
Students follow lines of inquiry with clear intentions and curated evidence.
Art Making Inquiries Portfolio
Common to SL and HL, curated screens with a clear inquiry narrative.
Different Task 2
Connections Study for SL, Artist Project for HL.
Understanding the Foundation: Create, Connect, and Communicate
The new IB Visual Arts curriculum is organized around three core teaching areas that work together to shape how students learn and create. These are not separate units but rather interconnected dimensions of artistic practice that students engage with simultaneously throughout the course.
Create focuses on how students generate ideas from investigation and observation, engaging with experimentation and working toward resolved artworks. During this phase, students learn how to follow lines of inquiry from conception to realization and develop their personal visual language. Teachers introduce a variety of art making forms and creative strategies, helping students understand that creation is a deliberate process guided by clear artistic intentions. Whether students are working with traditional media like painting and drawing or contemporary forms like video and digital art, the emphasis is on purposeful exploration rather than simply producing finished pieces.
Connect emphasizes how students investigate artworks from different times and cultural contexts, considering the relationships between artwork, artist, and audience. Rather than treating art history as a separate subject, students learn to situate their own art making in relation to context and cultural significance. This means understanding how and why other artists made certain choices, what inspired them, and how their work reflects broader cultural movements and social issues. Through this investigation, students develop deeper insight into their own creative decisions and begin to see their work as part of a larger artistic conversation.
Communicate addresses the methods through which students present and share their artistic work with others. This includes learning how to curate, document, and explain their artwork both visually and in writing. Teachers introduce methods for digital documentation and curation, helping students understand that how they present their work is as important as the work itself. Students learn to write artist statements, create rationales, and think carefully about their intended audience and how different viewers might interpret their work.
The allocation of teaching hours reflects the emphasis on integration. Standard Level students receive 20 hours of instruction in each core area plus 90 hours devoted to integrating Create, Connect, and Communicate, totaling 150 hours. Higher Level students receive 30 hours in each core area plus 150 hours of integration, totaling 240 hours. Importantly, the majority of teaching and learning time focuses on the integration of all three areas through art making as inquiry.
The Seven Assessment Objectives: Your Creative Roadmap
Rather than assessing separate skills and knowledge, the new curriculum uses seven interconnected assessment objectives that are embedded in the creative process itself. These objectives guide both teaching and learning, helping students and teachers understand what success looks like at each stage of artistic development.
Investigate requires students to explore art forms and creative strategies, as well as the meaning and cultural significance of artworks within and across contexts. This is the research and discovery phase where students ask questions, examine influences, and develop understanding. Generate describes how students create intentions and artworks through inquiry and the application of creative strategies. This is where ideas become visual reality, where students experiment and begin to develop their artistic voice.
Refine emphasizes how students enhance their artistic intentions and art making through investigation, dialogue, and critical reflection as part of inquiry. This objective recognizes that art making is iterative, ideas improve through feedback, conversation, and repeated consideration. Resolve focuses on how students fulfill their artistic intentions by creating completed artworks that convey meaning. This is the moment when experimental work becomes resolved, when a piece is finished and ready to communicate with an audience.
Situate requires students to position their own artworks and art making, as well as those of other artists, in relation to context(s), audience(s), and communities of artistic practice. This objective ensures that students understand their work within a broader art world and can articulate why their choices matter culturally and conceptually. Synthesize describes how students integrate concept and form through creative and curatorial practices to create artworks and communicate artistic intentions. This is the moment where thinking becomes visual, where ideas, research, technique, and form come together into a cohesive whole.
Finally, Curate requires students to organize visual and written materials, including both developing and resolved artworks, to communicate artistic intentions and inquiry. Curation is not just about selecting final pieces, it is about thoughtfully organizing evidence of your entire creative journey to tell a clear story to examiners about who you are as an artist.
Assessment Structure: SL vs HL
The assessment model maintains three tasks but significantly redesigns each one to support authentic learning and clearer differentiation between levels. All work is submitted digitally, combining visual evidence with written reflection and, for HL students undertaking the Artist Project, video documentation.
Standard Level (SL) Assessment Model
This task replaces the old Process Portfolio and is common to both SL and HL students. Rather than simply documenting studio activity, the portfolio requires students to curate visual and written evidence demonstrating how they pursued personal lines of inquiry guided by clear artistic intentions. SL students submit up to 15 screens with a maximum of 3,000 words total, providing evidence of how they explored a variety of art making forms and creative strategies while developing their visual language.
Critically, students must explicitly include the inquiry questions or generative statements they worked with, allowing examiners to follow the thinking behind the work. For example, instead of presenting a series of paintings without context, students would articulate the question driving their investigation and then show the visual and written evidence of how they explored this question over time.
This is an SL only task that focuses on situating one of the student’s resolved artworks within a broader artistic and personal context. Students select one artwork they have completed and present it alongside two artworks by different artists, demonstrating connections between their own work and the work of others. The submission includes up to 10 screens with a maximum of 2,500 words, with visual evidence accompanied by supporting analysis.
The key is that these connections must be informed by research and demonstrate understanding of the cultural significance of the artworks studied. Rather than superficial comparisons, students are expected to explain why the studied artworks matter conceptually and culturally, and how this understanding influenced their own artistic development.
This internal assessment task, internally assessed by the teacher and externally moderated by the IB, requires SL students to submit five resolved artworks that demonstrate their best achievements in communicating artistic intentions coherently. Each artwork must be accompanied by a title, details on medium and size, and optionally, up to two supporting images showing details or additional views.
Students also submit a curatorial rationale of up to 700 words spread over up to two screens, articulating their artistic intentions and the choices that create coherence across the five pieces. Rather than focusing on the number of artworks, the emphasis is on quality, coherence, and the student’s ability to select pieces that work together to communicate a unified artistic vision.
Higher Level (HL) Assessment Model
HL students complete the same Art Making Inquiries Portfolio as SL students, using the same format and word limits. However, HL expectations for depth, breadth, and sophistication are higher. HL students are expected to explore more complex inquiry questions, engage with a wider range of influences and contexts, and demonstrate more sophisticated thinking about their own artistic practice.
This is a stand alone HL only task that is entirely new to the curriculum. Rather than analyzing external artworks, HL students conduct an independent, self directed artistic inquiry that culminates in a resolved artwork of their choice, created within a chosen context. This task emphasizes student agency, project management, and the full creative cycle from ideation through contextualized realization and evaluation.
The Artist Project requires students to demonstrate how their work was informed by investigation of context and connections with at least two artworks by different artists, supported by dialogue and reflection. The submission includes a PDF of up to 12 screens with a maximum of 2,500 words, plus a three minute video showing where and how the project artwork was realized in its chosen context. Students also include finalized artistic intentions explaining the completed work.
HL students submit five selected resolved artworks chosen from a documented broader body of at least eight works. This emphasis on selection and curation distinguishes HL from SL, rather than simply creating five final pieces, HL students must make deliberate choices about which pieces best represent their artistic development and communicate their intentions to an audience.
The submission includes a curatorial rationale and five artwork texts, with each text critically analyzing and situating one resolved artwork within the student’s practice and broader artistic context. HL students also submit a selection chart showing the five chosen pieces and three or more not chosen works, making visible the curation process and demonstrating rigorous selection thinking.
Key Changes from the Previous Curriculum
Understanding what has changed helps clarify the new approach. The previous IB Visual Arts curriculum, assessed until May 2026, structured the course around three separate, clearly defined tasks. The new curriculum represents a paradigm shift from this compartmentalized approach.
First, the focus has shifted from task driven to inquiry driven learning. Rather than asking students to complete a Process Portfolio as a checkbox, the new curriculum asks students to conduct genuine investigations into art making and follow clear lines of inquiry throughout the course.
Second, the new curriculum requires fewer resolved artworks but greater emphasis on quality and curation. The new model requires only five resolved artworks for both levels, but SL students must articulate how these five work together coherently, and HL students must select five from a larger body and explain their selection choices.
Third, the visual arts journal is no longer a separate submitted component. Now, the journal is embedded as part of course practice, it supports all learning but is not separately assessed. Instead, students curate evidence from their journal to create the Art Making Inquiries Portfolio, which focuses on showing inquiry, not just showing everything.
Fourth, assessment is now more explicitly outcome focused rather than process focused. The seven assessment objectives are action verbs that describe what students should do, investigate, generate, refine, resolve, situate, synthesize, curate, rather than describing general categories of knowledge.
Fifth, physical exhibition is no longer required. The new model repositions exhibiting as important for learning and community engagement, but digital submission is the formal requirement, allowing schools greater flexibility in how students share their work.
Sixth, HL and SL are now more clearly differentiated. Both levels share the same assessment objectives and complete the Art Making Inquiries Portfolio, but Task 2 is completely different, reflecting different teaching hours and expectations.
Seventh, word counts have been introduced to ensure balance between visual and written evidence. Explicit word limits ensure that visual evidence remains primary while written reflection is concise and purposeful.
Common Misconceptions and How to Avoid Them
While the portfolio appears similar in format, the focus is fundamentally different. The old Process Portfolio documented everything students did. The new Art Making Inquiries Portfolio is carefully curated to show evidence of specific lines of inquiry. Rather than including everything, students select images and reflections that best demonstrate how they investigated their guiding question. The portfolio should tell a clear story about the student’s thinking and artistic development, not be a chronological journal of all work created. Teachers should guide students to be selective and purposeful in what they include, ensuring every image and reflection serves the larger inquiry narrative.
The difference between HL and SL is not simply quantitative but qualitative. HL students should engage with more complex questions, connect their work to broader artistic conversations, demonstrate more sophisticated thinking about cultural context, and show greater agency in directing their own artistic inquiry.
The Artist Project is entirely new and requires a different mindset. HL students conduct an independent inquiry that leads to creating their own resolved artwork within a chosen context. Research into artworks by other artists is used to inform the student’s own work, not to replace it.
Quality and coherence matter more than diversity of medium or style. Five cohesive works exploring the same theme can score as well as five pieces in different media if they fulfill intentions and demonstrate competence.
Writing is integrated throughout all components. The portfolio requires reflection on inquiry, Task 2 requires analysis and contextualization, and HL includes artwork texts. Writing should be developed progressively throughout the course.
Examiners grade all three components according to their assigned weightings. Weak performance in any component will impact the final grade, so students must take all tasks seriously and allocate time appropriately.
Art making is iterative, and the curriculum embraces this through the Refine objective. Students are encouraged to revisit, reconsider, and redevelop their work based on dialogue, feedback, and reflection.
Practical Implementation Strategies for Teachers
Begin the course by helping students develop genuine artistic questions rather than assigning only predefined projects. Teachers can facilitate inquiry through dialogue, asking what students are curious about and why it matters.
Transform the classroom into a contemporary studio where students share work in progress and engage in critique and dialogue. Dedicate significant class time to actual art making, not only writing and deadlines.
Teach students how to select, organize, and present visual evidence. Help them understand how images, sequencing, and short writing together communicate meaning.
Create ongoing opportunities for critique, documentation of feedback, and visible revision. Students should document how feedback affected decisions and learning.
Model how to research artworks, artists, and movements, and how to analyze cultural significance and contemporary relevance. Support students in connecting context to their own making.
Help students focus on coherence, intention, and selection rather than volume. Shift the question from how many to how well the works communicate a unified artistic vision.
Timeline for Implementation: 2025 to 2027
Establish the three core areas, build skills in various art making forms, and support students in identifying personal lines of inquiry. Focus on exploration and journal building, with inquiry that can evolve.
Students refine inquiry focus and begin developing work that will feed the portfolio and resolved artworks. SL develops the Connections Study. HL begins shaping the Artist Project.
Curate the Art Making Inquiries Portfolio, finalize SL Connections Study, and complete HL Artist Project including video documentation in context.
Finalize external submissions. Then select, document, and assess the five resolved artworks for internal assessment and moderation.
Conclusion: Embracing the New Paradigm
The new IB Visual Arts curriculum represents a genuine evolution in arts education, shifting from a compartmentalized, task based model toward authentic, inquiry driven artistic practice. Rather than students completing separate assignments, they now conduct sustained investigations into questions that matter to them, create work that communicates meaningful ideas, and position their practice within broader artistic conversations.
For students, this curriculum offers stronger creative freedom and an opportunity to develop as genuine artists. For teachers, it demands a shift from being primarily an instructor to being a mentor and studio facilitator. The key to success is understanding the philosophical underpinnings, that art making is inquiry, that create, connect, and communicate are integrated, that the seven objectives describe authentic practice, and that quality and coherence matter more than volume.
Sources and Further Reading
Use this as your website reference list and expand it as needed.
- International Baccalaureate. Visual arts updates.
- International Baccalaureate. Study visual arts, Diploma Programme.
- ManageBac. Subject Support resources related to DP Visual Arts updates.
- InThinking Visual Arts. DP Visual Arts new course and assessment updates.
- Van Agha. IB DP Visual Arts assessment tasks guide content.
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