Category Archives: Bookshelf

Building Meaningful Interpretation Around Unsettling Contemporary Art

November 4, 2015 Mike Murawski 5 Comments

Written by Mike Murawski, Kristin Bayans, and Phillippa Pitts

This essay is part of the new MuseumsEtc book Interpreting the Art Museum, an expansive volume of 19 essays & case studies from experienced museum professionals sharing some of today’s most successful initiatives in art interpretation.

From November 2014 through April 2015, the Portland Art Museum hosted the installation of a complex, unsettling, and physically-immersive multimedia installation piece entitled The Enclave (2013) by Irish contemporary artist and photographer Richard Mosse. Consisting of six monumental double-sided screens installed in a darkened gallery, paired with a powerfully haunting soundscape, The Enclave presented a unique challenge for the Portland Art Museum’s education team as they tackled issues of interpretation, visitor reflection, and public learning.

In The Enclave, Mosse employs discontinued military film stock to document the largely overlooked humanitarian disaster in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – in which 5.4 million people have died since 1998. In a kind of advocacy of seeing, The Enclave attempts to cast this forgotten tragedy in a new spectrum of light, to make this forgotten humanitarian disaster visible. Furthermore, Mosse aims to keep the experience as open as possible, allowing viewers to bring personal experiences, memories, stereotypes, and media images to the process of making meaning with this complex work. According to Mosse:

“The work does not prescribe a set of responses, and remains ambiguous in an unsettling and seemingly irresponsible way.”

Given these expectations for ambiguity and complexity, the museum’s education team decided to construct an extended series of meaningful opportunities for visitors and staff alike to respond to and react with the installation. These opportunities encouraged personal reflection and physical engagement within the space of The Enclave and provided open pathways for further learning. Opportunities offered incorporated a range in levels of engagement from which to choose.

This case study explores the strategies used by the museum to connect a variety of visitors with this unsettling work of contemporary art. These strategies include:

an in-gallery interpretation space designed for visitor reflection and response;
printed postcards inviting visitor written responses;
Tumblr site (http://portlandartmuseum.tumblr.com) on which the museum regularly posted visitor responses to The Enclave.

While these interpretive strategies serve as the focus for this case study, the museum also partnered with the locally-based international development non-profit organization, Mercy Corps and the Mercy Corps Action Center, whose staff facilitated workshops for museum staff and docents as well as teachers and students participating in a joint school program between the museum and Mercy Corps.

In addition, the museum hosted an extensive series of public workshops and conversations which specifically encouraged open dialogue and personal reflections paired with viewing The Enclave. Throughout these interpretive strategies, our goals were to allow for open, personal, even emotional responses to the piece; to encourage visitors to physically engage with the space of the piece; and to provide pathways for further learning, especially related to the situation in the DRC.

In-gallery interpretation space

Early in the education team’s thinking about how to facilitate visitor experience with The Enclave, it became clear that visitors walking out of the installation would need a way to work through their reactions and responses. In the absence of a tour or multimedia guide, it would fall on the content of the interpretive space to empower individuals to tackle The Enclave independently. Simply entitled Reflecting on The Enclave, the in-gallery interpretation space helped visitors transition from a state of being acted upon by the exhibition’s visual and auditory forces to having the freedom and quiet to react to what had just transpired. The space did not provide visitors with the museum’s point of view or any curatorial voice. The museum remained silent and instead provided a comfortable space for visitors to have and share their own perspectives.

Reflecting on The Enclave interpretive space, Portland Art Museum

This small “living room” space included a love seat, cushioned armchairs, and a small end table with a bin of pencils. Housed across from the seating area were five clear acrylic holders, each of which held one deck of interpretive postcards. The front side of each card displayed a still photograph from the exhibition and the backside displayed the interpretive prompts: I saw… I heard… I felt… Five cards were placed in the rack with the photograph facing forward and one card was placed in the rack with the interpretive prompts facing forward. This arrangement indicated to visitors the card’s multi-interpretive purpose. Sitting on a pedestal directly below the cards was a clear acrylic box with a slit in the lid. Cards filled out by visitors could be seen inside the box. The nature and placement of these items invited visitors to look at, pick up, write on, and add a card to those already in the box.

Attached to the side of the box was a sign inviting visitors to See what others have shared via the project’s associated Tumblr site. This information indicated to visitors that they could read others’ responses and that their responses were aggregated into an ongoing community commentary about The Enclave extending beyond the museum.

Response cards

Knowing from previous experience that cards are popular takeaways for visitors, these postcards aimed to provide visitors with an opportunity to say I saw this or I witnessed that. Therein lay one of the project’s most significant challenges. With six simultaneous screens and a 47-minute runtime, visitors emerged from The Enclave having witnessed entirely different scenarios. Some saw rolling images of stunningly beautiful landscapes. Others witnessed a funeral scene juxtaposed with a dangerous birth. A body abandoned in the grass. A sprawling internal displacement camp. Our challenge was to find the emotional or thematic touch points that could translate this immersive experience into static interpretive cards.

Our interpretive media team segmented the piece into major themes or experiences: war and conflict, the role of the photographer, nature and the sublime, Africa and the other. Cross-referencing this list with the potential photographs approved by the artist’s gallery, we chose six images that we believed could serve as touchpoints for a range of potential experiences: a sublime landscape, a military roadblock, a group of civilians, an individual soldier, a young woman, and a damaged village.

We deliberately selected images that were highly polysemic. For example, the landscape Platon echoed picturesque tropes of art history. It also could speak to environmentalism, highlight the surreal nature of the pink film stock, represent the work’s otherworldliness, or, as we saw in the response cards, embody an idea of hope. By contrast, we did not select a photograph called Madonna and Child, which featured a uniformed soldier holding a baby in the pose of the Virgin and Child. This image, while incisively poignant in highlighting the complexities of villain and victim, left little space in which the visitor could create meaning. By offering the visitor a broad range of photographs, we invited them to self-select the image that matched their experience.

Sample visitor response card from the Reflecting on The Enclave interpretation space, Portland Art Museum.

Initially, we had planned to further draw out these themes through a variety of questions printed on the verso of the cards: Who is the victim and who is the villain? What is the man on the right thinking? What about the man on the left? Due to a compressed project timeline, our initial prompts were developed without the benefit of visitor testing. Therefore we used a docent training session as an ad hoc focus group.

After standing in The Enclave ourselves and observing docent educators processing their experience, we redeveloped the prompts entirely into the three, simple, sensory-based statements: I saw… I heard… I felt… These words, which were repeated over and over in the training session, were familiar to us from educational research, particularly Harvard’s Project Zero Thinking Routines, which employed them. They provided enough guidance to bolster processing and reflection, but to still afford room for a variety of responses and types of meaning making. Moreover, by splitting the prompts into bite-sized statements, we also hinted to visitors that it was OK to have a range of responses from simple to complex, and to navigate the space on the reverse of the card in whatever way they chose.

Visitor responses

In total we printed 7,000 cards, of which around 4,000 were taken by visitors and around 500 slipped into the box in the gallery. Although each response was unique, the methods by which visitors used the cards could be categorized in three ways:

Lists: Some visitors took the prompt literally, charting what they saw, heard, and felt. They wrote in vertical columns over the words, sometimes even using lines to divide their cards into three spaces. They outlined and circled the light grey text to emphasize it. They drew lines between the printed words and their handwritten texts.

Notes to the museum: Often marked with explicit salutations to the museum or the artist, visitors used these cards to give us feedback in the form of concerns, thank you notes, and a frequent request to turn down the volume (the artist preferred the audio component of the piece to be quite loud, providing a physical experience of sound as well as of the projections).

Journaling: By making the background text light grey, we had successfully signaled to visitors that almost the entire card could be used to write or draw. Many visitors did exactly that, often writing stream of consciousness, free association, or personal reflections. Many show cross-outs and hesitations, reflecting the questioning and thinking that happened in the space. For example, one visitor wrote, “There was something about this. Something I’m not entirely sure what it was. Something about this just made my something click. All I can say is brilliant: I’m leaving with a lot to think about and a really heavy heart. But that’s what art does, right? Makes you think. Amazing.”

In terms of what the visitors wrote, we saw five overall themes emerge from the visitor responses:

Peace on Earth: Visitors who shared prayers, wishes, and hopes for those involved in the conflict. This was, interestingly, often correlated to the image Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams. In this case, visitors took the opportunity to speak directly to the woman depicted: “Sorry adout the war” [sic] or “Plz be safe.”

Cynicism and despair: Although there were uplifting moments in The Enclave, the artist did not shy away from depicting violence, destruction, and conflict. This response was almost a direct inverse of those in the first category.

Intellectual connections: These visitors related The Enclave to their prior knowledge of politics, literature, and film, bringing in comparisons to Kubrick, Heart of Darkness, Invisible Children, and others. As we know, adults learn by relating new ideas to their existing matrices of knowledge and experience. In this way, we saw them working through The Enclave, demonstrating learning and engagement as well as an interest in thematically related topics.

Self-absorbed artists: Many visitors attacked the piece, challenging the validity and morality of a white artist receiving accolades and making money by speaking for black communities and “capturing” images of black bodies.

Descriptive processing: Many visitors did not attempt to reach conclusions. They listed what they saw, heard, and felt, sometimes filling the entire card just with descriptive words.

Tumblr site

The Tumblr blog site was where all these varied responses came together. It provided a trans-temporal community in which viewers could find echoes of their own experience in the words of others. With over 100 posts shared on the site, it also provided a broader view of the museum audience (and the city of Portland) as a whole responding and reacting to The Enclave. Like the in-gallery interpretive space, the Tumblr site was designed to be as simple as possible both aesthetically and functionally. Visitors scrolled through back-to-back cards: image, comment, image, comment. As an institution, we provided no annotation or categorization. The cards were posted in a random order, free to complement or contradict their neighbors. Even the introductory text was completely neutral:

While The Enclave is on view at the Portland Art Museum, visitors are invited to reflect upon this immersive experience and share their thoughts with the museum. These are some of their thoughts.

Framed in this way, the site offered visitors validation. The museum posted, without comment or hierarchy, every type of response: those who called out Richard Mosse as a “selfabsorbed artist”; those who wrote only one or two words; and those who made spelling or grammatical errors. Viewed together, the stream emphasizes that there is no single interpretation or meaning for this work and that, in the museum’s eyes, no one viewer’s voice is more important or correct than the others’.

This approach carried inherent risks. As a department, we were committed to posting all responses, and yet aware that, given the racially charged nature of the work, we might encounter hate speech or other offensive content. There were cards that we did post that were difficult to endorse, such as one which read:

The people in this area of the continent are guided by superstition fed by rage and terror. No education or very little. No chance, no changes, no hope – only renewed conflict + murder.

Overall, however, we had only one card that we chose not to share because of its references to suicide.

In five months, our Tumblr site received a little over 1,000 page views: 10% of visitors viewed between ten and twenty response cards in a visit; 5% viewed between 30 and 40; 30% returned to the site at least once and 180 began following the museum on Tumblr. Even months after the exhibition has closed, we still gain new followers and see new reposts. Perhaps most interestingly, however, is the fact that no one card has emerged as the most shared or iconic image from the project. Although a few Tumblr users reblogged a batch of cards at once, most chose one or two, frequently non-sequential cards, to share with their followers. As virtual visitors, they selected from the diversity of responses offered, to find the few that resonated with them as individuals.

* * * * *

“My intention with this work was to create a dilemma in the viewer’s heart. If some viewers were struck by the beauty of war – and sometimes war is beautiful – then, I hoped, those viewers would then be appalled by their response: by taking aesthetic pleasure from someone’s misery, pain, or death. And in that moment, perhaps they might stand back from themselves in the act of perceiving – take a moment to think.” – Richard Mosse

As contemporary art continues to challenge museum visitors in a variety of ways, it is important for museums to carefully reflect on the ways in which visitors will experience and respond to unsettling, immersive, complex, and socially-relevant works of art. In our experiences with The Enclave, having a set of interpretive strategies that allowed for individualized reflection as well as collective sharing allowed for a more meaningful experience for many visitors. The opportunities for personal reflection and extended learning offered by the museum for The Enclave have helped to anchor the museum as a museum of its place, not just a museum in its place – and these experiences might provide guidance to other museums as they plan interpretation around similarly complex contemporary art.

* * * * *

This essay was republished with the permission of MuseumsEtc, and you can download a free PDF of this essay directly from their website. If you enjoy this essay, check out 18 more in-depth case studies in art museum interpretation that are part of the new volume Interpreting the Art Museum. Check out the entire catalog of museum publications available from MuseumsEtc.

* * * * *

About the Authors

KRISTIN BAYANS: Interpretive Media Specialist at the Portland Art Museum, where she works cross-departmentally to create mobile, web, and in-gallery learning experiences for special exhibitions, the museum’s permanent collection, and the Object Stories project. Previously, Kristin served as Senior Educator in the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s Vernier Technology Lab and as an Assistant Educator for the Smithsonian’s Mobile Learning Institute. She holds an MA in Museum Studies from George Washington University and an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art.

MIKE MURAWSKI: Director of Education & Public Programs, Portland Art Museum. Murawski earned his MA and PhD in Education from American University in Washington, DC, focusing his research on educational theory and interdisciplinary learning in the arts. Prior to his position at the Portland Art Museum, he served as Director of School Services at the Saint Louis Art Museum as well as head of education and public programs at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University.

PHILLIPPA PITTS: Associate Educator for Gallery Learning at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine, where she oversees interpretive media, adult learning, and participatory gallery spaces. Prior to this position in Maine, Phillippa served as the Kress Interpretive Fellow at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, Lecturer and Gallery Instructor at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and built apps and games in museums around the country. Phillippa holds an MA in Art History and Museum Studies from Tufts University.

Bookshelf, Teaching Tools

How We Experience Art: A Reflection on 2 Recent Books

January 29, 2015 Mike Murawski 6 Comments

I have to admit that I am a bit of an enthusiast when it comes to books about how we look at and experience art. So when I found out about the recently published books by Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford as well as Ossian Ward, I was more than just a little curious (I ordered them right away and began to dig in during the winter holidays).

Rendez-Vous with Art, by Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford (Thames & Hudson, 2014)

Ways of Looking: How to Experience Contemporary Art, by Ossian Ward (Laurence King Publishing, 2014)

First, let me dive a bit into the pages of Rendez-Vous with Art. This book reads like an enjoyable travelogue of the great museums of the world, retelling in lush detail a series of art encounters as filtered through the interests, knowledge, passions, and opinions of de Montebello (Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 31 years, 1977-2008). At café moments and interludes, both authors engage in brief conversations about how we experience art, how we think about it, and how we look at it. The book is, as the authors write, “an attempt to get at not history or theory but the actual experience of looking at art” (9). Visiting the Louvre, the Prado, the Palazzo Pitti, the Mauritshuis, the British Museum, the Brancacci Chapel, the Met, and other notable art sites, their conversations focus on their experiences with masterpieces and lesser known works that allow them to escape the crowds of some of the more popular cultural destinations.

I happened to be reading this book during the days leading up to a workshop I was facilitating with our docents at the Portland Art Museum, spending time in the galleries looking at an absolutely electric El Greco painting on loan to our museum from the Cleveland Museum of Art. I was searching for a new way to frame our extended experience with this masterpiece — a way to prompt our viewing of the painting in a way that could transcend the art historical facts of the painting’s creation and context. Could a work like this speak to us today about something meaningful? As a viewer, what does this work mean to me? De Montebello provided the tee-up:

“A characteristic of great works of art is that they persistently catch our attention and beckon us. It is like a piece of music that we want to listen to ad infinitum or a book that we love re-reading — because one never exhausts what a great work has to give, whether it’s in the detail or the whole…. It has an ability not just to defy time, but also to communicate through time, even to people who do not and cannot know much about the beliefs of the people who made it or the message it was supposed originally to have. Somehow, inexplicably, a great work of art transcends its own age.” (31, 34)

While I may not agree with de Montebello when it comes to how we shape visitor learning experiences and use social media & digital technologies to broaden public engagement (among other things), I did enjoy his grandiose statements about the powerful nature of experiencing art. The hustle and bustle of a crowded art museum can certainly be music to a museum educator’s ears, yet I know that many of us, like myself, also seek out the more intimate, quiet, deeply rewarding experience of being the only person standing in front of a masterpiece (how many of us sneak into the galleries when the museum is closed to steal away our own time with art?). De Montebello muses on the challenge of viewing art amidst the crowds of popular, well-visited institutions … or, as they write, “the hell of looking at art with other people” (128). As Gayford recounts, de Montebello originally wanted the title of the book to be “The Art Museum: An Imperfect Construct.”

At times, both authors seem rather grumpy about the millions and millions of people who crowd into museums to see masterworks of culture and history, but their questions about how we experience art in these contexts raises interesting issues about marketing, image reproductions, and digital collections. For example, given the deep crowds of camera-phone-wielding tourists crammed in front of the Mona Lisa on any given day, is it more valuable or meaningful to look at a high quality digital image on my iPad (here in the quiet comfort of my own home or office)? And how does our repeated exposure to beautiful, massive publicity banners and posters showings close-up details of masterpieces effect our expectations of the actual museum gallery experience with these artworks?

This is what it is like when you're standing looking at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Photo by Stephen R Melling, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0 — This is what it is like when you’re standing looking at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Photo by Stephen R Melling, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0

How Do We Experience Contemporary Art?

OK, let me shift gears here, from talking about experiences with Egyptian sculpture, Renaissance masterpieces, and nineteenth-century portraiture to experiencing the art of now — contemporary art that can be scattered across a gallery floor, projected on multiple walls, consuming a massive space, requiring us to talk to someone or eat something, confusing, perplexing, and having no apparent start or finish.

“The old rules of not touching a work of art or of reverentially paying homage to each picture in a state of quiet awe are now gone….” (Ward 8)

Carsten Höller “Test Site” installation at Tate Modern, 2006. Photo by David Sim, Creative Commons 2.0 license

Ossian Ward’s Ways of Looking makes a fresh pairing with Rendez-Vous with Art, focusing on art created since 2000 that frequently expects viewers to perform, interact with, or complete the piece in front of you. In this highly readable, straightforward book, Ward offers a set of tools that go beyond just looking and might help provide a way to make sense of contemporary art. While an art critic and art world insider himself, I think he succeeds in his attempts to combat the ubiquitous and opaque ‘art speak’ that so frustratingly surrounds contemporary art. He writes (and I quite agree):

“Too often, these gatekeepers [curators and critics] stand in the way of the understanding of a work of art by using a morass of theoretical jargon and pseudo-philosophical art-speak. This kind of clever-clever writing about art does very little to bolster or boost an artist’s cause, other than perpetuating more reams of similarly hard-to-fathom ‘discourse.'” (20)

So how does Ward propose we cut through the verbose jargon and allow for better experiences with contemporary art? His central foundation is to “start from zero” and wipe the slate clean — tabula rasa — using the first word TABULA as a mnemonic device for the approach he proposes. While I don’t want to give away all the details (after all, you should read the book yourself and explore this approach), here is a very brief summary:

Time: Always a good idea to start with a few minutes of calm contemplation, looking, and exploration. Take stock.
Association: What is the personal resonance or ‘hook’ for you? This can be a visual attraction or a connection with a memory or experience you’ve had. Make some associations.
Background: Use some basic ways to learn a bit more about the backdrop of the piece or the artist — using the title, label, press release, museum brochure or website, etc.
Understand: After looking, connecting, and learning a few basic background facts, the piece is more likely to sink in a bit more. What might be some broader messages at play here?
Look again: Simple as it sounds. After a bit of pondering, go back and look or engage with the work even more. Did you miss a detail?
Assessment: After these first four steps, you’re now in a better place to decide whether you think the work is good or not. But Ward reminds us not to hastily jump to this step (which we all do far too often).

Much about this method of looking at contemporary art or thinking about an encounter makes sense, and reaffirms many existing pedagogies and educational philosophies already informing museum practice. In addition, throughout his book, Ward provides us with wonderfully pithy ‘Spotlight’ features that lead us through parts of the TABULA approach with individual works of contemporary art — including explorations of Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), Carsten Holler’s whimsical Tate Modern installation Test Site (2006), Glen Ligon’s Warm Broad Glow (2005), and Roger Hiorns’s amazing and enormous Seizure (2009). When the TABULA approach seems a bit lacking, at least the discussions of contemporary art are enjoyable and digestible.

Everything Comes Full Circle

The entire experience of reading these two ‘looking at art’ books side by side became eerily connected when I reached the final pages of Ward’s book only to find a Spotlight on Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Two Circles (1661) — a painting that de Montebello and Gayford could have easily included in their travels. Ward comes around full circle to the more traditional ways of looking at art that form the foundation of Rendez-Vous with Art, writing: “there is no better way to slow down and tabulate one’s appreciation of art than by sitting with one of the Old Masters.” No matter what approach or strategy you take when it comes to encountering art of any time period or culture, is there anything more essential than spending time to look, perceive, and use our multitude of senses to take it in?

“It’s not rude to stare at art. Quite the opposite, in fact: it’s the least you can do. Stop. Breathe. Relax. Don’t think, just look, take it all in. Soak up your surroundings, feel the space in front of you, set your mind free, let your internal monologue recede and allow your eyes to settle. When was it that you last allowed yourself such a moment?” (Ward 148)

* * * * *

Featured header image: Carsten Höller panorama by David Sim, Creative Commons 2.0 license

Bookshelf, Inclusive Practices

Reflecting on a Hybridized Museum Practice

August 16, 2014 Briley Rasmussen 4 Comments

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series on ArtMuseumTeaching.com during August that focuses on the recent book Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today (2014). Find links below to additional posts in this series by several of the book’s authors, and please join us for an Online Book Club via Google Hangout on August 20th.

Written by Marianna Pegno and Traci Quinn, University of Arizona

In our chapter entitled “Collaborating with Communities: New Conceptualizations of Hybridized Museum Practice” in Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today (2014), we explore Homi K. Bhabha’s ideas of hybridity and cultural translation as they apply to our own practices. We focused on two programs — Peaceful Migrations and Giving Voice — wherein participant voice was key to creating content, programmatic structures, and exhibition design. In this reflection we demonstrate how these guiding frameworks continue to inspire our practice as museum educators and researchers, and further explore how we utilized these ideas while developing an exhibition entitled [IN] Translation. Focusing on the concept of hybridity, we reflect on three continuing issues:

the difficulties of including many voices;
persistent hierarchy and departmental separation in museums; and
our desire to include the museum visitor as a key player in hybrid museum practice.

Bhabha (1994) explains hybridity as an act that “entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (p. 5). Through this lens, we view the museum as a place of multiple meanings that produces a mixing and mingling of ideas, opinions, and creative visions. For museum educators, it can foster new ways of thinking about educational practice, programmatic structure, and exhibition content not as separate entities but as collaborating endeavors. Thus, through the process of developing [IN]Translation, our goal was to work with audiences and artists to rethink how the museum pedagogy can be more experiential in nature. We were working to transform the museum into an empowering environment that conversed with multiple narratives rather than simply our own curatorial or educational voice.

Thoughts After Publication

We continue to grapple with hybridity as it relates to museum education and institutional structures. In the development of educational programs we are trying to include as many voices as possible — which is not always easy. We have continued working with refugee families who participated in Giving Voice to develop in-gallery activities in which participants collaboratively created narratives about artworks in the museum. As a result, some of these reflections were affixed as a wall label next to the respective artwork, empowering refugee participants to display ideas about an artwork. While the institution has been more accepting of our work to reflect hybridity within the museum space, it is not as widely pervasive as we would like and only selectively displayed and included.

In relation, we constantly face inquiries and pushback from individuals and colleagues who are unfamiliar with the projects or who have no desire to make museum practice more collaborative across departments and with audiences. The projects we discussed in the book chapter and the projects we continue to develop & research take significant effort and time in order to avoid falling back into the institutional habits of hierarchy.

Individuals that do not have a relationship with the projects are often reluctant to participate in shared planning – or simply cannot dedicate the necessary time. We believe that their experience in the field is invaluable to the success of collaborative efforts, and yet we are met with frustration when they remain separate from educational motivations and thus the program participants.

Another issue that emerged throughout the development of our chapter and ongoing practices was our inability to anticipate visitors’ responses to exhibitions and educational endeavors addressing racial, political, and cultural interpretations of hybridity. When addressing such content, many visitors revert to stereotypical views that we are hoping to complicate through hybridized co-creation. Thus, we have been pressed to develop new experiences in the gallery that foster hybridity within the audiences’ interaction with the museum space and artworks. This idea of including visitor voice was one of the central components to the curatorial and educational design of [IN] Translation.

Thoughts on [IN] Translation

Visitor participating with Kristen Cochran's "Notes to self" from the exhibition [IN]Translation ARTIST WEBSITE: http://kristencochran.com/home.html — Visitor participating with Kristen Cochran’s “Notes to self” from the exhibition [IN]Translation
ARTIST WEBSITE: http://kristencochran.com/home.html

Through [IN] Translation, which was displayed in an exhibition space where were not beholden to a defined structure or hierarchy, we were able to explore these above concerns further and reflect upon our practice under conditions that fostered an ideal hybrid between education, curation, artist, and visitor voice. More specifically, we designed educational installations to supplement the works of art, most of which included opportunities for visitors to add visual or text elements and share stories and reflections. The goal was for the works and the participatory elements to hold equal weight in the design of the exhibit.

[IN] Translation featured eight works of art: one commissioned multi-media work by collaborating curator and artist Anh-Thuy Nguyen, plus seven juried works. The educational component of each artwork was planned with the artists throughout the development of the exhibition, in order to ensure that the artwork was not inappropriately changed or compromised by the educational elements. This exhibition provided us an opportunity to challenge hierarchies within a gallery space. We were able to show how the multiple positionalities of educator, curator, artist, and visitor inform one another – migrate within, around, and through one another – in order to foster a different sense of a museum experience.

[IN] Translation was an opportunity to play with the boundaries that normally exist as impermeable divisions between curator, artist, educator, and visitor; we could question how these roles could be seen as transitional, or process based. Within this exhibition we recognized how ideal this space was, especially considering that freedoms from hierarchical structures will not always be present in a more traditional museum or gallery setting. However, the instance of hybridity, in which these four voices were all present, gave way to dynamic conversations and learning opportunities and are worth noting for our future practice in more traditionally defined spaces. As we evolve as researchers, museum educators, and collaborators, our goal is to continue to develop programming that positions experiential learning at the core of curatorial and educational design.

* * * * *

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

TRACI QUINN: Doctoral student at the University of Arizona in the department of Art and Visual Culture Education. Traci’s research focuses on museum and community-based education. Currently, she is researching instances that challenge the hierarchical structure of museums and exhibition design and how exhibition and program can be collaboratively developed. After working in museums and community-based organizations for over 7 years, Traci has experience in the various facets of museum education including: program development, docent training, grant writing, community outreach, and institutional partnerships. As an art educator and a researcher, Traci is committed to the development of museum-based education as a catalyst for culturally rich and dynamic experiences.

MARIANNA PEGNO: Doctoral student at the University of Arizona in the department of Art and Visual Culture Education. Marianna’s research focuses on community and museum collaborations exploring instances of decentered authority and equitable partnerships. Having worked in museums for more than 8 years, Marianna has experience in museum management, educational programming, and curatorial practice. She has developed inclusive museum programming including tours for the visually impaired, K-12 enrichment programs for at-risk youth, and a multi-visit program for refugee families. In practice and research, Marianna aims to transform the museum into a community-centered institution, which is responsive to the voices of its constituency.

Online Book Club Hangout (VIDEO)

On August 20th, ArtMuseumTeaching.com brought together a group of authors and editors of the book Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today for a live discussion via Google+ Hangout. Those joining the Hangout included Joni Boyd Acuff, Marianna Adams, Briley Rasmussen, Alicia Viera, and Veronica Betancourt. Please find the video archive of this conversation below, and enjoy!

Don’t Have Your Copy of the Book Yet? No problem. As part of this collaboration with Rowman & Littlefield Publishers through this series of posts about Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today, we are able to offer ArtMuseumTeaching.com readers a special discount. To receive a 25% discount, go towww.rowman.com to order this book and enter the discount code: 4S14ACUEVA

Bookshelf, In Theory, Spotlight on Practice

Eggs, Oreos, & Solidarity: MCRP in Our Daily Lives

August 13, 2014 Mike Murawski 5 Comments

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series on ArtMuseumTeaching.com during August that focuses on the recent book Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today (2014). Find links to additional posts in this series by several of the book’s authors, and please join us for an Online Book Club via Google Hangout on August 20th.

Written by Melissa Crum, PhD

Writing the chapter entitled “Multicultural Critical Reflective Practice and Contemporary Art” in the book Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today (2014) challenged Keonna Hendrick (Brooklyn Museum) and I to consider our roles as critical multiculturalists when our marginality is not the focus, and how multicultural critical reflective practice (MCRP) manifests in our daily lives. MCRP is an on-going theoretical framework and practice that requires educators to investigate and challenge their cultural beliefs and assumptions in order to become a more cognizant, critical, and culturally competent educator (Crum & Hendrick, 2014). We reflected on our experience and impact on teachable moments in and out of learning spaces.

In what follows, I explore how past traumas might be used to form allegiances with other marginalized bodies in order to offer Socratic engagement in microaggressions from others. As classroom and museum educators, our job is to offer new ways of thinking for our pupils and patrons when we discuss complex and emotionally wrenching topics. We often prepare for offensive comments from youth but not from adults. My reflection questions, what do we do when we hear uncritical comments from peers?

Eating Identity

I was attending a conference that marked the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer of 1964. Freedom Summer was a project where over 1,000 volunteers from across the U.S. were trained to support Mississippians in non-violent disobedience to combat racist Jim Crow laws. The conference consisted of scholars, artists, and activists reflecting on the historic moment and imagining ways to organize for the future. Before the conference, three colleagues and I had brunch at a local restaurant that served an Asian twist on American dishes. When the waitress came to our table, a colleague asked the waitress’ opinion of the unique kimchi breakfast meal. The waitress offered a positive review and referred to herself as “an egg.” “Egg” is a metaphor for how she, a white woman, internalizes an Asian or “yellow” identity. Presenting herself as “an egg” was her way of aligning herself with Asian culture so we could view her food review as accurate. Upon her leaving, we questioned her statement, its purpose, and our role as scholars who critically interrogate presentations of identity. Each of us identify with different ethnicities – African-American, Mexican and Filipino, Pakistani, and Native American – and agreed that the statement was problematic. At the end of the meal, I decided to address the statement with her.

When she came to our table, I thanked her for the food review and great service. Then I said, “I have a question about a statement you made earlier. I was wondering what you meant when you said you were like ‘an egg.’” A bit flustered, she casually explained that it was a running joke and the restaurant owner, also a white woman, referred to herself as “an egg.” She added that the Asian cook also referred to her by this name. In between her retorts, I asked her a series of questions with a calm and genuinely inquisitive disposition absent of patronization: How did you expect us to feel after you made the statement? If any of us appeared Asian to you, would you have made the comment? If an Asian person were here, how do you think they would feel about your statement? Do you think Asians you encounter, like the cook, determine if your statement is appropriate? After some discussion, she noted that she is part Native American, reads Angela Davis, and concluded with an apology.

There were a few concepts at work in this moment: My empathy with other marginalized bodies and her assumed cultural clearance from them. I explained to the waitress that, “an egg” was similar to a Black person being labeled an “Oreo.” The idea that one’s exterior (skin color) contrasts their interior (cultural norms and sensibilities) doesn’t allow for complex identities and can be hurtful. But “egg” and “Oreo” are metaphors that operate in different ways.

“Oreo” is a derogatory term often used against African-Americans to signify the absence of language, mannerisms, and ways of life connected to stereotypical ideas of Blackness. To call a Black person an “Oreo” assumes they are mentally disconnected from a “true” Black identity and their supposed internalized whiteness makes them “safe” to those who may fear them. In contrast, the white of the egg hides any signs of difference represented by the yellow yolk. As a result, those who consider themselves “eggs” have the flexibility to hide or present their elements of difference on occasions that best suit their interests. Those who wear their difference on the outside (i.e. African-Americans) are not offered such leeway.

The white waitress referring to herself as an “egg” was not in an effort to demean herself in the way “Oreo” can. It was a way for her to validate her culinary tastes and do what bell hooks calls, ‘spice up the dull dish of whiteness’ (hooks, 1992). Calling herself an egg was her presentation of cultural clearance. For me, cultural clearance is a self-determined license to explore cultural tropes, stereotypes, and concepts through one’s own experiences as a way to make sense of one’s own identity and marginalized identities one chooses to appropriate. All cultural clearances require a back story to validate a connection to a foreign identity. The waitress’ back story – being “part Native American”, sharing the “egg” identity with the restaurant owner, the Asian cook using the term, and her familiarity with activist Angela Davis – was her way to align herself with marginalized bodies to validate her comment. As the white-owned restaurant is appropriating Asian flavors to “spice up” mundane American dishes, the waitress mimics the behavior in her self-presentation.

Our Responsibility

In practicing MCRP, we question individuals appropriating segments of culture and presenting them as identity accouterments to be displayed and removed at will. Such practices are reductionist in ways that do not allow for the cultural consumer to seek a deeper understanding of other cultures. Euphemisms like “egg” and “Oreo” are Enlightenment and Eugenic-eque attempts at categorizing identities, thus limits humanity. I believe, as an MCRP practitioner, I have the responsibility to speak up for other marginalized groups while locating my marginality in respect to theirs. At the restaurant, I connected to the trauma of African-American colleagues and students labeled “Oreo”, empathized with the absent Asian person whose identity was relegated to the consumption of fermented vegetables, and situated my identity along both groups in solidarity. Its important to do all three. If not, we risk supporting the causes of others to the detriment of our own. This solidarity acknowledges a larger interconnected social justice effort for which we are all responsible.

MCRP can help us build solidarity so that we can imagine ways to organize for the future. As I continue to consider the role of MCRP in my daily life, I seek to operate in the spirit of the brave Freedom Summer members of CORE, SNCC, and their volunteers combating discrimination through critical education.

* * * * *

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MELISSA CRUM: Founder of Mosaic Education Network, a consulting firm that provides services to companies, non-profits, and educators for arts-based diversity training and social justice curriculum. Crum earned her Masters of Arts in African American and African Studies and her PhD in Art Administration, Education, and Policy from The Ohio State University. She offers services to businesses, non-profits, educators and school administrators to address individuals’ self-perceptions and misconceptions of their employees, patrons, and students so that they work together to create an inviting atmosphere. Additionally, her work connects culturally appropriate curriculum, community-based problem solving, and arts-based methods to build innovative education strategies to help parents, teachers, and other community stakeholders to transfer their knowledge into curriculum regardless of their level of formal education.

REFERENCES & RESOURCES

hooks, b. (1992). Eating the other. In Black looks (pp. 21-40). Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Crum, M & K. Hendrick (2014) Multicultural critical reflective practice and contemporary art. In Multiculturalism in art museums today (pp.271-298). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Online Book Club Hangout (VIDEO)

Bookshelf, In Theory, Spotlight on Practice

It’s Not Always about You: Facilitating Critical Self-Reflection in Others

August 11, 2014 Mike Murawski 5 Comments

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series on ArtMuseumTeaching.com during August that focuses on the recent book Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today (2014). Find links to additional posts in this series by several of the book’s authors, and please join us for an Online Book Club via Google Hangout on August 20th.

Written by Keonna Hendrick, Brooklyn Museum

Melissa Crum (Mosaic Education Network) and I came together to develop multicultural critical reflective practice (MCRP) as a protocol because we shared the belief that the decisions museum educators make about our teaching practice — such as the artwork to discuss, language we use, expectations we set for learners — are informed by our willingness to move beyond our individual interpretations and values. When we teach, we may create opportunities for our biases to shape and limit learners’ perspectives on artworks, peers, and themselves. MCRP is a theoretical framework and ongoing practice in which educators identify, analyze, and challenge the cultural beliefs, values, and assumptions that color our interactions with artworks and learners. Leading others through MCRP while writing about the practice has challenged me to re-address my biases while reflecting on how my perspectives and values impact our teaching. I have facilitated practical applications of MCRP with many groups; however, my experience training a small group of emerging educators in a mid-sized art museum in this practice greatly impacted my engagement in the process.

Developing Critical Self-Reflection in Educators

Keonna Hendrick challenges learners to think critically about cultural representations in art. Photo by Jonathan Dorado , Brooklyn Museum

In the first of a two part-session focused on developing critical self-reflection in educators, I asked each educator to write a short autobiography at home, reflecting on a moment of their lives and writing freely for 30 minutes. I met with each of them individually one week later to discuss the process and to consider how their personal narratives might inform their work in museum education. Although they were not asked to share the details of their autobiographies, several chose to tell me about their personal experiences. They explored relationships, events, and expectations that informed the way they saw themselves in the past and present. I knew when I assigned the exercise it might trigger difficult memories, hard feelings, and even trauma that might be challenging for both participants and myself to work through.

As I listened to their stories, I was incredibly aware of the trust they vested in me to receive their personal truths and to guide them as they considered the intersection between their personal and professional lives. They were vulnerable, honest, passionate, and confused. I found it necessary to be present and aware of my own biases and experiences, and to resist responding from the feelings they may evoke. There were some moments when values were expressed that were in direct conflict with my own, and I had to remind myself that no matter how difficult reflections can be to hear, the purpose of exploring MCRP is to identify and address our attitudes (no matter how negative). It took courage for these educators to share their autobiographies — without any certainty of how I might respond — and to challenge themselves to think critically about their experiences. And it challenged me to listen without judgment and to respond with care while encouraging them to engage in deep reflection. While the educators commented on the success of the workshop, I couldn’t help but feel exhausted, wondering how Melissa and I might assist others in preparing to facilitate such delicate discussions.

Promoting Critical Self-Reflection in Our Practice

Facilitating exercises that promote critical self-reflection is hard work but it’s worth it. Just as museum educators should be aware of information, teaching strategies, and audience, facilitators of MCRP should be comfortable with and actively engaged in this practice. Witnessing the courage of the participants and facilitating MCRP with many participants individuals has urged me to delve deeper in my own critical reflective practice and to ask: Why have I been afraid to acknowledge certain aspects of myself and others? Identifying these fears and their origins helps me understand why my progressing self-awareness may have been stifled at times and charges me to take responsibility for working through those fears towards an improved cultural consciousness.

Creative Commons image from www.worldette.com — Creative Commons image from http://www.worldette.com

Identifying fear is no small feat. Even taking the first steps of facing those fears while admitting to behaviors and attitudes that negatively impact others can be incredibly difficult. When we offer MCRP as a resource to others for improved pedagogy, we become more accountable for our own failings as educators. Learning from my failures in teaching, forgiving myself for poor decisions, and continuing to engage in the work to address the limitations of my actions and knowledge are challenges I have encountered as a practitioner and facilitator of MCRP. Through journaling, reading both scholarly writings and personal narratives, and engaging in a monthly peer group, I have grown to recognize some prejudices that I had not previously explored as a result of ignorance and limited conversation. Although I am not proud of these prejudices, my ability to acknowledge and work to overcome them has enabled me to be more patient with others and myself. It has helped me engage in an ongoing practice of forgiveness for others and myself. Educators may make poor choices from time to time; however, resisting the temptation to rest complacently in those decisions and repeat them with learners and with artworks disrupts educators’ potential to support learners in becoming self-actualized and expanding our cultural perceptions.

* * * * *

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KEONNA HENDRICK: Senior Museum Educator at the Brooklyn Museum, Hendrick oversees the 10-month Museum Education Internship Program, a professional development opportunity for emerging museum educators working with school, youth, family, and adult audiences. She has also worked as a Family Programs Educator at the Museum of Modern Art and served as a board member for New York City Museum Educators Roundtable and Classical Contemporary Ballet Theatre. She holds a B.A. in History and Studio Art from Wake Forest University and a M.A. in Arts Policy and Administration from The Ohio State University. Hendrick is an innovative museum educator and arts administrator who develops practical applications for big picture ideas and issues. She is committed to exploring the transformative nature of art-centered experiences, promoting cultural understanding across communities, and engaging adults, children and adolescents in personally relevant experiences. Keonna’s postings on this site are her own and do not necessarily represent the Brooklyn Museum’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

Online Book Club Hangout (VIDEO)

Bookshelf, Inclusive Practices

Building Canopies for Multiculturalism: (Re)Turning to the Visitor

August 4, 2014 Mike Murawski 6 Comments

Written by Joni Boyd Acuff, Ohio State University, and Laura Evans, University of North Texas

As dear friends and colleagues, we met in the middle for the book Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today (Rowman & Litlefield, 2014). We — Joni, an expert in critical multiculturalism, and Laura, whose specialty is art museum education — had known each other for years and talked about just about everything, but never truly understood what the other researched in more than a cursory manner. The idea to collaborate came from this uncomfortable space of not really knowing what the other person did with their work. We decided to find out instead of to continue in our ignorance of what was really important to the other person. And, hence, this book was born. We realized as the Venn diagram of our research interests intersected, that there was a big gap in the literature on multiculturalism in art museum education. “Why?” we wondered. And, secondly, “What can we do about it?”

The book, Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today, is the result of this curiosity and our inquiries, as well as the diligent, creative, and groundbreaking work of our contributors (some of whom will also be posting here on ArtMuseumTeaching.com in the next few weeks). In this post, we will attempt to explain why we think multicultural practices in art museum education are important, and give a context for the book. We welcome your thoughts, comments, and questions, and hope that we can provide a welcoming space for stories and sharing.

Why is a Book on Multiculturalism in Art Museum Education Important?

First of all, what is critical multiculturalism, in brief?

Critical multicultural education works to investigate the maintenance of authentic cultural history, the subjugation of non-dominant cultural knowledge and the continuous movement, fluidity and evolution of culture (May, 1999). Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today aims to consider ways in which museums can work more effectively to become “social systems that enable the spaces of equitable educative possibility” (Dixon-Roman, 2012, p.3). We conceptualize equitable education as inclusive, comprehensive and “ubiquitous to the social process of thinking, feeling, being, and doing everyday human experiences” (Dixon-Roman, 2012, p.3), as per the tenants of critical multiculturalism. Unfortunately, as historic and existing debate suggests, museums struggle to meet the educational needs of its diverse patrons. If a museum is a suggested way of seeing the world (Macdonald & Fyfe, 1996); it is fair to assert that it must support various cultural frames of reference, as well as numerous versions and translations of the world. A practical and theoretical resource on multicultural museum education is important for two main reasons:

the increasingly diversified population of the United States, and
the heightened attention (due to economic, political, cultural, and ethical stimulus in the museum profession) and added importance placed on museum educators as representatives of their institutions, their field, and their communities.

These two realities provide the basis for this book and for the readers, who we hope will benefit from a deeper understanding of critical multiculturalism and its applications to museum education.

The U.S. is diversifying at a rapid rate and it is important that museum educators acknowledge, accept, and learn how to utilize the educational benefits of having such diverse populations to consider. According to the 2010 U.S. census:

20% of the population over the age of five speaks a language other than English at home.
19% of Americans have disabilities.
About 1.2 million Americans live with a same-sex partner and 11% of all unmarried partners are same-sex couples (Alternatives to Marriage Project, n.d.).
72% of citizens are white, non- Hispanic; 16% Hispanic or Latino; 13% black or African American; .9% American Indian or Alaska Native; 5% Asian; 1% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander; 5.5% another race; and 2.4% two or more races.
The projected racial composition of the United States in the year 2050 is 50.1% white, non-Hispanic, 24.4% Hispanic, 14.6% black, 8% Asian, and 5.3% all other races.

These statistics show that America is a vastly diverse nation and will continue to become even more so. Therefore, issues surrounding multiculturalism and equity will remain relevant and important as social and political issues. The above statistics are a stark reminder that art museums should be institutions of inclusivity, rather than exclusivity, and they show us why it is important for museum educators to understand the complexities and practicalities of critical multiculturalism. As stated by Winter (1992):

“At issue is the social and educational responsibility of public institutions in the face of cultural diversity, as opposed to the moral assumption of the museum as repository, both of ‘Art’ and of cultural values.”

Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today seeks to situate the educational role of the museum as one of multicultural expansion rather than abbreviation.

Context for Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today

Some people believe that “isms” (ex: racism, sexism, classism, ableism, etc.) are no longer relevant to the discourse around museums. In reality, the goal for museums and museum educators to engage in critical multicultural education work is relevant more now than ever. While some scholars and educators argue that issues of race, class, gender and sexuality are problems of the past, current data reveals that oppression based on these social indicators persist and have actually magnified well into the twenty first century (Weber, 2010).

CelebrARTE at Denver Art Museum. http://denverartmuseum.org/calendar/celebrarte-chocolate

According to the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, since the year 2000, the international economic crisis has intensified inequities of race, ethnicity, gender, and class; specifically, accessibility to higher education decreased dramatically, as tuition and fees more than doubled, disproportionately affecting groups with low socioeconomic status most (Weber, 2010). In addition, sexual politics relating to same sex marriage and same sex adoption laws continue to be heavily contested in most states. Social inequalities are still heavily implicating the present and future of members of non-dominant groups (Weber, 2010). Therefore, it is imperative that we continue to call for critical pedagogies and praxis that “confront the racial, class, gender, and homophobic biases woven into the fabric of society” (Stuhr, Ballengee-Morris, and Daniel, 2008, p. 83).

Why are we attempting this call to action?

Because, if repetition is the precursor to establishing a habit, then we feel that it is necessary and important to continue checking in on issues of diversity in our museums so that, someday, things might change to a greater degree than the infinitesimal shift that has occurred so far in our museums. Eileen Hooper-Greenhill (2006) wrote a decade ago about the shift in museums, the “turn” towards the visitor. We would parenthetically like to add emphasis to Hooper-Greenhill’s call to action, to suggest that we need to (re)turn to the visitor. This shift in language alludes to the realization that, in turning to the visitor, we, as museum educators, need to revisit what turning to the visitor means in a rapidly diversifying society where museums are frequently being turned away from by public(s) that we do not serve. The authors who contributed to this book are a group of groundbreaking, talented, empathetic, creative, change agents. They are museum educators, researchers, writers, and human beings who care about the audiences they serve in deep and meaningful ways.

Through case-study examples, the authors of Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today address issues such as cultural misrepresentation in the museum, inequality as it relates to resources, and the exclusion of certain voices in the museum. They offer practical, contemporary educative practices that foster democratic, equitable museum practices. We believe that museums have the potential to be agents of social change and, in this way, our book is hopeful and inspiring, as it identifies and commends the effective practices that some museum educators and staff have enacted in an effort to be inclusive. We hope to show, through the chosen chapters, how the merger of museums and diversity initiatives can create positive change and can help guide, address, and suggest ways that museums can be more inclusive, supportive, and equitable spaces for all visitors.

Online Book Club Hangout (VIDEO)

Don’t Have Your Copy of the Book Yet? No problem. As part of this collaboration with Rowman & Littlefield Publishers through this series of posts about Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today, we are able to offer ArtMuseumTeaching.com readers a special discount. To receive a 25% discount, go to www.rowman.com to order this book and enter the discount code: 4S14ACUEVA

* * * * *

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

JONI BOYD ACUFF: Assistant Professor of Art Education in the Department of Arts Administration, Education & Policy at Ohio State University. Before joining OSU, Acuff was an Assistant Professor of Art Education at the University of North Texas. She holds an MA in Community Based Art Education from the University of Texas at Austin and her PhD in Art Education from Ohio State University. Acuff has published about her research in varying scholarly, peer-reviewed journals such as Art Education, Studies in Art Education, and Visual Culture & Gender. Her research agenda and scholarship attends to critical multicultural art education, critical race theory in art education, community-based art education and culturally responsive teaching and curriculum development. Joni’s postings on this site are her own and do not necessarily represent Ohio State University’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

LAURA EVANS: Assistant Professor of Art History and Art Education and the Director of the Art Museum Education Certificate at the University of North Texas. Evans received her PhD in Art Education, with a Museum Studies specialization, at The Ohio State University, a Master’s in Museum Studies at the University of Toronto, and a Bachelor’s in Art History at Denison University. Previous to her PhD, Evans was a year-long fellow at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in the Department of Education. She has also interned or worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Lodell Gallery in New Zealand, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Wexner Center for Contemporary Art, the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, the Denison Museum of Denison University, and the University Art Centre at the University of Toronto. Laura’s postings on this site are her own and do not necessarily represent the University of North Texas’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

REFERENCES & RESOURCES

Alternatives to Marriage Project (n.d.). Statistics. Retrieved June 21, 2012 from http://www.unmarried.org/statistics.html#households
Dixon-Roman, E., Gordon, E. (Eds.) (2012). Thinking comprehensively about education: Spaces of educative possibility and their implications for public policy. New York: Routledge.
Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2006). Studying Visitors: In Macdonald, S. (ed) Companion to Museum Studies (pp. 362-376). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Macdonald, S.,Fyfe,G. (1996). Theorizing museums: Representing identity and diversity in a changing world. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
May, S. (1999). Critical multiculturalism: Rethinking multicultural and antiracist education. Philadelphia, PA: Falmer Press.
Stuhr, P., Ballengee-Morris, C., Daniel, V. (2008). Social justice through curriculum: Investigating issues of diversity. In R. Mason, T. Eca (Eds.), International Dialogues about Visual Culture, Education and Art (pp.81-95). Bristol, England: Intellect Books.
United States Census. (2010b). Retrieved June 6, 2012 from http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/usinterimproj/natprojtab01a.pdf
Winter, I. J. (1992). Change in the American Art Museum: The (an) Art Historian’s Voice. In Different Voices (pp. 30-57). New York: Association of Art Museum Directors.
Weber, L. (2010). Understanding race, class, gender, and sexuality: A conceptual framework. New York: Oxford University Press.

Remembering Maxine Greene

June 6, 2014 Dana 3 Comments

Written by Jessica Baker Kee, Ph.D. Candidate in Art Education, Penn State University, and Pincus Family Foundation Intern, Palmer Museum of Art

In the process of living and working as museum educators, we make space to honor Maxine Greene, the educational philosopher, author, and teacher whose writings and teachings have greatly impacted the field of aesthetic education. Dr. Greene, who passed away last week at the age of 96, conducted lectures and taught classes at Teachers College, Columbia University (where she had been professor emerita since 1965) until her passing. She is renowned worldwide for bringing a remarkable sense of empathy, creativity, and imagination into teaching and learning in the arts. Maxine Greene posited “wide-awakeness” as the bedrock of her educational philosophy: a heightened awareness of one’s own sensory, emotional, and spiritual existence, as well as a greater empathic connection to the human community. She believed direct, immediate encounters with works of art were central to the development of this enhanced awareness; in her 1977 essay Imagination and Aesthetic Literacy, she argued that:

“those who can attend to and absorb themselves in particular works of art are more likely to affect connections in their own experience than those who cannot.”

Throughout her career, she was a staunch advocate for “aesthetic literacy” through education in the arts, and argued against overly standardized teaching methods in favor of dialogue, learning from students, and building empathic learning communities in both schools and museums. When we use the work of Dr. Greene to inform our discussion and praxis as museum educators, we place ourselves within a rich tradition of intellectual and creative thought arising from the philosophy of John Dewey and others. Although she had an extensive background in existential philosophy, she remained grounded in everyday teaching praxis, which makes her writing uniquely accessible to a diverse range of students, teachers, artists and educators. I first encountered Dr. Greene’s work as a master’s student of art education, and it was a breath of fresh air in what often felt like a dense and theoretical field of study. Reading her work is an aesthetic experience of its own; her sparkling, lucid writing style draws the reader in as she invokes her own encounters with works of art, literature, poetry and the beauty of nature. Below is a list of her major works that may be of interest to museum teachers:

Maxine Greene Center for Aesthetic Education and Social Imagination (http://maxinegreene.org): a community of artists, scholars and educators devoted to discussing and celebrating Dr. Greene’s work.
Landscapes of learning. (1978). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
The dialectic of freedom. (1988). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts and social change. (1995). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. (2001). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Feel free to leave your own thoughts, musings, and remembrances of Maxine Greene in the comments, or submit your memories with the Maxine Greene Center’s “Remembering Maxine” webpage (which already has a powerful and growing series of people’s memories and experience with Dr. Greene).

ABOUT AUTHOR

JESSICA BAKER KEE is a second-year PhD candidate in the Art Education program at Pennsylvania State University. She completed her BA in Art History at Duke University and her MAEd in Art Education at East Carolina University. She has also worked as a museum education intern, a public and private school art teacher, a federal disaster relief agent, and an educational research consultant. Her research is rooted in phenomenology and explores constructions of identity and trauma within pedagogical environments, examining the impacts of race, class, and institutional policy on the lived experiences of art educators and their students. In her free time she enjoys running, yoga, art making and exploring the beautiful trails of Central Pennsylvania. Jessica’s postings on this site are her own and do not necessarily represent Pennsylvania State University’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

Bookshelf, Experimenting in Museums, Field Notes, Spotlight on Practice

Meeting the Future Head On: Future Reports, Trends, & Next Practices

May 16, 2014 Mike Murawski 3 Comments

“The purpose of strategic foresight is to prime your imagination to envision different futures — some of the many ways that the world could evolve into more than an amped-up version of today.” – Elizabeth Merritt

What does the future hold for museums? What are museums (or, more accurately, the people working in museums) doing right now that deserves to be shared, examined, and reflected upon? How can museums think more critically about their role in the transforming landscape of education — now and in the years ahead? We all have these questions floating through our minds, but may not often have the time and space to chew on them or hear others’ thoughts. I, myself, have a pile of printed reports, trend watches, and ‘future of museums’ readings sitting on my desk, and every once in a while I glare at it and wish that I could absorb it all in a few minutes like Neo in the film The Matrix. Without superhuman powers, though, I decided to dive into that pile this week.

In an exceptional Museum-iD post gathering perspectives from global museum innovators in response to the question “What will museums be like in the future?,” Adam Rozan from the Oakland Museum of California remarked:

“… museums will thrive, using challenges as opportunities to test new business and engagement models, and, in doing so, meeting the future head on.”

So it’s in that spirit that I wanted to bring together and share a group of resources from the past 6 months that present and analyze trends, future thinking, and ‘next’ practices in museums and education that help us meet the future head on. I hope that you find this list useful, and please add additional resources, links, and ideas to the Comments section below — allowing this to become a more organic resource. Let’s dive in, shall we…

Visitors engaging with a sea of all images that were posted on Flickr during a 24-hour period and dumped into the exhibition space in the "What's Next" exhibition at the Future of the Photography Museum in Amsterdam. Photo by foamamsterdam — Visitors engaging with a sea of all images that were posted on Flickr during a 24-hour period and dumped into the exhibition space in the “What’s Next” exhibition at the Future of the Photography Museum in Amsterdam. Photo by foamamsterdam

Next Practices in Art Museum Education

Intended to take us beyond “best practices,” Next Practices in Art Museum Education is a new compilation of information from the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) member museums and their innovative approaches to engaging the public with the arts through diverse learning opportunities. Next Practices incorporates 100 case studies of the recent and ongoing educational programming that its member museums have designed and implemented.

The resource underscores the many forms art museum education can take, and provides practical and inspiring ideas for future programming at institutions worldwide. The resource represents a much-needed survey of the exceptional educational practices happening in art museums across the country, and ranges across ages and types of engagement & learning.

NMC Horizon Report: 2013 Museum Edition

Released in November 2013, the NMC Horizon Report: 2013 Museum Edition examines key trends and technologies in the museum sector, as well as significant challenges that museums are faced with in adopting these technologies. The report hones in on six emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in education and interpretation within the museum environment:

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device): given the increasing number of people who take their smartphones and other devices with them everywhere they go, the BYOD movement is an effort to move away from a top-down system of providing devices toward a practice that instead provides the networks and frameworks through which museum visitors interact with a range of content on their own devices.
Crowdsourcing: A method of gathering ideas, information, or content from a wider public community around a shared goal — capitalizing on the power of collective intelligence and public knowledge, as in the case of Wikipedia. Crowdsourcing strategies are being used by museums to curate exhibitions, gathering metadata around artworks or artifacts, promoting community engagement, and crowdfunding new projects.
Electronic publishing: Near and dear to my heart, electronic and digital media are continuing to redefine the publishing avenues of museums, tapping into modern digital workflows and social media activities to develop new forms of content and significantly extend the reach of that content beyond the limits of traditional print. Beyond making these electronic platforms available to anyone, the report identifies the next phase of electronic publishing as linking these platforms together to produce new types of content.
Location-based services: Enabled by WiFi access points, GPS, RFID tags, and crowdsourced positioning technologies, location-based services are now available to deliver up-to-the-moment information that is related to a particular spot — guiding visitors through spaces, directing them to exhibits and objects that match their preferences, and triggering information and content specific to the visitor’s exact location in the museum.
Natural user interfaces: While we are already familiar with technologies and devices that respond to the natural movements of gestures of the human body (taps, swipes, arm motions, and natural language), there are prototype technologies being developed that extend these capabilities and combine facial expression and gesture-sensing technology with voice recognition that could allow museum visitors to interact in an increasingly natural fashion.
Preservation and conservation technologies: While museums have always addressed issues of preserving and conserving cultural heritage, these practices are being challenged by questions around how to preserve and conserve via digital materials as well as working with digital and time-based media — requiring new approaches and new skills that bring in electronic and multi-disciplinary perspectives to digital preservation efforts.

I was fortunate to be part of the 44-member Advisory Board and the process that helped identify these technology trends currently affecting the practice of museum education, interpretation, and visitor experience, and I look forward to the next annual report in this NMC series.

TrendsWatch 2014

Center for the Future of Museum’s annual forecasting report, TrendsWatch 2014, summarizes six emerging trends identified through CFM’s research and the Dispatches from the Future of Museums, CFM’s free e-newsletter. The report explores how each trend is playing out in the world, investigates what this means for society and for museums, shares examples of how museums are engaging with this trend, and suggests how museums might respond. Here are the six trends/topics that this report identifies:

“For Profit for Good: The rise of the social entrepreneurs”
“Synesthesia: Multisensory experiences for a multisensory world”
“A Geyser of Information: Tapping the big data oil boom”
“Privacy in a Watchful World: What have you got to hide?”
“What’s Mine Is Yours: The economy of collaborative consumption”
“Robots! Are Rosie, Volton, Bender and their kin finally coming into their own?”

The report’s author, Elizabeth Merritt, writes in her introduction:

“As you read about these six trends, think about how they will shape the world, what it would be like to live in the world they may create, and how you and your organization might respond…. Personally I think the most important and challenging question question is raised in ‘For Profit for Good’: How big an impact do museums want to have on the world, and how can we ensure that the good we do is good enough?”

A great read, and certainly a report to look forward to each year from CFM. And speaking of CFM, here are a few more resources and future thinking items from their realm.

Building the Future of Education: Museums and the Learning Ecosystem

Coming out of a convening organized in September 2013 by the American Alliance of Museums (AAMC) and The Henry Ford, the “Building the Future of Education: Museums and the Learning Ecosystem” report includes essays by educators, students, researchers and reformers that summarize and explore how leaders from the worlds of education and museums can work together to integrate the nation’s assets into what they call a ‘Vibrant Learning Grid.’ The convening and report asks the big question: How can museums and schools collaborate to create a new future for education?

The report pulls together leading thinkers and related case studies that focus on this and other core, burning questions, addressing a range of issues that include:

investing in greater capacities to support and manage partnerships
strengthening family engagement and envisioning parents as co-learners
building open learning networks across community institutions
leveraging digital learning and collaborative technologies

The report ends with a powerful “Call to Action” that came out of the second day of the convening, with some practical suggestions for moving the conversation forward and enacting change. They share several ideas, including increasing awareness, sharing information, disrupting conventional thinking about the educational landscape, and implementing radical experiments that increase the role of museums in an expanded view of education.

Guide to the Future at the 2014 Annual Meeting

For those of you heading to Seattle this weekend for the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), there are lots of great sessions, panels, and events to attend that bring together leading thinkers to discuss the future of museums as well as existing trends. The CFM’s Elizabeth Merritt shared her insights recently via the CFM blog, and I encourage you to take a look (even if, like me, you are not attending the AAM conference this year). You’ll find sessions discussing almost all of the reports I list above. If I were attending AAM this year, one of my top picks would be “Crowdsourcing to Community Sourcing: Engaging Visitor Input” with Jeff Inscho, Lori Phillips, Daniel Davis, and Petra Pankow.

Share Your Thoughts

What are some of your ideas about the future of museums, and the ‘next’ practices that will help museums thrive? And what are your thoughts about these types of reports and publications that spotlight ‘innovation’ and ‘future thinking’ — are they limited in their scope, or helpful as we all reflect on our own practice? What sources do you look toward when thinking about new ideas, experiments, and projects?

Bookshelf, Experimenting in Museums, Spotlight on Practice

Let’s Get Weird: 3 Arts Orgs Challenging the Norm

September 5, 2013 Mike Murawski 1 Comment

A recent online publication that could easily slip through the cracks — but I think deserves more attention — is titled Let’s Get Weird: Lessons on How to Innovate, Motivate, and Take a Leap of Faith. Compiled by the National Arts Marketing Project and Americans for the Arts, this appetizer of an e-book spotlights three organizations getting “weird” and thinking in a very community-driven, outside-the-box, and unconventional way. While these organizations — Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Laundromat Project, and Portland Art Museum — are not the only ones blazing this trail, they do reflect some interesting ways in which museums and arts organizations can embrace the unexpected.

As the National Arts Marketing Project writes on their website to frame this online publication:

“For arts marketers, it’s no secret that the engagement models of yesterday are being cast off in favor of fresh, bold ideas to boost audience development and revenue. If we’re keeping track, however, some of the new approaches that have been successful for organizations across the country would have seemed downright weird in decades past. Inviting naked cyclists into a museum to find new audiences? Bringing art to the local laundromat to promote community dialogues? Bringing random strangers together to interpret permanent collection pieces? These concepts may seem bold, but for [these 3 organizations], weird strategies like these have fostered an organizational culture that draws in the community and gives patrons an experience they won’t soon forget.”

Hack the Museum 2.0

Should anyone be surprised to find Nina Simon and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History at the top of the list of experimental, participatory organizations? I mean, she wrote the book on this type of work … literally. But instead of getting into a rut or taking any easy routes, Nina continues to lead her institution as a pioneer of participatory practice. And, more importantly, she is working to support and scaffold this type of work well beyond the walls of her museum — this summer’s “Hack the Museum Camp” brought together 75 creative and museum professionals for 48 hours to create a museum exhibition that challenges the way people think about displaying the art, history, and the heart of Santa Cruz.

Through this experience, the Museum of Art & History becomes a petri dish for participatory practice that is inevitably expanding to artistic and institutional practice far outside of the ‘innovative sunshine’ of California. The camp’s website nicely sums up the “Why”:

“To invite unusual collaborations, to give people a space to test out their craziest dreams, to push professionals to do something quickly, to encourage experimental thinking and prototyping.”

Wash Clothes, Make Art, Build Community: The Laundromat Project

I was truly inspired by the report’s feature on the Laundromat Project, a unique project that brings engaging, community-responsive art and artists into local coin-op laundromats across Greater New York City. As Rise Wilson, founder and creator, describes, the project focuses on bringing art to where the people are, and thinking about laundromats as unique community gathering spaces.

Not only are people across New York engaging in arts experiences as they wait for their wash cycle to end, but these neighborhood locations become creative spaces with the transformative potential to bring out new conversations, relationships, and a meaningful form of public art practice that spills out across the community.

“The power to harness our own imaginations is connected to a sense of freedom and agency to make the change we want in the world,” states LP Executive Director Kemi Ilesanmi. “Creativity is the engine, and we are together, with our neighbors, trying to make the world a more just and artful place one creative, unconventional, and artful intervention at a time.”

On Naked Ambition: Portland Art Museum

I vividly remember that night back in June when nearly 10,000 stripped-down cyclists converged in the park directly adjacent to the Portland Art Museum, preparing to launch the world’s largest World Naked Bike Ride to date. Instead of keeping its doors closed (which was tempting for various reasons), the Museum made the bold decision to not only open to the public that night, but to embrace the community energy and “weirdness” that is the World Naked Bike Ride.

Scantily-clad cyclists entered the Museum for $1 per item of clothing, and many (for obvious reasons) entered for free. As chance would have it, this was also the opening day for the Museum’s summer exhibitions Cyclepedia: Iconic Bike Design and Gaston Lachaise (in case you don’t know Lachaise’s work, we’re talking some monumental nude figures). 1,000 naked or mostly-naked cyclists entered the Museum from 8-10pm that night, and aside from averting my eyes as much as possible, I was reminded why I love the Portland Art Museum.

The Cyclepedia exhibition itself was a focused effort to engage in community collaborations outside of the “weirdness” of the Naked Bike Ride, with the Museum partnering with 26 organizations, bringing 40 programs to the Museum and the region, and connecting with bike builders, designers, collectors, and cycling enthusiasts across the Northwest and the globe. We brought local bicycle designers’ voices into the galleries through the Object Stories project (which can be found by searching for “Bicycle” here), and hosted a series of Summer Joy Rides that had groups exploring art and bicycle culture via community bike rides.

As the NAMP e-book declares, if any town in the US truly captures the spirit of the “weird,” it’s the artistic, DIY-loving city of Portland. And I can say, after being here for almost a year, nothing could be more true. The Museum is dedicated to relinquishing control and gaining broader community involvement, as well as experimenting with participatory engagement and social practice with programming like Shine a Light (no doubt I’ll write more on this in the coming months).

* * * * *

Karina Mangu-Ward, Director of Activating Inovation at EmcArts, pinpoints the change she sees happening across the arts non-profit sector:

“We see art organizations shifting from seeing themselves as producers of content to seeing themselves as platforms for engagement. This is a huge shift; one that requires a letting go of old ways of doing things and has profoundly exciting implications for organizations and the field.”

I know that this is happening in countless organizations across the US and the globe. Tell us about how your organization is getting “weird” or paving the path for more unconventional, risk-taking work? What changes have you seen in your organization recently that are providing space for meaningful participatory practice and playful thinking?

Bookshelf, Google+ Hangouts, In Theory, Spotlight on Practice

Museum Educators Do Still Read Books … Even the Classics

September 1, 2013 Christine Healey 5 Comments

We recently discovered that museum educators certainly do have the time to read books! This past July, a group of us participated in the inaugural ArtMuseumTeaching Online Book Club to look at the new book Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections, and Collaboration (2013), edited by Viv Golding and Wayne Modest. With student-centred and community-centred practice at the core of what we do as museum educators, the book raised lots of ideas in relation to theory and practice and how different roles across the museum consider or enact participatory practice.

For our second Online Book Club, we thought it might be a good idea to visit (or for many of us, re-visit) a classic text Learning in the Museum (1998) by George Hein, Professor Emeritus at Lesley University, Cambridge, MA. In this pivotal book, Hein presented an overview of the traditions and history of museum education, and developed a key framework for understanding educational theories as well as making connections with visitor studies research. Hein raised education and visitor experience as important considerations for museum professionals overall as museums are forced to “justify their existence”.

View the video archive below of the October 1st On Air Google Hangout with Michelle Grohe (Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum) and myself.

Some provocations for readers as we near the Online Book Club discussion:

Does Learning in the Museum influence the practice of museum educators today? How so? Are we still in a position of having to “justify [our] existence”?
Have new learning theories emerged from within art museum education research and practice since the book was written? Did Hein pave the way for this thinking?
Does ‘education’ and ‘constructivism’ have a specific meaning for museum educators? Does meaning change across the organisation?
Have art museums changed to become constructivist-learning spaces for visitors as Hein advocates? Can we share examples from our practice to demonstrate this?
You can also check out a great Q&A with George Hein posted on the Getty’s blog while he served as their Guest Scholar back in 2011.

We would love to know if or how your practice today connects to the ideas outlined in Hein’s book (now 15 years old). Then help us to decide if this book deserves ‘classic’ status!

To learn about this and future Google Hangouts and Online Book Club discussions hosted via ArtMuseumTeaching.com, join the Art Museum Teaching Google Community.

Read on!

Note: Thanks to everyone who participated in the October 1st Online Book Club Hangout. Here is a link to the video archive:

Bookshelf, Google+ Hangouts

Do Museum Educators Still Have Time to Read Books?

June 12, 2013 Mike Murawski 23 Comments

While many of you may immediately be thinking “heck no … I never have time to read,” the answer is actually YES. And to prove it, ArtMuseumTeaching.com is launching a new Online Book Club. As educators and museum professionals, keeping our head buried at our desk or constantly busy in programs can only get us so far. And I know that many of us (including myself) struggle to carve out the time to read the publications coming out each month or even the classic texts of yester year. Perhaps we’re all too busy reading blogs (not entirely a bad thing). Not only is it hard to find the time to keep up with the reading, it may also be a challenge to find ways to make certain theoretical or academic texts relevant to our own practice and professional work on a day-to-day basis.

So let’s bring back the books! This summer, connect with current thinking and museum colleagues through a series of Google Hangout Book Club conversations that will bring a variety of ideas and questions to key publications in the field of museum education (past and present). These discussions will not simply “review” the book at hand, but focus on how what’s on our bookshelf can inform our practice. How do ideas forwarded by certain authors and scholars connect with our day-to-day programs and work in museums? What new ideas might be sparked from the pages of current or classic texts in museum learning?

The inaugural Online Book Club was held on July 8^th at 3pm Pacific (6pm Eastern) focusing on the recent book Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections, and Collaboration (2013) edited by Viv Golding and Wayne Modest. For this discussion, ArtMuseumTeaching.com partnered with The Incluseum blog to take a deep dive into this collection of essays that explore the complex issues arising from recent approaches to collaboration between museums and their communities. The authors of this book outline a range of critical pedagogies and present important case studies that “challenge us to move beyond shallow notions that both elide the complexity of community identities and make simplistic claims to engagement by museums.”

As Viv Golding states in her introduction, this book explores best practice examples in detail to highlight how these provide “a better model of community collaboration” (3). In the chapter by Wayne Modest on youth participation and co-curating with teenagers, he addresses core thought-provoking questions such as:

“Who benefits from engagement, the museum or the community? How can we engage communities to their benefit? Who drives engagement, communities or the museum?”

Please view the video archive for this Hangout below — a great discussion about how the essays and case studies featured in its pages might connect to the work we’re doing on the ground in our museum or community.

To learn about future Google Hangouts and Online Book Club discussions hosted via ArtMuseumTeaching.com, you can join the Art Museum Teaching Google Community or follow me on Twitter (@murawski27).

Have ideas for other books we could feature in future Online Book Club discussions? Let us know in the Comments section below, and we’ll try to pull together a few more before the summer is over. We have some great ideas, so we’ll have more information available soon.

Read on!

Note: Thanks to everyone who participated in the July 8th Online Book Club Hangout. Here is a link to the video archive:

We look forward to continuing this exciting conversation as well as this series of Online Book Club discussion! Stay connected with the Art Museum Teaching Google Community to learn about upcoming discussions. And, as always, if you have any ideas for a future Hangout or online get-together, let me know and we can work to schedule here within the ArtMuseumTeaching.com community.

Bookshelf

Bookshelf: The Exemplary Museum – Art and Academia

April 14, 2013 Greg Stuart Leave a comment

In The Exemplary Museum: Art and Academia, Corrine Glesne takes a far-reaching survey of the state of academic art museums throughout the United States, primarily by means of detailed interviews with the diverse makeup of these museums’ constituents, including directors, staff, students, faculty, administrators, volunteers, as well as public and school audiences. Though my own experience in working with academic museums is admittedly somewhat limited, I became interested in this book through my frequent work with university audiences in museums. I was looking to this book to provide fresh insights into the relationship between the museum and the academic community, and it certainly did provide them. Some ideas presented in the book may already be familiar to many of us, but it was still nice to see them being reinforced across the field. One of the big questions it raised for me is: how can we, as educators, regardless of institutional affiliation, learn from academic museums, which have traditionally focused much more on education at their core than the traditional public encyclopedic museum model of “preserve and collect”? What challenges and opportunities do we have in common with academic museums, and what challenges and opportunities are unique to these museums?

In determining just what makes a museum “exemplary,” Glesne, who was commissioned for this project by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, narrowed her search by locating academic museums with objects donated from the Kress collection, and further refined her field of inquiry by identifying academic museums through surveys that seemed to be functioning as model institutions in terms of leading by example. This led her to a consideration of twelve institutions. While I would have liked to see a bit more information on the criteria that Glesne used to determine these museums’ “exemplary” status, this particular focus does lend itself to a manageable series of case studies. Tellingly, Glesne begins her analysis of the academic museum with an example of a docent-led high school tour of a Kress Foundation object, revealing her own personal emphasis on the educational role of the academic museum, as well as a somewhat obligatory focus on the role of the “great Kress giveaway” which is the subject of her first chapter. She also discusses how crucial outreach programs and K-12 educational programs became in the development of the academic museum’s history during the second half of the twentieth century, as they transitioned from private study collections to fully public institutions.

Connecting on Campus

Perhaps the crux of the book, in a chapter titled “Art Across the Curriculum,” Glesne discusses how academic museums have attempted to become embedded in the curricula of their parent institutions. For those of you who have worked with faculty before, many of these strategies for engagement in the museum might sound familiar, in terms of seeking out specific courses that mesh with a collection, networking with faculty at regularly-scheduled departmental meetings, and forming committees to develop curricula.

Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago

For me, this chapter reinforced the challenges of finding meaningful, sustainable connections with classes and allowing faculty, especially those from non-art-related disciplines, to feel independent and at home in working with a collection on their own, rather than with a museum staff serving as a mediator. Glesne also suggests some very novel approaches to connecting with faculty, including emphasizing the museum’s presence at new faculty orientations so that they are aware of the possibilities a museum can offer before they have even designed their classes.

In a particularly useful section of this chapter, Glesne breaks down the ways in which museums connect with academic curricula by identifying specific categories of curricular involvement. These categories include:

“Skill development,” for example, a foreign language class that uses museum objects to provide structure to a conversation;
“Interdisciplinary analysis,” or using a museum’s collection to find meaningful cross-references to other, non-art-related aspects of history;
“Comparative analysis” which seeks to make connections around specific concepts, for example, how objects might communicate different messages about “love” across time and cultures;
“Social critique,” which is often a topic of engagement for classes, especially as academic museums are sometimes more in a position to take risks in terms of controversial exhibitions;
“Research,” or how the practice of art historical analysis can cultivate research skills around these objects as primary source documents;
And finally, “creative inspiration” as a platform for the creation of works in other forms or media.

Glesne also discusses the increasing role of the “academic curator” as it evolved out of the Mellon Foundation’s College and University Art Museum Program, and how this unique position has played a vital role in establishing stronger connections between academic museums and university faculty. As Glesne points out, this position has often had the effect of freeing up the academic museum’s other education staff to think in a more focused way about K-12 involvement. However, I am somewhat cautious about this split, as it could be seen to reinforce differences in the approach to these two audience segments, rather than seeking to address commonalities between them. On the other hand, I often wonder if public museums might find an academic curator to be a valuable position in terms of focusing on increased interactions with college audiences.

Alternative Forms of Campus & Community Engagement

Photo from "Anything for Art" http://blogs.oberlin.edu — Photo from “Anything for Art” http://blogs.oberlin.edu

Glesne’s next chapter, “Museum Art in Everyday Life,” considers the ways in which academic museums seek to connect to students and the public outside of the curriculum. She discusses the many ways in which campus art museums have tried to increase visibility through social events and informal learning. Some examples that stood out in my mind are the Snite Museum of Art’s desire to make the Museum a kind of alternative “tailgate” space to connect the Museum with Notre Dame’s much more visible football games, and the always-popular Art Rental Program at Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum. I was particularly struck by how meaningful the ability to check out original works of art has been, not just for the students who rent these objects (for a mere $5), but for the greater Oberlin community, including a senior center that proudly displayed works from the program in its central building. Some of simplest, yet most effective programs involve turning over the programming to a student advisory council, allowing students to take ownership of the galleries. Glesne concludes this chapter by discussing the role that academic museums play in preparing people for careers in the arts. In surveying 79 museum workers, including staff, faculty, volunteers, and students, she concludes that while, admittedly, involvement in the arts is usually something that is inculcated at a very young age, experience with an academic museum in college can lead to further interest down the road in a career in the arts.

In the Periphery and at the Center

In the final section of The Exemplary Museum, Glesne ruminates on the larger role that academic museums play, both in academia and in the art world. She addresses the often peripheral nature of these spaces and the effects that the recent economic downturn has had on many campus art museums. However, she also addresses the ways in which these museums have been successful, through positioning themselves as centers of arts and culture on campus, and/or emphasizing the possibilities for collaborative, interdisciplinary education. For the public community, she notes that academic museums have been invaluable in providing arts access to regions that are either rural or are outside the coastal art centers of the United States.

Remarkably, Glesne first discusses the importance of the academic museum through metaphor, noting that her respondents often used words like “hidden gem, platform for narrative, catalyst, laboratory, library, and portal” in describing the changing role of the campus museum (p. 204). While these terms are certainly applicable to the twelve exemplary museums that Glesne surveys, they are also pertinent to the larger discussion about the shifting role of museums in the 21st century. Glesne also includes a useful bibliography and appendix section at the end of her book, including mission statements from participating museums, detailed responses to questions on why participants became interested in museums, and questions that she asked of museum directors. Of particular interest to the readers of this blog, she also includes an appendix on examples of educational technology in academic museums, which often tend to overlap with faculty projects involving these technology platforms.

Overall, The Exemplary Museum: Art and Academia provides a thorough and compelling survey of recent activities of academic museums around the country and the unique challenges and opportunities they encounter. While educators in public museums may find some of these ideas familiar, it is heartening to know that we are not alone in our work, and the unique role of the academic art museum provides a fascinating set of case studies for thinking about how any museum can make education at the center of its mission.

I am interested in hearing more on your thoughts on Glesne’s book in the comments below, especially from those of you who do work in academic art museums.

“The work does not prescribe a set of responses, and remains ambiguous in an unsettling and seemingly irresponsible way.”

In-gallery interpretation space

Response cards

Visitor responses

Tumblr site

About the Authors

Share this:

Like this:

How Do We Experience Contemporary Art?

Everything Comes Full Circle

Share this:

Like this:

Thoughts After Publication

Thoughts on [IN] Translation

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

Online Book Club Hangout (VIDEO)

Share this:

Like this:

Eating Identity

Our Responsibility

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

REFERENCES & RESOURCES

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

Online Book Club Hangout (VIDEO)

Share this:

Like this:

Developing Critical Self-Reflection in Educators

Promoting Critical Self-Reflection in Our Practice

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

Online Book Club Hangout (VIDEO)

Share this:

Like this:

Why is a Book on Multiculturalism in Art Museum Education Important?

“At issue is the social and educational responsibility of public institutions in the face of cultural diversity, as opposed to the moral assumption of the museum as repository, both of ‘Art’ and of cultural values.”

Context for Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today

Why are we attempting this call to action?

Online Book Club Hangout (VIDEO)

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

REFERENCES & RESOURCES

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

Share this:

Like this:

“those who can attend to and absorb themselves in particular works of art are more likely to affect connections in their own experience than those who cannot.”

ABOUT AUTHOR

Share this:

Like this:

“The purpose of strategic foresight is to prime your imagination to envision different futures — some of the many ways that the world could evolve into more than an amped-up version of today.” – Elizabeth Merritt

Share Your Thoughts

Share this:

Like this:

Hack the Museum 2.0

Wash Clothes, Make Art, Build Community: The Laundromat Project

On Naked Ambition: Portland Art Museum

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

“Who benefits from engagement, the museum or the community? How can we engage communities to their benefit? Who drives engagement, communities or the museum?”

Share this:

Like this:

Connecting on Campus

Alternative Forms of Campus & Community Engagement

In the Periphery and at the Center

Share this:

Like this:

A Forum for Reflecting on Practice