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Inclusive Practices, Spotlight on Practice

Disentangling Partisanship & Letting Rural America into Our Conversation

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Written by Greg Stuart

I am not usually in the habit of writing about projects that are in-progress or incomplete. However, in the wake of the current upheaval our country is experiencing, I feel compelled to share a powerful and cathartic moment I had recently in relation to our two-year Student/Community Curatorial Education Project that we are only just beginning.

First, a bit more about the project.  Here at the Samek Art Museum, a Bucknell University-affiliated museum in rural central Pennsylvania, we’ve been working for the past six months on an exhibition that is curated by Bucknell students with input from the local community with generous financial support from the Maurer Family Foundation. By “students,” I am referring to our Museum Guides in particular, paid work-study employees who serve as part gallery attendant, part roving docent. Our goal is to provide a platform for our constituents to have a say in our exhibition planning while also bridging the very real town/gown divide that exists here, often referred to colloquially as the “Bucknell bubble.” As the Public Programs and Outreach Manager for the Museum, I’m responsible for the aspects of this project related to community outreach and exhibition interpretation, while our Director shapes the curatorial elements of the project.

The first phase of the project involved organizing a meeting with our Museum Guides and a small group of community members to try to suss out issues that were most important to our local community. We were aided immensely in recruiting the community members by the Buffalo Valley Recreation Authority, an organization that is deeply embedded in the region. Prior to the meeting, our Museum Guides developed interview questions for the community members intended to elicit narratives and encourage empathy–a process directly inspired by design thinking, which has been written about on this site before. Our goal was to move through the first three steps of the design thinking process, from empathy, to definition, to ideation. Community members would interview each other using the questions developed by the Guides, then we’d come back as a group to brainstorm and refine the process to start developing big ideas about important community issues.

Following the first meeting, the Guides would prototype and test exhibition ideas at a later date with further input from the community.

And then the election happened.

Suddenly, the interview questions that the Guides developed weeks before the election, such as “are there any current events happening right now that you think are most impactful to the region?” or “What would you change about the local community and why?” took on a completely new meaning and sense of urgency.

Not knowing what to expect, we went into the first community meeting bravely, ready to have tough conversations if need be. At the beginning, our discussion focused on how we are even defining what constitutes this community. At first glance, our location in the central Susquehanna valley region often looks fairly uniform—quaint, Victorian-era towns surrounded by rolling hills and farmlands. However, as the community members pointed out, the region is anything but homogenous, with each town informed by a sense of identity often tied to the industry that led to its settlement. For instance, Lewisburg, the home of Bucknell, is shaped most by the influence of the University; the town of Williamsport began as a lumber town; and Mifflinburg’s past and present is informed by its former role as a “buggy town.” Beyond these divisions, towns often have different boroughs or townships, each with their unique sense of identity as well, as many of the community members reminded us.

As the conversation shifted towards the election, stories of discrimination emerged. One community member who has lived in the region her whole life brought up racist bullying that she witnessed in grade school in Mifflinburg. Another community member brought up one of many examples of unintentional racism that she witnesses frequently in living here. I was dismayed to hear our Director, who identifies as queer, mention that, while he has faced discrimination in big cities, he experienced an act of discrimination here that took a more “physical” form. A common theme seemed to be that the community—already divided—would become more so as a result of the election.

I should mention at this point that our group of community members could hardly be called diverse. All were white women in their thirties or forties, and though I have no idea how they voted, all were quick to condemn the violence and racism that President-elect Trump courted openly during his campaign. While this lack of diversity is something we will work to correct in future community meetings, it is telling that our small group most likely ran counter to a lot of what has been said recently about the impact of rural communities in this election.

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A way forward

One narrative to emerge from the election is that liberal coastal elites failed to listen to the impoverished rural heartland (though certainly this has shown repeatedly to be a false narrative, as many of Trump’s supports come from middle to upper-middle class suburbs). We have the opportunity to run counter to this false narrative as a fairly liberal, certainly elite, and often-coastal (at least in its student demographic, if not in its location) institution that was already in the process of letting its rural constituents in on our conversation before the election. Conversely, this community also has the opportunity to have a voice and stand out against this narrative as well in helping us shape this exhibition.  

Though I am focusing mostly on negative aspects of the local community that have surfaced in response to the election, I must stress that many of the comments that came out of our discussion were positive about the benefits of living in rural, small-town PA. A particularly insightful response came from a community member who mentioned that, in a small town where everyone knows everybody else, it is easy to spontaneously, organically, and quickly organize. I can only hope that our finished exhibition  can serve as a catalyst for this type of fluid community organization.

In a post-meeting journal response, Museum Guide Jillian Crooks, responded:

“The attendants confirmed my belief that people who are the most involved in community projects and activities are more interested in new projects and events. The women in attendance all seemed heavily interested in making Lewisburg better and more inclusive. This wasn’t surprising, but it was heartwarming.”

Some final thoughts

One of the larger questions that has come out of this election for Bucknell faculty is whether it is important to suspend academic neutrality when faced with a political perspective that is:

  1. Objectively wrong, or
  2. Violates other norms of greater importance, such as respecting the dignity and rights of others.

While I agree with the AAM’s stance on the importance of continuing to foster bipartisan support for our institutions, I think it is also critical to try to disentangle those aspects of partisanship that go against the caveats mentioned above. As educators, we have a responsibility to present and encourage evidence-based interpretations of our exhibitions and collections, and to foster inclusivity and diversity in our spaces and in our conversations with visitors.

Though I am pleased to share our Student/Community Curatorial Education Project as a case study, I welcome discussions (via Comments below, as well as on social media) on how to go about accomplishing the incredibly difficult task of disentangling partisanship from our ethical responsibilities as museum educators.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

photo1GREG STUART is the Public Programs and Outreach Manager at the Samek Art Museum, Bucknell University where he is responsible for the Museum’s educational programs, public programs, events, and marketing. Prior to joining Bucknell, he worked as a museum educator at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, the Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft, and Loyola University’s Museum of Art in Chicago. He has taught art history classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Portland State University, and Concordia University Portland. He holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Art History and English from Loyola University Chicago.

Spotlight on Practice, Teaching Tools, Video

Bringing the Museum into the Art History Classroom

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Written by Karen Shelby, Assistant Professor of Art  History at Baruch College, City University of New York, and co-founder of Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR).  This post was originally published online at Art History Teaching Resources, a streamlined, peer-populated teaching resources site sharing art history survey teaching materials between teachers.

mona-lisaMost art history instructors include a museum visit or two in the semester schedule. But what if a museum or gallery visit is difficult to arrange dependent upon geographic location of the college or university, class size, or the time the class is offered?

Even though I have access to numerous museums because I teach in New York City, I found that some of these challenges prohibited my students in engaging with the museum in what I considered to be a meaningful way. I often teach jumbo art history survey classes and there’s just no way for one instructor to physically tour 100 students around a museum at once in any meaningful way. If not class size, then my city college students’ schedules – job 1, job 2, family, other classes – meant they couldn’t make the visits I scheduled. For these and many other reasons, I increasingly found that it was often no longer possible to engage the students with a teacher-led museum visit (though where I can, I always still do!).  Through several discussions with Michelle Millar Fisher at AHTR, we came up with the idea to film some of the museums in the city in order to help facilitate professor-led discussions in our classrooms before our students hit the museum.

Google Art Project lets us inside the Tate Britain (among many other art museums) from our computer or mobile device.
Google Art Project lets us inside the Tate Britain (among many other art museums) from our computer or mobile device.

There are certainly helpful projects out there already that pointed towards our idea. But, while Google Art Project and Google Maps Street View allow students to view the interior and exterior of museum spaces, they are stilted and do not study the exterior façade and environment in the necessary depth of an academic exercise. We want our students to consider the politics of the museum space – how, why, and where the artwork is located in the museum, and the museum architecture itself.

We ultimately got this project supported by two Baruch Learning and Technology Grants that supported the work of filmmaker and editor Thomas Shoemaker who filmed at least ten museums as well as two discussions among museum educators and art history instructors. We’re still working on uploading some of them to the AHTR site, and also redubbing them – one part of the learning process was realizing that having a score was distracting. We are currently reinstating the “wild sound” they were created with. We are in the process of editing and uploading the following films: The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Tenement Museum, and PS1 (we have some fabulous footage of Five Pointz from the 7 train before it was torn down). In addition, we recorded a conversation among Michelle, architectural historian and Big Onion Tour Guide Ted Barrow, and myself about the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and another between Laura Lombard, manager of University Programs and Partnerships, and Mike Obremski, a gallery guide, at the Rubin Museum of Art.

We hope that the availability of the short museum segments will enhance professor/student engagement for a variety of academic disciplines. But for art history, these films can provide a number of pedagogical objectives. I use these films as introductions to the self-guided museum visits that I must now assign to the 100+ students in my jumbo courses. We also view the films in class after the students have toured the museum and handed in their formal analysis assignments. The traditional formal analysis assignment now includes a section that asks them to critically evaluate the museum space. The goal is to make them aware of how the decisions made by museum personnel subconsciously affect each visitor.  My model is Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach’s “The Universal Survey Museum.”

Duncan and Wallach analyze the Louvre, considering the information imparted to the visitor through the deliberate placement of the works of art, the organization of the galleries, and the architectural frame of the Louvre. They provided me with some ideas to create a list of questions for the survey student to consider as he or she moves through the museum, including:

    • Where is the museum located?
    • What does it look like on the exterior and interior?
    • What art historical period does it reference?
    • Why do you think this style was chosen?
    • How is the museum organized in the interior?
    • What cultures are featured?
    • Which are difficult to find?
    • What do you think about this organization?

Both Michelle and I have had some great pre- and post-visit class discussions spring from watching these films with our students. In one of Michelle’s classes, after students visited the Met independently (watching the Met Museum film before and after and discussing as a class), the students were asked to analyze the film that showed the Studio Museum in Harlem (without knowing the name of the institution) as an extra credit question on their midterm. Students showed confidence and facility with describing and interpreting the similarities and differences between the two exteriors, interiors, and neighborhoods. For example, they didn’t know the flag outside the Studio Museum in Harlem was David Hammons’ African American Flag, but they could interpret the difference between its symbolism (alternative, wishing to make a new statement about the politics inherent to the American flag) and the symbolism on the facade of the Met (classical, traditional, patriarchal). It was fun to parse this further after the exams were handed back, and to be able to continue to discuss – in a multifaceted way – spaces of display long after the museum visit had happened.

We’re pleased to have these films available and we hope they become a valuable resource to the arts teaching community. The goal is to add to the collection with the help of the recent Kress Digital Resources grant awarded to AHTR, but also from contributions from our peers.

We’d love to hear what you think of this project. What would you need changed or adapted in order to use it in your classroom or teaching environment? Could you make similar videos of institutions and places in your locality that we could post and share on AHTR?  We’d love if others in the AHTR or ArtMuseumTeaching community would add to the collection expanding it beyond the currently New York City-centered focus. Help us create some additional assignments or discussion points to be added to the AHTR site. We want your feedback and participation!

Editor’s Note:  Here at ArtMuseumTeaching, I’m interested in the thoughts and feedback from museum educators about using museum videos and short films to prepare students for their own self-guided visits to our institutions.  What are other ways in which art history faculty might connect their students to art museums, collections, and learning spaces they provide?  Are there ways in which emerging technologies might allow museums to ‘enter’ the jumbo survey classroom in unique ways?  How might museums work toward connecting better with the needs of college and university faculty who might not be able to visit with their students?  Your thoughts, questions, and ideas are welcome!

**This post was originally published online at Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR).

Spotlight on Practice, Teaching Tools

Teaching for Independence: Empowering Learning in the Art Museum

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Written by Mike Murawski

Prefatory Note: Before ArtMuseumTeaching.com went public, there were several months when it was simply my own personal (private) online space to reflect on my practice as well as larger issues around teaching and learning in museums.  It was (and is) so valuable to write about what we do as educators and museum practitioners, even without publicly sharing that writing.  Since the site went public back in February 2012, these reflections (along with those of nearly 2 dozen other practitioners) have been openly shared via this unique online ‘bazaar’ that spotlights practice — from million-dollar cutting-edge initiatives and multi-year projects to simple, personal reflections and moments to add one more teaching tool to our belts.  And while conferences such as the NAEA, AAM, and Museums & the Web — among others — can surface some truly incredible, thoughtful work happening in museums today (some of which has been highlighted on this site), it is also important to provide a space for reflections and conversation around a more daily teaching practice.  This post is an attempt to maintain those types of reflections on this site, and to encourage others to share their teaching & learning experiences as we continue to build this online community of practice.

A couple weeks ago here at the Portland Art Museum, I had a unique opportunity to work with a group of students visiting from neighboring Portland State University as part of their Freshman Inquiry course entitled “The Work of Art,” led by artist/educator Sarah Wolf Newlands.  This multidisciplinary course examines the ‘work’ that goes into artistic production, but goes way beyond that to explore the role art plays in our lives.  As the course site describes:

“It looks at the work art does in the world — how it shapes, reflects, disguises, complicates, challenges, or brings reality to our assumptions about the world…. What are the artistic levers with which we can move our world forward? What can looking through the lens of ‘art’ at the products from a broad range of disciplines reveal about ourselves, our culture[s] and our society? How does the art we do and the art we experience shape our identity? How does it disguise or reveal our essence, heal our hearts, and enable our joy? How does art influence cultural change? How can we use the arts to build community?”

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One of my own goals when working with groups of college students and adults in the galleries (and in the classroom) is always to break down the often rigid expectations of “what we do” in front of a work of art — moving past the assumptions that we need to behave a certain way or know something specific before we can have an experience with art. I also aim to teach for independence — an approach to our ‘work’ with art that empowers a participatory, learner-centered process of making meaning and attempts to break down the constructed hierarchies between teacher and learner, professor and student, expert and novice, institution and audience.

“The visitor’s response and experience come first, before the museum’s, before the history of art.” —Rika Burnham

For me, at its heart, teaching for independence asks that educators (whether in the museum, K-12 classroom, or university lecture hall) strive to facilitate deep, collective experiences with art that leave participants and learners better equipped to look, explore, question, and engage deeply on their own without always relying on the museum or an ‘expert’ to lead that process.

Opening Up the Learning Experience: An Hour with Mark Bradford’s Scorched Earth

As the PSU students gathered in the gallery, we began with a quick discussion of “what does learning look like in an art museum” to establish an atmosphere of thinking and reflection.  Then, we dove head first into a 60-minute co-learning experience with a single work of art — Mark Bradford’s Scorched Earth (2006). The experience was intended to be multi-modal, involving various ways of thinking and openly responding to the artwork in front of us– a process similar to other experiences about which I have written.

bradford3Here is a quick outline of our experience with Bradford’s piece  (and I always want to be clear that these tips and strategies are not ones that I necessarily invent, but are inspired by some of the ‘Jedi knights’ of museum education like Rika Burnham, to whom I am greatly indebted. I also do use some of these strategies repeatedly when I am in the galleries, since some are just exceptional ways to open-up an experience of freedom, comfort, creative looking, and excitement):

  1. Looking: We began with 1 minute of quiet looking, then having students share their initial observations with a person sitting next to them.  We followed that with another minute of quiet looking, this time using a paper tube as a telescope to see the artwork differently — followed by more sharing with their neighbors about anything new they noticed.
  2. Question: Students were asked to write down one question or wondering they had for this work of art.
  3. 60-Second Sketch: Everyone spread out across the gallery and then had 60 seconds to make a quick sketch of the entire artwork, filling their paper from edge to edge.  Students were asked to lay all of the sketches in the center of the gallery, walk around and see what others drew, and then select a sketch that interested them (and was not their own).
  4. Sketching with Language: Students had several minutes to “finish” the sketch they had selected, but by using only language — adding words, phrases, thoughts, and reflective writing directly on top of the drawing. I call this “sketching with language,” something pulled from Jack Kerouac and his creative process.
  5. Reading: In small groups, students shared their writing by reading it aloud– really honoring their writing by reading it directly instead of simply summarizing or paraphrasing it (which is what we too often do).
  6. Conversation Extender: By this point, students have had some serious time to look at Bradford’s work, share and exchange ideas about what they see and what they think about it, and do some sketching and writing to deepen or even shift their interpretations.  To extend their conversations and spark further thought, each group received a small packet of historic photographs from the 1921 Tulsa race riots — an event that historians have called “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history,” and an event that has been strongly connected to this work by Bradford.  Each group of students was simply asked to continue their conversation about the Bradford piece, yet to see how this added layer of historic images (powerful in their own right) might build or shift that conversation in any way. In talking about his own work, Bradford once says: “It’s about … tracing the ghost of cities past. It’s the pulling off of a layer and finding another underneath.”
  7. Group Discussion: During this entire experience thus far, students have been building personal meaning or sharing their ideas in pairs or small groups. So to wrap up, each group brings their thoughts and insights to the full class as we spend the last 10-15 minutes in an open discussion about the artwork and our experience with it.

Learning to See Learning in the Art Museum

For me, much of the experience with this group of college students was about empowering them to learn to see learning in an art museum (and with a work of art) differently — to begin to see looking and learning with art in a more active, participatory way that also allows for shared authority around knowledge and interpretation.  To help me gain a better understanding of how (or whether) this happens, I invited students participating in the experience described above to send me an email with their reflections after their museum visit. Here are a few great insights from their reflections:

collection of student sketches, questions, and writing in response to Bradford's "Scorched Earth"
collection of student sketches, questions, and writing in response to Bradford’s “Scorched Earth”

“Usually when I go to an art museum, the experience isn’t as fun and exciting. It’s hard for me to look at a work of art and really dissect it…. I probably will never get to just sit down in front of a work of art and analyze it with that many people again, and it was an awesome experience. Thank you for taking the time to teach our class fun tools that we can use in an art museum to really get the most out of our time there.”

“It was really cool to spend a solid hour just looking into what the piece could be about, what it could mean. I’m glad that you opened up the learning experience by allowing us to interpret the painting in our own way, then discuss with one other person, and then discuss in small groups. I think this allowed each student to really get the most out of what other students were understanding and interpreting from the work.”

“This experience was very enlightening because we learned so much from so little. It was profound to get so much out of little more than looking, thinking, and discussing.”

“It’s crazy how observing a piece for just a little longer than a glance can change your perspective of a piece and your understanding of it…. If more people were to do what we did today and take time to observe art, they would see it in totally new ways.”

This type of learner-centered, participatory meaning-making is something I continue to explore in the museum context, but I think it also has significant implications for how we conceive of art history teaching outside of the museum.  What if we allowed for more active, open-ended looking and exploration with art, and hold back some on the passive transfer of information?  What if we used drawing, movement, or creative writing as another way of looking deeply at art?  What if we really focused our teaching more on creating and supporting independent learners who see and think for themselves?

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This post has also been published online at Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR), a streamlined, peer-populated teaching resources site sharing Art History Survey teaching materials between teachers and stimulating conversations around pedagogy in the arts. The site was initiated in 2011 by Michelle Jubin and Karen Shelby, products of the CUNY Graduate Teaching Fellows program.

Bookshelf

Bookshelf: The Exemplary Museum – Art and Academia

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ExemplaryMuseum-coverIn 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
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:

  1. “Skill development,” for example, a foreign language class that uses museum objects to provide structure to a conversation;
  2. “Interdisciplinary analysis,” or using a museum’s collection to find meaningful cross-references to other, non-art-related aspects of history;
  3. “Comparative analysis” which seeks to make connections around specific concepts, for example, how objects might communicate different messages about “love” across time and cultures;
  4. “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;
  5.  “Research,” or how the practice of art historical analysis can cultivate research skills around these objects as primary source documents;
  6. 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.