when art pisses you off

Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to sit in on, participate in and document a training session for the MCA's Artist Guides (AGs), the corps of practicing studio artists who lead conversation-based tours for school groups throughout the academic year. The training was fantastic, in that I got to meet most of the AGs and hear them talk about their art, how leading school tours fits into it, and their unique role within the greater institution.

During the latter half of the morning session, Marissa Reyes, Associate Director of Education, School and Teacher Programs, rolled out the MCA's freshly crafted vision statement, which serves as a complement to the museum's mission statement by stating not what the MCA is but what it aspires to be. AGs, staff, and myself then broke up into small groups to parse out particularly complicated sections of the statement, and came back together as a large group to share insights and come to a collective understanding of the vision's meaning through the lens of the AGs' work with students.

Part of the vision statement refers the MCA as an "audience-engaged platform for producing art, ideas, community, and conversation around the creative process." A common question among AGs was: How do we make our students self-confident enough to become truly engaged? One AG, Alex, noted that when you come into a museum, you're essentially a human being, flesh and bones, in a building, looking at stuff. How can we help others make something more from that "stuff," when it also means taking the risk of making mistakes? Rachel Harper suggested that in order to do that, we need to set up boundaries to keep the space safe and allow students to push up against those boundaries. Marissa suggested building empathy toward one's students by using oneself as a starting point.

Something else that came up was the necessity of encouraging kids to share their negative reactions toward pieces of art. The guides talked about their experience with a Richard Serra sculpture in an exhibit a few years ago, and how students hated it when they first saw it, but how after engaging with it, many of them changed their minds. The group agreed that certain works of art are valuable within tours for their ability to turn kids off, and that those works serve as great icebreakers.

Today, I was talking with another AG about the Minimalism show that's going up on Saturday, which will be the site of the bulk of fall school tours. She expressed her excitement for it, and her particular interest in leading high school students through it. "Because they'll understand the conceptual part of it better?" I asked. "Because it's going to piss them off," she replied.

People talk about art as a thing of beauty, of cultural and significance, as an emotional force or a historical object, but I like art best when it pisses people off. Because what makes them angry, makes them talk, and when people talk -- especially passionately -- they learn.

routines and relationships, museum style

In a recent guest post on Nina Simon’s blog Museum 2.0, Laurel Butler, Education Specialist at the Yerba Buena Center from the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco, talked about a program that the YBCA recently piloted called YOU Membership. Participants in the program enter into a close relationship with the YBCA, whose staff basically serves as the museum equivalent of personal trainers. Seriously: being a YOU Member means that you have professionals evaluate your interests and needs in order to recommend a “museum routine” designed to deepen your involvement with the institution and extend the benefits you reap from that involvement. From the point of view of the visitor, I see two major benefits of participating in the program. First, instead of having to sift through all offered programs and events, you are automatically directed toward the ones that should be of highest interest to you. Second, you get lots of one-on-one interaction with museum insiders. 

As someone profoundly interested in ways in which the museum can make its interpretive processes more transparent to the public and privilege the voices of its visitors, this kind of initiative seems like a giant leap in the right direction. Still, considering the fact that YBCA continues to struggle with getting YOU Members to participate in the programming recommended to them, I can’t help but wonder if their efforts aren’t somewhat misdirected. Instead of spending a lot of time customizing visits for an intimate group of people, would the YBCA be better advised to focus on attracting wider audiences to the museum by proposing alternative ways of experiencing its collection?

I’ve been mulling over a few possibilities for using technology and the web to extend the appeal of the museum visit to a larger public. The first is some type of printed resource or website that treats the meta of the museum by demystifying the inner workings of the institution. This would be designed to the give the audience a better sense of what goes into constructing and maintaining a museum, and what decisions are made by various museum professionals. Knowing where the authority lies and where interpretation enters the mix in any decision-making process can empower one to challenge the end product, and I think people willing to spend a bit of time familiarizing themselves with the ins and outs of museum work would begin to feel much more comfortable calling into question the meaning and value of things they encounter in the museum of art. If this type of revelatory information could exist in museums themselves as interactive displays, I think the effects would be revolutionary.

The second idea resembles something like craigslist for museums. Not a social networking site per se, but a place to connect with people offering a service that you need, this could be a way for educators and museum visitors to connect in an informal way. Not only could museums advertise their exhibitions and programs, but they could learn about the desires of their visitors, and visitors could find peers with shared interests with which to visit museums, attend events, and debrief museum experiences.

first week

my first week as the school and teacher programs intern at the mca chicago was awesome. things i love about it:

1. my supervisors are competent young women who are incredibly approachable and very open and excited to allowing me to pursue my own research and interests within the internship whenever possible;
2. the education department's offices are right next to curatorial's;
3. my first major project consists of retooling and extending the life of a wiki that came out of the summer teacher institute, and is going to be a lot of fun.

one of the great things about this internship is that it is going to give me a chance to do a lot of observing, reflecting upon, and talking about tours and other education programs, something that will certainly aid me in thinking about new strategies that can be used to privilege the visitor voice in museums. a few thesis-related thoughts that sprang up this week:

• one of my supervisors, talking about the koi pond on the first floor of the mca, noted that many of the artist guides use it during school tours to set the tone for the visit, and introduce the mca as a space that challenges preconceived notions of what a museum is. what a great way to knock down the authoritative voice a few pegs from the get-go: find a feature of the institution that defies the normal characteristics of the museum as temple, and use it to bring up the paradigm.
• the mca does a lot of work to maintain and strengthen relationships with a small group of teachers and schools. how can this be balanced with attracting new audiences to the museum, and what should be breakdown be between close-knit relationships with a select few and shallower relationships with a much larger public?

reviving the blog

hello again, cyberspace. while this blog began as a home for posts pertaining to ray yang's cyberped class in the spring of 2010, i'm reviving it as place for journaling about my fieldwork internship in school and teacher programs at the mca in the fall of 2011. i should create a separate space for thesis-related blogs, but the thought of increasing my already expansive cyber footprint by one more blog is slightly nauseating, so this will have to do!

voki

i have to admit, i am not sold on avatars. this may go back to my middle school self's loathing of the times when i would go over to friend's house and they would want to spend hours playing sims... who knows. but i ended up on the world languages group of edutopia and saw a reference to voki. having never heard of it, i checked it out and discovered that it's a program that lets you create "personalized speaking avatars" for free that you then have the option of using on blogs and in emails. this actually seems like a potentially cool resource for foreign language classrooms, and i'll keep it in mind for this summer.

sleepless in sharp

we love museums... do museums love us back?

um. this is adorable. also, it says in less than 5 minutes what i am still not sure if i said in 18 pages of intro/lit review.

sir ken robinson on -- what else? -- creativity

thanks lee for posting this speech given by sir ken robinson about why stem disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math) are necessary but not enough in education. i don't think i've ever listened to a talk that this man has given that i didn't find extremely intelligent and articulate.

one of my favorite points in this speech was when he talked about getting a group of about 20 "creative" people together for a round-table type summit on creativity. he spoke about how a nobel prize-winning scientist was apprehensive to be in the same panel as a comedian, whose "razorblade mind" he feared would shred everything he said; the same comedian feared that anything he said would be immediately reduced to pieces by the "mind like a planet" of the scientist. sir robinson pointed out that we spend so much time being anxious about other people, and then when we actually meet, we find it remarkably easy to come together in common cause. i've been thinking a lot about this lately, mostly because my thesis is about creating conversation between strangers in museums. what he said is so true, but the difficult question is, how, when you're not organizing a fancy-pants panel, do you help people find that "common cause"?

another point of the speech that i really liked was when he talked about chuck close saying "inspiration is for amateurs," and noting that artists don't talk about being creative, they talk about making things. i love this because i think it highlights such a good solution to people's, and notably, kids, anxieties -- oftentimes, a simple shift from adjective to verb is enough to take off the pressure. If we talk about "creating" -- a simple verb, meaning "making," that anyone can do -- instead of "being creative" -- something that seems to require genius, or at least supreme originality -- isn't it easier to get started and end up with really cool stuff?

robert rauschenberg's erased de kooning

i found this video on the walker art blogs -- it's a pretty cool little piece about rauschenberg erasing the de kooning drawing. can you believe it took a month?!

this week's readings...

i'm unfortunately not going to be in class tonight, so here are my reactions to this week's readings. i posted below about how cool i thought the carrot revolution blog was, so now to the kennedy center. this is a less exciting site, but i have been using it some this semester to write lesson plans for workshops for my museum as critical curriculum class. it's pretty easy to navigate, and i like the way their lesson plans are presented, with different tabs for objectives/procedures/materials, etc. it's certainly a more appealing way to browse through lessons than if they were all in one long, word doc-like format.

to rayshawn's reading: i read what alana posted about it on her blog, and agree with a lot of the things she has to say. i think for me, a lot of it comes down to framing and rhetoric. instead of talking about "turning away students at the door," why couldn't the principle be talking about what kind of a wake-up call or measure is needed to get parents in the door for meetings, or for students to realize that they are jeopardizing their future? i was especially put off by this analogy:

They're not going to be able to go to work and miss 66 days and then expect the job to take them back.

True, but is that really relevant? These are not adult, working professionals -- they're kids, who have yet to finish their high school education. There are obviously a lot of factors at play when students miss over 66 days of school -- shouldn't there be concerted efforts toward identifying those factors? What efforts are being made to get parents in the door? What can be done to keep kids from falling into truancy? It just seems like this kind of tough stance is actually a lazy stance. Sure, it takes money and resources to keep kids in school, but the main issue here seems to be that it also takes a lot of work.

prezi love

i really wish we could have some sort of thesis proposal share-fest for all the first-year mat/maaes. i've gotten to talk to some of you about your projects, and everything is so cool and interesting that i just want to know more.

i thought i should mention that thanks to this class, i ended up doing a prezi for the panel. i got some good but tough feedback during the panel, and i have a lot of rethinking/rewriting to do, but i still love how my presentation looked.

i wanted to take advantage of the fact that you can embed prezis (cool, right?) to post it here, but for some reason blogger does not want me to embed something that's not a downloaded or youtube-d video. so, if you want to take a look, you can find it on my tumblr.

carrot revolution

i knew i was going to love this resource, if only for its name. there is some seriously cool stuff pointed out in the posts on this blog. exhibit a: street art view

google art project (gap) now has a companion: street art view. currently, there are a mere 16 chicago sites uploaded (class project?). i also found some in portland, maine, a little town i know pretty well. i've probably walked down this street at least 20 times in the past couple of years, and i've never noticed the graffiti pictured above.

exhibit b: pearltrees

 

this is awesome. there are a lot of ways to collect and display/share favorite web resources, but this is one of the most interesting-looking that i've seen.

deck of arts 4/21/11

your lit reviews will be done by wednesday, your panel presentations by thursday... so there's no reason you shouldn't come to this awesome event in the museum next thursday (the 21st) at 5:00! i co-designed the content and format with the rest of the lovely smc members, and it is (hopefully!) going to be something straight out of a nina simon blog post. you won't be disappointed!

evc

i've looked at the street level youth media site a bunch of times before, but i'd never heard of evc. they have some great-looking curriculum materials that i might use. i'm currently planning my elective course for the french immersion program i work at in the summer, and i'm trying to decide between a "make your own museum" class and a "this francophone life" class about oral history/podcasting. if i go with the latter, there are some lesson plans/activities on the site that i could easily adapt for the class. i know storycorps has a great diy guide that i could use as well.

if you need a laugh...

raising the status of teachers

sometimes i check out the "room for debate" feature on the opinion pages of the new york times, and recently, this article about ways (besides raising teacher salaries) to attract more people to the teaching profession.

i particularly liked the response of vern williams, a middle school math teacher in virginia, called "let us teach!" he writes that teachers need to take back the profession:

until practicing classroom teachers are allowed to make real decisions regarding curriculum, assessment, textbooks and professional development, the status of teachers will remain low.

this seems so obvious, and yet it is something that really resonates with me, as i think this accounts for at least part of the reason that i decided i didn't want to be a classroom teacher. mr. williams cites his experience working with johns hopkins university's center for talented youth one summer as proof that teaching sixth graders can feel as prestigious as being a college professor, if the institution you're working for hires selectively but then places confidence in the strength of your choices and methods as an educator. i've worked for the last three summers on the residential life side of mmla, a summer language immersion program for middle school and high school students. i'm going back this summer as a french teacher, and i'm so excited about it -- because in addition to the beginner french class i'll teach in the morning, for 2 out of the 4 weeks of the program i'll also be teaching a 2-hour elective entirely designed by me. i started working at mmla during its first summer and the program is far from flawless, but the directors put incredible faith in their instructors, and it pays off. the learning that occurs takes strange and numerous shapes, and is truly inspiring. i can't help but wonder what would happen if some of that same confidence and freedom was granted to classroom teachers across the country.

forgetting to remember

thanks to sarah for posting the article about bill gates, and thanks to jessica for pointing out the comments in response to the article. i always enjoy reading the comments after articles that seem polarizing or somewhat controversial and trying to figure out what kind of people are reading and responding.

this sentence in the middle of one of the longer comments jumped out at me:

there is no linear correlation between quality of teaching and student performance, and for one very good reason: nobody has the slightest idea, beyond common sense, of what constitutes quality teaching.

i agree with the gist of this statement, although i would argue that nobody has the slightest idea of what constitutes quality teaching because no one is using common sense. when i think about the teachers i had in grade school/middle school/high school, most of the ones that come to mind didn't teach subjects that i loved or even did spectacularly in -- instead, the ones i remember as being great teachers are the ones who worked hard to find ways to facilitate understanding in those students who didn't "get it" the first try, and the ones who didn't balk at getting slightly off-track or incorporating digressions and slightly unorthodox activities into their lessons if it was going to help people learn.

it's hard for me to believe that the people who think standardized testing is a good way to measure teacher quality, let alone student achievement, have ever taken the time to reflect upon their own experience with teachers in schools. what can we do to make them remember?

having fun at the mca

 

one of a two-part series in which paulina and i posed in front of the 12x12.

oh là là: a new french history museum?

i was skimming the times website the other day and i found this article about a new museum that french president nicolas sarkozy is planning to open. first, a bit of history:

about french presidents

they like to memorialize their presidencies by having national monuments built (and named after themselves) while in office. this sounds like i am generalizing/stereotyping, but it's just their way.

georges pompidou has the centre pompidou, an incredibly cool modern and contemporary art museum:

françois mitterrand has the national library:

and jacques chirac has the quai branly, a controversial museum of indigenous art from africa, asia, oceania, and the americas:

about sarkozy

the 9 months that i lived in france fell within the first year and a half of sarkozy's election, and were peppered with student, government worker, and transportation strikes, in response to reforms he tried to implement and as a result of general disgust with his person. in a way, sarkozy is much more american than french -- always pushing for productivity, unafraid of privatization, and unapologetic about his own blinged-out lifestyle. from what i saw and heard, the french population over 35 seems pretty split about how good he is for france, but the french youth? they hate him with a passion.

about the new museum

one reason why sarkozy is so unpopular among french youth is that he is anti-immigration and, well, downright racist (this is ironic, as one of his parents was a polish immigrant). which bring us to his proposed legacy: a museum of french history. while in theory there is nothing wrong with this, rest assured that sarkozy's take on french history will glorify all the usual suspects (ahem, napoleon), and gloss right over the travesties bestowed by france on places like algeria. the problem with history is that it's always told by the victors. this museum would be just one more slap in the face from a narcissistic power monger to the neglected and abused, though culture-rich, immigrant populations in france. normally, i'm all for new museums, but imagining walking through this one makes me feel nothing short of disgust.

mash flob!

i was looking at the mca's website to get an idea of the programming that will be going on during our class visit tomorrow night, and i stumbled upon this:

mash flob!

i got excited because i'm interested in alternative audio guides and programming that encourages a different kind of exploration of museum space, but then i noticed that instead of using a podcast form, the artist will be broadcasting live on fm radio. while i think this is an interesting idea that introduces a temporal element not present in similar experiences done through podcasts, who has a portable fm radio these days? not me.

more comments

i don't know what's going on with my blogger account, as i'm still not able to post comments on anyone's blog. i suppose for the moment, i'll just have to keep reacting via my own blog. i wanted to remark about two posts in particular. first, lee's post about AR apps:

when lee was talking about this the other night, i was a little confused about what an AR app would look like, but reading about these apps cleared things up for me. i particularly like the "nearest tube" app -- i would totally use something like that. this also made me think of gis (geographic information systems), a program that a lot of my friends who studied geography in college used to make these crazy-detailed maps overlaying various sets of data (normally dealing with the distribution of resources).

also, i liked sarah's post about "cyberped and revolution." this reminded me of an article i was reading in the new yorker the other day about mo ibrahim. he's a sudanese man who is largely responsible for the presence of cell phone towers in many parts of africa. he's made a whole bunch of money and is now giving away his fortune chunk by chunk to african leaders who reveal themselves to be genuinely for democracy and to have the interests of their countries' people at heart... i'd recommend checking it out, there's a very interesting correlation between political reform, youth engagement, and technology suggested there, too.

thoughts on the panel

it's tuesday night and my brain is already fried. hence, the bullet point form of my reactions from tonight's event:

•  major props to everyone else in the class for your past, current, and future work in schools. my brief stint teaching english in the french school system (which is extremely screwed up as well, although for different reasons) helped me realize that the classroom is not where i want to be. that doesn't mean i'm any less interested in the current state of our schools, or that a big part of me doesn't feel that schools are the most important place for art educators to be right now, but i know that i function better in and get more out of working in alternative settings. anyways, i'm really glad i have the chance to get to know you guys and be inspired by your work and ideas through this class!
• speaking of alternative settings, if you hadn't guessed, i am mostly talking about museums. thinking about the sad state of arts in schools makes me wonder, should museums be picking up the slack? do museum educators feel pressure to do this? what kind of museum programming is the most beneficial and most necessary for kids: family programs, teen lab-type programs, school tours, teacher workshops?
• i loved hearing from the girl from cyic about student organizing. what she said about the student bill of rights made me think of voyce, a multi-neighborhood organization of high school students working towards school reform. i did a research project for a class last semester that involved talking to some people from and about voyce, and it was so awesome to see what happens when youth are empowered to identify and work to solve issues that affect them directly.
• the "magical thinking" comment from the woman suggesting how liberals can live with the current state of the school system made me think about several of my friends who are coming to the end of their commitments with teach for america. tfa seriously expects their employees to have superpowers, or at least to be (enthusiastically) inexhaustible. i have witnessed several spectacular breakdowns à la "i just can't do it anymore!" over the past couple of years and thanked the gods i didn't go down that road...

that's all i've got. happy thesis-ing, everyone!

digital interactive

art project

 

this is the short video introduction/user guide to google's art project (the topic of the articles i chose for discussion on tuesday).

emily's link to youtube controversy

i tried to post this reaction to emily's link to the article about the evanston school board video on youtube but for some reason blogger is not letting me comment on blogs right now, so i'll put it here instead:

great find, emily! paulina and i are doing the first techno teach-in on web-based content sharing on tuesday, and this could be an interesting thing to bring up.

if i understood the article correctly, if the man who posted the video had recorded the meeting himself instead of trying to post the state's video, youtube would not have intervened to take it down... these kinds of copyright laws are so ambiguous, and they make me pity the people whose job it is to moderate these kinds of sites.

mp3 experiment: chicago

this is the youtube video of the mp3 experiment that happened a couple of years ago in lincoln park during improv everywhere's tour of select us and canadian cities. the weather wasn't great, but i think the addition of umbrellas to the mix creates an even cooler visual effect.

testing the theory: exploring museum "practices"

when ray mentioned towards the end of our discussion of museum 2.0 last week that nina simon is known to accept facebook friend requests and respond to personal emails in record time, i decided to try it out.

i've been talking to cheri, liz, and kevin of the student museum coalition (smc) about putting on an event at the museum this spring as part of, or perhaps as an addendum to, their treasure hunt series. my idea started when i read about the mp3 experiments, a series of projects put on by the new york-based improv everywhere, in this post on her blog.

i wondered if, in addition to encouraging visitors to navigate the galleries, locate works of art, and glean information from labels, it would be possible to facilitate a more loosely structured exploration of museum space and resources, and encourage visitors to converse and interact with each other, by designing a podcast that would function like the mp3 experiments, but in the museum.

however, i was hitting a wall with regard to a few logistical issues, so i decided that i would see if ms. simon had any advice for me. less than 12 hours later, I got my advice:

It sounds like what you are conceiving is a collection of "practices" for experiencing art. Instead of treating them sequentially (which may make some people feel like they have to rush through them to complete the set), I'd recommend a starting message that says something about there being lots of ways to experience art, pick one or two to play with today, etc.  I also wonder whether you constrain yourself if they're all audio-based. You could have a few that are on cards and some that are audio-based - that would encourage more social and spontaneous use.

she also pointed me in the direction of an online voicemail box system that could be used in lieu of a podcast or a series of audio tracks. this seems like a great idea, since it eliminates the need to download something onto an mp3 player; audio-based activities can be accessed instead by the use of a cell phone.

anyways, i know this is a sketchy insight into the project i'm developing, but i just wanted to say thanks for the tip and let everyone else know that nina simon really is as cool and helpful and intelligent as her blog suggests. also, if anyone is interested in talking more about this proposed event and/or wants to get involved, let me know! peace out.

art mobs

check out this project that started at marymount manhattan:
http://mod.blogs.com/art_mobs/

many museums have started to offer an alternative to snooze-inducing audio tours by posting podcasts of various themes to their websites, but i still find most of them a little long and boring. the art mobs folks didn't need or have moma's permission to do this project, but what if museums asked students or the general public to submit podcasts they recorded themselves about one or several works in their galleries, and then edited them and made them available? i'd listen. would you?

on arts education and 21st-century skills

i just read the article that emily posted for discussion next week, and i was struck by this short paragraph:

At this point, I believe that the prevailing public perception is that arts education is only for young people who want to be artists—“Glee” wannabes. If we applied this mindset to science, we would teach science only to students who aspired to be chemists, biologists, or astronomers.

this is so on-target. as the daughter of two "left brained" lawyers, i shied away from art a lot when i was a kid, believing that since i would surely never be an artist, there was nothing for me to explore by creating things. i don't think anyone ever told me this, but it's how i felt, and it's something that i regret. it's such a shame to waste the adventurousness and inventiveness of childhood by planning out kids' futures for them years before they have any inkling of what they really want to be when they grow up.

and even if what they grow up to be is a lawyer, why should that stop them from discovering other outlets for their creativity?

a favorite web resource

tastespotting:
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