Academics, Artists, and Museums

21st-Century Partnerships

Irina D. Costache, Clare Kunny, Irina D. Costache, Clare Kunny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351402972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Archäologie

Collaboration and interdisciplinary practice in the museum are on the rise. Academics, Artists, and Museums examines twenty-first century partnerships between the museum and higher education sectors, with a focus on art museums and exhibits.

The edited volume offers detailed analysis of how innovative curatorial relationships between museums and academia have sought to engage new, younger, audiences through the collaborative transformation of museums and exhibitions. Thematic topics explored include the forming and nature of interdisciplinary partnerships, the integration of museum learning into higher education, audience engagement, and digital technology. With a particular emphasis on practice in the US, the range of projects discussed includes those at both widely recognized and lesser known institutions, from The Met to the Tohono O'odham Nation Cultural Center in the US, to Ewha University Museum in South Korea, and Palazzo Strozzi in Italy. The role of art and the work of the artist are firmly positioned at the core of many of the relationships explored.

Academics, Artists, and Museums advocates for the museum as an experimental 'laboratory' where academia, art and the museum profession can combine to engage new audiences. It is a useful resource for museum professionals, artists, scholars, and students interested in collaboration and innovative practice.

Part I
Collaborations between art schools and their museums

1 The art museum and the art school: negotiating collaboration in Chicago

Judith Russi Kirshner and Lisa Wainwright

How do a venerable institution and a distinguished school take advantage of their physical and historical proximity to remain innovative and meaningful to a changing population in Chicago and across the world? This was one of the questions that we confronted as we began our reflections on the responsibilities, opportunities and synergies available to us and our constituents, students and visitors. Both institutions the Art Institute (AIC) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) have explored new narratives that imaginatively convert museum galleries from libraries to classrooms and finally to sites of creativity and even debate. Through collaboration new formats can provoke a series of political and aesthetic challenges that become templates for future educators. Such projects like the dynamic offerings of specially designed curricula in which SAIC faculty build on the museum’s collections to a new joint graduate degree program led by museum learning staff offer some examples, while the Art Institute’s JourneyMaker and the SAIC MOOC Touring Modernism course incorporate digital media to expand their reach and involve new communities. This chapter offering two overlapping yet distinct perspectives is intended to highlight current practice, pose questions, and stimulate unconventional models for experimentation to consider new meanings of art.

Part One

Since their founding in 1879 as museum and school, the Art Institute of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute have been linked by adjacency, shared goals, board members and civic vision. Both are now internationally recognized as two of the leading fine arts institutions in the United States celebrated recently as most popular by Trip Advisor and as a top art school in influential ratings. Although the founding mission has been sustained and expanded since its inception, the potential for innovative pedagogy has been transformed, even contested by demands for access that have evolved over time. Indeed, the very existence of a museum school is a rarity in current higher education.

For more than 150 years the Art Institute’s galleries have served as social spaces and out-of-studio sites of inspiration for artists. Our initiative, Museum Education Graduate Scholars Program, situates museum learning as the fulcrum of the museum/school connection and reactivates an historic model to confront current cultural and political consciousness. As early as 1894, the Chicago Public Art Society, begun by Ellen Gates Starr who with Jane Addams founded Hull House on the west side of the city, used reproductions of the museum’s holdings as enrichment in public school classrooms. In the first decades of the twentieth century advanced students mostly female, in SAIC mural-painting classes made works which were installed in Chicago schools. I want to underscore this legacy which continues anew in the Education’s Department, now renamed as Learning and Public Engagement, with its commitment to diversity and inclusion and in SAIC courses dedicated to projects in underserved communities and social justice as artistic practice.

As the new Woman’s Board Endowed Chair of Learning and Public Engagement Jacqueline Terrassa notes: “The department has always engaged all our audiences—adults, families, teens, children, teachers, as well as college students within our broad community underlining the department’s role in amplifying the collective value of the Art Institute.” The enormous numbers of visitors who come through docent programs that match younger people with trained volunteers is now more than 70,000 from grades K-12 during each school year. A third of those (28,297 in 2015–2016) participate in docent-led tours. Libby Pokel-Hung, Assistant Director for Student and Docent Programs, emphasizes their specific quality “No two of these tours will be alike—no canned “tour script” exists. Rather, docents tailor each experience to the teacher’s requests and students’ needs…. The process aids teachers in connecting the Art Institute’s encyclopedic collections to curricula on such diverse topics as civic engagement, world literature, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (S.T.E.M.). A shared philosophy emphasizes dialogue and student interaction. Each tour is shaped in real time by the observations, reactions that students share…. .promoting close looking and critical and creative thinking…. the thinking skills that works of art stimulate.” The TEAM: Thinking Experiences in the Art Museum program combines classroom lessons and student tours that help 4th and 5th graders “think about thinking.”

Given these foundational programs that many museums support, the decision to build a highly selective graduate program with our closest neighbor, SAIC, follows from the intent that brings museum staff to community engagement efforts with city agencies, libraries, parks, and schools collaborating to strengthen the fabric of communities and life of Chicago. The value of dialogue, student interaction and discovery as well as creativity are touchstones for all departmental initiatives.

Artworks from every period and culture at the Art Institute, informed the work of SAIC alumni like Christina Ramberg, Joe Zucker, Paul Chan and Roger Brown. Notwithstanding the serendipitous creative exchange between art and artist in the gallery—artists train artists—over time these same artists have exhibited and been acquired for the museum’s permanent collection. While the notion that by merely exhibiting their treasures, museums fulfill their educational responsibilities has been abandoned, John Dewey’s ideas have prospered at the Art Institute under enlightened directors in the 1970s and 1980s. Many professors from other Chicago institutions as well as SAIC instructors teach in the galleries with inventive curricula that stimulate questions and construct meaning.

In 2014 both Directors of the Museum, Douglas Druick, and of the School, Walter Massey charged the authors of this paper, as Deputy Director for Education and School Dean of Faculty, who are also academic art historians, to build a curricular bridge and sustainable model for learning across the railroad tracks dividing the two institutions. Designed to deepen the relationship and form a network of creative practitioners, the project has resulted in important initiatives. In addition to a robust system of internships for SAIC students in the department of Learning and Public Engagement, a trial program placing SAIC graduate students as informal greeters and guides in galleries was begun. Indeed, the department’s first Artist-in-Residence, conceived to be artist-as-resource, was Tom Burtonwood, a SAIC faculty member in 2015.

A joint venture, this SAIC/AI graduate student course is the first official academic undertaking. Museum Education Graduate Scholars Program is a recurring, year-long credit bearing seminar and related practicum in the museum. It emerges from collaborative efforts to establish alternative models of learning, interpretation and committed engagement for SAIC graduate students of the school. Like other programs in the Department of Learning and Public Engagement, it has a precise mission: training graduate educators to mobilize the interplay between public involvement with experiential knowledge acquisition and generative models that empower multiple voices. Given the emphasis on interpretation, Terrassa states, “promoting equitable engagement and fostering creative and critical thinking with art among the broadest audiences.”

Sculptor Robert Morris’s scatter piece provides a metaphoric reading for this experiment—an open field with many discrete parts and differing media, assembled first by the artist, the work becomes a place where visitors create their own trajectory, and locate their pathway. From my perspective, as retired Dean of UIC’s College of Architecture, Art and Design, the commitment to scholarship and to shifting the art historical discourse to incorporate other voices of artists and practitioners complicated our task. Just as a public university shapes its mission to privilege access, the twenty-first century museum has had to reconsider its strategic vision to emphasize accessibility in all its divergent possibilities. For me to reimagine a new kind of student was to wrestle with museum definitions of interpretation and agency. In other words, how might museums relinquish their authoritarian tone articulated by curators, historians and educators in labels, lectures and exhibitions in order to allow entry for multiple even conflicting interpretations from the public.

There are other examples of the emphasis on audience involvement that characterizes learning in the museum as obviously distinct from academic instruction. JourneyMaker, a new family interactive experience at the Art Institute of Chicago, addresses the challenges of accessibility, navigation, and meaning-making. Such innovative programs are impacted by new technologies and social media that allow for interactivity that must supplant the notion of a single expert.

Here is Robin Schnur, Director of Family and Teen Programs, describing this exciting program which just won the SXSW, South by Southwest 2017 Interactive Innovation Award for Visual Media:

The blended (digital to physical), social, narrative, and choice-based learning proposed by JourneyMaker is part of a broader strategy to reframe the museum as a site of creative participation and a place in which visitors are empowered by their own experiences. Since launching JourneyMaker in July 2016, over 10,000 journey guides have been made in the museum’s Family Room.

Families do present a special case, since they comprise a broad range of knowledge, interests, and developmental skills. A family, negotiating the range of needs and interests in the context of the museum where both the physical layout and the content itself are unfamiliar is a complex task.

It starts with a digital interaction. At home or in the museum’s Family Room, families create their own personalized tour choosing a theme and selecting five works of art from the museum’s collection to create a story. For example, a family might choose the Superheroes theme and then work through prompts together to choose their superpower, identify a foe, and select an obstacle and someone to save, as these ideas are expressed through five works of art. Once the family has finished their story, the digital interactive prints out a customized paper guide, with the family’s name on the cover, that shows all of their selected works of art. The included museum plan even indicates family amenities—elevators, bathrooms, cafes—and beacon works of art to help map a very large one-million-square-foot museum.

Schnur continues:

Since most in-gallery information is academic in tone and content, … JourneyMaker levels the field. By putting the selected work of art in a narrative construct, it gives the family a “way in.” The guide text reminds the family why they chose the work of art and invites them to respond creatively as a group.

An important element in the Museum Education Graduate Scholars Program is the group’s diversity: graduate students from the entire range of SAIC disciplines: artists, administrators, art historians, architects and filmmakers, not only art educators, are invited to apply. With differing backgrounds, students bring their imagination to object-based research, choice-based learning, and public engagement beyond Michigan Avenue. They will have mentors in order to better understand exhibition and collection interpretation and help galvanize, even upset the traditional interaction that occurs between visitors and educators.

SAIC students have the opportunity to study a dynamic teen program, itself an important demographic for museums, as Schnur notes, since teens “face special barriers to access.” One way in which the museum opens up to teens is by engaging them directly in confronting and solving the challenge of becoming a more teen-friendly museum. The Art Institute’s Teen Council is a group of 17 extremely dedicated young people who meet and advise staff, contribute their voices to programs, and produce events that reach and engage their peers.

For the past four years with the guidance of Hillary Cook, Assistant Director Youth Programs, Teen Council has designed, developed, and hosted a design competition in which teens solve museum challenges. This has been a 24-hour, overnight extravaganza, in which 100 teens work in small teams with artists-mentors. Teens propose ideas for new digital interactivities, innovative spaces, social furniture for the galleries, and even redesigned museum officers’ uniforms. The goals are for “teen voices and ideas to make their way into the fabric of the museum. Like JourneyMaker, participants who often go on to college, take an active role in generating new knowledge and ideas in the museum.”

SAIC graduate students also complete customized independent projects studying audience research, art history, educational research, artistic practice and processes and current theories of reception, perception and sensory learning. They will rely on the abundant research on teaching and interpretation in the art museum and as well as studies of creativity and visual literacy. Student goals include confronting the significance of museums and how the very language of interpretation might offer diverse models of cultural meaning, both historical and contemporary. Finally the requirement of independent graduate student research should propel another generation of educators to activate their practice beyond the encyclopedic museum to other community sites. Differentiating between curatorial expertise but incorporating that knowledge, we intended to avoid another degree that would neither serve intellectual requirements nor reinforce employment possibilities for the students.

Given the Art Institute’s emphasis on the visitor experience and accessibility in its broadest meanings—from disability to the underserved—how might the partnership with SAIC inspire internal staff collaboration, for example composing labels, interactive media, gallery talks and art-making? How could we confront the differences between the academic expectations and those of museum education so that both parties shape new templates for self-reflection and for change that might stretch and even alter museum practices? And finally, could this new curriculum challenge our own assumptions to foster critical thinking about collective learning with audiences in this museum or other cultural institutions?

In Chicago where public schools suffer from insufficient funding and political tensions, the school-museum graduate collaboration becomes another platform for the examination of the social context and political responsibilities of cultural institutions. John Ploof, Professor at SAIC, and Annie Morse, adult Lecturer at AI, were in early discussions emerging from existing internships for SAIC students. Discussions were challenging as we erased administrative barriers to arrive at core issues of content, first in a graduate level class and then an MFA degree or certificate. The original degree proposal was for an MAAE (Master of Arts in Art Education) with an emphasis in Museum Education rather than Museum Studies. This track was to be positioned alongside a second-degree track, the MAAE with emphasis in Community Based Art and Design Education.

By extension we hope to investigate and elasticize the field of museum learning with SAIC students from across a wide spectrum of life experiences encountering multiple art forms from multiple cultures. The goal—to encourage more voices of interpretation—will train graduates who can imagine and animate experiences between visitors and works of art. These realities were uppermost in the minds of Robin Schnur and David Getsy, art historian and Acting Dean of Graduate Studies at SAIC, who brokered the curriculum. Scafolded on existing Family, School and Teen Programs and SAIC’s Graduate...