ubiquitous

Here it is!

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 20:04:40 -0500

It only took me 7 months…a final version of my thesis, online!

The Art of Sound @ the Cincinnati Art Museum

Tue, 22 May 2012 10:32:30 -0400

The Art of Sound @ the Cincinnati Art Museum:

As the semester winds up and graduation draws ever nearer, it looks as though things are starting to come full circle. I’m including a link to a new exhibition that I’m very excited about for two reasons:

1. It’s an exhibition devoted to four centuries of musical instruments, with a special interactive that allows visitors to hear the instruments in use. Talk about a perfect fit for the ideas I’ve been exploring in my thesis (which is now DONE!)

2. I’ll be a part of the exhibition when I start my new job at the Cincinnati Art Museum in three weeks!

I’m so excited for this new chapter of my journey. Thank you all for reading my posts this semester - I hope to continue blogging about my new projects once I’m settled in Cincy!

Best,

Liz

RISD Grad Show @ RI Convention Center

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:09:24 -0400

RISD Grad Show @ RI Convention Center:

Check us out, y’all! Join me at the opening on Thursday night, or find my work on the site!

Thanks!

Doodling for Dollars - Wall Street Journal

Fri, 11 May 2012 19:31:16 -0400

Doodling for Dollars - Wall Street Journal:

Interesting take on corporate design thinking and visual problem solving. I’m glad to see that companies are starting to encourage their employees to put down their smartphones and start using their hands. Looks like us art educators could teach them a thing or two!

NAEA Responds to Getty Cuts

Fri, 11 May 2012 19:23:49 -0400

Thank you, NAEA! The National Art Education Association responded to the Getty Museum’s recent employee cuts (19 from the education department alone) in a letter that will be published soon in the LA Times. I couldn’t wait for that to happen, so here’s the letter in full. And for those of you that ask what I’m going to do when I graduate with an MA in museum education, this letter articulates the role of museum educators quite well…

May 7, 2012
TO: Editor, L.A. Times
FROM: F. Robert Sabol, President
National Art Education Association
RE: Museum Education Cuts at J. Paul Getty Museum

For many decades, the J. Paul Getty Museum has played a leading role in promoting objectbased learning through high-quality museum education programs and the professionalization of gallery teaching. The recent decision by President and CEO of the Getty Trust James Cuno to eliminate 19 positions in the Museum Education Department represents a significant step backward as well as a lack of understanding of the public value that museum educators provide.

Mr. Cuno’s statement, “The stronger the collection one has, the better one can do everything else,” is out of step with how the museum field and external environment are evolving. (The savings from the education cuts and staff reductions in other museum departments will make available $4.3 million for art acquisitions—a relatively small amount in today’s art market.) Given today’s competitive economic, cultural, educational, and leisure climate, many art museums are shifting from being solely “about something to being for somebody”—a concept first introduced by Stephen Weil, the late emeritus senior scholar at the Center of Museum Studies at the Smithsonian. While the collection and preservation of works of art are essential, for museums to
remain viable in the future they must also demonstrate their value and relevance to their communities, which is precisely what museum educators are trained to do.

Art museum educators help students and adults see, experience, and understand works of art from a variety of time periods, cultures, and regions—and encourage lifelong learning in the arts. Through inquiry and dialogue, museum educators promote the development of creative and critical thinking skills and an appreciation of diverse cultures, ideas, and human experiences. To these important ends, numerous art museums employ professional gallery teaching staffs.

Many museums also rely on docents to lead tours and support the educational mission of the institution. Indeed, the thousands of men and women who volunteer their time provide an invaluable service for millions of visitors to American art museums each year.

However, professional museum educators possess extensive formal education, considerable professional training, and specialized knowledge; they are uniquely qualified to help the general public develop an understanding of the value of art and artists in society. They have a deep knowledge of individual works of art, artists, and art history as well as a solid grounding in education history, theory, and practice. Museum educators contribute important scholarship to the field and use that research to inform the daily work of museums. Indeed, Elliott Kai-Kee, Education Specialist in charge of gallery teaching at the Getty, recently authored with Rika Burnham, Head of Education at The Frick Collection, Teaching in the Art Museum:Interpretation as Experience, a pivotal book that The Art Newspaper calls, “Essential reading for anyone engaged in the interpretation of art.”

When Mr. Cuno chose to assign the responsibility of gallery teaching to volunteers and
mandated that such a program be up and running in a few short months, he undermined the Getty’s educational mission and its longstanding commitment to visitor engagement and learning. It remains to be seen what vision emerges for the future of public education at the Getty. Works of art will always be central to the missions and purposes of museums, however, their continued relevance to individuals and contemporary society is dependent upon establishing meaningful connections with the people that view them, something that museum educators are uniquely trained to do.

"Even the walls are therapeutic"

Sun, 06 May 2012 13:58:48 -0400

A CBS news video featuring Cedar Sinai Medical Center’s art collection in Los Angeles. The art collection is meant to be conducive to healing, to make patients, caregivers, and staff “think and question.” A very inspiring piece for me as I finish my proposal for an art making program for local residents with Alzheimer’s disease at the RISD Museum of Art. Thanks Paul Sproll for sending this along!

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7407646n&tag=contentMain;contentBody

Design Education//Stanford's d.school

Sun, 06 May 2012 11:38:52 -0400

Last week, TLAD’s MAs discussed design education - what it is, why it’s different from art education, and why it’s increasingly important for a healthy curriculum that encourages 21st century skills. Dr. Paul Sproll shared with us his upcoming article on the history of design education in the US and the UK, and its implications for the future. Central to the issue of design education is a “design problem” or “challenge” - a real-world need for a solution or product that drives the process of creating, often very different from the “isolated” arts assignments in which students create still lives or portraits.

With this in mind, I was intrigued by Stanford’s “d.school”:

The d.school is a hub for innovators at Stanford. Students and faculty in engineering, medicine, business, law, the humanities, sciences, and education find their way here to take on the world’s messy problems together. Human values are at the heart of our collaborative approach. We focus on creating spectacularly transformative learning experiences, and inevitably the innovations follow. Along the way, our students develop a process for reliably producing creative solutions to nearly any challenge. This is the core of what we do.

The d.school is a wonderful articulation and application of design education at the university level, which is then shared with everyone from kindergarten students to senior-level executives. I encourage you to learn more about it here, or even take the new d.school “crash course” that launched this week.

http://dschool.stanford.edu/

RISD Museum's New Director Featured in Providence Phoenix

Sun, 06 May 2012 11:20:56 -0400

RISD Museum's New Director Featured in Providence Phoenix:

“Smith speaks of venturing beyond art as history and placing new emphasis on the materials and process of art making”…Great interview with the new director of the RISD Museum, John W. Smith. Written by David Scharfenberg, the article speaks of the new direction of the RISD Museum under Smith’s guidance. I wish they had spoken more about exactly how Smith is planning to bring more Rhode Islanders to the museum, beyond making it a “summer art tourism” attraction. But the plan to upgrade the museum’s website and make its 86,000 object collection available online is a great start.

Measurement - what's the deal?

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:58:19 -0400

Listening to the panel discussion after the Alive Inside premiere on Saturday at the Rubin Museum, I was disappointed to learn that many nursing homes and assisted living facilities were refusing to endorse Dan Cohen’s iPod Project (see previous posts below) because they couldn’t fund the project.

And why not? Used iPod shuffles cost as little as $49 a piece; these patients’ daily medication cost is usually much higher than that simple one-time purchase. Nope, that isn’t the issue. The problem is that these institutions would not get reimbursed by the government for endorsing this program because the impact could not be measured effectively. By effectively, they meant in numbers, in statistics that could prove the program worked.

Never mind the documentary film just released, which documented these patients awakening from their unresponsive and depressed states. Never mind that someone who had been using a walker for two years put on headphones and danced on her own. Never mind that this project opens doors to people’s souls in ways that medication never will.

Which got me thinking - isn’t this what always happens with art programming? With arts and music in schools? Why is qualitative evidence inferior to (often skewed) quantitative evidence? How long before government officials will understand that the benefits of arts education might not be able to represented purely in numbers and symbols? When will people finally understand the benefits of arts programming by listening to people’s stories? Isn’t it time already?

That’s one of our biggest challenges as art educators, and we will be tested time and time again. We need to argue for the effectiveness of qualitative research, and fight hard. Who’s with me?!

Public Workshop//Participation

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:39:55 -0400

Yesterday the MAs had the opportunity to hear a presentation from Alex Gilliam, a self-proclaimed “cheerleader of possibility” and the founder of “Public Workshop,” a project which aims for youth participation in their communities through actual design challenges.

Alex shared with us many projects he’s worked on across the country, a handful of which took place in museums. His presentation got me thinking about participation - a word that’s been on the tip of many museum educator’s tongues since Nina Simon published The Participatory Museum in 2010. It seems that you can’t avoid talking about participation in a discussion about the future of museum education and interpretation. The idea of participation plays a major part in my thesis work, so I thought I’d “participate” in the conversation by sharing the first few pages of my final chapter…

One of the hottest buzzwords in museum education right now is “participation,” but many institutions struggle to define what, exactly, this word means. When museum visitors participate, what are they doing? Are they talking? Drawing a picture? Touching a button? Dancing? Answering questions? Writing? Doing yoga? Uploading content? Museum educator Nina Simon, author of The Participatory Museum, defines a participatory institution as “a place where visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content.”[1] These types of activities can arguably take a number of forms, and judging by the fierce debate taking place between professional in museums, at conferences, and online in blogs and social media, those forms are still being determined.

But why do museums want visitors to participate in the first place? While it seems that there are just as many reasons for participation as ways to participate, the issue of the museum’s relevance to its community is at the forefront. In an age when people participate in their world every day via social media, audiences expect opportunities to participate in cultural events. Museums that do not offer such opportunities run the risk of losing their audience.

From their inception, American art museums have struggled to remain relevant in society. Although most institutions defined their mission to be “public education,” many had no connection to their local community beyond the upper echelons of society. As early as 1917, John Cotton Dana, founder of the Newark Museum, observed that American museums are “filled with objects not closely associated with the life of the people who are asked to get pleasure and profit from them, and so arranged and administered as to make them seem still more remote.”[2] Many decades later, it seemed that not much had changed. In 1981, museum consultant Marilyn G. Hood found that nearly half of the population she studied in Toledo, Ohio cited “being with people (social interaction), participating actively and feeling comfortable and at ease in their surroundings” as being the major factors in determining where they spent their leisure time – three things that this group perceived as not being present at all in museums “or are present in such small amounts that investing themselves in a museum experience brings minimal benefits.” Furthermore, Hood stated, this group “perceive[s] museums to be formal, formidable places, inaccessible to them because they usually have had little preparation to read the “museum code” – places that invoke restrictions on group social behavior and on active participation.”[3]

In 1992, the American Association of Museums’ report Excellence and Equity called for more inclusive institutions that truly met the needs of their communities, expanding “the definition of excellence not merely to include equity, but to require it – for museums to embrace cultural diversity in all facets of their programs, staff and audiences, in order to have any hope of sustaining vitality and relevance.”[4] Despite this repeated call to become a truly public institution, the problem persists today. As Simon notes in her book, the 2008 survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts revealed that over the last twenty years, audiences for museums have actually decreased, and “the audiences that remain are older and whiter than the overall population.”[5] Frequently, collections and exhibitions reflect the interests of this “older and whiter” audience and ignore the needs of the diverse community surrounding the museum.

Complicating this issue is “access,” which has recently become a loaded word in the museum context. While access might have once referred to the accessibility (both physical and digital) of the museum’s collections, or to the physical and intellectual accessibility of the institution for visitors with disabilities, “access” now frequently implies that certain groups of people are invited to the museum and others are excluded - often low-income or ethnic groups that do not feel welcome to the institution, or who feel that the museum “isn’t for them.” Annamari Laaksonen of the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies writes,“Participation in cultural activities, together with access to them, forms the backbone of human rights pertaining to culture. Access is a precondition for participation and participation is indispensable to ensure the exercising of human rights.”[6] In light of this statement, Rob Stein from the Indianapolis Museum of Art argues that “truly accessible museums” must provide all the support to visitors that they can, in order for them to have the most valuable and engaging experience.[7]

But how can museums integrate participation into programming and exhibitions that have typically been dictated by the “experts”? Simon notes that many visitors feel that the “authoritative voice” of the museum often present a one-sided view of what’s being presented, or worse, that it ignores or lacks the visitor’s perspective completely. By building participation into museum culture and valuing the responses of their audiences, institutions may be able to present a more diverse approach to topics that includes the voices of their visitors. Stein notes that this will require a serious attitudinal shift on the part of museum staff, from “authoritarian” to “authoritative,” which “demonstrates the expertise of the museum’s staff in a participatory context that recognizes the museum’s role in facilitating access to cultural objects and information.” This authoritative approach, he argues, lets the audience ascribe authority to the museum, and “not the other way around.”[8] Museums must shift their thinking from creating exhibitions “for” visitors to creating programs and content “with” visitors.

Music, it seems, may serve as an entryway for this kinds of participatory experiences in museums. As educator Lawrence Baines observes, “despite its boundary-defining qualities, music can serve as a unifying presence across cultures.”[9] Although people may vary in their appreciation of certain genres (certainly country music fans may have difficulties seeing eye-to-eye with hardcore rap fanatics), we are all united in our perception and enjoyment of music. “We are a musical species no less than a linguistic one,” Oliver Sacks contends. “All of us (with very few exceptions) can perceive music, perceive tones, timbre, pitch intervals, melodic contours, harmony, and (perhaps most elementally) rhythm.”[10] It is from this common foundation that we can use music in museums to teach from art and to connect visitors to each other.

[1] Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0, 2010), ii.

[2] John Cotton Dana, “The Gloom of the Museum,” reprinted in Gail Anderson, ed. Reinventing the Museum (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2004), 20.

[3] Marilyn G. Hood, “Staying Away: Why People Choose Not to Visit Museums” Museum News, April 1983, reprinted by the American Association of Museums, 150-157. Hood and her team of volunteers surveyed 502 residents from the Toledo metropolitan area over a three-week period in spring 1980 in cooperation with the Toldeo Museum of Art. Forty-six percent of those surveyed were “nonparticipants” and did not visit museums.

[4] American Association of Museums, Excellence and Equity (Washington, D.C.: American Association of Museums, 1992; Reprinted 1998), 3.

[5] Simon, i.

[6] Laaksonen, Annamari, Revista Observatório Itaú Cultural, n.11 (jan./apr.2011). São Paulo, SP: Itaú Cultural, 2011, pg. 50. As quoted in Rob Stein, “Is Your Community Better Off Because it has a Museum?” Accessed April 25, 2012. http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2011/11/03/is-your-community-better-off-because-it-has-a-museum-final-thoughts-about-participatory-culture-part-iii/#more-18117,.

[7] Rob Stein, “Is Your Community Better Off Because it has a Museum? Final Thoughts About Participatory Culture (part III),” Indianapolis Museum of Art blog, November 3, 2011. Accessed April 25, 2012. http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2011/11/03/is-your-community-better-off-because-it-has-a-museum-final-thoughts-about-participatory-culture-part-iii/#more-18117,.

[8] Stein, “Is Your Community Better Off..?”

[9] Lawrence Baines, A Teacher’s Guide to Multisensory Education (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2008), 63.

[10] Oliver Sacks, Musicophila (New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), xi.

Hi all! Today I’m working on the last chapter (!) of my...

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:27:31 -0400

Hi all! Today I’m working on the last chapter (!) of my thesis, “Music as Participation.” In this chapter, I explore how music - specifically performances and compositions - can be used in museums to facilitate social interactions and community building. I just had to share a video from my fantastic colleague Chelsea Kelly at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Last fall, the teens in Chelsea’s Satellite High School Program worked with H20 Milwaukee Music/the Peace Propaganda Project (a music education organization) to create electronic music compositions in response to Jim Campbell’s “Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio” (2010). The end result is amazing - a perfect example of building community through conversations between music and art.

For more information, please check out MAM’s blog at http://blog.mam.org/2011/11/11/hip-hop-in-the-galleries-inspired-by-art/.

Mermaid Bait. Unicorn Tears. Peg Leg Oil. What do these three...

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 11:48:28 -0400

Mermaid Bait. Unicorn Tears. Peg Leg Oil. What do these three (bizarre) things have in common?

They’re products of 826 National, a nonprofit that offers creative writing and tutoring services (for free!) to children in 8 different cities - serving over 29,000 students last year alone. In addition to tutoring, 826 also offers in-school workshops, book-making “field trips”, and many opportunities for student publishing.

But what of the mermaid bait, you ask? Well, back when the first 826 was founded in San Francisco in 2002, the founders had picked out the perfect space before the city informed them that it was zoned only for commercial use. So they became a store - AND a tutoring center. Now students go to the Pirate Supply Store - also known as 826 Valencia - to get homework help in a creative, stimulating environment.

On Wednesday, RISD TLAD MA and MAT students had the opportunity to meet Gerald Richards, CEO of 826 National, who presented on the program and answered students’ questions about starting their own nonprofit organizations. One of the big “take-aways” from Mr. Richard’s presentation was the importance of a creative, responsive space for students that de-stigmatizes the learning process: making them feel safe, respected, and most of all, like they’re not being punished or looked down upon for needing help with homework.

Want to help out? Visit www.826national.org, or if you’re in Boston, visit the Bigfoot Research Institute and buy yourself a jungle hygiene kit - the proceeds go directly to 826.

Music and Memory

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:04:05 -0400

Music and Memory:

Here’s the link to the nonprofit working with Dan Cohen’s iPod project featured in Alive Inside. If you like the program, help them out and donate an iPod shuffle!

The Aural and the Visual

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:51:31 -0400

The Aural and the Visual:

Looks like I’m not the only one thinking about the intersections of music and art…thanks alma mater! If you’re in the upstate New York area, I highly recommend this program at Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.

Alive Inside

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:27:51 -0400

Alive Inside:

This video arrives just in time for me to write my chapter on music and emotion…which in fact may become music and healing. Emotion with music is nearly inevitable - it is the underlying force, the reason for using music to engage visitors with art. Music therapy, of course, has been a field for years now, and museums are beginning to tap into its power.

This video is a beautiful and moving example. It is the trailer for Alive Inside, a documentary by Michael Rossato-Bennett and produced by Ximotion. The film features a project by social worker Dan Cohen, who began using iPods to engage Alzheimer’s patients in nursing homes. The results are incredible - just watch this man’s eyes light up when the nurse puts his headphones on. When asked “What does music do to you?” this patient, who was unresponsive minutes before, said

It gives me the feeling of love! Romance! I figure right now the world needs to come into music!

The Rubin Museum of Art is screening the documentary’s world premiere on April 18 and again on Friday and Saturday, and tickets include panel discussions with Alzheimer’s experts. You can find tickets here: http://www.rmanyc.org/pages/load/301

I’d love to develop a program like this for a museum, using music to engage Alzheimer’s or early dementia patients with art. Maybe this will become Ray’s final project…

Excellent interview from Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of...

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:31:50 -0400

Excellent interview from Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education at NYU, on the importance of arts education in public schools.

I wanted to share a great program sent to me by the Philadelphia...

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:20:00 -0400

I wanted to share a great program sent to me by the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Music in the Galleries, which invites students from the Curtis Institute of Music to perform in front of selected works in the permanent collection galleries. Participants are encouraged to contemplate how the music changes their experience of the painting and vice versa. This video is of a Music in the Galleries performance of a Curtis student’s composition in front of Rubens’Prometheus Bound. Enjoy!

Things are moving right along! Thanks to Aja for introducing me...

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:14:19 -0400

Things are moving right along! Thanks to Aja for introducing me to organizing my life with Post-Its! Beginning to reflect on my own teaching moments this semester, as well as organize case studies into categories: music as context, music as emotion, and music as participation. Any thoughts?

Fluxus Performance Workbook

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:44:19 -0400

Favorite fluxus performance ever: Milan Knizak,Cat, 1965: “Get a cat.”

Art Shots Music

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 23:10:59 -0400

Art Shots Music:

Hi all! Here’s a link to the concert podcast that I used with the Siva statue (below) during Art Shots on March 8. The concert, “L. Subramaniam: Master of Indian Music,” was hosted at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in September 2009. For the Art Shots talk, we listened to a kriti (traditional devotional song) from 4:10 to about 7:00.

Enjoy!