Preparing for Adult Tours

I lied last week about having very few tours this week. I had three student tours. They went well. Jillian and I decided to spice things up a little and change our works for our last tour on Friday. We toured “Chicago Specials,” so works that have specific history or relevance to Chicago. Since the Hyperlinks show was ending soon, I decided to tour Shade. It’s probably one of my favorite pieces in the collection. I also chose the Ando gallery itself (image to the left) by Tadao Ando–and the America Windows by Chagall (image at bottom right). I had thought that everything was going pretty well, but evidently the students’ teacher didn’t think so. When we got our evaluation back from her she had said that the kids were lost the whole time we were in the Ando gallery. They seemed pretty engaged to me…the evaluation also requested that next time we start with the America Windows. You know what? You can’t please everyone. I think the kids left the museum with a good experience, so I’m not unhappy with how it went. I’ll just try to take it as a learning experience and try to take it into account as I’m planning for my solo tours next week.

I’m nervous about touring alone, but I’m mostly just stressed as I try to prepare 5 new works to tour. I want to make sure that I push myself, but I also want to make sure that the kids have a large overview of the works here at the AIC. Right now I’m thinking about keeping the Ando gallery, but then also teaching the current exhibition within it–the baskets by Fujinuma Noboru. Noboru is a contemporary Japanese artist who works with bamboo to create the coolest baskets in the traditional Japanese method. My favorite is pictured at the bottom right, called Fortune (Fuku).

I’m doing furious research on Monet’s Grainstacks series, since I have my first adult tour with senior lecturer, Annie, next Wednesday. Our tour is an express (so only 30 minutes) titled “The More the Merrier.” Evidently it’s going to be about art in multiples. Annie will be talking about the Karttikeya, God of War, Seated on a Peacock and the collection of ancient glass in the ancient galleries. Simply because it took me so darn long to find the name of the darn sculpture, I’m going to include an image. I found it, so I’m going to show you it. It’s the image to the bottom left.

At the risk of sounding like a whiner, I really should have planned when I signed up for adult tours better. I’m going massive amounts of research on Monet and his Grainstacks at the same time as I try to prepare for touring 5 works by myself for solo student touring. Man oh man. I’m not getting much sleep lately. I feel pretty confident about touring Monet, though. I know Impressionism pretty well and I figure that as long as I try to get all of the basic information down about his life (these works were painted during the middle of his career to try to elevate his status through his perseverance, patience, technique, etc, he developed cataracts during his lily pond series, he never went blind, etc, etc, etc) I’ll be just fine. That and I figure that once Annie says that I’m an intern, I’ll probably get some credit for being new to the whole touring-for-adults thing. And I can’t forget to say that they are part of a series not a set. Annie and I were joking around that if I say ‘set,’ it implies that “you can trade them with your friends! Collect them all! Coming to a museum near you!” So I’ve been repeating ‘series, series, series’ under my breath all week to try to drive it home!

I’m sure I’ll do just fine, and I know I’m stressing over nothing. I’ll just be over here, with my nose in a stack of books preparing for next week–don’t mind me!

 

Catchup- Week Five

No more Dream Team Tours

I entered week five pretty intimidated.  I had a lot on my plate and I did not feel prepared.  But it ended up going surprisingly smoothly.  The first situation that I was nervous about was giving my first solo family tour.  I signed up on the same day in hopes that I would get to give another tour with my amazing partner Clara Fecht.  Unfortunately this day had two separate slots because it was a FREE DAY and many people were anticipated to be in the museum.  And there were.  I am not sure how many people ended up on my tour but at some point I counted about 40 something people.  I remember standing on the stairwell while they looked at Sky Above Clouds and I could see was a mass of people.  It reminded me of a herd of zebra, I was not sure where one patron ended and the other began.

I began the tour looking at the Scott Burton’s Low Piece (bench).  I had the families enter the gallery and try to guess which work we were going to talk about.  As I had hoped people had pointed to every piece in the gallery except for this one.  This lead to a really great discussion about how we view things, what we choose to value and look at and the way we may disregard certain things too easily.  I really enjoyed talking about this work with the families, and was very careful to avoid discussing the S&M implications of the work.  The tour also included Felix Gonzalez Torres’ Untitled (Strange Music), Verdure Tapestry, a look at the knights and armor collection with a quick stop at O’Keefe’s Sky Above Clouds.   This tour was fun and left me EXHAUSTED

This was also the day Clara and I gave our last student tour together. (Our high school group for Friday never showed up)  But we were happy that we got to go out with a bang because we got to talk about some of favorite works and the students were really responsive.

This week also marked my first Adult tour with Margaret Farr.  Our tour was titles Curious Creatures and it was a really different and enjoyable experience leading adults.  I lead a discussion on two Tang dynasty guardian figures as well as the Verdure Tapestry that I had been obsessing over.  Margaret told me that a lot of the regulars came up to her to share how pleased they were that I choose that piece since they come to these tour often and apparently Textile Arts are not often stops on tours.

Talking about MY tapestry

On the Saturday of the fifth week (that

marked the first of 3 weekends that I would be spending in the museum) I got to give another family

gallery walk.  This was much smaller then the Wednesday tour and had some really fun and chatty kids.  We stopped at Brancusi and they really enjoyed The Golden Bird.  They were also very happy with the sequential narrative of the Lautrec tambourine and circus painting.  This was followed by look at the monkey band in which a young girl stated the funniest, things I have heard on a tour:

4-year-old girl:  It’s funny when animals do people things.  People should be funny and do animal things I am going to poop on the floor.

Michael — Sense and Sensibility

Four years of art history at Vassar ingrained in me a particular approach to art.  Before anything else, my professors always stressed extremely close looking.  Formal analysis was, and still is, the crux of my investigation — examining the ways artists synthesize line, color, and shape to create compositions and individual styles.  Certainly, theoretical and historical contextualization is important as well, but I was taught that a rigorous formal analysis should always come first.

One challenge of museum education, then, is to teach the viewer how to look at art — how to break it down to manageable components, something that took me several years to figure out.  But this week, I had two tours that presented me with new challenges, and forced me to break out of my extremely (sometimes zealously) academic approach to art.

First, Marissa and I had our first ABCs of Art tour with Pre-K students.  In some ways, this tour was right up my alley — ABCs tours focus on exposing students to the ways artists use line, shape, and color.  But this tour was my first experience with such a young audience, and it took a lot of effort not to weigh down the conversation with jargon and unnecessary context.  One object I presented was a Butterfly Mask from Burkina Fasso; after identifying the different shapes on the mask’s surface, students collaboratively created their own mask.  Each student was given a cut out piece of paper, and after identifying its color and shape, got to place it on the mask.  The pieces of paper were cut into circles and triangles of different sizes in three different colors.  As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I learn through experience — and this experience taught me that pre-schoolers get bored of identifying the same two shapes and the same three colors pretty quickly.  Duly noted.

Bwa peoples, Burkina Fasso, Butterfly Mask

A second tour this week forced me to break out of my traditional approach to art even further.  Marissa, Danielle and I had the opportunity to assist with a tour for visually impaired students.  This experience forced me to watch my language carefully — our go-to question, “what do you see that makes you say that?”, no longer applied.  Instead, we focused on how students could engage with art and space through the non-visual senses, especially touch.  First, I helped the group explore a cast copy of an Indonesian sculpture in the Art Institute’s collection depicting two simian monkeys.  Students felt different parts of the sculpture — front, back, the space in between the figures, and so forth — and slowly discerned what was being depicted.  We were then able to discuss the relationship between the two monkeys, and think about why the artist may have chosen to depict such a subject.

Touching Islands

This tour, aside from being challenging, came with an extremely special perk:  we received curatorial permission to touch the sculpture Islands by Izumi Masatoshi.  As I helped students feel around the sculpture and describe what they were feeling, I was able to touch the artwork as well; this was a phenomenal experience for someone reared so heavily in seeing, and not touching, works of art.  Exploring the different textures, the smooth surfaces and the jagged edges, of Masatoshi’s rock sculpture very much changed the way I now interact with the piece.  And so it goes — breaking out of my academic comfort zone, for the benefit of students, continues to deepen my own understanding of art.

Marissa’s Fifth Week: What do you feel that makes you say that?

In the fifth week, a few of us had the opportunity to tour with a group of visually-impaired students. In preparing the tour, we wanted to focus activities on discovery in the same way we would with sighted students. This presented challenges but also opportunities to rethink how someone might use their other senses to experience art. The most direct experience came through touch.

Islands by Izumi Masatoshi

We received special permission to touch a sculpture by Izumi Masatoshi, a large installation piece of three pieces of Japanese Tohoku Basalt stone. The work is an arrangement of basalt rock that the artist . Though some students were initially hesitant to explore a rock (how boring!), once they began to follow the surface with their hands they found a mix of rough and sharp textures, cracks to follow to larger breaks in the rock, and smoother surfaces were the artist cut the rock. By following the crevice between they discovered that two parts of the sculpture fit together like puzzle pieces and concluded that they had once been the same rock.

The process of discovery was no different for them than for our sighted visitors. In experiencing the work, the students were encouraged to spend the time to explore and reflect on what they discovered and from the conversation with the group.

Ando Gallery

Visiting the Ando Gallery extended the exploration through touch to include their spatial sense. The gallery is designed by architect Tadao Ando. He designed the gallery based on traditional Japanese entryways. Sixteen oak pillars form a grid upon entering–the students explored their arrangement and texture by moving among them and feeling their texture. Immediately upon entering the gallery they noticed the dimmed light, the echo of my voice in the room, and the cooler temperature. The contrast from the other galleries in the museum was noticeable, and the different mood prompted reflection on the nature of the museum’s different spaces.

As a lover of visual art, I found developing a lesson for visually-impaired students challenging. However, it revealed to me how the the predominance of the visual can foreclose other types of sensual experiences that are available to all of us.

Emily’s Millenium Park & Adult Tour

First off, I cannot believe that it is already the 5th week! This past week has been quite exciting for many reasons, specifically the family fun tent over in Millennium Park, the Spanish Painting adult tour with Kate, and a visit from my boyfriend all the way from Texas.

Millennium Park houses all sorts of exciting programming, particularly in the summer months. From aerial dancers to alphabet animals, the family fun tent was entertaining for a wide variety of audiences, including me. Inspired by the Artful Alphabets exhibition in the Ryan Education Center, the art activities dealt with text or letters in a creative way. We switched activities from day to day, including mysterious messages and imaginative letters. I was able to help out in the tent from Monday-Thursday, allowing plenty of time to get used to the activities and interact with people from all over the place. Some people were visiting from out of town while others visited the family tent throughout the summer. Converting single letters into animals or monsters really peaked the artists’ curiosities and allowed them to think of something familiar in a new and different way. Mysterious messages involved the classic watercolor resist technique with white crayons (one of the only times you get to use one) and a sponge contraption filled with watercolor. Seeing artists “discover” their messages was truly entertaining and exciting for all. The tables were always filling up with new artists, which definitely showed how many interpretations of each project there were.

Kate and I shared a noon adult tour on Spanish painting. There were some familiar faces in the crowd, as well as some new ones. I kicked off the tour with Bernat Martorell’s Saint George Killing the Dragon. This work is exciting and always elicits many questions and curiosities. It connected to the other works on the tour as a chronological example of how International Gothic informed later movements and styles, acting as a precursor to the naturalism of the Renaissance as well as the exaggerated styles of Mannerism and Tenebrism. Heading to El Greco and Zurbarán with Kate, this connection was further acknowledged and addressed. After visiting Zurbarán’s Saint Romanus of Antioch and Saint Barulas, I addressed Bartolomé Estéban Murillo’s Saint John the Baptist Pointing at Christ. These two pieces connected because Murillo was influenced by Zurbarán’s use of contrasts, however, in the Murillo the contrast is beginning to soften and become more natural. I enjoyed researching this work of art as it was a surprise to learn how this work came to be and to learn more about the artist’s life. It was commissioned by nuns who were involved in a friendly rivalry with the monastery near by. These nuns were deeply connected to St. John the Baptist while the monks were more aligned with John the Evangelist. Because of this, the convent commissioned a series of paintings displaying St. John the Baptist’s importance.

On Friday, I was able to give a very unique tour: one to my boyfriend Dave! He flew up from Austin, TX and arrived at the museum right a lunch. We wandered through the Art Institute for over 4 hours… he had never been to AIC before so there was so much to see. His highlights were mainly in the Modern wing, including Charles Ray’s Hinoki, David Hockney’s American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), Alex Katz’ Vincent and Tony, and Robert Rauschenberg’s Short Circuit. We went to the Hancock Observatory, caught some amazing music over at Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park and also went deep into space at the Adler Planetarium. For the rest of the weekend, we explored Chicago food and fun. Dave had his first deep dish (only my second!) as well as the pickle spear-adorned Chicago style hot dog.

Danielle’s 5th Week: Altering My Perception

This week was relatively relaxed, with only one scheduled student tour, the last of the paired tours!  Shahrazad and I focused on the theme, “Natural Environment/ Built Environment.”  We discussed paintings of landscapes as well as indoor scenes, but I definitely think the highlight of the tour was Shade by Simon Heijdens.  This piece, commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago for the Hyperlinks: Architecture and Design exhibition.  Heijdens created a project where exterior climatic conditions would be visible inside the built environment.  A sensor placed outside the museum tracks the passage on wind across the building.  This movement is physically manifested inside the museum through a light projection, changing from opaque to transparent, that dances across a window of the gallery. Definitely a fantastic piece, however the Hyperlinks exhibit comes down July 20th.  However, I am excited to see where the piece will be moved to.

Emily and Danielle getting their art-making on at Millennium Park

Much of my time this week was spent helping out with the Family Fun Festival at Millennium Park.  Our activities were organized around AIC’s Artful Alphabets: Five Picture Book Artists exhibition currently on view in the Ryan Education center.  My favorite activity was choosing a letter from the alphabet, and designing an animal around the letter.

It was great to really get into the hands-on creative process with the kids and their families, and of course being outside was glorious!  (Particularly because the humidity heatwave hadn’t hit yet!)  This exhibition is fantastic, with such beautiful books.  I’m really inspired to integrate this as a stop in my ABCs of Art tour or Family Tour.

The week ended on an exceptional note: Mikey, Marissa and I were invited to give a tour to a group of high school students with visual impairments.  Although I have experience teaching art to individuals with disabilities, I was unsure about how to design a tour for this special population.

Mikey and Danielle touring a visually impaired High School group

Luckily, we were given special permission to touch Islandsby Izumi Masatoshi, a large installation piece of three pieces of Japanese Tohoku Basalt stone.  This is a special piece for me, one of my favorites in the museum, because the idea of bringing nature into the built environment is such a beautiful concept- so understandably I was incredibly excited to be able to touch it!  It was wonderful to finally feel the textures I had previously only seen.

Ando Gallery, designed by Tadao Ando for The Art Institute of Chicago, 1989

Another, highlight of the tour was going into the Ando room, the space has such dramatic lighting and an obvious change it temperature.  We used our arms and bodies to explore the space, and discussed how different this room felt to the others in the museum.    Marissa brought in examples of baskets, so the students could feel the weaving technique found in the beautiful bamboo baskets exhibited in the Ando gallery.  This hands-on experience enabled the students to better understand the beauty of basket weaving.

Students touching cast of sculpture

This was by far one of my favorite tours, and teaching experiences in general.  It was difficult at first to decide how to approach the objects, because many of them are so grounded in the visual format.

Cast of Simian Mother & Child, Java, 13th c.

However, from this experience I reflected on how limited my perception of art is, particularly when I depend too heavily on one sense.  The students were very aware of their surroundings, and sensitive to their physical interactions with the artworks and the general space of the museum.  It was a wonderful teaching opportunity, and definitely expanded my awareness of how accessible artworks and museums are to patrons with disabilities.

I’m hoping to use what I learned through this experience for my future tours, especially encouraging students to use all their senses to explore the artwork/space, and to integrate more experiential and kinesthetic learning into the tours.

Jillian’s 5th Week

Laura and I had a pretty light week this week, as we were only scheduled to give three student tours.  It was nice to have more time to research, especially since I gave my first adult tour on Friday and Laura and I presented new pieces to the school groups this week.  We decided that it was time to mix up our tours and each planned to present pieces that were new to us.  As with all tours, we began brainstorming an overall theme and eventually decided that it would be interesting to choose pieces that were somehow special to the museum.

Hinoki (2007) by Charles Ray

I chose to present Charles Ray’s Hinoki and Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room: Reconstruction at the Art Institute of Chicago. I had been wanting to discuss Hinoki  with students for a long time and was excited to bring it into the rotation.  Hinoki is a large, intricately detailed sculpture of a decaying log found by the artist in a field along the coast of central California. Ray brought the log to his studio in pieces, created a fiberglass casting, and sent the casting to Osaka, Japan where master carver Yuboku Mukoyoshi and 6 of his apprentices spent 4 years carving the sculpture. The sculpture was the first piece to be installed in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing and is the only piece displayed in the gallery it now calls home.  The students really enjoyed discussing the piece and were amazed that it took so long to create.

Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room: Reconstruction at the Art Institute of Chicago (original 1893-94, reconstruction 1976-77) Original: Adler & Sullivan, Reconstruction: Vinci & Kenny

The Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room proved to be similarly engaging for students.  They were amazed that the entire room used to be in a different location and that artists and architects took so much care to reconstruct it at the Art Institute.  One of our student groups was studying printmaking and they were particularly interested in the detailed stencil work on the walls and ceiling of the trading room.  A few of the students in the group were quite young and when they asked what the room was used for, I hesitated for a bit, wondering how exactly I could explain the stock exchange to a couple of 6 year old students.  I got some blank stares after I talked through it, but, at the end of the day, everyone in the group agreed that the design and architectural details of the room were pretty incredible.  I think I’ll rehearse an answer for the next time a first grader asks me about the stock exchange :).

It was nice to add some new pieces to the rotation and the kids seemed to respond well to the objects (and room!) we had chosen.  Laura presented Simon Heijdens’s Shade, the special Kimono exhibit, and Marc Chagall’s America Windows.

A Golden Spider-Silk Textile (2008) Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley

In addition to student tours this week, I gave my first adult tour with Anne Morse, a senior lecturer at the Art Institute.  The tour’s theme was African Treasures, and I was given the opportunity to present on any work in the African galleries that I believed to be a treasure.  Picking this piece took me all of about two minutes, as I had my eyes on this particular work for weeks.  I chose to present A Golden Spider-Silk Textile on loan to the museum from Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley.  This textile is made entirely from the silk of the golden orb spider from Madagascar and was created using traditional Malagasy weaving techniques.  The textile took over 70 people 4 years to create and is modeled after the lamba akotifahana, a traditional textile associated with the royalty of the Merina people from the highlands of Madagascar. The silk from over 1 million spiders was used to create the textile and it is the only one of its kind in the entire world. Click here to watch a fascinating video about the creation of this textile.

The talk went extremely well and I learned a lot about presenting pieces of work to adult audiences.  I think it would be pretty hard to have a bad discussion about a textile created entirely from the silk of spiders :).

Next week: Solo student tours!

Shannon: The Calm Before the Storm

Check it out!  I may just be making this prompt post thing a habit.  We can only hope.

I've already made so much progress - look, my leg's aren't crossed!

With no holiday Monday and a Saturday afternoon shift at the Family Fun Tent across the street (more on that later), this week certainly felt longer than last; not that I’m complaining.  Time is flying by this summer, so I’m cherishing whatever moments I can at the Art Institute.  We have finished our fifth week and now the interns will be heading into the first of only three remaining weeks today, Monday.  Shoot.  I mean, seriously, shoot.  This internship has been absolutely incredible for me, and I’m nowhere near ready to move on…or back to South Bend, IN.  I’m certainly excited to begin my senior year at Notre Dame – how could I not be looking forward to seeing all my classmates again and starting what should be an epic football season.  It’s just hard to leave behind such a fun experience.  Alright, this blog entry is quickly turning more serious than I can handle, let’s just go over the week, shall we?

As has been the trend in past weeks, there were no tours scheduled for Monday, so I spent the day discovering new artwork in the galleries, conducting research on pieces chosen for future tours, and, on occasion, twiddling my thumbs (only a little, I promise).  Tuesday was a bit more of a challenge for Emily and myself: the visiting students were less engaged than usual and we were being shadowed by one of our bosses, so the pressure was definitely upon us.  That said, however, I’m so happy we were observed Tuesday and not later in the week.  The entire purpose of this internship is growth, so I would prefer to be observed under more difficult circumstances than when touring with the most inexplicably engaged, cultured twelve year olds in Chicago.  While I admit I was frustrated following the tour, the constructive criticism and feedback I received after our tour Tuesday is exactly what I need to progress as a Museum Educator.

My favorite part about Tuesday, though, had to be the Innovation Studio.  As I’ve explained in previous posts, after select student tours, the group is led back to one of the Ryan Education Center’s three studios and participates in a watercolor activity emphasizing the use of innovation with particular interest in the artwork of Jackson Pollock and John Marin.  For Tuesday’s Innovation Studio, Marissa led the students through a brief discussion on the techniques utilized by both artists, after which I began the interactive portion of the hour.  As I’m sure you can already tell from my blog posts, I’m pretty energetic; and never has it been more appropriately applied than during the hour-long Innovation Studio.  My somewhat hyperactive nature was perfectly channeled while conducting watercolor experiments with the students and guiding them through the culmination of the project: the creation of their own artistic view of Millennium Park.  By the end of the hour, the students had painted masterpieces and I was off to lunch!

Getting prepped for the studio

Attention was then turned toward my second Adult Tour of the summer – Ancient Art with the museum’s Kress Fellow Kate – to be held on Thursday.  I have been fortunate enough to have some absolutely wonderful Ancient Art History professors in the past, so I am very interested in the subject.  This made me a particularly enthusiastic Museum Educator come Thursday.  Kate and I decided to tackle as many pieces as possible during the hour-long tour to take full advantage of the Art Institute’s impressive, albeit limited, Ancient Art collection.  We organized the tour to move geographically through Egypt, across the Mediterranean to Greece, and finally to the massive Roman Empire.  I addressed the third, fifth, and seventh pieces in the tour: an Egyptian Mummy Portrait from the 2nd century Fayum Basin; a 6th century BCE (or “before common era”) Greek Amphora, a type of storage jar; and a 2^nd century Roman copy of a Greek Statue of a Seated Woman inspired by artwork on the Parthenon, respectively.  As with my first tour the week before, I had a few glitches along the way – one visitor was particularly adamant that gold leaf was applied to the Mummy Portrait, despite my assurances to the contrary – but each glitch provided me with new strategies for my next tour.  Overall, the tour was a success – Kate and I even fist-bumped on our way out of the galleries, which I imagine is Museum Education code for “you weren’t terrible” (score!)  I even managed to find the Sprinkles Cupcakes “Sprinklesmobile” behind the museum on Columbus. Best. Day. Ever.

The end of the week was much calmer.  During the week, we took shifts at the aforementioned Family Fun Tent across the street in Millennium Park: a city-sponsored event throughout the summer featuring activities provided by various Chicago museums.  I had a shift Friday and Saturday afternoon, supervising children in the tent while they participated in the museum’s provided craft projects.  On Friday, the chosen craft encouraged students to design animals from the letters of the alphabets, and one of the supplies was an assortment of animal print tissue papers, which led to a rather interesting encounter with one of the children with whom I spoke: he was using a cow print to decorate his letter and, as he informed me, he likes cows because of their milk.  The only problem was, he was slightly confused about the whole milk process and was entirely convinced that milk is in fact cow urine.  I decided to leave that life lesson to his parents.

My tour this Friday was my last with the incredible Miss Emily.  For the final three weeks of the internship, all interns lead tours independently, and while I look forward to the challenges that await (and leading my first-ever solo tour!), I will miss touring with Emily.  Good news: we still get to spend all day together researching in the Art Institute dungeon.  As a parting note, however, enjoy this candid shot – I think it clearly shows why our tours were such a success…

...we have incredible poker faces!