Danielle: Lucky #7

This was a short week for me, I took Monday off in order to balance out the hours I worked at Kaleidoscope this past Saturday.  I tried to spend as much time as possible outdoors, enjoying the (relatively) mild Chicago weather.

View of downtown from Lincoln Park Zoo

 

I shouldn’t complain however, my friends in Texas constantly remind me of the boiling heat Austin has this time of year, so I’m very thankful for this break!  I toured the beautiful Lincoln Park Zoo and spent time in the fantastic Field Museum.

Sue from The Field Museum

My undergraduate degree is in anthropology (in addition to studio art), so I was like a kid in candy store at the Field, but of course there was too much to see in just one visit!  I’m going to try and sneak in another visit before I leave.

 

For my tours this week, I added some new pieces, the coffin and mummy of Paankhenamun, and a stirrup vessel from the Nazca culture of Peru.  I toured these objects along with my oldies-but-goodies, Mukenga Mask and Tomb Guardians on Wednesday.  I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the types of pieces I choose for my tours and have come to the realization that all of my objects have some connection to death.  The Mukenga Mask was created for use in a funerary procession, the Tomb Guardians protect Tang Dynasty tombs from evil spirits and tomb robbers, the Peruvian vessels depict decapitated trophy heads which were believed to increase agricultural fertility in the region, and of course the mummy and coffin are pretty self-explanatory.  I think that would be a fantastic high school or adult tour: Death in Many Cultures! I don’t think I’m particularly obsessed with death, but more in how different cultures address this specific part of life.  But Freud would have a different opinion I’m sure.

I spent much of my week reading about the Peruvian vessels, and trophy heads as well, because I had an adult tour on Friday centered around the arts of Peru.  Annie Morse and I divided up the Art Institute’s large collection of Peruvian art, with my focus being ceramic pottery from the Cavin and Nazca periods.

Stirrup-Spout Vessel, Chavin region, North coast Peru 900/200 B.C.

Despite being almost 2,500 years old, these pieces retain their beautifully, bold colors, due to the mastery of the polychrome slip painting technology as well as the dry and arid climate of the Peruvian mountains.  These stirrup vessels, so named because of their distinctive handles, were for everyday use as well as in rituals preparing for warfare or those celebrating a victory.  Once again, the anthropologist in me came out when researching the presence of trophy heads on these pieces.

Double-Spouted Bottle Representing a Masked Warrior with Trophy Heads, Nazca region South coast of Peru, 180 B.C./A.D. 500

The heads of defeated warriors were collected after battles, and through drilling holes into the foreheads, they could be hung on ropes and displayed during rituals or around the waist of rulers.  Obviously, I could go on and on about this, I find it so fascinating, but I’ll switch gears.

So, extremely exciting news, though not completely connected to the Art Institute, is… I got a job!  It’s only a contract position, meaning it’s up in December, but it’s at the Blanton Art Museum at the University of Texas (where I’m currently pursuing my master’s degree in Art Education).  I will be working as the interim UT student coordinator, designing and implementing fun and engaging programs to get the UT community excited about the Blanton’s collection.  It’s so exciting to take the next step in my museum education career, and of course it has so very much to do with this fantastic internship!  Thanks Art Institute of Chicago!

Danielle’s Week 6: Sickness, Iron Maiden, and X-Rays- Oh My!

Man oh man, as the weeks progress there’s more and more activities and experiences jam-packed into so little time!  And trying to remember everything that happened is a huge task in itself!   Unfortunately, a portion of week 6 was a bit icky for me, because I was sick with a respiratory/ flu thing.  Looking back, it was a good lesson in sucking it up, because unlike graduate school, you can’t really take a sick day when you have student and adult tours that you are expected to complete.  With and arsenal of DayQuil and orange juice, I faced my tours with minimal complaints (though my fellow interns may disagree on that!)

Armored Guardian King (Tianwang) Trampling Demon, Tang dynasty (618-907 A.D.)

I was excited to introduce some Chinese Tomb Guardian figures into my student tours.  The dripping, 3-color (or sancai) glaze  technique found on these ceramic figures is characteristic of the Tang dynasty.  The kids were really drawn to the dramatic expressions and active poses of the figures, acting much of it out–especially the stomping of evil spirits.  We also discussed what type of composite guard animal we would create to guard our own tomb.  Lions and tigers were popular, and I mentioned an alligator so that the guardian could chase the tomb raider on and land and in water.  The best part of the tours are when I am able to exercise my imagination alongside the kids.

I used these tomb guardians for student tours as well as an adult tour I shared with Lucas, a lecturer for the adult department.  Our theme was Asian art, and the previous week Lucas and I walked around the Alsdorf and Chinese galleries to determine what objects would be the focal point of the walk.  We spent an hour discussing works of interest, and it felt like a private tour due to Lucas’ wealth of knowledge!  A great resource for those interested in Asian and Ancient art is the aptly titled Ancient Art podcast authored by our own Lucas Livingston.  His descriptions of these objects are not the cut and dry lectures one is used to hearing, he interjects jabs and jokes, and even a little heavy metal.  Who better to explain the life and influence of Alexander the Great on the world than Iron Maiden?  Lucas agreed and inserted the song into this podcast about a seated Bodhisattva from the Gandaran region, check out the entire podcast.

Our week went a little longer than usual, with the annual Kaleidoscope Family Festival on Saturday afternoon.  Other interns have blogged about their experiences at this event so I won’t be redundant, but I was really excited that my family came in from Ohio during this event!  My cousin Stacy and her wonderful kids Maxwell and Madison arrived Friday afternoon, and I was able to give them a little mini-tour.

Me and the family posing in the modern wing.

It was great to hear their perspectives on the artwork, and of course I loved telling them the little stories and anecdotes I knew about certain pieces.

Mother and Child, 1921, Pablo Picasso

For instance, did you know that Picasso’s Mother and Childoriginally had another panel attached to the left-hand side of the canvas, depicting a man holding a fish out to the child?  Crazy, I know!

We got that great morsel of information from the conservation department during our museum practices seminar on Wednesday.  It was wonderful to see how damaged artwork is nursed back to health.  If I had the biology background (which you need in addition to Art History) I think I would have been interesting to go the route of conservation.  The amount of patience it takes to rebuild a broken 2nd century ceramic pot is incredible, I can’t even imagine how

Example of painting being x-rayed

painstaking it would be to get the details so accurate, but the product is breathtaking once complete!  I think the process of x-raying artworks is fascinating as well.  I’d feel a little like Sherlock Holmes, discovering the secret behind the painting, and illuminating the decision making process of the painter–particularly the mistakes they tried to cover!

Another fantastic week (well, aside from the sickness) and I just can’t believe that we’re in the final stretch!

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.

Getting into the Groove! Danielle’s 4th week

Although this week was shorter than usual, due to the holiday, we were still able to fit it so much!  I started bright and early on Tuesday morning with an Art From Many Places student tour with 1st-6th graders from a local community center.  I was heartbroken to hear the group leader explain that these children have no formal art education in school (or in their after-school program) due to strict budget constraints.  She further explained that trips like these to the Art Institute are the only form of exposure to the arts many of these children receive.  It was so sad to hear (though not surprising in the least), but definitely reaffirmed the importance of strengthening relations between art institutions and the surrounding community.  OK, I’ll step down off my soap box now…

My partner and I changed up our themes this week, to “Picturing People” and “Light in Art”  Pretty straight forward themes, but they enabled me to discuss some new and exciting objects.  For the “Light in Art” theme I was particularly excited to discuss one of my (newly) favorite photographers, Uta Barth.  Her series … and to draw a bright white line with light

... and to draw a bright white line with light, Uta Barth, 2011

debuted at The Art Institute of Chicago in May and will be up through August 14th.  Barth’s work is very conceptual in nature, taking a simple observation, in this case the dance of a ribbon of light across curtains, and turning it into a complex photographic experience describing visual perception and the passage of time.  I, too, am extremely interested in visual perception and the ways in which people perceive the world.  However, I realized that not everyone shares my interest, and therefore these  images were exciting to work with because they posed a challenge for me: How to make minimalist, conceptual photography interesting and relevant to students?  I connected these images to their personal lives, asking what they usually take pictures of with their camera and how that subject matter differs from Barth’s images.  The conversation was great and I could tell the students were eager to share their ideas and further explore Barth’s pictures.  All in all, it was a great end to the tour!

Meet and greet with Kate

I ended the week with my very first adult tour: Elephant Watch!  There are surprising a lot of artworks with elephants as subjects, and Kate, the Kress Fellow, and I took this opportunity to share them with our tour group.  I was the second stop, and spoke about the Mukenga Mask from the Kuba tribe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  I was immediately drawn to this piece because it has a wealth of materials and iconography.

Mukenga Mask, Kuba Tribe

Because this was an adult tour, I was able to delve deeper into the culture context and meaning behind each symbol, particularly the elephant trunk and tusk.  The elephant is a symbol of leadership and wealth in the Kuba tribe, due to the strength and power of the animal, as well as it’s importance in the ivory trade.

During my research I found an interesting factoid: elephants are integral to the biodiversity of western Africa because they create clearings and gaps in the tree canopy enabling tree regeneration.  Also, about 1/3 of the plant and tree species in the area around the Democratic Republic of the Congo have developed specialized seeds that can only germinate by being passed through the digestive tract of an elephant!  I definitely got some ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs’ when I shared that fact with the group!

Group discussing the Mukenga Mask

I felt very comfortable during the tour, and thought the group and I had a good discussion about the Mukenga Mask.  I received good feedback from both Kate and another senior lecturer, which was great to hear.  And, I cannot thank my fellow interns enough for supporting me and coming on my leg of the tour,  Kris and Jillian were even so great as to take pictures of me!  Some of them seem a bit blurry, but that’s because I talk so much with my hands!

Getting animated about the Mukenga Mask

Danielle’s Recap of the Work and Play from Week 3!

Whew!  First week of student tours- DONE!  Such a wonderfully proud feeling.  I will admit, the first student tour was a bit hectic.  My tour partner, Shahrazad, and I had a group of 10 first, second and third graders.  Shahrazad and I designed our tour around the theme of community and group identity, and chose to discuss 6 objects: a Japanese Bodhisattva figure, a mural fragment from Teotihuacan, Mexico, Marc Chagall’s American Windows, a drum from the Sonofu tribe of Cote d’Ivoire region, Public Notice #3 by Jitish Kallat, and Whirligig by Frank Memkus.  I was understandably nervous at the outset of the tour, desperately trying to keep all the information and questions in my head, and of course the minute I got in front of the kids, my carefully planned format flew completely out of my head!  But, thankfully the kids were absolutely wonderful.  They were so eager to talk about the artwork, so the fact that I spaced a bit on some of my questions didn’t appear to affect their enjoyment at all!  The first tour was also an exercise in flexibility.  The student group was a bit late, so we had to reorganize the order of our objects and cut one out completely (the Japanese Bodhisattva).  But I think we did a great job on the fly!

As the week progressed, the tours went much more smoothly, a direct result, I think, of my rising comfort level with both the objects and the tour format as a whole.  It was a very interesting process of researching the objects, synthesizing the information, and designing engaging and expansive questions from it.  I organized my half of the tour around the same objects the entire week, the Teotihuacan Mural segment and American Windows by Marc Chagall, primarily so I could better track, and therefore understand, the effectiveness of my questioning strategy.  I tried out different strategies of linking an object to the viewers’ lives, because this is key to a successful and meaningful tour.

Mural Fragment from Teotihuacan, Mexico

For the Teotihuacan segment, I asked the students about their experiences with murals and public art; asking them to describe the images and stories depicted in examples around their community.  I loved that together we were able to find thematic connections between our contemporary examples and a mural piece over one thousand years old!

Touring American Windows by Marc Chagall, was a great tie in to the holiday weekend, because it is a piece that was created and gifted by Chagall to the city of Chicago, and The Art Institute of Chicago in particular.  It was meant to celebrate the artistic and social freedoms of the United States, as well as commemorate America’s Bicentennial.  It is such a beautifully colorful piece as well, and I think the students had a great time talking about it.  One student even asked, as we were walking into the gallery, if the windows were an aquarium because the color was so saturated!

American Windows by Marc Chagall

The fantastic week was extended thanks to the 4th of July!  Fellow intern, Emily, and I attended a dramatic reading of the Declaration of Independence at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park on Friday evening.  It was a beautiful night, and listening to over 100 cultural leaders read the Declaration aloud was a great way to celebrate our country’s birth!  I was truly amazed at the sophistication of the picnics I saw spread throughout the park.  People ate gourmet foods atop full-sized tables!  The people of Chicago definitely take their picnics seriously!

The interns celebrating the 4th of July!

The entire intern group was able to celebrate the 4th in true patriotic style at Jillian’s house.  It was wonderful to have everyone together outside the docent room!  We ate some deliciously patriotic cupcakes, and danced through the night.  And of course stopped to pose for this adorable group picture!  All in all, I’d say the 3rd week was absolutely fantastic!

Hello Chicago!! Danielle’s first 2 weeks

Wow, I can’t believe it’s already been 2 weeks! So much has been packed into such a short amount of time, how ever to recount it all. I spent my first few days trying to orient myself to the surrounding city, which meant I got lost. A lot. Being from the Southwest, I’m used to relying on mountains to give me directions, but no such luck in Chicago. However, my lost adventure were fruitful, I found some coffee shops and restaurants around the Art Institute of Chicago dorms, where I am living for the summer, and even stumbled into the Chicago Blues Festival!

The first day at the Art Institute of Chicago was another practice in orientating myself. We interns were taken on a fast and furious tour of the museum which included all the short cuts and back-ways, and I’m still trying to remember them all! The first day ended with a meet-and-greet with the museum education staff, and it was such a great treat meeting them all, everyone was so friendly and full of great advice (particularly since many of them are ex-interns!). The next few days were like a museum studies mini-course, with some great readings detailing key ways to engage audiences and cultivate conversations about art, and some interesting discussions about best museum practices. As an art educator with a background predominantly in community-based organizations, I was eager to get as much information as possible about museum education.

Week two was even more jam-packed than the first! Each intern picked 3 objects from the permanent collection and performed in-depth research into the background and cultural context of the pieces. We then designed a tour around each piece With a specific audience in mind- student, family and adult. It was difficult to choose pieces, because there are just so many great things in the collection. The objects I finally chose were: a Japanese Bodhisattva figure from the 8th century AD (student tour), Willem de Kooning’s “Excavation” (adult), and “The Bedroom” by Vincent van Gogh. Creating relevant and engaging questions for the tours was more difficult than I had anticipated. I wanted to provide good information, without simply lecturing people, and found that layering the information and questions is key. However, doing this seamlessly is a great skill that I am still working on!

We executed mock tours for the museum education staff and fellow interns during this past week, a time to practice what we had learned and critique each other’s work. Thankfully we have an amazing group of interns, so this critiquing experience (though a bit rough at times) was overall really constructive and beneficial, with everyone obviously trying to help each other succeed. Public tours start this Tuesday, which should be great, I’m very excited to take the kids around the museum. It should be a wonderful time, and I’m sure there will be lot’s of funny stories to go along, so tune in next week!

(p.s. We took some pictures with the high school interns, and those should be posted soon!)