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Behind the Scenes Education

Beyond Digital: Open Collections and Cultural Institutions: Part 2

Pieces of paper thumbtacked to the wall
View of the author’s Beautiful Data Final Project installation. Photo by the author

This is part two of two posts about my experiences at the Beautiful Data: Telling Stories with Open Collections workshop at Harvard University’s metaLAB. Read part one here.

When my teen program started up again this fall, I brought my students into the Milwaukee Art Museum galleries to look at a single work of art for an hour (you can read more about this process here). As usual, I noticed the high schoolers opening up to each other, to new ideas, and to finding ways that art relates to their everyday life—whether a photograph of Milwaukee or a landscape by a Baroque Italian painter. These discussions are guided by the students—I might throw in some useful facts to open up the conversation, but they take the lead. As a result, on any given day, we might relate artworks to religion, politics, narratives, families and friends, or even moods and feelings.

Categories
Behind the Scenes Education

Beyond Digital: Open Collections and Cultural Institutions: Part 1

View of the author’s Beautiful Data Final Project installation. Photo by the author

This is part one of two posts about my experiences at the Beautiful Data: Telling Stories with Open Collections workshop at Harvard University’s metaLAB.

This past June, I participated in a two-week workshop at Harvard University’s metaLAB called Beautiful Data: Telling Stories with Open Collections. Thanks to a grant from the Getty Foundation, the metaLAB brought together over twenty curators, technologists, educators, and scholars to grapple with how we might use publicly available data from museum collections in our work. In the first week, speakers as varied as digital museum specialists to experience designers to scientists who study vision all pressed us to think of our work in unexpected contexts. In the second week, we took what we’d discussed and applied them to projects of our own.

Categories
Art Behind the Scenes Education

Teens Discuss Postcards from America

Title view of Postcards from America: Milwaukee, with prompts teens used to explore the exhibition.
Title view of Postcards from America: Milwaukee, with prompts teens used to explore the exhibition.

On one of the last warm days in October, I led sixteen teens into the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Postcards from America: Milwaukee exhibition. This blog post is a description of our experience spending one hour together looking at a single photographer’s work in the exhibition.

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Behind the Scenes Curatorial

Ask a Curator Day 2014 Recap

Back in September, the Milwaukee Art Museum participated in International Ask a Curator Day, an online initiative started in 2010 in the UK. The idea? Use social media to open up conversations between visitors and museum staff. This year’s Ask a Curator Day saw an astounding 721 museums from 43 different countries answering visitor questions pretty much around the clock.

Of course, we museum staff do this every day on site and online, but we love that Ask a Curator Day gives us the chance to reach a huge virtual audience from all around the world. After the jump, you’ll find some highlights from our Twitter feed on Ask a Curator Day. Thanks to everyone who tweeted us!

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Behind the Scenes Education

Reflective Evaluation: How Can Museums Change Teens—and Vice Versa? Part 3

The Satellite High School Program Teens, 2013-14. Photo by Front Room Photography

In my previous two posts in this Reflective Evaluation series, I detailed all the ways we found and evaluated data to show teen participants in the Satellite program became more reflective. So: did the interviews, exit slips, readability tests, and final projects all add up to a full image of the impact that a year’s worth of reflective practice can have on students?

Categories
Behind the Scenes Education

Reflective Evaluation: How Can Museums Change Teens—and Vice Versa? Part 2

Liz and Justine watch the final project videos. Photo by Front Room Photography

In part two of my three posts on this year’s Satellite teen program, I’m sharing the unexpected data that helped me see the bigger picture about my students’ ability to reflect thanks to being in the program.

Categories
Art Behind the Scenes Education

Reflective Evaluation: How Can Museums Change Teens—and Vice Versa? Part 1

Luis and Rosaly show their families the Museum. Photo by Front Room Photography

Over the past four years, I have worked with hundreds of Milwaukee-area teens who love art, and who, over their time in teen programs at the Milwaukee Art Museum, grow to love museums as well.

I have always had a sense that my students grow over their time at the Museum. This year, though, to really study that growth, we designed our longstanding Satellite High School Program as a year-long experience to explore exactly how weekly sessions at an art museum might change the thinking of our teen participants. To that end, our program outcome for students was that they would show an increased ability to reflect upon their own experiences and performance.

Categories
Art Education

Teen Voices in the Museum

Milwaukee Art Museum Satellite Program group, 2013-14

Teen programs provide a very different kind of opportunity for museums to experiment with interpretation. Because many teens participate in multiple programs for extended lengths of time, they become advocates and resources for our museums and collections. Here at the Milwaukee Art Museum, I’ve been experimenting with interpretation strategies that go deeper than one-day-only programs, providing not only learning experiences for students involved, but powerful tools and content for the Museum, too.

Categories
Education

How to Engage Teens at the Museum

Helena discusses Fragonard’s “The Shepherdess” in the Milwaukee Art Museum galleries. Photo by Nate Pyper

How do art museums engage teenagers? We offer a number of internships at the Milwaukee Art Museum for teens, but for most students, their first (and sometimes only) exposure to the Museum is through a school field trip. In collaboration with our docent corps, we asked the students themselves how to engage teenagers in the galleries.

Categories
Behind the Scenes Curatorial Education

Help Us Prototype Your Museum Experience

Signage that says 'Help us prototype your museum experience'

At the entrance to the permanent collection galleries at the Milwaukee Art Museum, you’ll find something new as of December 2013: what we affectionately call in-house our “Prototyping Pedestal.”

So what exactly is it?