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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.

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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

Reflections of an Intern: Front Lines of a MOOC

Filming commences in Windhover Hall. Photo by Melissa Marchese
Filming commences in Windhover Hall. Photo by Melissa Marchese
When I told my Alverno College advanced media and journalism instructor that I was looking for an internship, she wasted no time connecting me with Chelsea Kelly, the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Manager of Digital Learning. I am not an Art Major or Education Major, but I knew immediately that I wanted to be Chelsea’s digital learning intern. I quickly learned that my CMT (Communication, Management and Technology) Major would definitely guide me for the tasks she had in mind.

I am interning for Chelsea while she is building a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). These courses are available to anyone online, and the Museum received a special grant to develop a course. This one in particular was about getting to look at art in a different way. I know this must be shocking to hear from a Milwaukee Art Museum intern, but growing up my favorite form of art wasn’t actually paintings, sculptures or photography–it was dance. I had very little knowledge of art or its history, which actually made me the perfect candidate for interning for this MOOC: I love museums, but I never knew how to interpret it. Working on this MOOC has made me look at art differently.

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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?

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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.

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Art Behind the Scenes Education

ArtXpress 2014: Remember Struggle Create Change

The mural in progress. Photo by Front Room Photography
The mural in progress. Photo by Front Room Photography
There’s a reason why the summer teen program at the Milwaukee Art Museum is called ArtXpress. In less than a month, a group of sixteen high school students came together to absorb the current Kandinsky: A Retrospective exhibition, digest the meaning of abstraction, and collectively orchestrate their own Kandinsky-esque abstract mural to be blown up onto an Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) bus that will travel routes all over the city. In addition, the teens also mentored Milwaukee Public Schools elementary schoolers through the exhibition, challenging the teens to more deeply articulate the important aspects of Kandinsky’s pioneering work in abstract art.

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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.

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Behind the Scenes Education

School Programs: Young Minds Create!

Ms. Sue Gaudynski, Lincoln Elementary. Photo by Laci Coppins
Ms. Sue Gaudynski, Lincoln Elementary. Photo by Laci Coppins
When does inspiration begin? Well, for students of Ms. Sue Gaudynski’s class at Lincoln Elementary School, pre-kindergarten!

The first week of June marked the 15th Annual Junior Kindergarten Art Show for Ms. Gaudynski and her young scholars. Using works of art from the Milwaukee Art Museum and neighboring museums as inspiration, students learn about the artist, artwork, and art genres.

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Behind the Scenes Education

Teaching How To Teach

Evan and Kira introduce the program at the start of the event. Photo by Front Room Photography
Evan and Kira introduce the program at the start of the event. Photo by Front Room Photography
For my internship with the Satellite High School program, Chelsea, my supervisor, let me organize the elementary school visits, where our teens taught much younger students about art in our collection. The teen interns work with students from Milwaukee Public Schools Community Learning Centers (CLCs) to introduce them to the Museum Collection and the feature exhibition. This was a challenging yet rewarding experience to manage!

As an upcoming art educator myself, I found I had to take into account different layers of teaching. I first only thought about the lesson I would teach to the teens–meaning I would show them what exactly we would be doing with the kids. But soon I realized the extra layer–that the teens would then be teaching the younger students. So essentially, I was teaching how to teach.