At the end of February, teens in the Satellite High School Program gathered around Michelle Erickson’s Texas Tea Party (2005). They’ll study this object for the whole semester, using different methods of looking to form their own interpretations. For their first session, we spent one full hour looking closely at the work and having an open-ended dialogue about what we saw, the artist’s intent, and what it all might mean.
Tag: teens in museums
The Museum has offered teen programs that change the lives of young people for over thirty years. I’m thrilled to feature an interview with one program alum, Jesús Hilario, who is a senior in high school at Rufus King High School in Milwaukee. Jesús was an intern in the Museum’s ArtXpress high school program in 2013, and is a recent multi-award winner for the national Scholastic Art Awards, on view at the Museum through March 22. ArtXpress is a summer studio internship program for teens, who take inspiration from the Museum’s feature exhibition to create a mural that positively addresses a community issue and is displayed for a year as an advertisement on a Milwaukee County public bus. The Scholastic Art Awards is a national program that has encouraged the artistic endeavors of young people throughout the United States for over eighty-five years.

It’s my pleasure to share the work of the teen interns in this semester’s Satellite High School Program. Fifteen students from all around Milwaukee spent a semester exploring and discussing art, touring elementary school students, going behind the scenes, speaking to staff, and learning about career skills. Then, the teens created final projects expressing how art can be made relevant to our lives today and how the Milwaukee Art Museum can be an icon for the city, inside and out. This post, part 4 of 4, showcases the work of these students in their own words.
The final group of students created works out of many different kinds of media for their final projects.

It’s my pleasure to share the work of the teen interns in this semester’s Satellite High School Program. Fifteen students from all around Milwaukee spent a semester exploring and discussing art, touring elementary school students, going behind the scenes, speaking to staff, and learning about career skills. Then, the teens created final projects expressing how art can be made relevant to our lives today and how the Milwaukee Art Museum can be an icon for the city, inside and out. This post, part 3 of 4, showcases the work of these students in their own words.

It’s my pleasure to share the work of the teen interns in this semesterrsquo;s Satellite High School Program. Fifteen students from all around Milwaukee spent a semester exploring and discussing art, touring elementary school students, going behind the scenes, speaking to staff, and learning about career skills. Then, the teens created final projects expressing how art can be made relevant to our lives today and how the Milwaukee Art Museum can be an icon for the city, inside and out. This post, part 2 of 4, showcases the work of these students in their own words.

It’s my pleasure to share the work of the teen interns in this semester’s Satellite High School Program. Fifteen students from all around Milwaukee spent a semester exploring and discussing art, touring elementary school students, going behind the scenes, speaking to staff, and learning about career skills. Then, the teens created final projects expressing how art can be made relevant to our lives today and how the Milwaukee Art Museum can be an icon for the city, inside and out. This post, part 1 of 4, showcases the work of these students in their own words.

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.
How to Engage Teens at the Museum

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.
Four weeks ago I had no idea that I would be creating a post that would be viewed by anyone who accessed Milwaukee Art Museum Blog. When I first started the internship I was ecstatic: Working at the art museum? I was movin’ on up in life. Then when I found out I was going to create a blog post, you could pretty much say my day–if not year–was made.