The end of fall

After three months of writing lesson plans and coming home with clothes stained with paint, the first semester of the Art After School Program has come to an end. It is bittersweet as I had to say goodbye to a group of wonderful students who were responsible for making the class as enjoyable as it was, but I am excited to start a new class in January. I believe the winter class will benefit greatly from the experience I gained this fall and I have a some ideas on ways to improve the class.

This internship has been a wonderful opportunity. It helped me to feel more confident teaching. I have always believed I would not be able to do it effectively as I am a rather shy and reserved person, but I really enjoyed teaching each week. It helps that I talked to some of the parents during the students' exhibition of all there art and I found out that some of the students really enjoyed the class. The internship was a learning experience as well. It taught me that I needed to take a step back and be more willing to facilitate. Coming from a background in art history, I have a tendency to fall into lecturing which is not a enjoyable experience for elementary students. They want to move and talk about their lives and I needed to make more room for that in the class. I hoping next year I can design some kinetic activities.

The most impact lesson I took away was that I need to structure the classes around a topic that the students find relatable. The topic of the most successful class I had was hand washing and the types of objects people used in the Middle Ages to wash their hands. It gave the students the opportunity the think about the objects they have in the lives and use and compare them to things they had in the past. They seemed more willing to talk and think about why people do certain things. The lesson did unfortunately devolve into me trying to explain water pressure and how faucets work which I was not prepared to do.

Next semester, I am going to try to take what I learned and make the classes more focused on the students. Instead of having them make unrelated objects each week, I am going to have them pretend to be a leader of their own kingdom and make art that they would like to have in their kingdom. For example, I am going to have them design their own royal outfit and make a model of a castle in which they would like to live. I am hoping that this gets them more invested in the art they make. I want them to get excited and feel that the things they are making are important.

Here some pictures from the student exhibition. I think they did a fantastic job:

Conclusion

The core of the activity for this internship is now over, so I wanted to give a recap of it. It was a very different experience compared not only to my previous work in museums but also to others' experiences in Dallas museums; it truly is a different type of museum. Here is what I did and learned in the past few weeks:

1. I communicated with the two artists, translated texts, triaged between the director, galleries who hold artists' works, previous curators and, most importantly, the shipping companies. A portion of this has happened over the past year, not just the last weeks or month(s). The artwork arrived after many adventures, a few pieces were broken and needed restoration, then they were sequenced and installed. Not to speak about accompanying the visiting artist for a significant amount of time in his two-week visit to Dallas. I also tried (in the year before the exhibition even opened) to investigate some fundraising options that would help with the printing of the catalog - for example, the Italian consulate in Houston or the Italian community organization in Dallas - but this didn't pan out.

This experience was very useful for me, not only in trying out in the wild how a museum exhibition would come to be from finish to start, but also to help me connect the curatorial and the education side of museum work. This semester I have been TAing for a class in communication design, in which the concept of user experience as a design concept (UX) has been the focus. You may have come across the abbreviation: it is rather fashionable lately. In brief, it is design derived from the experience of the users and involves significant research in user perceptions and influence. This attention to UX was a link for me and showed the way on how the curation of an exhibition has a direct pedagogical impact on viewers - not only the way artworks are displayed, but also what was selected and why.

2. Catalog and publicity. I wrote bios and introductions for both artists, selected and edited images, and made layout of this 16-page catalog. There were a few glitches in the production and the communication with the graphic designer, but there was also the confirmation how this museum is so different from the others locally. While I was scrambling to figure out who is the facebook page admin and get him to create an event or even post the information on the website, I thought  that all the work of the past year would fall through because the information was posted in the various channels online only the day before the opening. However, I was surprised to see there were at least 50 or perhaps even 100 attendees of the reception, who had received the information via the printed newsletter. So, conclusion: printed materials are important and have impact.

3. Working with an artist. It is ironic that, on the coattails of my internship last summer, when my work was from the standpoint of the visiting artist who participated in education programs, I was now in a position to work with an artist as a curator and educator. In sum, it is not simple and requires the balancing of maintaining the autonomy of the artist while creating one's own program(s) that the artist collaborates with, but does not necessarily know how to navigate. In fact, I wanted to recommend that if you are interested in learning how to work with artists in a museum environment, you should visit the next meeting of the MER in DFW (Museum Education Roundtable) where this topic will be discussed.

https://dfwmer.wordpress.com/

My work with the artist consisted in developing the artist talk and then the workshop with Italian language students. We worked in this together since it was important to maintain the simplicity of the language, an internal logic that built on the practices of foreign language teaching while also keeping the captivating story that he had to tell. We had a disagreement over the art activity portion because the artist's definition of what MADI art is was very stringent, but in the end he was really happy with how it turned out. Students said they understood everything  :)

The most successful event, in my opinion, was the Arcadia Salon, which is an artist talk recurrent event the museum organizes on some Thursdays. Since I was going to translate, I told the artist he could say whatever he wanted and, unlike the students' visit, language barrier was not an issue. But he ended up following the structure of the previous talk. Another success was that he incorporated a couple of questions that followed an artful thinking strategy, which enlivened the dialog. By the way, the October meeting of the MER was community development, which I attended and tried to apply some trick from it to my work with this very tight knit community of museum goers.

4.  I am now planning the creation of a children's book - more specifically, a workbook of activities -  based on MADI art. This is especially appropriate because this art movement emphasizes geometric abstraction and three-dimensionality. The plan is to choose one artwork each by ten artists, write a simple intro to their style and then set aside a page for an activity that can be cut, collaged or colored to emulate the artist's work. I have talked with Sur Won about contributing cartoon characters that would be the connection between the explanation and the actual activity. However, the challenge is securing high resolution images of the work to be included, for ten different artists - which are protected by copyright - as well as figuring out the best way to print it - through the regular printing shop that the museum uses (cheaper but requiring an upfront order of 200 copies) or an online on-demand service like blurb (more expensive per copy but does not require a volume order, so more feasible as a test). I will also continue with some workshops in relation with the exhibition.

In all, this collaboration has been a precious opportunity for me and I am really grateful that I had the chance to pursue it. It brought me some really invaluable contacts, getting to know better an amazingly kind and empathetic person, the museum director, and learning more about the nitty gritty aspect of museums in which fewer people work on more aspects of it. The exhibition ends on January 20 and if you happen to visit the museum, please let me know!