Thursday, April 15, 2004

The neglected audience

Christine Temin in the Boston Globe has a nice piece on several Massachusetts art museums reconsidering how they welcome and engage schoolchildren. Instead of the cattle call of the traditional annual school field trip, these museums are working to connect with children on many levels, and reinforce the museum as a place to discover their own creativity. Some interesting examples:

At Harvard's Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, works by fifth-grade students from the Captain Samuel Brown School in Peabody are on the walls through April 22 in 'Fabulous Fakes.' Forgery training it's not; it's training the eye and hand through the time-honored means of copying the masters -- Picasso, Degas, and others, in this case. These days, that represents a radical turnaround from educational theories that copying might stifle students' creativity.

At the Fuller Museum of Art in Brockton, children are being recognized as collectors. The Fuller is inviting Brockton kids from ages 8 to 12 to bring their collections -- baseball cards, sea shells, whatever -- to the museum on April 25, for consideration for inclusion in 'Kids Collect,' at the museum from May 8 through July 25.

It's a welcome step forward from 'air-drop culture,' where busloads of public school kids are dropped off at a cultural facility, engaged in bulk, given space for a sandwich and a juicebox, and then sent back to school -- a tradition common to both museums and performing arts centers across the country.

The article also mentions a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education awarded to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, to explore what elementary-school students actually learn from a multiple-visit program.

All welcome steps in connecting with the future artists, audiences, supporters, and civic leaders that will steward our culture once we shuffle off.

posted on Thursday, April 15, 2004 | permalink