Articles by: Chelsea

On Museums and Museum Education

On Museums and Museum Education

My goodness gracious, readers. Has it been a while or what? Our last post was nearly a year ago in January 2011. On the eve of January 2012, I thought I would pop in and share some updates and other more recent museum-related musings with you.

I’m still working as a museum educator in Milwaukee, WI and my colleague is now a gallery director in New York City. We love this site and care deeply about it, but when you write about museums and art history all day long, it’s difficult to do so in your free time, too. That said, we’re thrilled that folks continue to come visit the site, and hope its archives continue to inspire, provoke, and further your thinking about art, art history, and museums.

For my day job, I frequently post about my profession and art history on our institution’s blog. Many of them are general enough to share with you here, so I hope you’ll check them out and find them useful.

On Tim Gunn and Gallery Teaching
A love letter to the profession of museum education and teaching art.

Hip-Hop in the Galleries, Inspired by Art
My fall teen program participants made hip-hop music in the middle of the art museum galleries, complete with bass and turntables. Don’t believe me? Watch the video.

Help Harmony Blossom: ArtXpress 2011
The Bus Unveiled: ArtXpress 2011
My summer teen program participants made a giant mural inspired by the art of the Qianlong emperor, complete with a social justice theme, that went on the side of a Milwaukee County Bus. The process, challenges, and successes here.

I’ve also written a number of explorations of works of art in our Collection that I call “slow art”–in which I sit with a piece for 45 minutes to an hour. (Credit for this powerful exercise go to the great Rika Burnham.) Afterwards, I wrote about my realizations, frustrations, and the joy of looking at art (cheesy, but true!) in reflection-style blog posts. Here’s a selection of my favorites:
Agnes Martin, Untitled #10
Howard Finster, The Youth of Abraham
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Homer and his Guide
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street at Shoneberg City Park

If you’re interested, you can read all of my posts on the Milwaukee Art Museum blog here.

Also, conversation continues to happen here on the Art Histoy Blog surrounding this nearly two-year-old post about the effectiveness of museums, inspired by Steven Colbert! Check it out, and please contribute your voice in the comments there, if you feel so inclined.

We’re sending you our best wishes for a happy holiday season and a peaceful new year. Thanks for reading!

Thursday, December 22, 2011 0 comments
Art Baking: Venus Madeleines

Art Baking: Venus Madeleines

Told you we’d pop in once in a while with a post! Just want to point any readers out there to this art-inspired recipe I dreamed up on my baking blog: Botticelli’s Birth of Venus Madeleines. I know all you art historians out there will get the joke right away, so just click on through and check out the rest of the pictures and the recipe.

Saturday, January 29, 2011 1 comment
We’re on hiatus!

We’re on hiatus!

Although it may be obvious at this point, the Art History Blog is on hiatus. My fellow blog writer and I have now graduated from college and are finishing up our first years as full-blown museum professionals — which means that while we still, of course, love art history with every fiber of our beings, it’s a little harder to write solid, worthy posts for this blog after our art-history-filled work days!

We’ll pop in every so often with a post and will hopefully one day be back to posting regularly, so keep us on your bookmarks. Till then, you can follow either of us at our respective museums on Twitter at MAM_Chelsea (me) or NBMAA (Alexander), and check out some of the other art history blogs that won awards for being a top art/art history blog this year, below. In addition, feel free to get in touch with us if you like. Thank you so much for your support of this blog!

Top Art History Blog

Thursday, August 19, 2010 2 comments
Art and Fashion

Art and Fashion

It makes sense that the worlds of high fashion and art often collide, and lately I’ve come across quite a few crossovers.  Below, a few of the curious collaborations and inspirations I’ve come across recently.

(Left to right) Warhol-inspired perfume; Delftware boot vase; Lady Gaga in Vogue, December '09.(Left to right) Warhol-inspired perfume; Delftware boot vase; Lady Gaga in Vogue, December ’09.

  • For $220, you can smell like Andy Warhol’s Money series with Bond No. 9 New York — Andy Warhol perfume. Apparently, the prints smell spicy and citrusy. Who knew?
  • Here’s a really unusual gift idea from ELLE’s December 2009 issue… Delftware-inspired Wellington rain boots — that aren’t rain boots at all, but in fact porcelain vases.
  • Award for most simultaneously awesome and bizarre fashion/art crossover yet: Lady Gaga’s feature in Vogue’s December 2009 issue, where she poses as the witch in Grace Coddington’s interpretation of Hansel and Gretel.  In her feature, Lady Gaga describes her performance for the LA Museum of Contemporary Art gala, at which she played a piano made by Damien Hirst. Here’s hoping her next music video not only features the craziest of runway fashion, but some contemporary art too–might I suggest a dance segment alongside one of Jeff Koon’s metallic balloon dogs?

Have I missed any happenings between art & fashion? Let me know in the comments!

Sunday, November 22, 2009 9 comments
Big Questions for the Met’s Thomas Campbell…and you

Big Questions for the Met’s Thomas Campbell…and you

Last night the Colbert Report hosted Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Campbell to ask him some probing questions about the elitist art world that are on every “Blue Collar Joe Six-Pack”‘s mind. Did you catch the segment? If not, click over to Comedy Central and stream that episode immediately (Campbell starts at about 16 minutes in).

It might be satire, but Colbert asks the big questions that everyone should be asking of museums: What is the point of art?  Is art only good if an art critic says it’s good?  Can “good” art exist without an audience? Who decides how much art is worth? Who decides what goes in a museum?  Colbert even begins by saying: “I don’t like art…and that’s mainly because I don’t get art.” So I ask a further question: How can museums help visitors feel more comfortable around the art — how can we make them feel like they “get it”? (Further, how can we help them feel comfortable with the fact that it’s OK to not “get it” — after all, isn’t that why art is studied: because we never feel like we’ve completely plumbed the interpretations of a work of art?)

These are huge, massive questions. I don’t really think that museum staff have the answer to most of them, and that’s probably why we do what we do — because we want to begin to answer them. I do think they’re questions we should ask ourselves and our visitors, because they can help us learn more about our audience and about our collections and institutions.  So as a museum educator, I’m asking all of you, how would you answer the big questions put to Campbell last night? How can museums help you “get art”? Comment away!

(PS: A final thought… Colbert ends by asking about the art housed in the Met: “Do they [the public] vote? Do you let them vote?” He’s met with a chuckle, but what an interesting web 2.0/feedback venture that would be… to ask visitors as they exit: do you think we should keep this work on view in the Museum; why or why not? Would you want to do something like that in a Museum?)

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 11 comments