Creativity and Collaboration
Skyway - a Contemporary Collaboration: Artistic Practices beyond the Museum View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ola Wlusek
Skyway 20/21 exhibition was a celebration of artistic practices in the Tampa Bay region, as it was a unique collaboration between Florida, USA’s four institutions: the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota; the Tampa Museum of Art; and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa. Working together, curators from each institution offered context for the diversity of art being made in five counties. Many of the artists represented in Skyway 20/21 work in familiar fine art media, such as painting, sculpture, or photography, but their practices incorporate interdisciplinary approaches to artmaking. Through site-specific investigations and community engagements, their work expands the artist’s studio and museums into the community at large. Their artistic practices inhabited the intersections of the personal and the political. Artists mined their unique experiences, the experiences of their communities, and the collective consciousness in order to explore the politics of visibility and agency in the 21st century on a global scale. Through her collaborative projects, such as NOMAD Art Bus, Justice Studio, and SPACEcraft, artist Carrie Boucher works to highlight and address disparities by facilitating creative engagements and organizing networks of artistic support in places where individuals typically lack access to the means of artistic production. How can museum curators champion social practice in their collaborative approaches to exhibition-making? How can cultural institutions support the work of socially engaged art practices in order to become productive and accessible places for cultural exchange and offer community support?
Featured Centring Community Voices: Shifting from Authoritative-voice Exhibits to Perspective-based Projects View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tyler Stewart
This paper reviews four case studies of exhibition development projects that included community perspectives within the visitor experience. Each of these projects sought to both establish and strengthen relationships between the institutions developing exhibition projects and the communities they serve. By centring community voices within museum projects, a deeper sense of ownership in the final result is fostered through increased participation. Many museums have realized the importance of shifting from authoritative-voice exhibits to perspective-based projects that avoid telling a singular story and instead allow visitors to draw their own conclusions from a multiplicity of featured voices. The exhibits profiled within these case studies used social media, surveys and qualitative interviews to engage community participants – each with their own strengths and drawbacks. These projects were exhibited in multiple formats, including interpretive displays, comic books and audio exhibits. Each project engaged the community in different ways to build stronger connections. This study examines how each project was developed and what learnings can be taken away for other institutions seeking to engage the communities they serve in more meaningful ways.
Utilizing Asynchronous Learning Spaces to Explore Constructing Visitor Engagement View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kathryn Medill
This session explores an asynchronous online special topics course about museums, created for undergraduate students at a private arts college. The study briefly unpacks the seven guiding themes of the course that were scaffolded to prepare students for their final project–designing a museum engagement for visitors in a hypothetical museum space. We review several examples of final student projects and course reflections to see if/how these students’ understandings of the role of museums and visitor engagement changed as a result of the course. We end with a review of if/ how scenario based course design might help prepare students to pursue careers in museums.
Listening Through the Lens of Peace: Audio Guides and Young Adult Visitors in Art Museums View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kathleen Vaughan, Emily Grace Keenlyside
How can the production of and engagement with audio guides to a museum’s collection of Baroque and Enlightenment art support community engagement? Further, how can audio guides produced as a curricular project by graduate students, and engaged by college students as listeners, support learning? We take up these questions with the purpose of considering the effectiveness of these collaboratively-produced audio guides as pedagogical tools to address key thematics of peace and social justice, raise awareness about the complexity of achieving and maintaining peace, and prompt critical self-reflection through guided encounters with artworks. We use a case study analysis of two audio guides using a museum visit, post-visit class discussion, and short questionnaire, the research focuses on college students’ experience of the audio works, created through a partnership between Concordia University and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to launch the new Pavilion for Peace. The paper also includes discussion of methods of collaboratively-produced research-creation, since the audio guides were positioned as artists’ interventions, oriented to inclusion, and developed by students under the creative direction of the primary researcher, also an artist-scholar of socially engaged art and public pedagogies. The research considers what goes into the making of museum audio guides; reflects on the social role of art museums, and explores the possible roles of artists in ‘speaking back to’ or ‘speaking with’ museum collections to add contemporary relevance and engagement. These considerations are of particular relevance given the current moment of increased museum activism, political polarization, and ecological uncertainties.
Embedding Interpretive Spaces into Art Exhibits: A Pathway to Meaningful Participatory Engagement View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Agnieszka Chalas
Visitor-centred interpretive planning strategies (e.g., in-gallery response stations, chalk walls, activity tables) are still rare in art museums where the white cube mode of exhibition display tends to dominate. Where present, such strategies have typically been set entirely aside from spaces where art is displayed or relegated to small side rooms within galleries due to the perception that they interfere with visitors’ unhampered art appreciation. Notwithstanding such a perception, we know that in the absence of supplemental information, art museums, particularly contemporary ones, can be alienating to audiences lacking specialized art knowledge. Embedding differing interpretive strategies throughout an art exhibition can, therefore, transform galleries into more welcoming and dynamic spaces that enrich both new and existing audiences’ experiences with art by providing them with opportunities to do something beyond viewing art and reading labels. To illustrate this claim, I present several different examples of interpretive spaces that have been developed at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG) in the recent past and contextualize them in the relevant interpretive planning literature. If art museums are to truly embrace their educational potential, they’ll need to ensure that learning and meaningful engagement are at the core of all the experiences they offer, not just their educational and public programs. In sharing KWAG’s examples, I, therefore, hope to inspire other art museum practitioners who are interested in re-conceptualizing the visitor experience in spaces where art is installed.
