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What We May Be: Museums and the Implications of Special Programs
RONNA TULGAN OSTHEIMER Director of Education, Clark Art Institute
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Over the past ten years, many art museums have taken action to be “more relevant to more people,” as Nina Simon advises, in order to make museum work meaningful, powerful, and accessible to diverse communities. 1 Museum educators are often responsible for this effort within their institutions, designing programming for new audiences and actively considering how to serve groups that may not have visited in the past, as well as individuals who may be marginalized from mainstream society.
The practice and thinking around developing outreach programs for targeted audiences both reflects and shapes the field of museum education, dictating changes in programming and in the roles of educators. Who gets to decide which audiences to focus on? How do we adapt our practices to meet the needs of new audiences? What does all this mean to our profession and to the museums where we work?
Nine museum educators who are responsible for targeted outreach programs or are in positions to set policy about programming for particular groups convened for three days in May 2017 to consider these types of questions. The intent of the colloquium, What We May Be: Art Museums and the Implications of Special Programs, was not to serve as a forum for show-and-tell about various innovative programs, but instead to provide time to reflect critically on our practices and how programming for specialized audiences may change the definition of what it means to be a museum educator.
All the colloquium participants are passionate about their work and aware of how the field of museum education is changing. Each contributed an essay to this publication reflecting on different possibilities for how museums can be relevant to new audiences and what these programs may mean to our profession.
“Who Does Inclusion Exclude?: Disability and the Limitations of Models of Inclusion,” by Rebecca McGinnis, senior managing educator, accessibility, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, shares the Met’s history of programming for people who are blind or partially sighted and
FIG. 1
Museum Building, Clark Art Institute
considers the more recent focus on the goal and ethic of inclusion rather than access.
Emily Wiskera, manager of access programs, Dallas Museum of Art, discusses her experience developing a program for children who are on the autism spectrum and their families in “Museum as Sensory and Social Space: Autism Programming at the Dallas Museum of Art.” Wiskera describes the unique needs of this group and the very specialized practices designed to make the museum experience valuable and meaningful for this particular audience, as well as how the experience has helped her understand the concepts of equity and mission in new ways.
Veronica Alvarez, director of school and teacher programs, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), contributed the essay “Museums and English Learners: Inclusion versus Exclusion.” Alvarez focuses on how art museums are ideal environments for K–12 student English Learners and details the practices museums can adopt to support this kind of learning, including partnerships with schools and classroom teachers. Furthermore, she considers the fact that due to changing national demographics, this type of work is mandatory for museums if they want to stay relevant to their communities.
In “Taking It to the Streets: Engaging Our Neighborhood,” Karleen Gardner, director of learning innovation, Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Mia), writes about programs designed to engage Mia’s neighbors as a first step to building relationships and providing meaningful programming. Gardner describes a number of collaborative mural projects and how they provided a bridge between the museum and its neighbors, resulting in increased participation from people who live right around the museum but were not actually visiting.
Laurel Humble, associate educator, community, access, and school programs, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, describes the growth of the Meet Me at MoMA program into a more general focus on engaging with the elderly in her
essay “Evolution of a Focus on the Elderly.” Humble discusses why MoMA chooses to prioritize this audience and some of the issues this has brought up, and she describes the museum’s broader initiative for older adults, Prime Time.
Lindsay Catherine Harris, teen programs manager, Brooklyn Museum, considers how art museums, as places that explore human expression, are not only in an ideal position to provide safe spaces for people who may feel marginalized in mainstream society but may even have a responsibility to do so. “Creating Space by and for LGBTQ+ Youth of Color” discusses how the Brooklyn Museum has prioritized this initiative, focusing on how the LGBTQ Teen Night Planning Committee exemplifies this work.
In “Art, Experience, and Community: Learning and Engagement at the Saint Louis Art Museum before and after Ferguson,” Amanda Thompson Rundahl, director of learning and engagement, Saint Louis Art Museum, shares the historical racial makeup of the greater St. Louis area as a context to understand work the museum does, specifically in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014. The tragic event spurred conversations at the museum about whether or not staff should develop special programming in response.
Twyla Kitts, teacher programs educator, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), Richmond, writes about how the museum can address issues of social justice through teaching about art in “What Museums May Be: Crucibles for Reflection, Empathy, and Optimism,” and how this approach can help the museum be meaningful to different people in new ways. Kitts focuses on how museum education can help visitors consider what it means to be a citizen of the world.
As director of education for the Clark Art Institute (fig. 1), I share my experience developing a program for a very specialized
audience, adjudicated youth sentenced to participate in the program Responding to Art Involves Self Expression (RAISE). In “The RAISE Program at the Clark: Engaging with Humanity at an Art Museum,” I discuss how developing a program for this new and atypical audience stretches the boundaries of museum education practice and how this helped the Clark redefine its approach to programming.
It has been an honor to host the first of the Clark’s What We May Be colloquia and to serve as one of the editors of this important publication. This series of essays provides insights into the evolving field of museum education and the kind of thinking that is involved in educators’ day-to-day work. Together, the essays reflect a fierce dedication to the practice, a sense of the importance of and potential in the field, and how changes in museum education are indicative of changes happening in museums at large. I applaud my colleagues in the field for the integrity, creativity, personal commitment, and resilience that they bring to our work, elevating its importance for all. Maybe the answer to the question, What are the implications of special programs at art museums?, is that museum educators, by designing such programs, are also becoming agents of change.
