Art Gallery research

Have you heard of Art Babble? This is a fantastic site for webvideos produced by art museums. SFMoMa and MoMA are some of the key producers. I think it was launched not too long ago. Some excellent videos of artists in their studios, installation videos, and lectures by artists and experts at given museum. Great for brainstorming ideas for future videos with artists....

It's super-dooper. Beautifully set out and great range of institutions. I found this on it: an introduction to the coming year's programs at the AIC by their director - fab programs and a nice way to promote them! http://www.artbabble.org/video/art-institute-director-jim-cuno-introduces-500-ways-looking-modern

Funny title, interesting article. A good round up of (relatively) recent shifts in educational practice that have strong implications for learning in the museum. It's by Anna Cutler from the Tate, who gave one of the interviews in the 'Tate Encounters', posted by Sheona below.

I think what's good about this is the way she has taken on board the recent scholarship into teaching and learning and conceptualizes public and education programs in galleries through this without thinking that it is the same thing - she looks at what is unique and where the strengths lie.

I just posted this and now realise it's old news for you all, still the article is probably worth another highlight.

This recording is part of: Education Practice at Tate 1970-present Programme A Monday 23 February - Friday 27 February 2009 In considering how museums have significantly reconfigured their relationships with audiences over the last decade and given how Learning as a department carries a notable responsibility in developing audiences, this series of interviews with present and past members of Tate staff aims to create an understanding and account of how Education practice within Tate has historically evolved from information and explanation to interpretation, engagement to participation, informal knowledge to professional research. Questions to be considered in this programme in relation to Education practice are: * Since its inception what are the historical legacies of the original Education Department within the operation of Tate and more recently Tate Britain? * Where has Education been historically positioned and now? * What kind of agency does Education hold within the production and reproduction of knowledge within Tate? * What is its relationship to a research practice? * How does it configure its publics?

(It's a long interview, so I'm listening to it in the background whilst doing other things, which might mean I'm missing things...) But two things that stand out so far: she champions the position that quality and accessibility are not mutually exclusive; and she speaks of 'publics' (much as we speak of 'audiences', plural). Now, these might seem like self-evident and perhaps somewhat lofty aims, but what does it really mean? How do we embed these values/ideals in our programs? I think these are amongst our biggest challenges...

the interview is way too long but there are some good bits. She doesn't really offer any instruction about quality and accessibility not being mutually exclusive but just champions the cause. In fact there's a lot of cause championing and she says she has a fabulous team who help her out and do everything. She seems to be embedding scholarship in their discipline which seems like a good thing to me.

exhibition of history of photography of sculpture

interesting photography/sculpture themes

Presentation by Helene Illeris, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art and Visual Culture The Danish University of Education, at The Museum Council of Iceland's symposium on the educational role of museums, October 21, 2005, at the National Gallery of Art, Reykjavik, Iceland. NB It will be better to start looking at some of the other material first.

Unfortunately, couldn't view the link. Google said it couldn't process it, then offered my a plain HTML alternative, but this was blocked as unsafe content by the network. :-P

That was odd - it did that for me too just then. But whn I hit the 'download OK' button it downloaded fine.

I'll be very curious to see where the discussion leads us after Skin!

MoMA | Do You Know Your MoMA? 06/25/2010

Been travelling in the States. First to Washington to present the George Brown Goode Memorial Lecture at the Smithsonian (talk titled How Web 2.0 is Changing the Nature of Museum Work), then to the American Association of Museums Conference in Los Angeles (presentation titled The Museum's new website: transforming educational audiences). Here's my notes/impressions of the state of our sector.

lots of good ideas being circulated in these conferences

A US organisation that promotes access to art for the visually impaired - includes some good training materials/guidelines.

You might find this interesting, good summary of what's going on.

Really interesting - thanks, Francesca. The first 10 examples are well-established, widely-used (social media, blogs, mobile apps, flickr, etc), but it gets more intriguing as you read on and see the very creative ways museums are adapting these technologies to suit their collections. LACMA (home of the Rainn Wilson 'celebrity-takes-over-our-twitter-feed) and The Walker Art Centre are particularly good. The Walker have a photo booth at their party-oriented 'After Hours' nights, and the photos go directly to flickr - very clever and fun http://calendar.walkerart.org/afterhours/index.wac

Blog in response to a pretty damning article about the Brooklyn Museums community engagement or 'popularism' http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/arts/design/15museum.html?scp=1&sq=brooklyn%20museu

Jonathan found this website

new web site

Remember the talk we had from our US visitor regarding a theory of 'stages' of understanding? It's neatly summarised here, in an interesting article about writing for adult audiences. This whole website - Museum-Ed - is excellent. It collates museum education documents from various institutions (mostly US) and is a mine of information about conferences, training info, education guidelines, etc. And very easy to navigate :)

TED Talks In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning -- creating conditions where kids' natural talents can flourish.

Rhizome is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.