photograph by Taylor DabneyTell Me a Story: Museum Studies Seminar Exhibition will be on view from February 3 to May 13, 2016, at the Lora Robins Gallery of Design from Nature, University of Richmond Museums. The exhibition will feature approximately 20 works of art selected from the permanent collections of the University Museums’ Harnett Print Study Center and Harnett Museum of Art.
Students enrolled in this year’s seminar will focus on how museum visitors engage with works of art. To facilitate this interaction, the theme of storytelling will unite the selection of artworks, which date primarily from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and provide examples of various styles and media, with a range of subjects, including the human figure, landscape, still life, and abstraction.
However, instead of a usual exhibition display with labels and panels written by curators who provide background information about the works on view, visitors to Tell Me a Story will be creating content related to the artwork, in the form of storytelling that they provide. For example, a viewer in front of Jennifer Bartlett’s The Four Seasons: Autumn, (1990-1993) will see the following exhibition label next to the print: “A brown human skeleton, a set of dominoes, a scruffy dog, pieces of tartan, and two kings, a queen and a jack from a deck of cards, all laid out on a lush green lawn — what is going on in this print? Is the artist Jennifer Bartlett trying to tell you a story in this artwork? Or can you make up a story even better than what she intended?”
Exhibition visitors will be given prompts and tools to write stories, either fictive or autobiographical, inspired by the artwork. University students will study and enact ways to encourage visitors’ storytelling and to share their narrative creations both in the exhibition space and online. The exhibition will also feature a table with art supplies for people who would prefer to make a visual story rather than a textual one. By the end of the semester, the original artworks will be accompanied by the visitors' visual and narrative responses, demonstrating the contagious and vibrant nature of creativity.
As part of the class, University students will conduct several events and activities that will enable different demographics of museum visitors to engage with art through their own inventive storytelling. The students will organize “College Night,” an annual event at the museum for University of Richmond students; will teach a two-part class for students in Richmond’s Osher Living and Learning Institute for members ages 50+; and will coordinate a two-part class visit with a local k-12 school or service organization. Finally, in late spring the students will organize Family Day, a free event that is open to the public, during which the bulk of visitors’ responses to the exhibition will be on display either in the exhibition or online.
This approach to organizing an exhibition that continues to change after the official “opening” via visitor engagement is aligned with the museum industry’s relatively recent focus on participatory practices that enhance visitors’ ability to create personal relationships with objects in museums and to express their ideas about those objects, if they so choose. Essentially, these activities encourage visitors to adapt from being passive consumers to co-creators of their museum experience, while maintaining the societal and cultural function of museum. Participatory exhibitions and programs help manifest museum scholar Stephen E. Weil’s call for museums to change “from being about something to being for somebody.”
Organized by the University of Richmond Museums, the exhibition is curated by students in the spring 2016 Museum Studies Seminar and N. Elizabeth Schlatter, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions, who is also the professor for the 2016 Museum Studies Seminar.
Sunday, April 3, 2016, 1 to 3 p.m.
University Museums Family Day!, Lora Robins Gallery of Design from Nature, University Museums
Join us for a FREE! arts-centered family fun day with the exhibitions Massive: Large Rocks and Minerals from the Collection and Tell Me a Story: Museum Studies Seminar Exhibition, hands-on art activities, and refreshments
Sunday, April 3, 2016, 1:30 and 2:30 p.m.
Museum Story Time for Children, Lora Robins Gallery of Design from Nature
Reading from Amy Krause Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld’s book Duck! Rabbit! (1:30 p.m.) and Chalk by Bill Thompson (2:30 p.m.)
In conjunction with Family Arts Day
