Brooklyn Museum Eye Spy Guide
You’re inside the art gallery. Pictures on the wall, installations in the floor, text, audio guides, volunteers and other visitors surround you. A toddler nearby points at a painting and asks, “What’s that?”
In a recent blog post Brooklyn Museum wrote about an gallery guide they created for the stroller set. Based on a sturdy, thick-paged child’s block book, the museum’s Eye Spy guide helps little (and big) people look. The Eye Spy guide is specific to their Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea show.
My passion is to get people to galleries, museums, festivals – out to art. And while I bring audiences in, once they’re inside, the museum’s interpretation teams make the experience meaningful.
Here’s another kid-friendly example.
At specific locations, the Art Gallery of Ontario stocks a suitcase with activities related to the theme of the gallery section. The program is part of the AGO’s mandate to engage and inform, bring the art in the space to life through the family’s experience with it. A peek inside one revealed costumes … imagine running the halls in a cape and hat!
For the older gallery visitor … say, over 12 … what helps improve the experience? Friends, tours, text on the walls, audio guides? My favourite is the docent, the well-informed, polite, passionate volunteer gallery guide who, person-to-person, can explain the art. I like the real-time, real-life aspect of a tour guide. Others like to be left alone to look.
Maybe something, maybe nothing is needed to make your visit better. Perhaps your need changes each visit with your level of familiarity with the art. Just as repetition is key to communicators, choice seems to be crucial to art interpretation.
There are many types of learners, so too galleries and museums can provide a variety of methods to help audiences learn about the art.
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Here’s my interpretation tip to Picasso: He paints all perspectives at once. See from the top, the side, up, on an angle – (almost) each perspective is in the picture.
