Museums Seek to Lure, Then Lock In, Teenage Connoisseurs
HOOKED Samuel Tejada, 17 (pointing), and other members of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Teen Ambassador Group interpreting Picasso’s “Three Musicians.” CreditMark Makela for The New York Times
Walking past Ghirlandaio’s “Old Man With a Young Boy” at the Louvre over Christmas break, I listened as my 18-year-old son, Ethan, explained how the artist was among the first to portray eye contact within a portrait; how Leonardo used the color blue to convey distance; how Raphael was a favorite of the Medicis. At the Musée d’Orsay, I watched as my 16-year-old daughter, Maya, dragged Ethan over to Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe” — a painting they had both studied — and then debated its merits.
It wasn’t pride I felt so much as relief. Not only have my kids apparently absorbed what they learned in high school art history class, but they have also come to realize how engrossing museums can be. It looks as if they’ll be museumgoers when they grow up. Museums have become compelling to them rather than compulsory.
In a way, it’s easiest to take children to a museum when they’re too young to object. Once they become consumed by sports activities and phone screens, cultural organizations can be a tough sell. But seeing art with teenagers, or having them discover it on their own, is one of those parental milestones that make the heart swell.Photo
Prompts for a painting interpretation exercise. CreditMark Makela for The New York Times
It’s good to introduce the museumgoing habit early, even though visits will inevitably be cut short by weary legs, growling stomachs and limited attention spans. And it’s always a good idea to start with museums that offer eye candy, like the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, with its annual train show, or hands-on opportunities, like the Children’s Museum of Manhattan or the New York Hall of Science in Queens.
Museums have increasingly caught on to the idea that they need to lock in their visitors earlier. While they have long offered children’s programs — come for cookies and collage! — institutions all over the country are now devoting far more creative resources to targeting teenagers.
A 2014 survey of 220 museums by the Association of Art Museum Directors found that about a third had docent programs for teenagers, or teenage councils. Research by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance shows that children’s attendance at cultural institutions in southeastern Pennsylvania has risen by 17 percent since 2009 and now accounts for more than three million visits annually.
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Such efforts result not only from museums’ efforts to build patronage but also from their desire to make their institutions more up-to-date and accessible. “Teens are an important audience,” said Emily Schreiner, associate curator of education for family and community learning at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “The goal is not necessarily numbers through the door as it is a very gradual cultural shift, as people from all walks of life feel that they belong in the museum.”
The Philadelphia Museum recently set up a Teen Ambassador Group comprising 10 people who come to the museum every other week for a year to work on programming for their peers, culminating in an art exhibition. “By dint of our architecture and our location, there is an intimidation factor,” Ms. Schreiner said, referring to the museum’s imposing columns and lofty downtown site. “We want to break down those barriers to entry while still celebrating what we have to offer. We want to have teens helping to engage their community rather than us adults programming for them and hoping they show up.”
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Similar examples abound: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, all have some form of teenage council in which students learn about the museum, meet with staff members and sometimes give tours to people in their age group. Last year the Jewish Museum started offering free eight-year memberships to 13-year-olds who are recent bar or bat mitzvahs.
Some museums have tried to attract teenagers with a more laid-back social atmosphere. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum invites students to visit the galleries after hours over the course of five weeks; at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 15 teenage interns help plan an “After Dark” night for others their age. This month the Art Institute of Chicago invited 100 teenagers to spend 24 hours at the museum reimagining aspects of its operations, like the security officers’ uniforms and gallery benches. (The event also featured a midnight dance party, a caffeine bar and sunrise yoga.)Photo
A “Teens Take the Met!” event. CreditThe Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Teens Take the Met!” evening, in which dozens of cultural institutions also took part, attracted about 3,000 people, ages 13 through 18, for activities like designing a tote bag, making sculpture or dancing to a D.J. “We were shocked by how many came out on a Friday night,” said Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the Met’s chairman of education. “Young people need engaging creative spaces where they can be various parts of themselves.”
Some programs for teenagers are more overtly educational. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington teachespublic high school students about Holocaust history through a 14-week training course in the spring.
The New-York Historical Society has a Sunday morning program for high school students in which they pursue research themes with scholars like Eric Foner and Kenneth T. Jackson, of Columbia University, or the longtime Washington power broker Vernon Jordan. Mr. Foner assigned the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address to prepare students for a discussion on Lincoln.
Last fall the Museum of Modern Art started its second online course on the New York art scene for teenagers. (The first included trips to Brooklyn artists’ studios.) In Washington, the National Gallery of Art arranged for about 60 local teenagers to investigate El Greco’s work with Brian Baade, a conservator who teaches at the University of Delaware, in tandem with its recent retrospective on that artist. At the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the artist Barbara Kruger is working with high school juniors and seniors on a public-art project that addresses social justice, identity, race and gender.
In some cases, museums have lured young people with inventive technology. At the newly refurbished Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan, for example, teenagers have been particularly attracted to the Immersion Room, which allows visitors to design their own wallpaper and project it on the walls.
From a mini music video to photo shoots with friends, teenagers have shared images created in this space, especially on Instagram. “The new @cooperhewitt design museum in Manhattan, New York, is basically the unofficial #selfie museum,” one said, adding, “This place is so. much. fun.”
Even as my kids got older, I made a point of seeking out installations with some element of spectacle, like the Guggenheim Museum’s 2008Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective — featuring ascendant wolves and seven suspended white sedans — or its 2011-12 Maurizio Cattelan show, a virtual explosion of life-size wax human effigies and taxidermied animals floating throughout the rotunda. The Guggenheim building, of course, is a draw in itself because of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling architecture — I love how my daughter has come to casually refer to it as the Gugg.
I also remember the fun of taking my son on the No. 7 subway line to Queens for Katrin Sigurdardottir’s 2006 installation “High Plane V” at MoMA PS1, an Arctic topography of floating ice floes viewed by climbing a ladder and sticking your head through a hole. And at the Whitney Museum of American Art last summer, Ethan and I enjoyed pondering Jeff Koons’s plexiglass-encased vacuum cleaners, or what happens when his floating basketballs start to deflate.
Then there was our 2012 family outing to MoMA in Midtown to see Martha Rosler’s “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale,” where you could actually buy things. Maya made an offer on an oversize ceramic artichoke and got a real art-world lesson: It was out of her price range.
Correction: March 19, 2015
An article on Page F6 today about museum programs for teenagers misidentifies a museum. It is the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — not the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
fonte: @edisonmariotti #edisonmariotti
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/arts/artsspecial/museums-seek-to-lure-then-lock-in-teenage-connoisseurs.html?ref=artsspecial&_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/arts/artsspecial/museums-seek-to-lure-then-lock-in-teenage-connoisseurs.html?ref=artsspecial&_r=0
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