Smarthistory Workshop at the
Portland Art Museum (A Case Study)

Background

Recently, and with the support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Smarthistory partnered with the Portland Art Museum. Our visit was the brainchild of Tina Olsen, the Director of Education and Programs, who thought there might be value in creating Smarthistory-style conversations for the museum—and wanted to test out her theory. We in turn, saw this as an opportunity to bridge the gap that exists between art historians in higher education and those in the museum world. Thanks to a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, we worked closely with Tina to design and execute an intensive two-day workshop to help educators, curators and docents develop the skills needed to create and produce interpretive content in the form of conversation that focused on their rich permanent collection. By the end of the workshop, we had recorded content for twenty videos focused on works from their permanent collecton (videos at Portland Art Museum and Smarthistory). 

Goals

Our goals included working across museum departments (with expert and non-expert voices) and opening up interpretation to emotion and opinion—in essence modeling thoughtful and exploratory conversations to invite museum visitors to discover collection objects on their own. While we have a clear sense that Smarthistory videos are engaging and helpful for art history students and informal learners, we had no real sense of how and if they would be successful in a museum context or how they might be transformed by other museum professionals. We were also excited to have two non-Western curators amongst the participants; we have been very curious to understand how our conversations would play out with art that was not part of the Western tradition. So, this was an experiment—for both Smarthistory and for the Portland Art Museum—and no one was quite sure where it would leave us. We have already begun evaluating how successfully we achieved our goals and will continue in follow-up surveys and interviews.

Self-Publishing from the Education Department

It is clear to us that content experts at museums and universities are no longer dependent on centralized IT departments to create and distribute high-quality educational materials. We recognize that museum professionals in both education and curatorial departments don’t have the time and perhaps the confidence to learn new technologies unless they see first hand a substantial benefit. Video and audio production is still veiled in jargon and is viewed as an extremely expensive undertaking that is best left to IT departments and outside consultants. We took a different approach. Our workshop sought to empower the curatorial and education departments with conversational strategies and inexpensive easy-to-use equipment and software. Very quickly, curators were planning future recordings while after the first brief lesson, two educators were confidently editing audio while zooming and panning across still images.


For the full workshop syllabus - click here
Since this was new territory for all of us; we prepared carefully and even assigned preparatory “homework."

Homework 1: Materials to read and listen to about museum interpretation and conversation.

1. Rika Burnham, If you don't Stop, You don't See Anything, 1994
2. Peter Samis, Visual Velcro: Hooking the Visitor, Museum News, 2007
3. Nancy Proctor A Smarthistory.org Dialogue, MuseumMobile blog
4. Nancy Proctor Art is Hard: How Mobile Can Help, MuseumMobile blog
5. Beth Harris & Steven Zucker Modeling Conversation to Model Learning, Smarthistory blog

Homework 2: For our icebreaker we asked each workshop participant to bring in a reproduction of an object that had personal meaning to them—these also formed the basis of the first audio recording.

Homework 3: The homework also focused on museum interpretation and included example audios and videos from the Eastman House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Smarthistory and covered a wide range of styles. Some were long, some short, some were conversations while others were lectures and interviews. We asked - which do you think are most engaging, which the least? Can you catagorize by type?

1. Philippe de Montebello & Keith Christiansen Duccio di Buoninsegna's Madonna and Child
2. Eastman House videos
3. Metropolitan Museum of Art Cast in Bronze: French Sculpture, Renaissance to Revolution
4. Smarthistory: Beth Harris & Steven Zucker discuss Cassatt's Breakfast in Bed
5. Smarthistory: Beth Harris & Steven Zucker discuss Raphael's School of Athens