Teaching and Learning with Museum Exhibitions: Innovations across the Disciplines

Colgate University Hamilton College Skidmore College University at Albany, State University of New York

Teaching & Learning with Museum Exhibitions: innovations across the DISCIPLINES Edited by Ian Berry Mimi Hellman Rachel Seligman

Teaching and Learning with Museum Exhibitions: Innovations across the Disciplines is a project of The Teagle Foundation grant Teaching and Learning with Museum Exhibitions: An Inter-Institutional Approach.

Published in 2020 by The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher.

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery Skidmore College 815 North Broadway Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 518 580 8080 www.skidmore.edu/tang © 2020 The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College All artwork is copyright the artists.

All recorded conversations have been condensed and edited.

Grant Participants

Colgate University Hamilton College Skidmore College University at Albany, State University of New York Editors

Ian Berry, Mimi Hellman, and Rachel Seligman Publication Project Manager

Rebecca McNamara Design

Claudia Brandenburg, Language Arts Printer

Shapco Teagle logo design

Jean Tschanz-Egger

Photography

Courtesy Thomas Bangsted and Marc Straus Gallery Owen Barensfeld Courtesy Frédéric Brenner Erin Covey Bryan Berlin Edwards Arthur Evans John Bentham David Broda Gerard H. Gaskin Jim Gipe and Stephen Petegorsky Daniel Goodwin Zheng Hu Sarah Kunze Courtesy Jungjin Lee Dan Lubbers Jason Ohlberg Andrzej Pilarczyk Janelle Rodriguez Stefano Scatà/agefotostock Cindy Schultz Courtesy Fazal Sheikh Courtesy Studio K.O.S. and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul

6 Welcome Ian Berry 8 Introduction to the Teagle Project Mimi Hellman and Rachel Seligman 24 Reflections on the Teagle Project Katherine Alcauskas, Daniel Goodwin, Elizabeth Marlowe, and Rachel Seligman, Moderated by Mimi Hellman

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Promising Practices for Exhibition-Based Pedagogies Writing in the Museum Michael Marx Exhibition Interventions Owen Barensfeld and Siobhan Hart Curating for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning Katherine Alcauskas and Rachel Roe-Dale STEM in the Museum Katherine Brown, Jennifer Cholnoky, and Rachel Seligman Exhibiting and Teaching Challenging Material Nurcan Atalan-Helicke and Rebecca McNamara

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Object Lessons Disruption as a Productive Teaching Tool Petra Watzke Illuminate Something Invisible Daniel Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild Pairing & Sharing in the University Museum: Making Students the Experts Elizabeth Marlowe Multi-Course Collaborations and Their Benefits for Students and Faculty Jenna Reinbold and Timothy A. Byrnes

Raiding the Museum: Developing Visual Literacy through Interpreting Museum Objects Robert Knight Writing with All Five Senses Janna Urschel Psychological Principles in the Museum Alexandra List Choreography as Seeing Jason Ohlberg Augmented Discourse: Connecting Exhibitions to Curriculum through Technology Nicholas West

98 In Conversation: Studio K.O.S. Angel Abreu, Rick Savinon, and Susan E. Cahan 108 Directors Dialogue Tracy L. Adler, Ian Berry, Anja Chรกvez, and Corinna Ripps Schaming, Moderated by Tom Shapiro

118 Appendix A: Exhibitions 122 Appendix B: Courses 124 Contributor Biographies

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welcome It is an honor to present this culminating publication of the three-year project Teaching and Learning with Museum Exhibitions: An InterInstitutional Approach. In this document, we are pleased to share a sampling of outcomes, provocations, and ideas from the campuses of Skidmore College, Colgate University, Hamilton College, and the University at Albany, State University of New York. During the past three years at our four institutions, faculty teaching 291 courses across forty disciplines—from American Studies to Dance to Geosciences to Philosophy—developed exhibition-based assignments for a total of 5,839 students. The following pages include reflections and stories from many of these courses.

This kind of work only happens if all participants decide to commit, stay the course, take risks, and work together as we enter into new territory by experimenting with new ways of teaching. The level of commitment, good faith, and collegiality over the course of the project has been phenomenal.

Over 140 colleagues from 57 colleges and universities across the country joined us for the concluding conference on June 21–22, 2019. Participants traveled to Skidmore College, in upstate New York, from California, Illinois, Wyoming, and elsewhere around the country, joining our nearby colleagues from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire,

New Jersey, and Vermont and our neighbor institutions in Albany, Williamstown, and Schenectady, New York. We began the event with an inside look at some of the work done by our faculty and students at Skidmore, Colgate, Hamilton, and the University at Albany. During the opening showcase and reception, the museum was electric with diverse, innovative projects displayed in spaces throughout the Tang Teaching Museum, along with a special demonstration by the explosive Streb Extreme Action dance company.

The conference included different formats and spaces for conversations, allowing multiple points of entry. We wanted to inspire participants to return to their home institutions feeling energized by a renewed sense of purpose and with ideas for new things to try in their communities. Our keynote dialogue with Dean of the Tyler School of Art and Architecture Susan E. Cahan and artists Angel Abreu and Rick Savinon from Studio K.O.S. offered just those kinds of inspirational lessons and ideas. Thanks to them and also to Tom Shapiro, founder of Cultural Strategy Partners, who joined us to moderate the concluding dialogue between the four museum directors and who offered his own take on the distinctive value of college and university museums.

The catalytic spark for this three-year program was a grant from the Teagle Foundation. We offer

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our greatest thanks to all at Teagle and especially to their program director, Loni Bordoloi Pazich, for their generous support and trust in our model of interdisciplinary teaching in museums.

Thanks to my colleagues here at Skidmore, who shepherded that relationship and supported us throughout, especially former Dean of the Faculty/Vice President for Academic Affairs Beau Breslin, Director of Foundations and Corporate Relations Barry Pritzker, current Dean of the Faculty/Vice President for Academic Affairs Michael Orr, and President Philip A. Glotzbach.

Their advocacy for experimental teaching and learning with museums has been essential to the success of the Teagle Project.

The Teagle Project was directed by faculty leaders at each of the four host institutions, and they deserve our most heartfelt thanks for providing logistical, conceptual, and emotional support throughout the project. Thanks to Robert Knight at Hamilton College, Daniel Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild at the University at Albany, Elizabeth Marlowe at Colgate University, and Mimi Hellman here at Skidmore. It was wonderful to have my museum director colleagues with us every step of the way: thanks to Tracy L. Adler, Johnson-Pote Director, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College; Anja Chávez, Director of University Museums, Longyear Museum of Anthropology/ Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University; and

Corinna Ripps Schaming, Interim Director/ Curator, University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York. May this be the first of many collaborations.

Thanks to the entire team at the Tang Teaching Museum, who helped make this event and so many events during the course of the project happen. Thank you especially to Olivia Cammisa-Frost, Molly Channon, Sophie Heath, Michael Janairo, Annelise Kelly, Eric Kuhl, Jessica Lubniewski, Patti Sopp, Jean TschanzEgger, Tom Yoshikami, Cynthia Zellner, and the great kelly ward, as well as our sound maestro Frank Moskowitz. Thanks to Jane Cole ’21 for compiling contributor biographies. Thanks to Claudia Brandenburg of Language Arts for the elegant design of this journal and to the many photographers whose work is reproduced. Special thanks to Tang Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator Rachel Seligman, who worked tirelessly to make all parts of this ambitious project a reality with great enthusiasm, energy, and wisdom, and to Associate Curator Rebecca McNamara, who led the charge in editing and managing this publication. And to our leader, Mimi Hellman: Mimi is the first Charlotte Lamson Clarke ’53 Chair in Art History at Skidmore and our project director for Teaching and Learning with Museum Exhibitions: An InterInstitutional Approach. Mimi led us with inspiring rigor and grace, and we couldn’t be more grateful.

Ian Berry Dayton Director, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College

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Introduction to the Teagle Project Mimi Hellman Associate Professor of Art History, Skidmore College, and Teagle Project Director Rachel Seligman Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College

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An Inter-Institutional Approach to Exhibition-Based Teaching Our premise: sustained collaboration among museum staff and faculty members at four educational institutions can yield a richer understanding of the potential of exhibition-based pedagogy than a single academic community can generate on its own. During the Teagle Project, a three-year grant funded by the Teagle Foundation, professors in 40 disciplines developed a wide range of learning experiences in 291 courses that enrolled a total of 5,839 students.1 Classes worked with various exhibitions at their campus museums during five consecutive semesters beginning in spring 2017 (see Appendix A). In spring 2018, each of the four institutions presented a portion of This Place, an exhibition of photographs by an international group of twelve artists who made work in Israel and the West Bank between 2009 and 2012. This exhibition, with its varied approaches, formed a diverse and fragmented portrait of the region, alive to its rifts and paradoxes—making it an ideal focus for educational engagement on our four campuses.

This volume presents key findings from the Teagle Project, predominantly through documentation of a two-day public conference held at the Tang Teaching Museum in June 2019. The following introduction provides an overview of the collaboration as a whole.

To launch our ambitious endeavor, a leadership team composed of museum staff and faculty members participated in a three-day study trip to New York City that was modeled on an annual faculty seminar program offered by the Tang Teaching Museum. Our discussions focused on how different types of display settings construct narratives about history, place, and identity, and how museums can foster teaching and learning across the disciplines.

We saw This Place at the Brooklyn Museum and met with the exhibition’s initiator, photographer Frédéric Brenner. We also explored how display strategies shaped particular ideas and experiences at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Tenement Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the High Line, the National

September 11 Memorial and Museum, and the African Burial Ground.

During the following three academic years, designated faculty liaisons worked with museum colleagues to provide faculty members with information sessions, pedagogy workshops, individual consultation, and stipends to support the development of assignments based on a variety of exhibitions.2 Some assignments considered an exhibition as a whole; many focused on selected elements. Some instructors focused directly on the subject matter or visual attributes of artworks, while others treated them as points of departure for studying thematically related topics. Still others used artworks to catalyze creative expression or to strengthen basic academic skills, such as visual observation or oral presentation. A few took the museum itself as a subject by examining curatorial strategy, marketing, or educational programming.

Exhibition-based teaching took place in courses at all curricular levels and involved classes that varied in size from twenty to one hundred.

Courses at Colgate, Hamilton, and Skidmore were for undergraduates; some of those at the University at Albany included graduate students.

Most assignments involved more than one gallery visit and played out over two or more weeks; a few classes worked with an exhibition for an entire semester. Students produced a wide range of projects including short stories, personal reflections, poems, oral presentations, research papers, blog posts, exhibition wall labels and audio guides, photographs, drawings, and dances. Most engaged in some kind of group work, from informal discussion or peer-review exercises to sustained collaboration. At the end of each semester, instructors submitted brief reports summarizing the goals, methods, and outcomes of their assignments. These were posted on a password-protected blog to which all project participants had access.

This Place alone inspired learning experiences in more than sixty courses across more than twenty disciplines (see Appendix B), and all four schools hosted field trips so that faculty and students could see the iterations on other campuses. We chose This Place as the shared

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exhibition because it is artistically compelling, multidisciplinary in its themes, relevant to real-world problems, and far too complex to be explained from any single perspective. Some members of our campus communities questioned its scope, which included no Israeli or Palestinian artists. Some assumed that the photographs expressed fixed ideological positions.

However, the project leaders believed that the artworks—as well as their larger circumstances of production and distribution—were open to multiple, even contradictory interpretations and regarded their complexity as an ideal basis for rigorous, nuanced academic inquiry. In the end, the many professors who chose to engage with This Place found that it fostered active, productive learning.

Over the course of our three-year experiment, faculty participants reported that teaching with exhibitions energized class dynamics,

encouraged curiosity and creativity, and opened up new perspectives on their course material.

Almost all expressed interest in working more extensively with exhibitions in the future. The project leaders came to see our endeavor not as a quest for “best” practices, which implies the existence of universally valid models, but rather as an ongoing process of testing, sharing, and adapting a variety of practices in order to determine what seemed promising for each campus community.

Below is a summary of our most salient findings

regarding museum practices, outreach to faculty, and pedagogical approaches, as well as the overall benefits and challenges of exhibition-based teaching and learning.

Museum Practices There are many ways, both large and small, that academic museums can address curricular goals more purposefully through their curatorial practices and public programming. These include: Curate for multidisciplinary engagement.

In principle, any exhibition can support numerous modes of inquiry. For instructors who do not routinely teach at museums, the potential is most evident when artworks suggest broad issues that resonate across numerous disciplines.

Exhibitions presented during the Teagle Project that inspired especially diverse pedagogical engagement included Embodied at the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University, which explored representations of the human body from diverse cultures and historical periods; Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day at the Wellin Museum at Hamilton College, which reflected on the artist’s Native American heritage as well as broader issues of race, sexuality, religion, and gender; Like Sugar at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, which confronted the fraught history and contemporary meanings of an everyday substance; and Carrie Schneider: Rapt at the University Art Museum at the University at Albany, which drew attention to women as authors and readers.

Co-curate with faculty. Substantive faculty involvement in exhibition making can foster their long-term engagement with the museum and help to generate widespread pedagogical interest. At Skidmore, a curator at the Tang Teaching Museum developed Like Sugar with a professor of English, and Sixfold Symmetry: Pattern in Art and Science with a professor of mathematics. In each case, a team of additional faculty members from different disciplines provided both ongoing feedback during planning stages and exhibition content.

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Encourage exhibition interventions. Inviting

classes to create exhibition content (such as new wall texts, brochures, or audio guides) or present critical responses in spaces adjacent to the galleries enables faculty and students to become active interlocutors rather than passive consumers of exhibition narratives. This can help to mitigate the perception that museums are elitist spaces and that curators, artists, and art historians are privileged arbiters of meaning.

Provide special access. Opportunities to interact with curators as well as visiting artists and scholars can incentivize and enrich pedagogical engagement with exhibitions. Ideally, such encounters emphasize diverse, multidisciplinary perspectives; explore alternative approaches to the material on display; and offer behind-the-scenes insights into exhibition planning and programming. They can be especially effective when classes meet privately with museum staff or visiting speakers, and when faculty and students serve as co-organizers or moderators of public events.

Document and publicize. Building reposito-

ries of sample assignments, student work,

and other material is important for longitudinal assessment and as inspiration for new initiatives. Publicizing pedagogical opportunities and narratives of innovation keeps the vitality of the museum visible amid competing institutional priorities.

Faculty Outreach Practices Teaching is shaped by a host of disciplinary, institutional, and logistical pressures. Stipends can incentivize the development of new learning experiences, but multiple tactics are needed to inspire and sustain museum-based teaching over the long term. Here are some that we found to be particularly effective: Plan ahead. Promote future exhibitions well

before instructors finalize their course offerings for the corresponding time periods. Even when exhibition checklists are not yet final, sharing general information and examples of possible content with faculty as early as possible opens up more time for faculty to contemplate ways to incorporate exhibitions into their syllabi.

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Offer various entry points. Send personalized

emails to instructors that link upcoming exhibitions with their teaching interests. Offering individual consultation with a museum staff member or faculty liaison is well worth the time commitment. Organize group brainstorming sessions where colleagues can hear about exhibition content and promising teaching strategies. When a show is being installed, host a preview for those who are interested in teaching with it. Support course planning and delivery with readily accessible online resources.

Start with existing learning goals. Let each professor’s knowledge and student learning goals be the starting points for developing assignments. Goals could involve discipline-specific knowledge and/or basic academic skills. Assure instructors that museum-based teaching does not necessarily mean acquiring new kinds of expertise that they do not have the time or inclination to develop. We have found that when encouraged to lead with their strengths, many colleagues end up venturing into new terrain.

Provide examples. Sample assignments

can be pivotal for helping instructors move

from general interest in an exhibition to workable plans for teaching with it. Models can transcend disciplines: an anthropologist’s assignment about close looking, for example, might inspire a biologist who also seeks to strengthen visual acuity.

Support accessible methods. Impact does not

necessarily correlate with novelty or complexity.

For those new to museum-based teaching, the most feasible, effective class activity might be an exhibition tour planned in collaboration with the curator or a simple exercise like freewriting or conversing in a foreign language. Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a classic technique among museum educators, can be transformative for professors who feel unequipped to discuss artworks. By asking students to describe what they see, support their points with visual evidence, and then look even more closely, VTS fosters close observation, respectful listening, and group cohesion.

Engage the core curriculum. Incorporating exhibitions into first-year seminars and required general-education courses can re-energize teaching methods that may have become

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habitual. Further, bringing large numbers of students into the campus museum early in their college careers helps them to discover that it’s a welcoming place open to all members of the community.

Cultivate allies. Faculty members who are

already engaged with the museum through teaching, curatorial projects, or official liaison roles are well-positioned to bring other colleagues into the process. Find common ground with other institutional entities (centers for teaching or writing, the library, etc.) that offer programming for faculty or students. Invite members of the administration to introduce exhibition-related events or to attend special tours that highlight pedagogical initiatives.

new to exhibition-based teaching, it can be tempting to let museum colleagues take sole responsibility for leading tours and discussions. But working together to define learning goals and to deliver a class experience is more sustainable for museum staff and more empowering for faculty. It also models collaboration for students and affirms that exhibitions can be understood from various perspectives.

Pedagogical Practices Over the course of the Teagle Project, the effectiveness of certain teaching goals and strategies became especially evident across multiple courses and disciplines: Skill building. The subject matter or broad

themes of an exhibition can be a rich basis for assignments, but those are not the only options. Many types of artworks can be used to strengthen basic academic abilities such as visual literacy, critical thinking, creative expression, writing, research, foreign language proficiency, oral presentation, and teamwork.

Quantitative literacy might seem like a more elusive goal, but it can be addressed through the visual properties of objects.

Public-facing projects. Student engagement is especially strong when assignments generate materials or performances that are presented within the gallery or in other public spaces on campus. Whether students are creating wall texts, audio guides, dances, or their own artworks or preparing gallery talks or poetry recitations, they become more committed, enthusiastic learners when their work is shared beyond the classroom.

Multiple gallery visits. It is productive to build

Meta-cognitive awareness. Exhibitions

at least two exhibition visits into an assignment. This provides an opportunity for students to become accustomed to the gallery space, to absorb the material more fully, and to consider how their understanding changes from one visit to the next.

construct particular narratives, most notably through the selection and juxtaposition of objects and the language in wall texts. Examining curatorial choices with students—both what they reveal and what they avoid or obscure—can be a basis for considering how particular goals and methods shape knowledge in their course discipline. This fosters more reflective, integrative involvement in the learning process.

Collaboration between museum staff and faculty. Especially when instructors are

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of environment, self, and others that cannot be achieved through screen-based learning and interaction.

Belonging. When classes from different depart-

ments work with the same exhibition, it can generate a sense of shared purpose that extends beyond the gallery space. Faculty who participate in museum initiatives often report feeling more nurtured and engaged as educators. For students, feeling welcome in their campus museum—not just as visitors, but as participants—can deepen their sense of belonging within the academic community as a whole.

Visibility. Evident involvement by professors

Benefits and Challenges Faculty engagement with a campus museum can yield diverse, creative modes of teaching and learning and can position the museum as an integral part of the academic community.

Benefits include: A new kind of energy. Being in the museum is

a very different spatial, intellectual, and behavioral experience for students accustomed to a classroom, laboratory, or studio. Especially when it is acknowledged and discussed, this change in location can heighten students’ attention, receptivity to new ideas, and self-awareness as learners.

Productive discomfort. The unfamiliarity of

the museum can be beneficial, but it can also make it an uncomfortable space. This is an opportunity to talk about the educational value of curiosity, uncertainty, risk taking, and collaboration. Faculty model these values for their students when they try new teaching methods and tap the expertise of museum staff.

and students makes the educational mission of a campus museum more visible to visitors from within and outside of the academic community. When the galleries are animated by active learning—class discussions, students working on assignments, student-authored wall texts, and more—it can enhance the museum’s standing and leverage as a vital part of a larger institutional mission.

Building a culture of museum-based teaching and learning across the disciplines takes time, resources, and a broad consensus that it is a worthy endeavor. Although the circumstances of museums at large public institutions are very different from those at small liberal arts colleges, shared challenges include: Supporting STEM. Faculty in the arts and

Embodied experience in shared space.

humanities are more likely to engage with exhibitions than those in the social and natural sciences.

Bringing science faculty into the museum is not simply a matter of adding new material to existing curricula. It entails a shift in educational paradigms and institutional culture that requires imagination, persistence, and small steps over time.

Exhibitions encourage us to slow down and pay attention. Although electronic devices can be integral to museum experiences, many students and faculty find that embodied, multisensory, collective engagement with carefully arranged material objects fosters an awareness

Working with challenging material. Every academic community has its own thresholds for controversy, which may change over time in response to various factors. When is it educationally productive for a campus museum to feature

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a potentially problematic artist or subject? If an exhibition involves challenging issues, should instructors take responsibility for addressing them even if they extend beyond the course content? Our experience with This Place suggests that campus museums are uniquely positioned to support inclusive, rigorous, respectful discussions of such questions and to approach challenging material in ways that are proactive rather than reactive.

Resource allocation. As interest in exhibition-

based teaching grows, museum staffs spend more time working with individual instructors, hosting workshops, maintaining online resources, leading class sessions, and helping students prepare public-facing projects (editing wall texts, supervising performance rehearsals, etc.). Sustaining such work over the long term may require additional personnel or changes in the definitions of roles.

Administrative support. The many benefits of exhibition-based pedagogy can be fully realized only if they are recognized by institutional leaders and accounted for in criteria and policies related to hiring, teaching responsibilities, and advancement in rank. A robust culture of museum-based education can become a distinctive element of a college’s or university’s mission and an asset in the recruitment and retention of faculty, museum staff, and students.

The ultimate goal of the Teagle Project is not only to embed exhibition-based pedagogy more deeply within the curricula of the four participating institutions, but also to promote its value within the higher-education community more broadly. Accordingly, this volume is designed to be a resource and guide for museum staff, faculty members, and administrators who seek to expand the ways in which their campus museums contribute to teaching and learning across the disciplines.

This volume presents a broad range of ideas and strategies that have shaped our work during the Teagle Project. In the “Object Lessons” section, project participants share specific assignments. In “Promising Practices

for Exhibition-Based Pedagogies,” conference roundtable facilitators share lessons from their discussions on particular challenges: supporting writing courses and STEM courses, curating for interdisciplinary engagement, facilitating student interventions in exhibitions, and working with challenging material. We also provide edited transcripts of three panel discussions from the conference: an introductory reflection on the Teagle Project by some of the project leaders; a keynote conversation with artists Angel Abreu and Rick Savinon from Studio K.O.S., moderated by curator and scholar Susan E. Cahan; and a conversation between the four museum directors, moderated by Tom Shapiro. We hope that our experiences will serve as inspiration for others.

1 Exhibition-based teaching under the auspices of the Teagle grant began in spring 2017 and continued each semester through spring 2019. Courses represented in the project are based in the following disciplines: Africana Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, Arabic, Archaeology, Art History, Arts Administration, Asian Studies, Biology, Communication/Journalism, Computer Science, Dance, Documentary Studies, Education Studies, English (literature), English (writing), Environmental Studies, French, Gender/Women’s Studies, Geology/Geosciences, German, Health and Human Physiological Sciences, History, International Affairs, Jewish Studies, Management and Business, Mathematics, Media and Film Studies, Music, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, Religious Studies, Social Work, Sociology, Spanish/Hispanic Studies, Studio Art, and Theater.

2 The leadership team consisted of the following individuals. At Colgate University: Faculty Liaison Elizabeth Marlowe (Associate Professor of Art and Art History and Museum Studies) with Anja Chávez (Director of University Museums) and Nicholas West (Picker Art Gallery Curator of Collections). At Hamilton College: Faculty Liaison Robert Knight (Associate Professor of Studio Art) with Tracy L. Adler (Johnson-Pote Director), Katherine Alcauskas (Collections Curator and Exhibitions Manager), and Michelle Reynolds (Curatorial and Programming Coordinator) at the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art. At Skidmore College: Project Director Mimi Hellman (Associate Professor of Art History) with Ian Berry (Dayton Director) and Rachel Seligman (Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator) at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. At the University at Albany, State University of New York: Faculty Liaisons Daniel Goodwin (Associate Professor of Studio Art) and Edward Schwarzschild (Associate Professor of English) with Corinna Ripps Schaming (Interim Director/Curator), Darcie Abbatiello (Registrar), Berly Brown (Curatorial Assistant), and Naomi Lewis (Exhibit and Outreach Coordinator) at the University Art Museum.

Installation view, This Place, February 1–May 20, 2018 Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University

Installation view, This Place, February 10–June 10, 2018 Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College

Installation view, This Place, February 3–April 22, 2018 The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College

Installation view, This Place, February 1–April 7, 2018 University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York

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Reflections on the Teagle Project

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Katherine Alcauskas Collections Curator and Exhibitions Manager, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College Daniel Goodwin Associate Professor of Studio Art and Teagle Project Faculty Liaison, University at Albany Elizabeth Marlowe Associate Professor of Art and Art History and Museum Studies and Teagle Project Faculty Liaison, Colgate University Rachel Seligman Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College Moderated by Mimi Hellman Associate Professor of Art History, Skidmore College, and Teagle Project Director

Mimi Hellman: The intention of this panel is to create a conceptual framework for the rest of the conference, to raise some questions, and to tell you a little bit about the work that’s been done on all four campuses over the last three years.

The Teagle Foundation funded us to work together: we are Hamilton, Colgate, Skidmore, and University at Albany faculty and museum staff collaborating with one another to figure out how to develop new practices in exhibition-based teaching and learning across the disciplines. At many college and university museums, this might sound familiar. It’s not necessarily unusual to get the art historians into the museum. It may be natural to see artists in the museum. But how do you get the physicists into the museum?

How do you get the sociologists? How do you get the biologists? How do you get the dancers?

Moreover, how do you sustain multidisciplinary pedagogies? Especially with exhibitions, which are, by nature, ephemeral things, how can faculty teach regularly at their campus museum when the material is always changing? It’s not necessarily realistic to invent completely new assignments and completely new course units with every new exhibition.

I’d like to start with a question about how teaching and learning in museum spaces is different from teaching and learning in other educational spaces—the space of the art, dance, or music studio, the space of the science lab, or the space of the chalk-and-talk classroom setup.

Rachel Seligman: I’ve been at the Tang Teaching Museum making exhibitions with faculty since 2011, and I think a lot about how what happens in the museum space is different—about what makes it distinctive. There are a number of ways to answer that question. Certainly, the spatial difference of a museum, the very fact that the museum is not a hierarchical space in the way that a classroom is hierarchical is an important factor. It sets up a different dynamic between the people in the room, the people who engage together, the faculty member and the students, or the faculty member and the students and a member of the museum staff.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about over the course of the Teagle Project is the way that, because the museum space is a public space, students who we engage in the process of generating content as part of our exhibitions have a

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very different relationship to the work that they’re doing—to the research, to the scholarship, to the writing or presenting, in whatever form that might be—than they do to the papers they’re writing for a class unrelated to the museum, which may only be read by their professors. I’m interested in the way that, in the space of the museum, students can be more than consumers of knowledge, they can also be producers of knowledge. Being responsible for conveying information to a general public creates a different kind of learning.

Lastly, I think that it’s a space where students can learn in different ways and learn skills that are broad reaching and not necessarily contentbased—the kind of broader skill building we talk a lot about, especially when we’re answering that question about how we get the physics folks in the museum or the biology folks in the museum. We’re thinking about the ways that, in a museum, you can work on public-speaking skills, on collaboration, on group work, things like that, in a real-world context. There are a lot of ways in which moving into the space of the museum really does change student learning and can change teaching in significant ways.

Elizabeth Marlowe: I wonder if there is a way to think about museum spaces as different from classroom spaces because it’s easier to see how a narrative has been put together there. It’s not hard to get students to see that these objects have been placed in a sequence, and that these labels are short, and whoever wrote them surely knew much, much more. The fact that there are only seventy-five words available means those words have been very carefully constructed. I see it as a space where it’s easier to get students to think critically about the production of knowledge than I have been able to do with them in the classroom, where my authority and the authority of the readings that they’re doing or the authority of the images on the screen somehow feel less tenuous than the narrative that’s constructed in the space of a museum. That’s what excites me about teaching in museums. And ultimately, that’s what I want my students to be able to get out of any engagement we have in a museum space—to be able to critically unpack how this narrative has been put together.

Katherine Alcauskas: We have found the space of the museum helps students connect a variety of ideas

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that they’re grappling with in class. When you go into the museum and you see a variety of objects side-by-side, it helps students make connections.

“Oh, three weeks ago we were talking about X. And now I can see how that plays into this.” I think maybe the visual experience also plays into that ability to connect different types of thoughts and different lessons throughout the semester.

Daniel Goodwin: And there’s a temporal aspect to teaching in a museum space, too. It’s about slowness. In the museum, there’s a pace you can accomplish that you can’t really get away with in the studio or classroom. It has to do with a very slow and close and more rigorous critical analysis in front of a work that has a certain level of completion and distinction you can’t do with a slide, you can’t do with projection, and you can’t even do with the work that the student made twenty minutes ago. And you have a staff of pros at the museum who can help you navigate that slow unpacking.

MH: Let’s talk a little more about this idea that there’s an embodied encounter with objects in a space that feels very different, looks different, has different protocols, has some rules that are different from the rules in a lab or the rules in a dance studio. What is it about the particularity of that slowed-down, heightened attention in this potentially unfamiliar space? We have lots of students who haven’t grown up going to museums. Very often our students are in the museum for the first time when they’re with us in a class.

DG: We have 18,000 students at the University at Albany. And probably a small fraction of them ever tripped through the museum. Many do, but 18,000 is a lot of different life experiences. My colleague Corinna Ripps Schaming, director of the University Art Museum, tells a great story about encountering a student who said, “Oh, I didn’t realize it was free,” as the reason she hadn’t made it into the museum. There are challenges and invisible barriers everywhere.

We don’t have a teaching museum. We have a comprehensive research university, and it’s a

different kind of space. A lot of students feel like, “This does not concern me, necessarily. That’s an art thing. I’m doing this other thing.” Crossing the disciplines is the biggest challenge.

KA: Another thing about a museum space is it encourages creativity, so that being surrounded by artwork encourages students to think a little bit more dynamically or answer in a little more radical way than they might in the traditional classroom. For example, we have a sociology professor who doesn’t teach with our exhibitions but uses our programming space every time it’s available, because she finds that just moving her course outside of the classroom into the creative space of the museum changes the dynamic. Students who don’t typically speak, speak up. Maybe others, perhaps because they’re intimidated by the space or for other reasons, don’t feel it’s their space and don’t speak up as much.

RS: I think that’s true also for those who come into the museum to use exhibitions. That is one of the great truths of changing spaces.

Different students learn differently. Some students’ learning styles are better suited to a gallery, where maybe the hierarchy has shifted and they’re seated in a circle instead of rows, or whatever it might be.

But let’s go back to the ideas of slowing down and of the difference in being in a space with original objects. Because our students are used to digital platforms for viewing images and visual materials, and they view them at an incredible speed: they look and swipe and swipe and swipe.

We all do this now. We’re all looking at so much material all the time. And we’re looking at it very rapidly and making decisions about things very rapidly.

The thing I love so much about being in the museum space and engaging with objects is not only that it feels like you have permission to slow down, and you can build your assignment around that, but also, it’s a moment to say there is value in the physical thing. There is value in the tangible object. Its scale, its texture—these things are important to the object and, in the

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larger sense, are important to living in the real world. They’re important when navigating the world. And that gets lost when we spend so much time navigating the world with a tiny screen.

KA: I think that, as well, having a physical object helps some students map more conceptual thoughts onto things—they seem to somehow be able to grasp the physical in a different manner.

And so, they are able to work through some of the concepts they’ve been learning about and reading about with the physical object in front of them.

DG: I have to say, that exercise that we did at the Tang on one of our earliest trips to the Tang’s print study room, we stole, of course.

MH: That was the whole idea!

DG: It was a writing exercise, with different levels of reveal about the history and meaning of an object. We’re going to experiment with that model. Corinna and I are team-teaching a freshman seminar where we’re going to do that exercise across an entire semester with the same object to really slow it down.

MH: I love that, and it leads me to ask about discomfort. We have many faculty report things like, “My students were so much more talkative.

Students who don’t talk in the classroom talk at the museum. It was energizing. It was such a change of scene. It was great.” The majority of the feedback that we get seems to be along those lines.

But it could be that you’re not a student accustomed to being in museums, you don’t know what the museum rules are, and human beings don’t really like change all that much most of the time. Just being in an unfamiliar space, being uncomfortable in your body, because you’re not behind your desk anymore, and you’re not on your device, that can feel scary, right? It’s also scary for faculty who are not in their familiar space, either.

EM: It was something we grappled with a lot when thinking about how to bring faculty in to teach

with This Place in particular. Because in addition to faculty discomfort with the idea of Art with a capital A, we also had faculty who said, “I don’t know anything about the history of photography,” and others who said, “I don’t want to go anywhere near the Israel-Palestine issue. It’s politically fraught. Is this going to blow up on our campus? Are we inviting problems?”

We ended up deciding to address that at Colgate by developing the Pair & Share model.

The idea was simply to empower students: Look, you’re taking a class on environmental justice. You’re taking a class on religion and politics. You’re taking an intro survey Art History class. You go to the museum with someone from a different class, and you figure it out. You have enough knowledge already from whatever class it is you’re taking to go to this space. This assignment prompt is saying that you already know enough to go into this space and have a conversation and feel like you have something to tell us about.

We built Pair & Share to try to get past some of those initial hurdles. And it worked incredibly well. The students really responded to it. They felt quite empowered to speak just by the framework of the prompt. Some of them actually said, “I had no idea that being in a museum could be like this.” Maybe that’s a way to think about what a college or university museum can do.

KA: We’ve had a number of faculty who expressed apprehension about teaching in the museum because they either didn’t know the subject of the show or they’ve never used a museum before. And in fact, they expressed that it was very meaningful for the students to see their own faculty members learning and grappling with the subject matter alongside the students. So it challenged, again, the idea of authority and showed that we are all learning all the time. And it also reminded them that their faculty member isn’t the be-all and end-all. They still don’t know many things, too.

MH: Faculty modeling that kind of risk taking and agility, trying new things, learning new things, not knowing everything, is great. We talk a lot about

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how we want that for our students, but are we going to walk the talk? The museum is potentially one place where we can do that. There are risks.

You’re pretty vulnerable when you decide to do that and get out of your knowledge base and your familiar teaching space. We heard a lot of reports from faculty who were willing to give it a shot and who were pleasantly surprised by the outcome.

So let’s shift a bit to talk more about what makes an exhibition well-suited to teaching and learning across the disciplines. There are many different kinds of things that we can display in many different ways, right? What are some of the things that seem to work from a curatorial point of view for bringing in faculty who have different kinds of learning goals for their students?

DG: I don’t know that there’s a formula for producing an exhibition that will necessarily work for teaching and learning. I’m learning that there might be something like a template, though, because I did that naive thing that you said would be crazy to do, which is to do a different class every year. But there are some things that are transferable. There’s a sort of skeleton. There’s a format. There’s a way of slowing down, for example.

EM: I wonder if one of the things we could think about with the sciences in particular is the difference between teaching with temporary exhibitions versus getting faculty and students

in the room to talk about objects in the permanent collection, where they can actually figure out ways to do pigment analysis as part of their freshman seminar on colorants, for example, or if there are particular materials that an object is made of that are relevant.

RS: We have an assignment that began a couple of years ago in a long-running biology intro course. There are many sections of the course, and there are different instructors. But all of the students come to the museum to make histograms, to draw objects that are on display that are biomorphic in some way, in preparation for doing their first dissections. They’re learning how to describe an object. They’re learning about proportion. They’re learning about texture and the relationships of scale within the object. And then they also describe the different parts of the object with made-up functions as if it were an organism. And that assignment happens with objects from the permanent collection. So the faculty know that there will always be something here for them to work with.

KA: To pull back a little bit to where we started about what makes an exhibition itself relevant interdisciplinarily, I think one thing is to have a topic that has some specificity but also is rather broad and could be approached from multiple angles. The Wellin’s director, Tracy Adler, had a great idea, which was to pair This Place with a second exhibition—so not thinking about just one exhibition, but instead, about the entire exhibition program of our museum and what’s happening from semester to semester.

It was paired with a solo show featuring contemporary artist Margarita Cabrera, who makes soft sculpture that addresses the immigration crisis and movement over the Mexico-US border. And this was helpful in two ways. One, This Place was entirely two-dimensional photography. Margarita Cabrera creates sculpture. It opened up the museum that way for the studio art department. Secondly, it opened up the concept of geography, borders, and contested space. It took something that was very specific

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and opened up the conversation. And I think through doing that, we’ve really increased the departments that came to see either one exhibition or the other, or both in tandem, to discuss these topics.

MH: One of the things that’s starting to emerge here is this idea of subject matter or content.

Exhibitions can have overt or explicit subject matter if you’re showing figurative art of some sort or if there’s a particular theme that’s been identified. And, of course, that’s the easiest thing to latch on to if you’re a faculty member. “Oh, well, I’m a political scientist. I can talk about this.” Or: “I’m in religious studies. I can talk about that.” Museum outreach to faculty often becomes a matter of saying, “Who is teaching in the explicit subject area? Let’s invite them to teach with this exhibition.”

But if one wants to be more innovative and risk taking, the next question is, what else is there that’s maybe not exactly about any overt subject matter? What else can faculty and students do? A juxtaposition with another exhibition that maybe has some broad thematic connections relating to place, homeland, movement, migration, and displacement—that’s an interesting idea.

What are other things that we’ve been able to do, to move beyond explicit and obvious aspects of subject matter in order to get more folks into the exhibition? I’m thinking about the world that our undergraduates are entering and the kind of agility that they need and the many kinds of careers that they’re going to have.

I’m thinking about citizenship, transferable skills, habits of mind.

EM: Something I learned in conversation with this Teagle group is to try to think more in terms of the skills-based teaching that can happen in museums rather than the content-based teaching—skills of communication, description, creative response, all the ways museums can encourage particular actions on the part of students and how we can harness those actions toward the larger learning goals of our classes.

That’s something I’ve heard a lot of you talk about at various times. Every time you say it, I

write it down and realize I need to think about how to do that. And I don’t know that I’ve learned the answer yet, but I feel like that’s a really important goal for reimagining what we’re doing with a teaching museum and how it fits into a larger college or university mission.

RS: I’m always enthusiastic about and encouraging teamwork in courses—how students can work together on a project in the museum— because I think that this kind of group work, collaboration, learning those skills of how to work together is an important larger learning goal of our institutions. The museum is a good place for that to happen.

Another exercise I always encourage is some sort of public presentation or public speaking.

The museum is a natural space for that.

DG: For sure. As I think about the most successful projects that I saw come out of the various courses that happened during This Place, they

included all those things. It was some kind of team-based learning. In the class that Ed Schwarzschild, an English professor, and I taught, there were writers and photographers collaborating at the graduate and undergraduate levels teamed up through the whole semester.

And one big surprise was that some of them switched roles at certain points. They learned enough about one another’s disciplines that they were ready to try something new.

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But the other is presentation—if not public speaking, then some kind of written text or a response, an intervention. Owen Barensfeld, a photography graduate student, created an assignment where three instructors teaching different sections of the same course mounted an intervention exhibition in response to This Place. They were very critical of some of the work. And then they had to have their work critically analyzed and put on display in public. There was more at stake because it was on public view in a gallery. You can’t do that with every class, but maybe you can.

Maybe we should.

MH: Let’s talk a little more about different kinds of collaboration. This project revolves around four institutions collaborating with one another.

That was a big part of our mission, and maybe one of the hardest things for four very different institutions, three liberal arts colleges and a large state university with different kinds of resources and different kinds of institutional cultures. We’re trying to incentivize teaching and learning in our museums, museums of different ages, with different kinds of collections and exhibition programs. We had to work across a lot of differences in order to sustain and commit ourselves to some shared goals.

Can you say a bit about the inter-institutional collaboration?

KA: The Wellin is the youngest of all the institutions. We’re about six years old. The Teagle Project was extremely helpful for us as we were still figuring our way and creating what the museum is. It was interesting to hear what you were doing at your institutions, what was working. And the cultures are incredibly different. Even between Skidmore and Hamilton, there are different cultures on our campuses. It was interesting to see what worked somewhere might not work at another institution. But there’s a lot we can learn from one another.

EM: I took the collaboration model very seriously.

DG: You did!

EM: I actually took my class to all four installments of the This Place exhibition. We spent a lot of time in buses. My class was about museum exhibitions, and I team-taught it with my colleague, Nick West, who’s our Picker Art Gallery Curator of Collections. Students already had the benefit of having a curator and a faculty member in the room together, and they were also curating their own exhibition on campus at the time.

One of the things that was maybe slightly imperfect about this class is that we tried to do too much in one semester. But it was very exciting, if a little bit all over the place. Students had the benefit of seeing how similar material ended up getting presented in very different ways on four campuses with four very different museum spaces and cultures.

The kinds of critical insights that they were able to come up with by the end were about the different choices made on the different campuses and what it means to put on an exhibition of extremely fraught, politically complicated material. They had a three-dimensional understanding of that.

DG: Looking at the reports of what everyone did and realizing how much we shared and how diverse the work that was done was, that was astounding and will inform the next few things we do for sure. Not only that, but we never would have gotten away with this if it hadn’t been for you all. Collaboration gave us permission. They can’t stop us now!

RS: A kind of leveraging the collaboration for institutional support.

DG: Legitimizing it.

RS: Especially with This Place, there was a general sense that there was a larger collective purpose, that there was this kind of community across our campuses, and we were all engaged around a common theme and a common focus. So many different classes engaged. And they were aware that there were all of these other classes engaged on other campuses—it was felt across our

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campus life, in all different spaces, both in the curricular spaces and in the co-curricular spaces.

There was a buzz, a feeling of common purpose that I think really had an energizing effect. It built on itself.

DG: For sure. And I think further, now that it’s over, the fact that the show was about a problematic topic was one of the most interesting things that came out of the collaboration—the ways we solved problems that arose. And we had very different ways of doing that.

RS: I’ve been thinking a lot about that, too. We spent a lot of time as a group of collaborators thinking about the what ifs and how we would respond. And it turns out that an exhibition that tackles a controversial or difficult subject is actually an amazingly rich space for modeling things like productive dissent and productive disagreement and grappling with difficult issues.

It was, in fact, really a catalyst for some amazing learning that a less-fraught subject might not have generated.

DG: I totally agree. The amazing thing I learned is that our campus values free speech above all.

I don’t know why that should be a revelation to me. But in one meeting, our chief of police said, “Protest is okay. That’s fine.” It was important to learn that about the big ecosystem of a SUNY campus.

Audience: How were the four institutions selected?

And what is the working dynamic across those very different institutions?

RS: The Teagle Foundation encouraged us to collaborate when we were writing the grant. We looked for a group of not all exactly like-sized, like-situated, like-resourced institutions. We were thinking about some practical things like relative distances. And we needed to be sure that the museum spaces would be able to display roughly a quarter of This Place. The exhibition space was an important early factor.

But then we began thinking about Skidmore and the University at Albany being quite close,

about forty minutes apart, and Colgate and Hamilton being quite close, twenty-five minutes apart, so there would at least be the possibility that multiple classes could visit at least two components of the show.

There was also the bigger picture of wanting to be sure that this exploration of teaching and learning with museum exhibitions would happen at institutions with very different cultures so that we end up with lessons that are transferable and sustainable for museums and galleries in educational institutions across the country.

Audience: My university museum is a new institution. We’re four years old. One thing that’s on my mind is community support. When you did this thing that is so campus-focused, were there aspects of what you did in which you also were able to involve the community?

RS: It’s a really good question, and something we talked about together. We were very invested in the idea that our communities would know what we were up to and would have an opportunity to contribute to programming. Because This Place existed already, the programming was an open space for listening and getting feedback and having the larger community engaged.

One of the things we did three or four months before This Place opened at the Tang was to convene a community forum—an evening where we invited leaders of various religious organizations and community groups from around Saratoga Springs and the New York Capital District to join with student groups active on campus—to sit together and hear about the project and then hear from them what they were interested in, what ideas sparked for them, and what concerns they might have. In response to that, we implemented some specific programming decisions. And in fact, that is something all four campuses did.

DG: We did a tremendous amount of community outreach with more than one big community group meeting in advance of the show, and we had a couple of community events after where we presented work from all the classes. It was

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surprisingly not just students who attended; it was folks from the community as well.

RS: I might also add that, regardless of the exhibitions on view, for folks from the community to come to the museum, even just to wander around, see what’s going on—to see students working in the gallery, to see students choreographing a movement sequence in the gallery, to see students on a Math Trail in an exhibition, to see faculty and students interacting— perhaps has the potential to demystify and democratize the museum as it’s perceived by the larger community.

So, the museum begins to feel more like a place in which they have a sense of ownership and agency. I do think that simply the presence of different kinds of activities related to teaching and learning—even if those activities are primarily directed at faculty and students at your institution—simply the visibility of those activities as part of what’s happening on a daily basis in the museum space can be quite powerful.

Audience: How did you evaluate the success of your project in terms of teaching and learning?

MH: Documentation and assessment was an important part of the project. There were multiple measures. We left it up to faculty to define their own goals and criteria for student learning and pedagogical endeavors. We developed a faculty questionnaire for indirect assessment of student learning—that is to

say, rather than assessing what students produced, assessing the faculty members’ narratives about the nature and outcomes of the learning experiences.

I think there’s been some adoption of a questionnaire on other campuses. Going forward, at the Tang, we’ll continue to use it even when the grant is over, because it seems like a useful way to maintain an archive of narratives about teaching and learning.

But were also interested in how faculty wanted to evaluate student learning. We encouraged faculty members to give us copies of assignment guidelines and examples of student work so that we could see more directly what students were achieving. Some faculty did quantitative assessments. They would administer a survey, for example. They were sending us pie charts and graphs. Other faculty were sending us students’ first-person reflections.

Are there better ways to document and archive?

I think we’re still trying to figure that out. And we do want to give faculty a certain amount of agency there. We don’t want the museum to become a place where we say, “Well, if you’re going to teach with the exhibition, you have to fill out this form.” That seems a little counterproductive, and yet, of course, we want an archive. We want to do longitudinal studies. We want data, because we want to be able to track what’s been done and use it to plan for the future.

KA: We found the faculty reports to be incredibly helpful. Because usually a class comes to visit the exhibition, and then you send them off, and you never hear what the visit results in. So the reports through the Teagle grant were incredibly helpful to understand how faculty were utilizing the exhibitions and what were the results of that.

My colleague Michelle Reynolds, our Curatorial and Programming Coordinator, created some great programs around faculty. One of the things she implemented was a year-end capstone faculty luncheon in which the faculty presented to one another what they did as part of the Teagle Project.

It also was an informal way to poll them and get feedback. It was a verbal way for them to critique us and give feedback on the museum in general.

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Audience: Were there faculty who approached you as a result of this and said, “Hey, that was fascinating. Here’s my idea. Can we do this?”

DG: Yes. In our case, we only had one stand-alone course based on This Place, the course that Ed Schwarzschild and I taught. But we had twentytwo other courses that had at least one project and some of those had multiple projects across multiple weeks. We had several assessment tools.

One was assembling a faculty committee. Faculty proposed projects and the committee approved them. Twenty-two projects were accepted; some were not.

But an interesting thing that happened when we had our public presentation of the outcome of the project on our campus was that faculty who blew us off initially, were like, “Yeah, I guess that was kind of cool. Are you going to do it again?”

There was a lot of that. A lot of faculty now want to participate in the next thing.

MH: Any other responses to that? Folks who have come to you after the fact, as it were, kind of waking up?

EM: At Colgate, we had fourteen faculty participate in the This Place–focused semester, where we did the Pair & Share exercise. And there was enough buzz about it that we turned that around the following semester with support from our dean.

The stipends for faculty were much smaller than the Teagle stipends. But they were a nice perk.

The second semester, we had forty-four faculty members participate. So we went from fourteen to forty-four. There are a lot of different reasons why we could account for that leap in the numbers. But I’m hoping we can create some momentum so that we can continue to build on the majority of those forty-four faculty members who’d never taught with our museum exhibitions before. So I think there was a real step forward toward one of the larger goals of the Teagle Project, which is to broaden the interface between the museum and the curriculum.

MH: Another thing that we saw at Skidmore, although it’s very difficult to document, is that

sometimes students are the best ambassadors for faculty outreach. Students mention their experiences to professors who are not working with the museum, or faculty overhear students saying to one another, “Well, in my class, there was this exhibition, and I had this great conversation.” It’s coming in a sort of roundabout way.

One of the things I’ve come to wonder through this project is whether it can be useful to actually bring students into that process of really understanding what we are doing at our museums. Can we be more purposeful and thoughtful about making them part of the planning and outreach? Students as true collaborators in crafting these experiences.

Audience: I wonder if you have any takeaways for the recognition that is required of the expertise and time commitment on the part of museum staff as real partners in teaching and learning on campuses?

DG: It can’t be underestimated. I have to say, it has been one of Corinna Ripps Schaming’s projects for more than three years to educate an administration that our museum is a site for research and that art and curation, it turns out, are research. And we also have a president who gets it and appreciates that creative activity constitutes research. We grow new exhibitions. We bring artists-in-residence. And this is a research activity. That wasn’t really on the radar until the last few years.

Audience: I was curious about what sort of draw on staffing resources this program was. I heard you say you went from fourteen classes to forty-four.

And as an educator, all I can think is, oh my God, that’s so much work, especially for professors who are not used to using the museum. Often that includes a tour, people checking them into the tour, etcetera. Do you wish you had more people in place that could have assisted in that?

Audience (Nicholas West, curator of collections, Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University): It was an immense draw on staff resources. And I think that is one element that we need to figure out in terms of

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how we go forward. We are a small staff at the Picker. We had students who visited us three times during the same semester for different classes. So there’s a little bit of finagling that needs to be done. And in terms of staff resources, we need to think more carefully about what that draw is.

EM: I would reiterate something that I’ve heard Ian Berry, the Tang’s director, say, which is, whether we see that as a problem or as a wonderful achievement has everything to do with how we prioritize what is happening in our museums and what we think we should be spending time doing. Certainly, the fact that the time commitment caught us all by surprise was not ideal, but we had a third of our student body passing through our museums in one semester, and I think we have to come up with a museum structure and an administrative structure that sees that as a positive and not as a headache to be avoided in the future.

RS: We also have been the victim of our own success, especially over the last few years in the amount of use of the museum in teaching both in collections and in the galleries. And as the teaching grows and grows, it takes all of our museum staff, not just the people we call educators or curators. We all work together to make sure it can happen. At the Tang, we see it as an amazing opportunity.

Audience: It struck me when you began, and you said something like, “How do we get more physicists into the museum?” I was thinking about whether the physicists wouldn’t say, “How do we get more art historians into the labs?” And the theater performers saying, “How do we get more historians into the studios?”

And then, Rachel, what you said was especially helpful to me, about the nonhierarchical nature of being in a museum and the public presentations rather than just papers. Some of that is not museum-specific, right?

Are museums especially valuable places? Is it because of the place of museums in our public culture? Is there something else going on? Why is

a museum more valuable than, say, the theater?

I think what you’re saying is there’s this distinct value that other kinds of activities don’t really get at in the same way.

KA: First and foremost, we are an interdisciplinary space that does not belong to one department.

We are a space that is not territorial, that does not fall into departmental divisions in the same way that, for example, maybe the theater would.

And I think as an extension of that, we’re a place where people can collaborate. And I’m not sure about every institution, but I think that traditionally, there hasn’t been much team-teaching, for example, or collaboration in that way before.

I think that’s changing. And the museum can be a place where two different departments can come together in interdisciplinary ways.

Museums are especially important because they don’t belong to anyone. They belong to everyone on campus.

MH: I think that’s a useful response. In the question, I hear a little bit of caution about museum exceptionalism that begins to feel exclusive in relation to other spaces for learning that might also be interdisciplinary. I don’t know if we’re there yet, but maybe we’re moving in the direction of the idea of a museum as a kind of a crossroads, a collective space, a space that everyone can potentially pass through, learning and collaborating in different ways—but also a museum as a facilitator that projects energy out into the larger community. So, the museum re-catalyzes theater, re-catalyzes the studio, or recatalyzes the lab.

Our museums are modeling and seeding relationships and initiatives that are going to start sprouting up here and there across our campuses. That might be a more expansive way to think about what is special about the museum—not special in an exclusive way, but special in a catalyzing, energizing way from which the whole community benefits.

Promising Practices for ExhibitionBased Pedagogies

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The following texts reflect on the Teagle Conference roundtable conversations.

Writing in the Museum Michael Marx Exhibition Interventions Owen Barensfeld and Siobhan Hart Curating for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning Katherine Alcauskas and Rachel Roe-Dale STEM in the Museum Katherine Brown, Jennifer Cholnoky, and Rachel Seligman Exhibiting and Teaching Challenging Material Nurcan Atalan-Helicke and Rebecca McNamara

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Writing in the Museum

“In today’s fast-paced world, a close reading is an act of deceleration.”

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Michael Marx Associate Professor of English, Skidmore College

Writing in a museum seems like a subversive act. Museums, after all, are filled with roped-off spaces with signs that warn “do not touch.” But museums also foster creativity, thought, and vision, making them excellent sites for writing.

Building upon students’ visual literacy skills, a close reading assignment of a museum object serves as a way of seeing. Close reading of an object develops skills in patience, observation, and interpretation. In today’s fast-paced world, a close reading is an act of deceleration. It forces students to slow down, requiring them to spend time with an item in an exhibition and pay careful attention to it. Over multiple visits, they formulate interpretations and discover evidence to support their interpretations. Sometimes, the evidence resides in the object; other times, research beyond the exhibition helps to discover what viewers need to know to understand the piece.

Similarly, deceleration not only sharpens students’ critical interpretation skills but also invites creative thinking. As students study a

museum piece, they form questions about it: Are there gaps or absences in a photograph or painting that our imagination fills? Are there patterns—or disruptions of patterns—that invite our exploration? Such questions can serve as generative material for creative writing, such as personal narratives or short stories.

Museums not only present opportunities for writing, but also include multiple forms of writing. Introductory wall texts for an exhibition and individual artwork labels can become writing assignments. These concise forms of writing require writers to be attentive to their audience and what they need to know to understand and appreciate an exhibition. Students all bring areas of disciplinary expertise with them to a museum exhibition. Refocusing the texts of an exhibition according to students’ academic majors or areas of interest reinforces the idea that writing is a mode of seeing, a metaphorical lens that highlights their academic and nonacademic knowledge.

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Exhibition Interventions

“Students shifted roles . . . from consumers of knowledge to producers of knowledge.�

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Owen Barensfeld MFA Candidate and Instructor of Record in Photography and Related Media, University at Albany

The project based on This Place that Darian Longmire, Bjorn Bauer, and I developed in conjunction with the University Art Museum had our photography students meet frequently in the museum over the course of a month to photograph, discuss, and research the exhibition and display space. Along with this, discussions and exercises were conducted in the classroom looking at notions of authorship, the politics and ethics of photography, and the controversy surrounding the exhibition. The students were then asked to produce a series of photographs in conversation with the exhibition and space of

the museum. Selected pieces were included in a group show, TH!$ P1A€E, which exhibited work from all three sections of the course in a gallery adjacent to the museum and culminated in a public opening event where students were able to discuss their work with visitors.

The overall impact of creating a public-facing exhibition was very positive. Our students were intensely excited about producing the work and set a high standard for themselves. The public opening gave them a much greater sense of accomplishment than they would have had from just a critique and a grade.

Siobhan Hart Associate Professor of Anthropology, Skidmore College

Skidmore College students intervened in the This Place exhibition in a variety of ways, from choreography and dance performance to fiction writing and analyzing historical and geological landscapes. In an upper-level course called “Heritage and Communities,” my students supplemented This Place with a public-facing audio guide. Some of the photographs in the exhibition were used as case studies of how places and practices are ascribed value, how heritage designations can be empowering, disempowering, inclusive, and/or exclusive. The audio guide was not meant to be a definitive text, but rather situated places in the exhibition in a broader heritage discourse.

The creation of a public-facing product had a significant impact on student learning.

Students learned how to intervene in a public discourse in an informed and concise way. One student stated: “I learned how to disentangle complex issues into down-to-earth audio for the general public,” while another responded that

the project “challenged my way of thinking.”

Furthermore, engagement with the exhibition allowed us to work on multiple curricular goals (oral presentation, visual literacy, research, public engagement) concurrently. Because the project was public-facing, students shifted roles from the beginning to the end of the semester, from consumers of knowledge to producers of knowledge.

One useful thread that emerged from this roundtable was the importance of multisensorial exhibition interventions. Developing content beyond a visual description enhances the development of receptive, expressive, and observational skills and recognizes a multitude of ways of experiencing an exhibition and communicating (as well as the potential pitfalls of privileging the visual). Another useful thread from the roundtable conversation explored the complexities of shared authority in the co-creation of publicfacing interpretive materials.

“Our students were intensely excited about producing the work and set a high standard for themselves.�

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Curating for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning

“For exhibitions to appeal to faculty across disciplines, they must be multivalent.�

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Katherine Alcauskas Collections Curator and Exhibitions Manager, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College

For exhibitions to appeal to faculty across disciplines, they must be multivalent—approachable from numerous directions and containing a variety of touchstones that could speak to or stand in for much larger topics. For example, at the Wellin Museum at Hamilton College, a monographic exhibition of work by Jeffrey Gibson transcended his specific individuality as a gay Native American contemporary artist to allow for broader conversations on identity within religious studies, anthropology, and women’s and gender studies courses, among many others. Similarly, the Wellin paired the exhibition This Place with another temporary loan exhibition featuring work by contemporary Latina artist Margarita Cabrera that addresses immigration across the Mexico-US border. The museum thereby opened up the concepts of borders, contested space, and politicized geography beyond Israel, bringing the issues closer to home and ultimately casting a wider net in terms of disciplines to which the exhibitions would appeal.

Presenting faculty with information on upcoming exhibitions as early as possible and

continuing to present information frequently and in different formats are important in drawing a wide variety of faculty participants.

For some exhibitions, museum staff might not necessarily see direct connections between the content and certain disciplines, but when presented with background and contextual information on the exhibition, faculty themselves are able to make connections given their in-depth knowledge of their own fields and goals for their courses. This underscores the importance of cultivating relationships with individual faculty members—especially those willing to take intellectual risks—who might be apt to use the museum’s exhibitions in their teaching even if the connection to course content is not immediately obvious. Peer-to-peer outreach is also effective as faculty can share with others their experience teaching with exhibitions, their fears or insecurities going into the exercise, and what their students gained from the experience that they would not have otherwise attained in the classroom proper.

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Rachel Roe-Dale Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, Co-curator of Sixfold Symmetry: Pattern in Art and Science at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College

My experience co-curating, with Rachel Seligman, Sixfold Symmetry at the Tang Teaching Museum offers a case study in curation for teaching across the disciplines. The concepts of symmetry and pattern are inherently interdisciplinary. However, the true interdisciplinarity of the exhibition emerged serendipitously out of our desire to create a show that was unique and that somehow offered a novel perspective on symmetry and pattern. To achieve this, we tapped into the wealth of experience and insight of Skidmore’s faculty.

We reached out to faculty members from a wide variety of disciplines, including music, religion, modern languages, and more, that were using themes of symmetry and pattern in their work and invited them to be part of our conversation.

Many of these faculty became curatorial collaborators for the show. As conversations evolved, we created a checklist of artworks, objects, and

experiences (such as the interactive computer exhibit showcasing John Conway’s Game of Life) that reflected the view of symmetry and pattern from many lenses. By the time Sixfold Symmetry opened in fall 2016, many faculty had already been involved in its production.

From a math and science perspective, most of our classes require us to teach specific technical content, and connecting to exhibition content is hard both because it feels disconnected from the course material and because time in the museum takes away from time in lecture or in the laboratory. However, by incorporating faculty from these subject areas into an exhibition from the beginning, we ensured that relevant content was included and that faculty felt connected to the show’s programming. This made faculty much more likely to integrate the content and experience into their classrooms.

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“We reached out to faculty members from . . . music, religion, modern languages, and more . . . and invited them to be part of our conversation.�

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STEM in the Museum

“Virtually any exhibition can be conducive to STEM topics.”

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Katherine Brown Associate Professor of Physics, Hamilton College

Virtually any exhibition can be conducive to STEM topics. One fairly accessible entry point is through the physical appearance of materials used. Basic physics can explain the nature of light and color on the atomic level; basic chemistry can explain the composition of paints, pigments, and varnishes; basic biology/anatomy can address how the eye and brain make sense of visual information. Additionally, an exhibition might feature an artifact that has been studied using parts of the electromagnetic spectrum outside the visible range: infrared, UV, and x-ray imaging techniques are frequently used to see what the eye cannot.

In other cases, artists might use optics to fool the eye or accomplish a certain effect. Occasionally, artists are inspired outright by STEM topics in

creating their work. But often there are more subtle connections that can be made by focusing on concepts that have both a technical and non-technical interpretation, such as symmetry, infinity, illusion, perception, and reality.

To prepare for an exhibition visit most efficiently, it is important to cover any technical information beforehand with lectures and readings; this is especially relevant if the students will only get one chance to view the exhibition in class. If possible, I like to encourage students to go back to the exhibition on their own, perhaps to reflect further on the connections identified in the course but at least to take a selfie that they can include in their written response to a prompt!

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Jennifer Cholnoky Visiting Instructor of Geosciences, Skidmore College

Our roundtable discussion had roughly equal numbers of STEM faculty and museum administrators and staff. The museum folks were particularly interested in ways that they could encourage and support the use of exhibitions and collections by STEM faculty. The most significant hurdle for many STEM faculty is that they “don’t know where to start” with museumbased pedagogy and feel out of their areas of expertise. Introducing museum-based pedagogies with relatively simple exercises can help bridge that gap. We discussed how observation is a fundamental science skill. Faculty can use slow looking and Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) exercises, with the support of museum staff, to develop observational and interpretational skills in their students that can then be tied back into their own curriculum.

Another theme that came out of our discussion was the affirmation that museum faculty and staff are a terrific resource for STEM faculty, helping them find connections with exhibitions and develop curriculum that can be incorporated into their courses. It can sometimes be difficult for faculty to discern STEM connections to exhibitions, but with some creative thinking, intersections can be found, maybe even beyond or outside of the thematic bounds of the exhibition. Museum staff with knowledge of media, artistic processes, and object provenance can be invaluable to faculty in these explorations. Some examples we discussed included considering light, optics, and pigments in paintings for a physics course and investigating earth processes evident in landscape photographs for a geosciences course.

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Rachel Seligman Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College

A new strategy for connecting artworks with quantitative reasoning was employed at the Tang Teaching Museum for the first time in Like Sugar, a recent interdisciplinary exhibition that I co-curated with Sarah Goodwin, Skidmore Professor of English, in consultation with three other faculty members in studio art, biology, and environmental studies. We worked with an additional collaborator, Flannery Denny, who created a Math Trail for the exhibition. The Math Trail is a series of mathematical problems that move visitors through an exhibition, each one engaging with a different artwork or object via basic quantitative reasoning skills like estimation, basic formulas, units, percentages, fractions, statistics, probability, geometry, etc. The Math Trail can engage with artworks through their content or through relationships that can be teased out between works and/or

the space of the galleries. Math problems can help viewers understand, in a new way, the concepts that an exhibition is presenting and can engage visitors for whom math is a more comfortable entry point for complex or difficult content. Conversely, for those who are daunted by math, the experience is a fun, unintimidating way to connect numerical principles to social and cultural issues—to see the ways in which mathematical concepts and calculations are an essential part of lived experience. The Math Trail can also be something that creates new connections and collaborations between the museum and faculty or community members with math expertise. Finally, if a Math Trail were developed in collaboration with students, it would be a powerful way for them to engage with the museum and the public in the role of knowledge creators.

“Observation is a fundamental science skill.”

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Exhibiting and Teaching Challenging Material

“Diversity of voices and learning opportunities was important for students to engage with a controversial topic.�

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Nurcan Atalan-Helicke Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Skidmore College

My class visited the This Place exhibition multiple times at the Tang Teaching Museum and also visited additional portions of the exhibition at some of the other venues. The opportunity to visit other museums and to study the work of other artists in depth was critical in students’ learning. We not only had a chance to see the choices of other museums in terms of how they provided space for and engaged with viewers’ perspectives, but also how different the artists’ own perspectives were. By visiting three museums and working at the Tang through multiple visits, my students and I had a better opportunity to integrate the artists’ work into our class assignments, discuss controversial issues in detail, and rethink our assumptions about the geographical region exhibited. We had the entire semester to engage with the museum, and every activity students carried out, from

attending public events organized by the Tang to organizing a public panel discussion themselves, contributed to their final grades. This was critical in enabling students to think about the different elements of the exhibition, how public events and speakers’ talks complement an exhibition, and how they can learn not just in class and from the instructor but also from other students, faculty, and artists. This diversity of voices and learning opportunities was important for students to engage with a controversial topic, along with the intense readings they completed over the course of the semester. While I understand that not every class has a chance to engage with an exhibition as deeply as we did, even visiting a few times over the period it is open and attending a curatorial tour and public events can be effective ways to move beyond conventional modes of learning in the classroom.

Rebecca McNamara Associate Curator, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College

The purpose of asking the question, “How do/ can/should we exhibit and teach challenging material?” is not to elicit a single answer, but rather, to sustain the question, as well as myriad other questions about what it is we are exhibiting and teaching, why, how, and whose voices are being considered. We must listen to the voices of marginalized populations and be open to new perspectives, including—perhaps especially—those that galvanize us to act, to evolve, and even to change or complicate our positions.

As curators and educators, we must ensure our projects evolve as well, even when that project seems complete. In our roundtable discussion, the question was asked: If an exhibition has opened, and someone finds a curatorial choice harmful or offensive, tours can be modified,

but really, isn’t it too late to change the show?

One response: it is not. If a negative critique grounded in a perspective we had not considered alters how we, as authors of programs, classes, and exhibitions, understand something, there is always time to think creatively about how we might construct a response and, when warranted, a physical change, whether it involves the wording on a label (easy) or the display itself (harder). Our public presentations, which real people interact with, can and should breathe (progress, shift, transform, mature, react) as living things—a notion that seems both radical and obvious. Such efforts take time, staff, money, administrative support, and other resources, but rigorous flexibility can demonstrate allyship and commitment to growth.

“As curators and educators, we must ensure our projects evolve . . . even when that project seems complete.�

Object Lessons

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Disruption as a Productive Teaching Tool Petra Watzke Illuminate Something Invisible Daniel Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild Pairing & Sharing in the University Museum: Making Students the Experts Elizabeth Marlowe Multi-Course Collaborations and Their Benefits for Students and Faculty Jenna Reinbold and Timothy A. Byrnes Raiding the Museum: Developing Visual Literacy through Interpreting Museum Objects Robert Knight Writing with All Five Senses Janna Urschel Psychological Principles in the Museum Alexandra List Choreography as Seeing Jason Ohlberg Augmented Discourse: Connecting Exhibitions to Curriculum through Technology Nicholas West

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Disruption as a Productive Teaching Tool

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Petra Watzke Visiting Assistant Professor of German, Skidmore College

In the classroom, we often encounter disruption as a breakdown of communication or as technology problems, which are detrimental to the goals of a class. Yet disruption as a positive influence was the biggest takeaway from my experience with exhibition-based teaching and learning. I discovered that this practice has the potential to shake up established dynamics in the classroom community and to unlock the potential for self-determined creative scholarship.

In spring 2017, I taught a portion of my course on creative writing in German with the Tang Teaching Museum’s exhibition Sixfold Symmetry: Pattern in Art and Science (curated by Rachel Roe-Dale and Rachel Seligman). In this course, students learn to identify general characteristics of various genres of German literature and demonstrate their understanding of these different genres by writing their own versions of short literary texts. I structured our work in the exhibition around the genre of poetry. The students were assigned to write a sound poem based on one artwork in the exhibition of their choosing. Sound poems do not rely on the lexical units of words, but on made-up words that conjure emotions and ideas by prioritizing sounds over literal meaning. The students’ sound poems were supposed to demonstrate their

engagement with their chosen artworks as an evocative interpretation.

In the weeks leading up to our work in the exhibition, I introduced my students to sound poetry and its relevant characteristics. I had planned and prepared every single step of the assignment we would do with the exhibition.

Overall, I felt prepared and confident in the project. Yet I vividly remember the first day of teaching in the exhibition as a frightening and overwhelming experience. I looked at my students: they appeared either confused or intimidated. I thought to myself, “What were you thinking? This is never going to work.”

Teaching in the exhibition disrupted my course in several significant ways. First of all, even though I felt prepared, the radically different environment and the students’ reactions to it produced a sense of unease that disrupted the conventions we had already established. But this sense of dread quickly transformed into a productive jolt of energy that infused the dynamic of our learning community in the best way possible.

The disruption of exhibition-based teaching can be a positive force that allows educators to transcend the barriers of our classrooms in multiple ways.

Teaching in the exhibition was also a spatial disruption. Students were not supposed to sit still in their places as they often are required to

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Thomas Bangsted, Last of the Dreadnoughts, 2011–2012, pigment print 58 3/4 x 83 inches, courtesy of the artist and Marc Straus Gallery

do in the classroom. Rather, they were invited to roam around, examine the artworks, and find out things for themselves. This spatial freedom affected the students’ relationship to the subject matter, as it allowed them to engage with the artworks in an unmediated way that created a sense of control and independence.

Working in the exhibition disrupted the classroom hierarchy. I most certainly was not the expert. Students had to turn to the museum staff if they had questions, and I acted more as a facilitator for these interactions. Because of this, the students developed their own expertise on the subject. This affected their attitude toward the creative process. They had to structure and self-regulate their work in the gallery setting in a way that is much less teacher-controlled than work in a classroom setting. This self-direction was highly motivating for the students.

Working in the exhibition disrupted my approach to pedagogy. As a teacher of language, I do a lot of communicative teaching, with a focus on group and partner work. I included a

little bit of that in the beginning so that students could work together to develop a rudimentary vocabulary of sound poetry. But eventually, it was just one student with an artwork, and they had to establish communication with this artwork and creatively express their ideas. Although I accompanied their process of developing the sound poem, the nature of working in an exhibition meant that the students had more space to develop their ideas in an unguided and individual way. The work in the exhibition thus allowed for the development of an independent, selfstructured learning experience.

The outcomes of this pedagogical experiment were exceptional. Not only did the students’ poems exceed my expectations, but the experience itself proved empowering. It fostered independent and self-guided learning, something that I always try to instill in my students because it encourages them to be lifelong learners. The experience further encouraged creative scholarship, an important skill for college and life beyond.

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Sound poem Owen Peterson ’17 Der Eisenwahn Plätsch flusch plätsch flusch Kriege geriege Biede gebrige Wiegte die Tiffelscheuff Mit Friegenden Friede Plätsch flum plätsch schlup Sie säufte Meer

The sound poem by Owen Peterson is a good illustration of the success of this process. He was one of the students most intimidated and overwhelmed at the beginning, yet his poem demonstrates a clear understanding of important characteristics of sound poetry in a creative engagement with his chosen artwork, Thomas Bangsted’s photograph Last of the Dreadnoughts (2011–2012). This accomplishment proved to me the power of our work in the exhibition: the creation of unique and self-confident engagement with art and literature.

Disruption can prove an empowering tool in the college classroom (and beyond). Through teaching in the exhibition, I learned the value of not being afraid to step outside of my own comfort zone and let the students take on a more independent role. The experience also taught me to encourage creativity in my classes whenever possible. In subsequent semesters, I continued to include creative assignments in my teaching. These are assignments where I specify the objectives but leave the form of expression up to the students. In many of my courses, students now get the option of submitting a creative project instead of writing a final essay.

I have received podcasts, films, and graphic novels, among other projects, that grapple with key components of the courses in unique and creative ways. It is amazing what students can produce when they are passionate about something and when they feel that they have the freedom to be in control. Independent and joyful learning as well as the power of creativity are invaluable outcomes of inviting disruption into the classroom community.

Und läufte leer Ferngespantz warschte Bewahl Noch Stillschen herr Pschuf flusch glätsch flusch Der Griesige Verstuck Wohr fließige unguckt Zum zwilligen Vergängnis Kein frückter Verrüch Plätsch flusch rausch falumsch Sie Pfütze geschutze Vom Lachegeschlag Schläf plutsch plätsch flusch Für den Fiendenfahn Nur sie brienen kahn Vom Schpimmel geschiegelt Der Eisenwahn

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Illuminate Something Invisible Daniel Goodwin Associate Professor of Studio Art and Teagle Project Faculty Liaison, University at Albany Edward Schwarzschild Associate Professor of English and Teagle Project Faculty Liaison, University at Albany

In spring 2018, our stand-alone semester-length seminar, “This Place: Writing and Photography,” used the exhibition This Place as a touchstone and a springboard to generate discussion and, even more importantly, to inspire new interdisciplinary creative work. By design, the seminar included a unique set of students: MFA and MA graduate students in Studio Art, MA and PhD graduate students in English/Creative Writing, and BA students in both Studio Art and English/ Creative Writing. Our goal was to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations throughout the semester.

We paired writers and photographers, matching undergraduates with one another and PhD students with those in MA and MFA programs. We required them to produce work together.

In order to give the students experience working together across disciplines, we assigned several

collaborative exercises. These exercises were designed to help students build up to the semester’s final project, a student-produced and -printed book-length publication called Some Places. One of those exercises, called “Illuminate Something Invisible,” was particularly successful, and has the potential to be a useful collaborative exercise in almost any interdisciplinary arts-related class.

We adapted our exercise from a photography project created by Arthur Ou called “Photograph Something Invisible” from The Photographer’s Playbook (2014). In our collaborative project, each writer/photographer pair produced a folio of five photographs (each 11 x 14 inches) and a 2,500-word essay. Teams, in consultation, identified a subject that is invisible. They were permitted to define the term invisible as broadly

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or as specifically as they liked. We asked them to consider the myriad ways in which a subject might be thought of as invisible (optically, physically, socially, politically, etc.). After each team made their choice, they had to decide how they would “shed light” on their subject and make it visible to their audience. We shared Ou’s original prompt with our students, including these lines: “Related to invisibility are ideas of disappearance (think about time), hidden forces (think about wind), and degradation (think about rotting fruit).”1 Our students produced phenomenally interesting work in response to this exercise. The example offered here comes from a collaboration between an MA student in photography and a writer who was an MA student in English as well as a working journalist. Together, they decided to explore the issue of the slow, widespread disappearance of bees in upstate New York.

The journalist decided to make their topic visible by conducting substantial, well-researched interviews with several local beekeepers, including one 69-year-old man whose voice concludes the piece by warning: “You can’t turn your back on the bees or you’re going to lose them.” The photographer was strongly influenced by Stephen Shore (one of the photographers in This Place), and he aspires to work in the same tradition. This student photographer has developed the habit of carrying around a 4-by-5inch view camera. He would convince people to let him make portraits and/or capture urban

landscapes. He chose not to simply illustrate the work of his journalist classmate. Instead, he tried to internalize the content and emotion of his partner’s written piece. He then set out to photograph something that would mark our complicity in the current plight of the bees. He wound up producing an eerie, surprisingly moving, depopulated urban landscape.

It is also interesting to note another indication of the exercise’s success: while in many cases the writers stuck with writing and the photographers stuck with photography, there were also cases in which partners elected to switch roles. Writers decided they wanted to try photography and photographers wanted to write. These experiences made the semester-long collaborations even stronger and seem to have had a lasting impact on the artistic practices of both the writers and the photographers.

Finally, we should note another important sign of the success of both the exercise and the seminar as a whole: because of the excellent response to the seminar and because of the strength of the work our students produced, we are team-teaching another exhibition-based seminar, and we hope to encourage others to do so as well. This could become a significant step toward making museum-based teaching a permanent part of our university’s curriculum.

1 Arthur Ou, “Photograph Something Invisible,” in Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern, eds., The Photographer’s Playbook: 307 Assignments and Ideas (New York: Aperture, 2014), 259.

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Pairing & Sharing in the University Museum: Making Students the Experts

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Elizabeth Marlowe Associate Professor of Art and Art History and Museum Studies and Teagle Project Faculty Liaison, Colgate University

What became the Pair & Share exercise began with a dilemma. The Teagle Foundation was expecting a sizable group of Colgate faculty to incorporate the Picker Art Gallery’s portion of This Place into their teaching. However, very few colleagues who had initially expressed an interest in the Teagle Project felt that they had the expertise to work with the exhibition. As the Faculty Liaison for the project, my first move was to bring in specialists to lead hour-long workshops on the history of photography and on the Israel/ Palestine conflict. I told my colleagues about Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) as a technique for exploring artworks from non-specialized perspectives. But the idea of replicating any of that in their classrooms in front of their students was making them nervous. So I decided to flip the concept of “expertise” on its head. What would happen if we put the onus on the students to figure out what this exhibition has to do with the class they are taking? What if we start from the premise that even though they don’t know anything about this particular topic, the modes of analysis they are learning in their classes are enough for them to walk into the museum and engage with this (or any) exhibition critically? And what if we create a space for them to discover that, through a conversation with a peer in a different class, they will bring different critical lenses to the conversation? My colleagues were game to give this idea a try.

For the This Place Pair & Share, each participating class received a tour of the exhibition with Picker Art Gallery Curator of Collections Nicholas West. Then each student was assigned a partner in one of the other participating classes. The students were required to return

to the exhibition with their partner on their own time and talk to each other in front of the artworks about how they understood them and how the photographs connected to their respective courses. Each student then wrote a short reflective paper on the exercise, considering the nature of disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge and the ability of a common “text” (i.e., a common set of artworks) to pull people into conversation.

The reports from the fourteen participating faculty members were so enthusiastic about the outcomes of the Pair & Share exercise that I decided to try it again the following semester, in fall 2018, and see if it could be scaled up to include even more courses. In early August, I sent out individualized email invitations to every faculty member who was teaching a course that fall with a title that suggested any possible thematic connection to one of the two exhibitions in our campus museums that semester: Embodied, focusing on the human body and the construction of identity (curated by Sarah Horowitz for the Picker Art Gallery), and Not a Costume, which considered Native American self-fashioning and cultural appropriation (curated by Christy Delair and six students and community members for the Longyear Museum of Anthropology). I sent sixty-six invitations; forty-three colleagues said yes.

I spent a few days in late August organizing the pairings. I first sorted the classes by which of the two exhibitions the instructor wanted their students to see, then by the week in the semester when they wanted the visit to take place. Within those groupings, I tried, as much as possible, to pair students across academic

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divisions (students in social science classes with students in humanities classes, for example).

Then I shared the pairings as a Google document with the faculty members and they filled in the names of their students. Faculty scheduled their classtime museum visits with the respective curator for the appropriate weeks. After the class visit with the curator, the instructor gave students their assigned partners’ names and made them responsible for planning the return visits. Finally, each student wrote an essay reflecting on the experience. I also held two informational lunches early in the semester with the participating faculty to discuss the larger purpose of the exercise and how to frame it to their students.

Even at this enormous scale—976 students participated, one-third of the student body—the project was a success. There were some bumps, most of which resulted from varying expectations of the participating faculty members, which translated into incompatible student attitudes toward the assignment. In the future, I will require all participating faculty members to attend one of the informational lunches (not just make it optional) and require that the assignment be worth at least 10 percent of the final course grade (to discourage students from dismissing the exercise, which is a problem for their more earnest partners in another class). I also will require students to post their scheduled meeting times with their partners on the Google document with the pairings, so that instructors can make sure the meetings are happening when they should.

By far, however, the benefits of the Pair & Share exercise outweighed the headaches. I asked my colleagues to send me their thoughts after they had read their students’ papers. Their responses were overwhelmingly positive. Here, in their words, are some of the main benefits:

Students listening to and learning from each other: Several of my students were paired with students from a drama class and their partners pointed out the performance aspects of clothing, which they had not considered.

In several instances, my students were paired with a student who could identify personally with the exhibit, which brought the exhibit down to a more personal level.

I was most surprised at how many of my students reflected how really listening to their partners changed or opened their view to the work at hand. It was sweet and honest.

Being able to share insights with a peer who was taking their ideas seriously was a confidence booster for many of my students.

While they often sought agreement, they didn’t always find it. The moments of difference often came from differing cultural or racial backgrounds.

Students talking and thinking critically about disciplines and interdisciplinarity: Most of the students’ reflections demonstrated that they spent substantial time discussing particular objects with their partners in another course and learned that the objects could be analyzed in different ways and with different approaches.

Differences and disagreements led many students to reflect not only on the complexity of the artworks but also the implicit assumptions shaping their own disciplines.

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Particularly for first-year students, this exer-

Perhaps half of my class had never been to

cise is a great way to impress on them that

an art gallery before . . . I like to think they all

there is no single correct answer, but a variety

left this experience feeling like this is a kind of

of ways to describe and analyze a work.

experience that is open to them and for them and that they should never hesitate to go to

Students feeling empowered:

a gallery in the future for fear of not knowing how to behave.

It empowered students to develop their own opinions and engagement with the work and also really listen to their partners.

Pair & Share was special because students were in charge of their learning: discovering a place and interacting with their peers to make connections outside the classroom.

From reading their accounts, it is clear to me that the students of both classes were proud of what they had learned and were eager to communicate their ideas.

They were surprised they could have so much to say about objects they did not know from class, and this gave them confidence to go to museums again. Some were very diligent in trying to apply knowledge from class. That gave them some confidence.

Additional benefits: It was interesting for me to learn about how other classes are approaching issues of identity, appropriation, and modernization/ Westernization, and I may incorporate some of these approaches in later iterations of my course.

Something about the material encounter with objects in the museum seems to have inspired especially detailed and vivid student writing.

Some of the main obstacles to faculty engagement with college and university museum exhibitions are the perceptions that exhibitions take precious time away from materials that are more directly relevant to the course content (such as instructorchosen readings) and that the instructor lacks the expertise in the exhibition materials to teach it themselves. But as the responses above suggest, the Pair & Share exercise turns these obstacles into advantages. In the context of a conversation with a peer from a different class, the student takes on the role of the expert. All sorts of benefits result from empowering students in this way, including alerting them to discipline-based modes of analysis, training them to apply their knowledge to new material, and making them aware of how their education is enabling them to engage with and think critically about the wider world. All this can be accomplished with only a single class session (for the visit with the curator) and only 10 percent of the final course grade.

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Multi-Course Collaborations and Their Benefits for Students and Faculty

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Jenna Reinbold Associate Professor of Religion, Colgate University

I have been teaching a course titled “Religion and the Contemporary World” for a number of years, and I was drawn to the Pair & Share exercise because it struck me as having the potential to further two of my central goals for this introductorylevel course. One goal is to push students to move beyond our primarily text-based materials and to “see” religion and its presence in the world in a different way. This entails recognizing the fact that religion pervades our world in ways that go beyond the discrete locales, institutions, and communities typically associated with religion (churches and mosques, for example).

I approached This Place as a lens through which to consider religion’s presence in the landscapes and inhabitants of Israel and the West Bank.

Secondly, given that this course consists exclusively of first- and second-year non-majors, and given that most US high schools don’t offer courses on the academic study of religion, another goal in this course is to build both the knowledge and the confidence of my students—to improve their “religious literacy” as well as their appreciation of the particular ways in which this literacy enables them to make sense of many aspects of the contemporary world. Pair & Share struck me as an exercise that would give me the opportunity to encourage students to see themselves as blossoming experts in the academic study of religion.

For my particular Pair & Share exercise, each student from my class was matched with

a partner from an upper-level “Global Theater” class. After receiving a short introductory lecture about the exhibition, the partnered students navigated the exhibition and chose two or three photographs that they wanted to focus on. Each student was then tasked with using the ideas and materials from their respective course to teach their partner about their chosen photographs.

Ultimately, the outcomes of this project were extremely positive. A number of students informed me that their feelings of “expertise” in the study of religion as well as their sense of the importance of religious literacy were enhanced through conversation with partners who had no background in our particular course materials.

The papers that my students wrote were generally very good, and even those papers that did not rise to the level of stellar were marked by a tone of enthusiasm stemming from the interactive, “hands-on” quality of this assignment. Most striking to me were a number of papers that revealed a level of thoughtfulness and interdisciplinarity that left me with no doubt as to the potential for this and similar projects to take the study of sacred space and religious conflict to a new level of student engagement. At their best, these papers demonstrated the capacity of a museum exhibition to concretize and enhance students’ sense of, as one student put it, “subtle themes about sacred space and how the threat of [dispossession] activates meaning.”

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Timothy A. Byrnes Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science, Colgate University

I once visited an “options pit” at the American Stock Exchange, where dozens of traders shouted at one another and used hand signals as millions of dollars in equities changed hands. It was necessary in that frenetic setting for the various traders to know who was who, and so the members of each firm wore a different color jacket. That way, blue could confidently trade with red or green while orange would never mistakenly execute a trade with itself. As I stood transfixed by this spectacle of color and cacophony, it struck me that it had a lot in common with the disciplinary divisions of a university. Members of academic departments do not necessarily don different color jackets to announce their identities. But we certainly do “wear” our individual canons and methodologies as ways of communicating to ourselves and to one another that we know who is “us”. . . and who is not.

My displeasure at this realization was deepened some years later when I team-taught a seminar in which a selected group of students were asked to explore the interdisciplinary ramifications of their individual honors theses.

I found, to my chagrin, that those seniors seemed even more attached than their professors were to the particular colors of their disciplinary jackets.

That experience convinced me of the central importance of interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching and rendered me an excellent candidate for participation in Colgate’s Pair & Share exercise in relation to the This Place exhibition.

The exercise enriched my classroom in a number of closely related ways. The course I taught that semester, “Transnational Politics,” focused on the role of non-state-based dynamics in international relations. Migration, identity, and the political implications of settlement are central themes of the course, and so, the direct connections between our course and This Place were obvious. That kind of clear connection can be a bit dangerous for students in the social sciences, however, because they are all-tooprone to view art as nothing more than a kind of

didactic instrument. Generally, they are just not trained or prepared to understand art on its own terms, as its own form of expression.

Luckily, our class was paired with an Art History course taught by Elizabeth Marlowe, Associate Professor of Art and Art History and Museum Studies. She was able to lead the students in “reading” the photographs, emphasizing artistic choices like framing, exposure, and size. Students could then go beyond consideration of the subject matter in order to assess visual form in the photographs and consider how the artistic expression itself defined the experience of viewing the exhibition.

Finally, the students in “Transnational Politics” were also able to assess and discuss the “meta politics” of the exhibition. This Place is controversial not only because it depicts contested dynamics of settlement and identity. It is also controversial because of who was invited into those dynamics to take the photographs, who was privileged to enter into that space for the purpose of depicting the people who live there and, by extension, the conflicts between and among them. These more straightforwardly “political” aspects of the exhibition were readily recognized by the Political Science students in “Transnational Politics.” They and their partners from the Art History course were thereby able to experience and assess the photographs more fully from both a formal and contextual perspective.

All of these elements—the subjects of the photography, the form of the artistic expression, and the controversy surrounding the creation of the exhibition itself—added great value to that semester’s “Transnational Politics” class. For me, personally, it was a welcome opportunity to grow as a teacher and a scholar who is open to deeper explorations of interdisciplinarity. My hope is that I will be able to continue to bring this kind of artistic texture and perspective to my classroom through collaborations with other faculty and the campus museums going forward.

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Raiding the Museum: Developing Visual Literacy through Interpreting Museum Objects

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Robert Knight Associate Professor of Art and Teagle Project Faculty Liaison, Hamilton College

In teaching photography, I have often found that one of the initial challenges is getting students to move past photography as a form of documentation (I was here; this is what something looks like) to photography as a form of self-expression and ultimately to photography as a medium for communicating ideas. One of the ways that I address this in my teaching is by showing students work by other photographers.

Unfortunately, looking at others’ work is most often done in the classroom using a PowerPoint slideshow. The Teagle grant encouraged me to reconsider this approach by having students work with objects at Hamilton’s Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art. Over the past three years, I developed a museum-based assignment that I call “Image Mapping.” It is an image analysis exercise and can be used with any selection of photographs.

For three semesters, including during the This Place exhibition in spring 2018, students worked with photographs on view in the Wellin Museum galleries. On two other occasions, when the current exhibitions did not include photography, students worked with material in the Wellin collection that was made available in one of the museum’s seminar rooms.

In each case, the first step is a class visit to the Wellin to see the images in person and to discuss them as a class. We start by using Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), an incredibly simple but effective approach that can be used by art educators with any audience. Participants begin by describing what they see and supporting that with visual evidence, then looking deeper and continuing the description process. At the end of the class, students are asked to choose one work

from among five or six photographs, and they receive an approximately 8-by-10-inch reproduction of their chosen image printed on an 11-by-17inch piece of paper. Their assignment is to use the white space around the image to describe the formal and aesthetic aspects of the photograph and to begin connecting those building blocks to a potential interpretation.

By this point in the semester, students have been making their own photographs and developing a visual language to describe images for about eight weeks. A couple of things happen during the Image Mapping assignment that are really important from a pedagogical standpoint.

First, the “sacred” work of art is made approachable. Students are understandably intimidated by artworks and professional museum exhibitions.

Many have spent little or no time in museums previously and even the experience of entering the museum space can feel oppressive. The process of writing on a copy of the work shifts it from the hallowed to the more commonplace and allows them to break the work down into accessible components. In that process, the experience of looking at art and going to museums is made a bit less intimidating. In addition, there is something subversive about the act of writing on a work of art, even a reproduction, and that act can be empowering for students.

The second thing that happens in this process is that students are forced to slow down and really look closely. There is a lot of white space around the image, and I tell them that they should have enough to say to fill that space.

They can easily Google what some historian has written about a work, but during this process they are forced to think for themselves. The

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Image Mapping exercise, Amy Harff ’21, Hamilton College (original image by Frédéric Brenner, on view in This Place, Wellin Museum, spring 2018)

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Image Mapping exercise, Grace Godwin ’21, Hamilton College (original image

by Wendy Ewald, on view in This Place, Wellin Museum, spring 2018).

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examples reproduced here offer typical student analyses reflecting the level of detail that is explored. Amy Harff, for instance, paid close attention to the relative positions of the people in the photograph, who appear to be members of a family. The student considers whether the arrangement suggests a traditional hierarchy with the father in charge. Does it suggest an emotional distance between some members of the family? One daughter is the only one looking down and the student insightfully asked, “What is she looking at? Odd one out? Discomfort?

Black sheep of family?”

Students can take various approaches to this exercise and it can even become a space for a creative response. Some students, such as Dan Tu and Grace Godwin, drew on their pages using different colors to highlight different themes in their images. Further, Godwin’s color key identifies both formal and thematic aspects of the image, including Western culture, conflicts, lines, color, technical observations, masculinity, aspects of childhood, and other questions.

The second part of the assignment requires students to produce a written response based on their analyses. This can take the form of a traditional museum wall label, a poem, or a short story about the image. One student wrote a coming-of-age narrative about a young woman’s choice to join a combat battalion in the Israel Defense Forces. Meanwhile, Tu wrote a more art historical analysis, asserting through careful research that the man in the photograph is a Palestinian Muslim.

It is worth highlighting the benefits of requiring students to write in a photography class. Close looking and writing about the work of other artists helps students become better photographers, which is the ultimate goal of the course. At the same time, writing forces students to engage with several of Hamilton College’s eight foundational educational goals, including communication, expression, and aesthetic discernment. It also supports Hamilton’s unofficial goal to implement writing across the curriculum.

During the exhibition This Place, my class had a chance to meet with artists Wendy Ewald

and Fazal Sheikh. This meeting happened to coincide with the day their Image Mapping assignments were due. During class, they shared their visual and written analysis with the artists and discussed their interpretations in relationship to the artists’ intentions. Half the class had worked with Sheikh’s images and the other half had worked with Ewald’s, and they sat down in separate groups in the Wellin Museum’s experimental classroom and talked about their approaches and interpretations. While this type of interaction and feedback from the artists themselves may not always be feasible, it offered an exceptional experience for the students.

The final aspect of the assignment is to share the student work with a larger audience.

This takes place in different ways, depending on the Wellin exhibition in question, available space in the gallery, and staffing resources. For example, responses from students were included as additional wall texts in the Wellin’s fall 2017 exhibition Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions (curated by Katherine Alcauskas).

Student responses have also been included as printouts in a binder that is available to museum visitors and have been displayed alongside photographs from the Wellin collection in the museum’s public flat file viewing space, just outside of the main galleries.

This approach to sharing student work is consistent with how I handle student projects generally in my classes. Each semester, my students display their final photography projects in public exhibitions in Hamilton’s Kennedy Center for Theatre and the Studio Arts or in other spaces on campus. Showing their work publicly empowers students with the knowledge that it is worth consideration beyond the classroom by a larger audience of their peers and other visitors to the college. This has the doubly beneficial effect of raising their self-esteem as young scholars and artists while also encouraging them to put forth their best effort.

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Image Mapping exercise, Dan Tu ’20, Hamilton College (original image by Wendy Ewald, on view in This Place, Wellin Museum, spring 2018).

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Writing with All Five Senses

Some Places publication, produced, designed, printed, and bound by students in Daniel Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild’s seminar, “This Place: Writing and Photography.”

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Janna Urschel Graduate Assistant, University at Albany

I come to the questions posed by the Teagle Project both as a student and as a teacher.

In spring 2018, I was a graduate student in Associate Professor of English Ed Schwarzschild and Associate Professor of Studio Art Danny Goodwin’s combined photography and writing class centered around the This Place exhibition at the University Art Museum. I am a writer primarily, but I love to challenge knowledge silos, so I thought it might be fun to crash around in Fine Arts like the proverbial bull.

The first assignment of the class asked us to respond to a single work in the exhibition. But what did that mean: “respond”? Jungjin Lee’s Unnamed Road 045 (2011) drew me back again and again like a siren song, but it wasn’t singing in a language I knew.

I spent a solid six hours listening and feeling for what it was trying to tell me, seeing and re-seeing, struggling to translate the visual medium of form, composition, line, and texture into English words. I tried to review it, to interpret it, to story it, but the assignment was so open, I couldn’t fall back on comfortable genre requirements. The longer I spent with the photograph, the more violence I felt I was doing to it by trying to pin it down with words. This impression was solidified when I attended a Dunkerley Dialogue with Stephen Shore and Skidmore Professor Emeritus of English Terence Diggory at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. When asked about the lack of interpretive labels accompanying his work, he averred that he felt texts foreclosed on interpretation.

Not even one assignment in, and already, bull that I was, I felt I’d pulverized all the teacups. Writing about art seemed to box in both media inexcusably.

I carried these anxieties with me into the following collaborative assignments with my partner, a photographer. I didn’t want to “merely” narrate his photographs, and he didn’t want to simply “illustrate” my stories, so we decided on a tack of respectful distance, purposefully leaving gaps between our works where the meaning of the collaboration would take place— the audience would do the work to bridge them.

Then I got behind the camera myself, which was like visiting a foreign country without a pocket dictionary. I spent several hundred shots producing a series of remarkably basic variations on a single scene that varied only in focus, exposure, and framing (in language terms, I learned the grammatical equivalent of “Me taco have”). I don’t know what Ed and Danny would say about the product, but the process, the process was the thing. From then on, our collaboration took a turn away from paranoid don’t touch signs toward a kind of joyful, juxtapositional anarchy.

I didn’t close the gap, but I stopped caring about trespassing on it so much. Smashing china, as it turns out, is actually a lot of fun. Trusting the process, I found myself turned on and opened up as an artist.

The process, in fact, was so unfettering that I had to share. The following year I incorporated museum visits into my course “Introduction to Creative Writing.”

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Jungjin Lee, Unnamed Road 045, 2011, archival pigment print, 42 x 80 1/2 inches, image courtesy the artist

This assignment was designed for a fifty-minute class of primarily freshmen and sophomores, who are overwhelmingly not English majors or people who identify themselves as particularly creative. I do it at the beginning of the year to establish that the primary work of the class doesn’t take place in the class at all, but that writing is of the world and in relation to the world. In other words, I aim to frustrate their orientation toward traditional classroom instruction by decamping to the educationally defamiliarizing space of the museum. The open, non-podium-oriented space of the museum and self-directed nature of the activity radically minimize a teacher-centered hierarchy, which is crucial for a creative writing classroom.

Because art is an act of thought, experience, and response, in responding to the art they are entering into conversation—collaborating—so they learn intuitively that their own art moves forward such conversations and does not exist in a vacuum of purported genius. They begin to learn the process, and I emphasize my lack of concern at this stage with product. To the degree possible, I don’t want them performing for me.

The class is not about stuffing their sausagecasing brains with predigested information, but about the process of noticing itself and what opens up for them when they slow down and are simply open to something real in the world.

First, I ask them to wander and view the exhibition, then pick a piece that speaks to them in some way, then perform the exercises with that one piece. I ask them to suspend judgment and

interpretation until a later stage in order to hold open the door for the artwork itself to speak as they experience the productive frustration of the basic question: what are you, art?

Next, I ask them to use the descriptive powers we’ve been talking about for the first few class periods of the semester. This is what I call “noticing” and consider the foundation of creative writing. What do they see? Our primary sense is visual, and the museum pieces are usually primarily visual, so I start in their comfort zone. Then I ask them to move on to the other senses and really reach into synesthetic territory. Yes, it’s a two-dimensional photograph or a vase with a “do not touch” sign on it, but what smells does it evoke? What tastes? What do you hear? What does it do to your skin? I want them to get their whole bodily sensory apparatus engaged in the world of the art object and to simultaneously stretch their lexical muscles.

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To ask about what kinds of smells are evoked by a reel-to-reel projection of the moon involves certain imaginative contortions, making this also an excellent stimulus for conversations about concrete versus figurative language.

Finally, I let them turn their cognitive brains back on and think about meaning. In the museum, I ask them just to experience the object. As homework after class, I ask them to turn it into a poem. That’s it. This is the first creative assignment they turn in, and I ask for no formal requirements. We really haven’t even talked about what a poem is at this point. Instead, I want them to define the genre by doing. I want them to experience the frustration of the essential inadequacy of words and the wide-open range of form, but also the magnetic pull of the attempt, and especially the wild freedom of making something new in the smash-cake meeting place of art and language.

At the end of the semester, I “workshop” my classes by asking what worked best on the syllabus and what I can adjust. The museum visit routinely gets a unanimous and enthusiastic thumbs-up: students love getting out of the classroom and into the museum space, the stimulating novelty of an art encounter, and the kooky challenge of figuring out how a sculpture tastes.

While my students don’t necessarily produce technically brilliant poetry from this exercise, they do something perhaps more valuable: they embrace the process. They break a lot of teacups.

The exercise sets the tone for the remainder of the semester, freeing them to crash around in a broader educational head-and-body space, kindling all of their senses to enter the multidimensional world of objects outside the self and privileging process over product, which reduces anxiety and gives them back control of their own educational and artistic being.

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Psychological Principles in the Museum

This image of vineyards in Champagne-Ardenne, France, by Stefano ScatĂ , is used in a textbook presentation of visual grouping principles by Peter O. Gray and David F. Bjorklund (Psychology, 2014). The principles are first defined and presented schematically using graphics and verbal explanations, then illustrated in this photograph.

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Alexandra List Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Hamilton College

In the natural sciences, art and the museum are not obvious pedagogical tools. But in spring 2018, when the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College participated in the multi-site exhibition This Place, I implemented museum-based instruction into a standard introduction to psychology survey. My course is one of numerous sections designed to provide consistent coverage of disciplinary breadth and fundamentals. The demands and constraints on each section are made even stricter because the course also plays an institutional role in developing quantitative and symbolic reasoning proficiency and because close to half of our student body enrolls in the course while completing their undergraduate studies.

Why, then, even consider integrating art and the museum into an already-constrained course, especially one in which the primary goal is to provide students with a foundation in the scientific study of mental processes and behavior?

Several compelling answers exist. A museum visit, in any course so heavily populated with first-year students (around 80 percent across all sections), is a rich occasion to model deliberate and broad engagement with often-changing and independent campus events such as those at our museum. Especially for students who later pursue other majors or unrelated professional paths, it is an opportunity to explicitly demonstrate how courses carry lessons beyond their

classroom spaces and semesters. This vital lesson can potentially curtail default disciplinary siloing.

Furthermore, art and the museum can contribute meaningfully to students’ mastery of introductory psychology content and skills.

When considering course content, certain psychological principles (e.g., visual ones) can be demonstrated within art and the museum independent of a particular exhibition, whereas other psychological principles (e.g., socio-cultural and developmental ones) depend more heavily on an exhibition’s themes and media. In my course, I arranged one guided museum visit during class time, employed related exam questions, and offered students extra credit for reflections following later, independent visits.

The guided visit centered on a key introductory psychology topic: visual perception. The visual principles of grouping and pictorial depth cues are two particularly evident avenues for integrating both art and the museum with course content. Specifically, principles of grouping address how we know which elements “go together” or group into wholes, and include proximity, closure, good continuation, common fate. For comparison, consider how the image reproduced here from our exemplary textbook illustrates the grouping principles of proximity, closure, good continuation, and similarity of color, lightness, texture, or orientation of contours, and how these same principles are

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Fazal Sheikh’s work illustrates numerous grouping principles within a single piece.

Fazal Sheikh, Latitude: 31° 21’ 7” N / Longitude: 34° 46’ 27” E, October 9, 2011, from Desert Bloom, 2015, inkjet print, 21 1/2 x 29 1/4 inches, courtesy the artist

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apparent when grouping objects in a museum installation and within individual artworks, like Fazal Sheikh’s Desert Bloom (2011). Identifying these principles in a context other than a textbook figure or projected slide allows students to appreciate how ubiquitously these perceptual principles apply.

The museum space and exhibited art also provide a rich opportunity to identify pictorial depth cues, for which we consider how organisms experience three-dimensional representations from two-dimensional images (whether in the world and/or physiologically). The visual information cues to environmental depth, such as occlusion, relative size, linear perspective, differential lighting, and texture gradients are adequately described in textbooks, but are more vividly appreciated in artworks or through the museum space itself.

To test the ease of exploring these visual principles with new material, I repeated the approach in spring 2019 using the Wellin Museum’s Theaters of Fiction exhibition (curated by Katherine Alcauskas). The process was again successful in exploring visual principles, but socio-cultural and developmental themes evident in This Place (e.g., the role of students’ own religious, cultural, and familial identities in shaping their reactions) were far less applicable to Theaters of Fiction, in which very few humans were depicted and the socio-political issues raised were more subtle and rare. Exhibitions may thereby limit or change accessibility to socio-cultural and developmental principles, whereas visual principles may be more universally applied.

In addition to supporting course content, certain fundamental scientific skills pertinent to psychology, such as observation, listening, and evidence-based argumentation, can be reinforced in the museum through Visual Thinking

Strategies (VTS). The VTS approach allows viewers, independent of the exhibition or their prior artistic expertise, to reflect on and discuss their experiences through guided questions (i.e., What is going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can you find?). During our museum visit, VTS allowed students to practice speaking aloud about art, responding to others, and identifying visual information in the environment that motivated their (and others’) comments and experiences.

The exercises delivered three additional unanticipated benefits. First, some students were more outspoken in the museum than in the science classroom, shifting a notoriously hardto-change classroom discussion dynamic. Second, students commented on my own enthusiasm, likely reflecting the benefit to faculty engaging with new material. Third, in the museum, faculty have the opportunity to model the exploratory learning process.

In sum, the museum and art bring opportunities for both content delivery and skill development in introductory psychology, though some flexibility is required in response to changing exhibitions. Especially if only one (or some) of many sections adopt museum-based activities, faculty may need to manage students’ expectations and may need to explicitly explain the activity’s pedagogical value. Open questions include whether (or how) this mode of student learning could be quantitatively assessed and how this particular model might scale beyond forty-student-maximum enrollment courses.

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In this photograph, visual depth cues are evident.

FrĂŠdĂŠric Brenner, Palace Hotel, 2009, archival pigment print, 74 3/4 x 59 7/8 inches, courtesy the artist

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This Place installation of Fazal Sheikh’s Desert Bloom (2011) and Stephen Shore’s photographs at the Wellin Museum, illustrating numerous depth cues, both via installation and through the museum space (floors, walls, and ceiling).

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Choreography as Seeing

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Jason Ohlberg Assistant Professor of Dance, Skidmore College

I engaged students in two sections of my “Performance Workshop” course in collaborations with two separate exhibitions at the Tang Teaching Museum in 2017 and 2018. This presented an opportunity to rethink learning objectives for the course, which is designed to facilitate a studio rehearsal process and the creation of choreography for performance. The challenge was to create an experience around a museum-based, studentcentered process. This raised several questions: What is the educational potential of museumbased exploration in a creative process?

How might working with objects inform physical research?

How might that research facilitate a student’s

What more can you find?

Class time was split between days creating movement phrases in the studio and days when I sent students to the museum to work directly with the art. Assignments focused on patterns represented in artworks, which could be approached as compositional “problems” to be solved—such as creating new movement based on information in an image or manipulating existing movement based on patterns represented in the artwork. Students also engaged in self-reflective journaling to capture their experiences throughout the process.

Although assignments in the museum were both physically and mentally challenging, students typically returned to the studio excited and visibly proud of their accomplishments— as confirmed in their journal entries:

sense of agency or ownership in the choreographic process?

After a rehearsal in the Tang, I always had a feeling of accomplishment as if I had just

Might these experiences generate conver-

solved a complex puzzle, and I can happily say

sations about “seeing” and how we create

that I am proud of the phrases I have helped

meaning?

to create. As a dancer, it is really nice to have a sense of ownership in a piece of choreography.

The first collaboration was with Sixfold Symmetry: Pattern in Art and Science (curated by Rachel Roe-Dale and Rachel Seligman). We began with a tour of the exhibition using a slightly altered version of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) to help students physically access information present in the images. I asked the following questions:

—Libby ’20 I often find it difficult to relate to art in museums because I haven’t studied any other form of art aside from dance at a collegiate level and don’t always feel that I have the appropriate tools to analyze what I am exposed to in a gallery setting. I was grateful

What movement is in this picture?

to have the opportunity to connect to the artwork in the Tang through the medium of

How would you physically express what you see?

dance, which I know so well.

—Olivia ’17

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Developing a sense of competence and confidence in working with objects and gaining a sense of agency in the process were themes that echoed throughout students’ journals. This was also exceedingly evident from the material that came back from the sessions in the museum; the specificity, detail, and quality were exceptional.

Additionally, the collaborative efforts seemed to have a positive effect on group phrasing and the execution of unison work.

The second exhibition was more complex.

This Place—a fragmented portrait of Israel and the West Bank through the lens of artists not from the region—presented several challenging subtexts. For this collaboration, I asked students to wrestle with concepts of identity, place, and otherness. It is important to note that I designed assignments to encourage students to see information present in the images but not attempt to derive narratives from them. I primarily focused on tasking students with relating to and expressing physically tangible information present in the images. I was curious how spending time with these images might change the ways in which students saw them. How might time affect “seeing” and perhaps meaning?

Though we worked with the entire exhibition throughout the semester, one of the most pivotal assignments revolved around the work of Wendy Ewald, whose This Is Where I Live (2015) presents photographs by adults and children, from communities across Israel and the West Bank, whom she worked with to produce the images. I asked students to spend an entire class period with this work with the goal of selecting two or three individual images that caught their attention in some meaningful way. We spent the subsequent class with those images, and I asked students to let the less salient ones fall away until they were each left with just one—one image that, for whatever reason, struck a personal resonance.

Students then spent the entire semester with that single image. The first assignment was to create a gesture phrase from the information in it.

That might entail creating a phrase based on the play of light, shadow, and movement in the image or based on a personal reaction or memory. We then turned those gesture phrases into larger, more complex solo material that was incorporated into the larger dance being created. Throughout the process, I repeatedly asked students to return to their photos to see what information they had

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yet to discover. I was particularly impressed with how repeatedly working with the same images continued to produce qualitative complexity and richness in students’ dancing—something that was noted by colleagues during the performance of Milk and Honey, the piece created from this process. The following are student reflections on the experience: I could take directional cues from different compositional techniques, textures of movement from the mood, lighting, and landscape of photographs, and pedestrian gestures from the subjects of the photographs.

Being able to have a working relationship with an exhibit, observing and working with the different photographs in order to create and alter choreography enriched my movement in a way that will forever inform my dancing.

—Lily ’21 The space provided a new atmosphere that was not only different from the studios we usually create in, but also aesthetically rich and full of complex content. I enjoyed working

in the exhibit each time we visited and appreciated that we visited multiple times; it made the project feel more in-depth and like a sincere collaboration, as opposed to just grazing through material.

—Anika ’19

This work engaged students in both physical research and museum-based modes of inquiry.

It fostered a sense of agency and ownership in the creative process and embraced a diverse span of perspectives that ultimately encouraged community building. Importantly, repeatedly engaging with images facilitated conversations about “seeing.” The immersive time with the artwork was key; students could not have had the same experience without it. The process enabled students to see both the artwork and their dancing in expanded ways and encouraged deeper conversations about how we create meaning. By embracing movement, a dancer’s primary language, this collaboration enabled a physical dialogue with material that wound up broadening students’ perspectives and enriching their educational experience.

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Augmented Discourse: Connecting Exhibitions to Curriculum through Technology

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Nicholas West Curator of Collections, Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University

The Challenge

For the installation of This Place at Colgate University’s Picker Art Gallery, we had several discussions about how to integrate informed student responses into the exhibition space.

Our challenge was to develop an assignment that facilitated students’ critical responses to the photographs, to have those responses dialogue meaningfully with the exhibition (i.e., not be in a separate space), to have a component of public presentation of student work as part of the exhibition, and to do so with minimal physical intervention in the exhibition space.

To address this challenge, a team consisting of Camila Maroja, Assistant Professor of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University (formerly at Colgate); Sarah Kunze, Instructional Designer of Innovative Media at Colgate; and myself, the coordinating curator, came together in summer 2017 to devise an assignment. In our meetings, we discussed deploying technology to achieve our objectives and decided to explore how augmented reality might be incorporated into the classroom and exhibition space.

The term “augmented reality” describes a real-world environment that has been enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information.

The information is layered onto the real world and can be accessed and interacted with through the use of a digital device. For the purposes of our exhibition intervention, this digital layering seemed to be an excellent means to avoid physical alteration of the exhibition space and to provide access to a significant amount of additional content. Viewing the exhibition would only be impacted when using a digital

device—requiring visitors to opt into this mode of interacting with the artworks—and necessitated the inclusion of only minimal guidance and instructions.

The Assignment

We designed a project (with help from Nicole Chen ’18) for Maroja’s class “Art and Theory 1980 to Present,” which she taught in fall 2017— that is, the semester before the exhibition opened.

Over the course of the semester, the students would write several texts—work that could be assessed in a traditional manner—but would also translate these texts into media content that could be included in the exhibition.

Since the photographs in the exhibition were not yet at Colgate, students worked from high-resolution digital images. They were presented with lessons on the exhibition concept, introduced to projects by the four artists who were represented in Colgate’s portion, and learned about some of the critical responses to previous iterations of This Place, including the Decolonize This Place action staged at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016.

Students selected a work that they would then spend the rest of the semester thinking and writing about. They wrote three different types of exhibition texts that each went through several rounds of revisions: a 350-word object label; a 600-word didactic wall text; and a 350-word label about an alternate image that they believed would make a good addition to the exhibition. Students were also given the option to make use of the resources available through our learning and applied innovation team to turn their texts into “rich media” (audio, video, interactive elements).

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The Tools

Student content selected for inclusion in the exhibition was digitally uploaded and mapped onto specific images and objects on view to create the virtual layer accessed through the augmented reality app. We looked at several options for the augmented reality app and found that many did not suit our needs. We sought something with a low barrier to entry, one that did not require providing an email address or signing up for a service. We settled on an app called Layar, which was easy to use and fully

functional after being downloaded onto a digital device. The app worked by uploading the relevant images into the platform and associating content with a specific image. The student content was uploaded and formatted by Kunze, who then associated sixteen “texts” (including images, audio, and video) with six artworks and three text panels in the exhibition. When running Layar on a digital device, a visitor could “scan” an artwork, which the app would match to one of the pre-uploaded images and then give options for accessing the virtual content.

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The Lessons

Overall, students responded well to the assignment and they received some in-depth training in working closely with images and critically examining the ideologies of exhibitions. However, student experience did not translate easily into visitor experience.

Many students chose to keep their labels and didactics as written text rather than transforming them into formats such as audio or video. The insistence on using text not only created a surprising amount of work for the instructional designer in creating image files from the text, but overall also made for a less engaging visitor experience. For future iterations of this project, we would build in the production of rich media as a compulsory part of the assignment.

Although we attempted to lower the accessibility barrier by selecting an AR app that would be easy to download and use, we still faced hurdles in encouraging visitors to take up the AR activity. Security requirements necessitated that a visitor leave a form of identification in order to check out one of the museum’s iPads with the AR app loaded on it. This proved a significant

deterrent as the five iPads were only checked out eight times. Visitors could also download the app on their personal devices, but we were not able to track how many visitors did so. Future projects of this kind will necessitate earlier conversations with security personnel to facilitate less onerous access to the technological tools needed to participate.

Evaluations of the project as an engaging learning opportunity were generally positive, and students listed it as a course highlight in class evaluations. Maroja reported: “In addition to honing their writing skills, students engaged closely and critically with the images and began to understand the ideology involved in presenting objects as a coherent group. The exhibition was also understood as a primary source.�

While this project could use some fine-tuning around creating a seamless visitor experience, in general, the use of augmented reality technology seems a promising avenue for integrating deep engagement with museum exhibitions in a classroom environment while also creating new student-centered discourses within the exhibitions themselves.

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In Conversation Studio K.O.S. Angel Abreu and Rick Savinon of Studio K.O.S. and Susan E. Cahan Professor of Art History and Dean, Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University

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Susan E. Cahan: Good afternoon. I’m the dean at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia, and in this role, I’m immersed in the culture of higher education. I’ve been in higher ed for almost twenty years now, and I understand the rules, the teachingresearch-service equation, the politics, the hierarchies, and I certainly understand the bureaucracy.

I also understand the important role that museums and galleries play at colleges and universities. Someone yesterday raised the question, “Are museums especially valuable places?”

That is, are they exceptional spaces? Or, are they just really great spaces? I believe that on college campuses, museums are truly special places because they can be free of many constraints that affect us in the classroom and even in the studio. They have a flexibility that other parts of the college or university sometimes lack and that allows for a degree of exploration absolutely necessary for creativity.

In this afternoon’s conversation, we’re going to pull back and address some large questions that Ian Berry has posed to us: “What is the value of art? What is the value of teaching? What matters the most right now?” Just some modest topics!

These questions are important because they concern not only what we do, but how we do it, and most importantly, why.

Our goal for this conversation is to inspire and encourage everyone in this room to continue to push ourselves further in everything we do, and to understand the importance of our accomplishments in our teaching and in our professional and personal development. And to continue to strive to accomplish even more in a world where education, and a kind of education that engages the emotions as well as the intellect, is increasingly important.

I’m going to start by asking Angel and Rick to tell the history of K.O.S., or Kids of Survival, and what problems in the education system and in our society, generally, it evolved to address.

Angel Abreu: I can start with an anecdote of how I met Tim Rollins. I grew up in the South Bronx, and my middle school happened to be the school that Tim was teaching at, I.S. 52—the worst

school in the worst district in the city, and I didn’t want to go there. I was a precocious fifth grader, and I went to my parents and said, “I do not want to walk the three treacherous blocks to get there. Do I have any other options?”

I don’t know how my parents let me do this, but I took two buses as a ten-year-old to get to one of the first charter schools in the Bronx, but when seventh grade came around, I no longer had a choice. So, I show up to I.S. 52. The very first day was just as I imagined it would be—chaotic, paper strewing all over the place, students running around—and seventh period came around. It’s an art class.

As we’re walking toward room 318, there’s a collective hush. So, obviously, the other students really respected the person that was in that classroom. I walk in, and there is Tim wearing a threepiece red suit—he was a heavy Marxist at the time, and so that was his uniform. He shuffles everybody along, saying, “Come on in. Come on, come on.” Tim really had a whole lot of energy.

And we all take our seats, and he says, “We’ve got a lot of work to do.” He proceeds to put down what looks like a test—on the first day of school!

Everyone was like, “What are you doing?” It was a multiple choice test with questions like, “Out of these four artists, which one is not a Cubist?

What year was the first Surrealist manifesto written?” And so, I could read the questions, but I had no idea what he was talking about. He says, “Just take the test. Just do it.” So, we all take the test. Half hour later, we hand them in. And Tim just had this grin that’s . . . He was like Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He really just stirred the pot. And he says, “This is the midterm test that I’m going to give you in six weeks. I’m not changing a single word, and I guarantee that all of you will get As.” And at this point, I realized, “This is where I belonged all along.”

A few months go by, and he meets my parents, tells them about this after-school program that he’s running using education as a medium for making art. I had no idea what that meant, and so I didn’t want to show up unprepared to the studio. I show up to the studio with this Crayola watercolor set, and the group was getting ready for a major show at MoMA PS1.

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Rick Savinon: We were all laughing at him.

AA: The students just erupted with laughter.

There’s a major piece over here, based on Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Over here, there’s a major work based on Franz Kafka’s Amerika. And here I am with my watercolor set.

RS: I’m still laughing.

AA: I would be, too. I was embarrassed but not discouraged. The studio was kind of an egalitarian version of a Renaissance studio but without any condescension at all. The expectations were high. Your own expectations were high. We knew we had something to do, and we never failed to let someone know when something really wasn’t that good and they could do better. But we also encouraged each other big time when something was really good, which luckily was more often.

SC: Let’s rewind a little bit. For people who might not know what Tim Rollins and K.O.S. was, let me throw out a prompt. Tim once said to me, “I was hired as an art teacher, but how could I

justify teaching art when the students didn’t even know how to spell art?” So, what was the class that started it all, how did reading and writing become part of the K.O.S. practice, and when did you start working in the studio, Rick?

RS: I started in 1985.

SC: What were you learning? What were you supposed to be doing there?

RS: I met Tim through a summer program at Lehman College. K.O.S. already had been formed as a group, and he took on the act of teaching this workshop to finance the studio. He said to me, “I have this group if you want to join.” But the thing about Tim is that he had so much enthusiasm.

He would set fire to you, you know. He was the type of teacher that would listen. That’s one of the things that Tim was very good at. He would sit there, he would listen to me. And I thought, I need to be with this person because I feel that someone’s caring about my education.

SC: How did books get introduced into the art studio?

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RS: Tim was teaching in the South Bronx, and I think Carlos Rivera, one of his students who was part of the initial K.O.S. group, drew on one of Tim’s books.

AA: But it wasn’t just any book. Imagine Tim on an $18,000-a-year salary, and he bought this first edition 1984 by George Orwell. It was his prized possession. He was passing it around the class because he really wanted to promote the tactile relationship with books. Feeling books, opening them, smelling them, it inspires a love of reading.

SC: This was supposed to be an art class. Why were you reading? What was going on there?

RS: I think part of it was because Tim actually came to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts with Joseph Kosuth.

SC: So language was already part of his culture.

Was he trying to teach you guys how to read?

You knew how to read because you read the test.

Were there other kids who didn’t?

AA: There were several of us who were learning disabled or dyslexic. And for those who couldn’t really read, some of us would read to them. Tim also developed homemade books on tape. He would go home and, in his cassette recorder, record himself reading books and then play the tapes for us later.

Tim always escaped with books. He grew up in a small town in Pittsfield, Maine. And while we didn’t necessarily share skin color or anything like this, Pittsfield was downtrodden and we shared the pitfalls of low expectations. That’s how we connected. He understood that literacy was a way to get out.

SC: So, Tim’s love of books and of language and his sensitivity to the importance of literacy informed the work in the art studio. In fact, it eventually led to the method of artmaking that Tim Rollins and K.O.S. became known for: using books as inspiration and book pages as canvases.

A lot of what we’re talking about centers around Tim because he was a galvanizing figure, and we all miss him since he passed away recently. But one important theme that I want to underscore is that the teaching and learning that happened in this classroom that Rick and Angel were a part of, and then in the after-school program, it wasn’t just about teaching a certain subject, and it wasn’t just about what happened within that fifty-two-minute class period, and it wasn’t just about doing his job. Tim walked in as an art teacher and realized that these students needed more than that. They needed to learn more than how to make a figure drawing, and they needed to learn in a different way. And with a different group of students, maybe something different would have happened. But with this particular group of students in this environment, Tim had something unique to offer, and it turned into something so much larger than anyone could have imagined.

It’s important to remember this was the 1980s, which was a time when a lot of art spaces were showing work by people who were not professional artists. There was a lot of activity around the idea of a cultural practice that was socially engaged and that was intrinsically interdisciplinary and more democratic.

If you’re my age, you’ll remember The Times Square Show in 1980, a site-specific installation produced in a former massage parlor by Colab, an artist collaborative. The East Village scene was just beginning to start up, and artist-run galleries were happening. Group Material had been founded in 1979 with a gallery to showcase work produced by people who lived in the neighborhood, and the term “artist” became very elastic. It could include everyone from kids to seniors, amateurs to professionals, and everything in between. So, this was a moment in the history of art where there was an opening for presentation of a kind of practice that stepped outside the boundaries of what had been defined as “art.” That door cracked open, and Tim ran right in with K.O.S. Over time, their practice grew, and museum exhibitions and acquisitions started happening.

My sense is K.O.S. was key to changing the definition of what a museum could be and what

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a gallery could be, because it allowed for voices that had not previously had legitimacy within the art system—the voices of young people.

Rick and Angel, can you talk about the role that museums played in your work when you were younger, working with K.O.S.? What role did museums play in your personal, creative, and intellectual development and in your artistic research?

AA: I never went to a museum before I met Tim. I had no reason to. My parents are very meat and potatoes—if you couldn’t eat it, drink it, sleep with it, then what? What does it have to do with me? And so, I adopted that notion a little bit. Once I started working with Tim, part of the protocol was we would run through the Museum of Modern Art. I had no reason before that to even go below 125th Street in New York. This was my first time venturing past that border, which felt very, very strange.

Later, I read W. E. B. Du Bois, and it hit me like a lightning bolt what Tim was doing, what the pedagogy was when I read what Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, when he said, “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.” It’s like, this is what it’s all about. Those first few visits to MoMA and the Met, and these other places, I was afraid. But it wasn’t that I was afraid of the things that were there, I was afraid of what I might become. I had no idea. It was like a key that was turned, and, all of a sudden, this whole world became available to me.

Tim would say, “Listen, I’m going to take you to MoMA.” We’d respond, “Oh, God, no.

We don’t want to do that.” But he’d promise us lunch at Burger Heaven after. “All right, let’s do it.” So, his protocol was to run through the galleries of MoMA, every floor, and then go have lunch. And while we’re eating, he’d say, “Okay, what caught your eye? I know we went through really fast, but what caught your eye?” Someone would say, “Well, they had that painting with all the black blocks and different versions of black, and it felt spiritual.” And he’d say, “Oh, yeah. That’s Ad Reinhardt.” So then after lunch, we would go back and visit all the works we mentioned and stand in front of them. He

wanted us to stand in front of the work and take them in in depth.

RS: I remember when I went to MoMA, and I saw a Cézanne painting, and I said, “I’ve never seen this painting before.” And Tim said, “It’s been here for years.” I said, “No, you’re lying. I know you’re lying. You’re trying to trick me. I’ve never seen this painting before.” I went up and asked the guard, and the guard said, “This painting has been here for years.” I said, “I’ve grown the eyes to see it, to finally see it.”

I think I was nineteen years old then, and I joined the group when I was fifteen. In those four years, I had evolved as a person, as an artist, as a creative person to finally see the things that I could see because of the experiences I had within the group. It opened up more possibilities for me and for the rest of the group.

SC: Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between texts and visual imagery in terms of the methodology that you use?

AA: After Carlos Rivera started drawing on the Orwell book and Tim got over being extremely angry, the idea hit him: “Whoa, there’s something happening here.” It was a visual manifestation of having a conversation with these authors or composers. What we do is carefully take the pages out of the books and put them up on the canvas in a grid-like fashion. We’re not necessarily illustrating the books. We’re having a conversation. It’s almost like a séance in a way. And as we developed and matured, we became a think tank. We literally mined these books, and we would come up with that thing that worked.

RS: It’s like a roadmap. It’s a journey. We make several variations of a work, and they always evolve. You’re having a conversation with the text. We often try to work with texts to bring them to life—we rebuild them or relive them through the work that we do.

AA: Emerson said that books are to be used, not just read. That was our mantra. They are

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amazing teaching machines. It was so fun, that we didn’t know we were learning.

RS: We didn’t know the direction we were heading in. We would flock to the studio and work on these paintings. And little by little, as people realized what we were doing, universities and museums would call out to us and say, “We hear that you’re combining literature and art as a learning tool.

Can you come and show us what to do?”

SC: Talk to us a little more about your experiences in museums and the roles they’ve played for you in the different dimensions of your lives.

If you think museums are important, talk with us about why.

AA: It’s a space of reflection, and space where there’s possibility realized. One of my most favorite parts of our practice, especially when we got into doing workshops with younger folk, is once we collect all the materials, we go back to the studio, we put it together, and then have those student participants come back a month or two later, and they see their names on the caption, and you can see the light bulbs above their heads. It’s all about possibility.

Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Invisible Man (after Ralph Ellison), 2012, india ink, pencil on book pages, 12 1/8 x 11 3/4 inches, Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of the artists in honor of Ginger Ertz, 2017.43

SC: What do the workshops consist of?

AA: We usually start with a book, similar to what we would do in our studio. Teach the book, certain aspects of it, details, because, in two or three days, you really can’t cover the whole thing; we just scratch the surface.

RS: The workshops consist of three hours a day over a week. We take the key moments in the book, and then we usually have everyone sit around a single table, everyone reads the book, and some will read certain passages out loud.

And then from there, we start making the work.

We try to focus on the students to create their own works. And then, little by little, we bring in a structure that we made in the studio, and it all unfolds. We see ourselves in the students.

SC: How did art become a way of finding real meaning and purpose in the material that you were reading?

AA: We didn’t necessarily choose the books, the texts would choose us, if I’m being honest. There are always things that really speak to us. Recently, we worked on W. E. B. Du Bois’s Darkwater,

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written in 1920. There’s a chapter in it called “The Immortal Child” that talks about disenfranchised kids in education. And we were just taken aback as to how relevant every single sentence in that chapter is today. And so, that became a source for many of our recent workshops.

SC: Can you describe the process of creating one of the works with Darkwater, where you find forms through an art-making process that renders meaning that’s intrinsic in the text manifest in the present?

RS: Well, it’s intuitive at times.

SC: Ian asked us to address some big questions.

So: What would you say is the value of art?

RS: Art changed my life in a way where I view things in a different perspective. I remember the first time we had a show in Madrid, and we traveled and I was able to see all the architecture there. And when I came back to where I lived, my neighborhood, I was looking at the architecture that I would pass by every day as a kid, and I was exposed to something different.

Like I said with the Cézanne painting, I grew the eyes to see it. In that way, it completely changed the way I view the world.

SC: Do you draw? Do you brainstorm? Do you make collages? How does the text become an artwork?

AA: Let me ask you something, what do you think the most important tool is for an artist? Who can answer this?

SC: Pencil?

AA: That’s a good one.

RS: The garbage!

AA: The garbage can. Curators will say you can’t throw anything away. Unfortunately, we threw too much away, I think. But we would just make and make, and some of these works would take years.

RS: You have to run through all the garbage in order to find treasure.

AA: So, for instance, in Darkwater, there’s a passage that talks about a golden river. That really stuck with us. It’s golden: what are we going to do here? We would carefully, carefully rip these first editions apart—carefully because they’re almost a hundred years old. And then, in a bath of gold, we would dip these pages and almost baptize them. The gold and the black would mix, and they would separate and do these crazy, really beautiful things.

AA: I truly believe that there is a kind of triangular reciprocity with experiencing art. This idea comes from John Dewey’s Art as Experience, where you have your own experience, your own empirical knowledge that you can control, hopefully most of the time, and then that informs the material to use for whatever media. The viewer brings their empirical knowledge, and you can’t necessarily control what that person’s reaction may be. I love that relationship. It’s that conversation that is only really possible from experiencing art and music.

SC: I’m an art historian, not an artist. And for me, experiencing good art always involves a sense of discovery and mystery and a connectedness that almost defies language, a connection between my intuition, my emotional life, and my intellect.

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I do this thing, I’ve noticed, where I lose myself in the work and experience it without the ability to translate what I’m experiencing into language. And then, I come back from that and try to analyze what I’ve just felt in order to understand the work and be able to share that experience both with myself and with others. I see some people in the audience nodding. Do you want to share with us what you think the value of an art experience is?

Audience: I think it’s transformative—the idea is that you are engaged with the artwork and that it creates an experience that’s actually meaningful. We’ve talked a lot about the educational value of art, but it’s also beyond the intellectual, beyond the emotional. It’s something that has real meaning and real depth—we want that to resonate. We want people to have meaningful experiences that will serve them throughout their lives no matter what it is that they do after school.

SC: I’d say that good art keeps giving me back more. There’s complexity, there’s richness, there’s mystery, there’s the unknown. It stretches our ability to constantly explore the unknown and find more. What’s the value of teaching? Well, what’s the value of learning?

The value of learning is so basic and fundamental. It’s about living. It’s about evolving.

It’s about developing. It’s about the fact that, in any given moment, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the next moment—we create the next moment. And this is what being alive, truly being alive, is.

This is the kind of thing that you are enabling your students to do when you give them the opportunity to search themselves and to reflect with an object and to have that process of back and forth. I keep thinking of the Image Mapping exercise where the students were asked to annotate a photograph. That’s exactly what they were doing, seeing and experiencing, and then translating into words that thing that they were feeling, and then going back and doing it again, and doing it again, and getting more and more and more. That is the process of living.

AA: What’s really too bad is that these things have spirit, right? We treat art that way. But we often treat art better than we treat one another. In museums, art stays warm in the winter, cool in the summer. And that’s a bit of a problem.

SC: That gets to some political issues, not only the one that Angel just mentioned, but also the question of access and who has access to institutions. My own research is on the history of segregation in art museums. Even though it’s not discussed as much as things like redlining, it was real, and it still is real to a certain extent.

My work looks at ways in which museums need to change and ways in which they have changed and are continuing to change. But the idea that only some people should have access to complex, beautiful things that give back is wrong. And the way in which discrimination works in our institutions is both overt and very subtle.

AA: It reminds me of a story, actually, when I was fourteen or fifteen, and we went to a big Jasper Johns show. We showed up dressed and armored with our best suits. For any openings or big events, Tim wanted us all to wear suits. We show up in suits, we have our tickets, and we go up to the guard and he asks, “Where did you get these?” And, by the way, he looked just like us. I remember I was so angry, and I just stormed off.

Tim had to run after me. The curator fixed it for us or something and we were let in.

RS: I also remember a time when the Black Male show opened at the Whitney in 1994 . . .

SC: You had work in it, right?

RS: Yes. The artist Ashley Bickerton came up to us and said, “I remember, there was a time when the only people of color were you guys.” And it was amazing, because there were so many people of color there for the show, and we just kind of cheered and laughed about it.

AA: Then we walked outside and we couldn’t get cabs. Honestly, Glenn Ligon is across the street and he’s doing the same thing.

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SC: I can say from my own research that the experiences that these guys had being questioned upon entering museums or galleries were typical—in the major museums at least in New York City and probably in other parts of the country. People of color would literally be turned away at the door. Thomas Hoving, who was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the late 1960s through the late 1970s told me that African American people would be turned away at the door of the Met and told it was a private club.

It’s kind of hard to believe, but that really did happen and now things are hopefully changing much more rapidly. There seems to be a moment now where work by especially African American artists and other artists of color is being shown in museums and galleries, and there are a lot more people coming up through the ranks as museum professionals who are curators of color and educators of color. We seem to be in a moment of development now where things are improving. I want to use this opportunity to implore all of you to continue to try and advance those improvements and advance that access in equity.

out of the twenty, maybe one or two are selected, but they’re selected by the group. So, we all come together and say, “Well, this one works with this one. This will be a great composition.”

AA: But as far as using it as a pedagogical tool, Tim would say to us, “We’re all Hester. We’re all Hester Prynne. If you could design a scarlet letter, what would your scarlet letter look like?”

Audience: How do you organize the proceeds when museums acquire your work? Does it go back to the kids or the schools? How does that whole management side work out in your projects?

AA: Essentially, we’d work out a way with whatever institution we’re working with. We usually would have some sort of exhibition, and then we’d be asked to do a workshop with such and such school that they have a relationship with. And so we’d say, “Absolutely.” But the deal is that the museum has to acquire whatever work we make together.

So, with those proceeds, which really weren’t a lot, we would pay for our college tuitions, pay us back just a little bit. We weren’t rolling in dough at all.

AA: When we were much younger, we would get to the studio and do our homework first. Once we do the homework, then we would get to the act of really learning, in our opinion. Richie Cruz was one of the members of the group at the time, and he was in eleventh grade. He had to read The Scarlet Letter. As he’s reading it, all of a sudden, he slams the book down and says, “This is bullshit.” Tim runs across the studio and picks it up. He’s like, “What are you talking about? This is Nathaniel Hawthorne. This is part of the canon. This is one of the most amazing American novels of all time,” yadda, yadda.

Comes back the next day, and he’s got an idea.

RS: Just to keep the studio alive. The great thing about the institutions acquiring the work is that the students in the workshop were able to see the work as well. So, if we did a workshop in Boston, they can go to the museum years later and say, “Hey, I was part of this workshop years ago.” I just had a student from Carnegie Hall contact the gallery, and he sent a really heartfelt email saying he was really sorry about Tim’s passing, but he just wanted to reach out to me because I actually conducted a workshop with Tim in the 1990s. And he said that that changed his life. And so, that’s part of the reason we continue to do these workshops because that’s the value, for me. That’s the value of art for me, is that when you do these workshops and the students walk away with a different perspective that the impossible is possible.

RS: Each of us have notebooks. And so, we sit in the studio, and we draw, and we draw, and each of us draw twenty scarlet letter designs. And

AA: The work is really a byproduct of the experience, of intense research. It’s evidence of that research, essentially.

Audience: I would love to hear about The Scarlet Letter.

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SC: I’m thinking back to the formula in higher ed of teaching-research-service. How can you separate those things in this kind of practice?

You can’t separate them.

Audience: I want to pursue an earlier thread about the audience for your work. I had the sense that for a while K.O.S. went lower profile, and I wondered whether it’s related to audience. Who was the work for, and how does that relate to your financial model? And does that have repercussions for the work itself?

AA: Our market died in the mid-1990s, and once we picked up a few galleries again in the mid2000s, people would ask, “Where did you guys go?” Listen, we never left. We never went anywhere. We kept working. We experienced tremendous peaks and valleys.

And to answer the second part of your question, we had to do certain things, like taking workshops on the road, which actually informed a paradigm shift of how we worked. It was a financial necessity initially, but, boy, it was a huge blessing.

If you can only imagine, there’s no possible way that someone like Tim could do something like he did in the mid-1980s, starting this group with having fifteen to twenty teenage boys and girls in an old, abandoned gym for hours on end. There’s no way that could happen now. And so, there was just this moment in time that it was just made possible for that to occur.

SC: How do you explain the longevity of your collaboration? Artists have peaks and valleys in their careers—that’s a normal thing, but it’s not normal for a collaborative group to last as long as you have. How do you explain that?

RS: It’s a lot of hard work. Also, for us, making the work keeps us alive. It’s what actually brings life to us in the studio. I remember there were times during the early 1990s when nothing was selling, and we were doing the workshops, and I would just run to the studio to make work. Even if the work did not sell, it just kept me going. And there were many times where Tim would go have a drink, and he would say, “I’m sick of this. I’m not doing this anymore.” And I turn around and say, “I know you’re lying. We’re gonna go back to the studio.”

AA: It’s agape love. It’s really love. I mean, we genuinely love each other. And this, again, led to some of the whispers that people had, wondering how that could be. In the early 1980s, there’s this kind of Renaissance, this paradigm shift happening with galleries and museums. But then, once our novelty rolled off, once we weren’t the darlings anymore, and we grew up a little bit, and we continued, there were whispers, “Hey, this is a gimmick. Tim’s making all the work, and then using this as a gimmick.” Or, “He’s a slave driver. They’re making all the work and he’s taking all the proceeds.” We just pushed on.

SC: You raised a theme that I want to make sure to touch on. The Teagle Project participants have been working together for three years, and your grant’s coming to an end. And I don’t know if you have a plan to continue working together, but it would probably be a good idea to maintain a sense of community voluntarily because what seems to have come out of this project is really powerful. And maybe, I don’t know, this will be the biggest collaborative group in the history of art! But I’m serious about the connectedness to other people. It sounds to me like there are some very strong bonds that have been created over these last three years of working together. So, I would encourage you to turn to each other as a community and keep this going.

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DIRECTORS DIALOGUE

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Tracy L. Adler Johnson-Pote Director, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College Ian Berry Dayton Director, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College Anja Chávez Director of University Museums, Colgate University Corinna Ripps Schaming Interim Director/Curator, University Art Museum, University at Albany Moderated by Tom Shapiro Founder, Cultural Strategy Partners

Tom Shapiro: This conference has compellingly demonstrated the generative power of institutional and cross-disciplinary collaboration. I want to start with three brief observations I’ve gleaned from the presentations. First, it’s often perceived that “expertise” and “collaboration” are in opposition. Many in the academy, including some museum professionals, feel that they are unilaterally giving up something meaningful for the sake of a partnership. Second, college students see this differently. They embrace collaboration as an attitude, not a tool. This generation’s sense of sharing is as innate as a sense of ownership is to previous generations. It manifests in their attraction to flat organizations, crowdsourced opinions, and even the constant re-assessment of what truth and reality are. Everything is up for reconsideration. Not coincidentally, the conversation with Susan Cahan, Angel Abreu, and Rick Savinon pointed out that artist collectives often work in this way to challenge “accepted” norms.

Finally, and happily, multidisciplinarity is museum practice. Traditionally, expertise means going deep into a subject matter. The academy is built on that kind of vertical commitment—as are lawyers and physicists and middle managers and everything else we have professionalized since the Industrial Revolution. In the 1960s and 1970s, the growth of museum studies

professionalized and specialized museum work as well. Still, collaboration remains inherent to museum practice. Thus, the academic museum is the most accessible and partner-ready collaboration resource on campus.

Mimi Hellman asked yesterday about ways the Teagle Project and your collaborations might have taken students and faculty out of their comfort zones. I’m wondering what in this process over the last three years made you feel uncomfortable? What did you learn about yourself and how did you grow?

Tracy L. Adler: I operate in the realm of trying to bring new artists and different points of view to the fore, and I feel like that is our job.

Students are coming to us at such a critical time in their lives, at ages eighteen to twenty-two.

We can really open their minds, and it’s an opportunity to change the future because they are our future.

We work with artists who often have haven’t had a museum show before, and we work with our students in ways that they have never been engaged before. Students have the opportunity to work alongside those artists.

Everyone gravitates toward different aspects of the project based on their experience. And then we educate them when they come into the

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museum, but we also want to think beyond that: how do we create a museum as a social sphere where they want to come? So they don’t only come because their professor requires it. We have to acknowledge the healing properties of art, so how do we enact the museum so it’s a place where people can heal mentally, too?

TS: But what during this project tripped you up?

How were you taken out of your comfort zone?

TA: I’m uncomfortable with This Place. There were neither Israeli artists nor were there Palestinian artists included. And so, when we talk about “the other,” and we want to give people agency to speak for themselves, this is not a show that did that. I had a real problem with that from the very beginning. But the idea of collaborating was the most important thing, and so I said, “Okay, let’s go for it.”

As part of an answer to those concerns, we built an experimental classroom in the gallery.

I wanted to signal to people that this is not the end of a conversation, that you see the exhibition, then classes land in the experimental classroom and that’s where dialogue begins.

TS: Corinna, Anja, and Ian, what were you challenged by? What was difficult, not process-wise but personally, about this kind of collaboration?

Corinna Ripps Schaming: From a curatorial perspective, to take an existing exhibition that another curator had put together and dissect it into four parts was very problematic.

Anja Chávez: I wouldn’t say that I was uncomfortable about it, but we had a deep discussion among the directors, and one of the reasons why I was for this exhibition and wanted to make a case for Colgate to participate, was knowing that in an academic museum, you can and should present and contextualize work in any way that you see fit, so we would not be bound to the existing wall text. We were able to rewrite the wall text from other iterations of This Place, and it was a big moment, for me personally, to say, “Now we can de-contextualize the work and present it in an academic environment and invite all parties, all political opinions, and really showcase what academic museums are capable of doing.”

And then there was the excitement to see the project being contextualized during the inaugural

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study trip for Teagle Project leaders, with each school inviting about four or five faculty members and at least one museum colleague to visit various institutions in New York City and talk about museum practice. The beauty of it was one could have chosen just the art museums, but that was not the case. We went to the Tenement Museum and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and that really set the right stage for interdisciplinary dialogue— learning from one another. And that was beautifully continued at Colgate through the Pair & Share exercise. Rather than making me personally uncomfortable, I continued to see the project as a positive.

Ian Berry: The three years were a great opportunity to test out my feeling of optimism and enthusiasm every day while doing this work, and testing that out with different communities whom we are learning with. We’re meeting these faculty colleagues and seeing different ways, different attitudes, different tones, different responses to the same thing, and for me it was, “We’re doing this and this is going to be fantastic.”

TA: The ringleader!

IB: I think of challenging material as an opportunity, not a problem. Potential misunderstandings and misreadings and activist moments are fruitful and exciting opportunities for dialogue, and so I’m glad for having some of that to push us to say a little bit about ourselves to one another. Those moments led us to say to one another what we stand for as individuals and as institutions—and to say that to our faculty and students.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a moment when we’re pushed to state our boundaries, our desires, to ask, What are our choices? We’re all making choices about who we’re going to spend time with. For me, the Teagle experience was one of learning and listening and testing out a hopeful, optimistic practice.

TA: Your situation is a little bit different, though, because the Tang has proven itself. The Wellin opened in 2012, so we were still relatively new when we signed on to this project, and the

collaboration helped to build capital on campus. I had to really think about that quite a bit. It would have been different if we had been an established institution and had lots of buy-in to begin with. Teagle was extremely instrumental in us obtaining that, but it was a critical time. We were in our first five years, so that was also something that scared me.

TS: A lot of what’s been talked about are the relationships that are core to collaboration. And a relationship is a negotiation of sorts—a process of sharing control. One reason to collaborate is to create something that is, in the whole, bigger than you can achieve independently. What did you intentionally give up in order to get the bigger outcome?

IB: There is great possibility in giving up ownership and in collection sharing and faculty sharing ownership, for example. When we started this, I looked at the group of faculty liaisons and leaders and imagined what the faculty would be if all our four institutions were thought of as one faculty.

The experts were not just situated on each of our home campuses; they were on all four campuses.

I don’t really see that kind of collaboration as giving up of anything; not owning it all means that there’s more—more possibilities and more to potentially surprise you.

AC: I would argue it’s more about empowerment.

It’s one thing to work with everybody but then to also stand back and let others be in the foreground. We heard, beautifully, how the faculty empowered the students, but this project was also empowering for faculty.

The Picker Art Gallery has been in existence for several decades but I didn’t feel that we were rooted and anchored deeply into the curriculum prior to my arrival. Faculty had been using the collections but not to a great extent.

I knew we needed to get it going, but it can’t just be done with museum professionals; you need faculty investment. So for Colgate, the success of the project was guided by Liz Marlowe, our Faculty Liaison, and her beating the drum and contacting other faculty and, of course,

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staff members like my colleague, Nick West.

We learned about ourselves and we certainly moved forward.

CRS: I felt very privileged to be a part of this project and to have a wonderful team at UAlbany. When you’re thinking about relationships with our faculty liaison, other faculty, our staff, and thinking about what it meant to extend those collaborations internally as well as externally, I think we all learned a great deal about who we are, what it means to be part of this public higher-educational system, and we’ve really grown from that. My appreciation of the team that I work with every day has grown leaps and bounds, and it’s an extraordinary benefit to discover things about the people you thought you knew.

TS: Thinking forward to your next collaboration, whether it’s cross-institutional or within an individual campus, what would help prepare you for success? What do you need?

TA: It really helped having Ian initiate it, having someone dream it up and the rest of us join the call. I think that was the linchpin that moved this forward: one person who’s initiating and who is the visionary because we all have so much work to do, and we’re all just trying to get through the day and get on to the next exhibition. To have someone stop and say, “Let’s really do this together” is vital.

IB: Networks are so important, and this is a good example of an existing network that existed before the Teagle grant. We all knew one another, we’ve traveled together, we’re close enough geographically that we see one another’s exhibitions from time to time, but we’re not in the same city, we’re not living together every day, so we still have a lot to learn about one another.

But there was an existing respect and trust already in the ground. That’s something I consider when I think about future collaborations—I’m thinking about people and institutions and collections that we share some common purpose with.

TA: I would add that collaboration takes work; it’s more work than not collaborating. The Project Director, Mimi Hellman, never let the ball drop, and that’s what you need. In a way, if the “Teagle fairy” were to come down and give us something, it would be someone whose job it is to ensure that our collaborations continue, and maybe that responsibility doesn’t belong to any one institution but several of us. We’re all strapped in terms of our resources, in terms of our staff; we know that taking this on would be in addition. And so, to make that logistically feasible, you need the person who is doggedly continuing to move the project along and continuing to create open lines of communication between the collaborators.

AC: There were certain aspects of our collaboration that I thought going in, “It’s going to take days to get results, such as dividing up the exhibition,” which was just logistics, but . . .

TA: We sorted it out.

AC: That took just two hours and actually went very smoothly.

CRS: Moving forward, it would be essential to have whatever theme or idea that we collaborate about to be generated from within. Something that we agreed upon and grew organically from there.

We learned so much about who we are as institutions by seeing ourselves in high relief.

I think it would be interesting to bring another public institution into the mix, establishing a kind of parity among us and even more opportunity to learn about how our different institutions function and, in turn, how we can support and learn from one another.

TA: We can start by making the time to talk more, because then you can say, “Oh, I was thinking to do this show, but, you know what, I could do it at the same time that you’re doing this other show.” It’s not about redundancy, but it’s about affinities because they are key for setting priorities and allocating resources.

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TS: How do you assess and communicate the impact and success of a collaborative project? I’m thinking now of the very particular audience of college administrators, because they are key for setting priorities and allocating resources.

TA: Collecting data is how you make the case.

For us, the Teagle Foundation was really helpful because we really hadn’t formalized our program of engagement, and it gave us a model for how we could potentially do it. We’ve adjusted it and adapted it to our culture, but there was everything from the proposals through the reporting to us monitoring and keeping track of all the classes and the types of engagement.

We had about fifty classes engaged with exhibitions this year—that’s a quarter of our population coming through exhibitions, and that doesn’t count our collections visits, which involves another thirty or so classes. I like the data, I like the information, and I can look back three years and say, “Okay, we had fifty-one visits in 2016–2017, we have sixty-four the next year, and this year we have seventy-seven.” You can’t deny those numbers.

IB: Yes, but those numbers don’t really get at it for me. I agree with you about how decision makers need some of that data to make decisions. And that’s very important, and we need to do a better job in museums at collecting and communicating that data. But I’m invested in figuring out how to communicate values in ways that are more convincing, at least to me. And I think all of the staff of the Tang here and a lot of us at Skidmore are thinking about evaluation and reporting and how that can accurately attach itself to the interdisciplinary liberal arts experience and what may come out later in life for our students or what may come out in really important ways that we don’t know about.

Museum visit surveys on the way out never really get at the impacts that are happening in people’s lives down the road. I don’t have the answer, but I’m engaged in trying to figure out that right kind of storytelling. We have an ethnographer, Neal Matherne, engaged with us for a couple of years, thinking about how to describe our collections across Skidmore’s

campus, partly through numbers and charts and important measures, but also asking, What are those stories that bring collections to life?

I’m interested in all of us engaged in a communal effort to try to figure out how to describe that better to the people who support us, to the people giving us tenure, to the people hiring us, to governments and governors and all the different people that are potentially in our worlds. I think there are going to be multiple answers.

AC: The storytelling certainly is very powerful, but I also believe that at this time, the Tang is in a very different position, given the fact that you

have already built this history of working together with the faculty, and so perhaps then the data per se is not as crucial.

IB: I’m not quite sure . . . Each of us has a different story, but the world of our enterprise of teaching and gauging if that lesson actually changed someone is similar. We’ve heard some really great evaluation form comments, like, “This was the best class, this was my favorite class.” We should be collecting those stories in different and interesting ways that have a certain rigor to them, that do have purchase with decision makers. I think that’s an interesting challenge for us.

TS: Are there specific ways your museum changed as a result of this collaboration? New practices, tactics, approaches, and so forth?

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AC: At Colgate, I felt the visibility of the museum rise across campus. Today, there are questions about satellite exhibitions and questions about if we’re doing X, Y, Z, what kind of exhibitions we’re doing. It’s great to see the museum being anchored in the curriculum.

TA: It gave us a forum for feedback. We host something at the beginning of every show where we bring faculty both from Hamilton and elsewhere in to talk about how they might teach specifically with that show. I can’t downplay the importance of the feedback that we received and how we listened in a way that, perhaps if we didn’t have the Teagle grant, we wouldn’t have.

We don’t normally see faculty assignments, but we were able to get all the assignments and actually look at them and see what’s happening. I think holistically about exhibitions from all these different points of view, but it’s been a real learning experience to see either the poems or the visual work or the analytical papers that came out of them. It’s just great to take it in, and I’m sure it will have some kind of outcome.

CRS: At UAlbany, the three-year experience changed our sense of who our community is.

Our very first exhibition in 1967 was of Nelson Rockefeller’s contemporary art collection, and so we don’t have that legacy of the teaching museum—even though it’s what we’ve been doing the entire time. We also had this publicfacing way in which we looked at community and wanted validation from outside-campus communities, but what’s been happening more and more is we’re thinking about our 18,000 students as being our first and primary community.

Looking at the broad demographic of that student body is just so incredible. What could the museum world be, what could the art world be if it looked like our student body? How can we, in this role at a public higher institution, be part of making that world, making that change? Those ideas and priorities shifted for us completely as a result of this project.

TS: What structural changes—either resourcewise or philosophical—help make collaboration work for you? What helps make the investment in collaboration valuable and worthwhile?

IB: I think it goes to choices, and in our institutions, we’re talking about after the money’s gone, what happens? Do you commit to this kind of work? We’re currently working on another grant that has to do with race and access and inclusion in our collections. That’s going to end. Does that mean we don’t care about access in our collection the day after that money runs out? These are really important decisions for museum directors. With the money that we can control, what are we going to not do so we can continue this other project or do something else? Maybe we’re not going to wait until fundraising gives us the financial opportunity, but we’re going to do it now because we think it’s urgent. We need a more diverse staff, we need more expertise that’s not already represented on our campus, we need a collection that has different types of artists from different backgrounds in it.

Are we going to wait or are we going to shift things around now? And how do you do that and challenge yourself with care for the staff that we have and care for the traditions that we have and care for our communities? I think we’re doing it within the Tang, and this is an interesting provocation for all of us. It’s a good thing to remember that we do have some abilities to make choices with what and how we’re going to spend our days, and it doesn’t always have to mean waiting for that donor or that grant. This donor and that grant have made important changes in all our museums that have allowed us to do great things, but in small ways, can we adjust small things?

Can we change a corner of a gallery? Maybe we gather for an annual lunch?

AC: It’s a power of choice but also the desire to push and move forward to make academic museums exemplary institutions that thrive on experimentation.

CRS: If you’re waiting for a funder, you wouldn’t be able to open the door every day. Just make it happen.

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AC: Work with what you have.

Audience: Are there any examples where you could cite students have felt greater ownership of your particular institutions? Meaning, they didn’t experience just a one-time visit but they understood what the museum is and can be and made repeated visits because of what you collaborated on?

IB: Yes, these three years, there was a concentrated focus with a group of faculty on multiple exhibitions that were happening in the museum.

And many of those faculty are now regular users of the museum; specific assignments are repeated and, also, all of those things can be measured by the numbers of students in each of those classes that are then going to return on their own. And maybe they’re going to apply to be an intern and maybe they’re going to show up at an evening lecture and they’re not doing that as an assignment. That’s not an easy thing to exactly measure, but we certainly feel like it’s happening.

CRS: I also want to highlight students participating in programs through internships and

work-study programs. We have a relatively small staff but because of that, we have forged strong relationships with our interns and our workstudy students. We are committed to providing pathways into the museum field by training students so that they get complete hands-on experiences, whether curating exhibitions or painting the walls. Within the last two and a half years, our students have been going out and getting hired, and that’s an incredibly rewarding and tangible result of our efforts.

Audience: How can we bring some of these creative, multidisciplinary ways of looking at art beyond our student body to our general public?

IB: We could challenge ourselves to show our work more, to be even more transparent institutions so that people in our communities understand and access different parts of the museum and its processes to generate less mystery and maybe less elitism about who feels like it’s their place to come to the museum or not. I think we could probably do a lot more to be transparent about how the exhibitions get on the walls, how choices are made, who’s making choices, and I

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think our communities could find that to be very exciting. Maybe it’s a curiosity, maybe it’s a generosity, maybe it’s an education. However it’s read, it could be a way to bring more community in. What if we had our staff meetings open to the public?

TA: I think it would only be interesting to us.

IB: It’s true, maybe nobody would show up, but it could be interesting.

AC: At one of the museums I oversee, the Longyear Museum of Anthropology, we’re in a process of decolonizing, and we turned over the

process of creating an exhibition to community members. There is also the Peale Center in Baltimore, which is being developed in collaboration with community and which relies on oral history, so there are a lot of really interesting things happening right now in the museum field.

The traditional way of how things have been perceived as passive or as not involving community members enough makes me think about how to make our museums more relevant. In that regard, the Teagle Project was phenomenal because it opened up all of these doors: it wasn’t just us doing things, we were doing things together, my staff was working alongside faculty.

We learn from one another.

TA: I think it depends on the shows. Accessibility means different things to different people, but

you can make shows that will appeal to a five-yearold and to a trustee. We have our docents interacting with the broader community, so it’s one community fostering another community, which can foster another community. We brought in the elders from the Oneida Nation because one of our security guards works at their community center.

Whether it’s a student, a security guard, the museum director, we’re all emissaries, right?

The first few years we were open, community members would say to me, “When are you open to the public?” And I would say, “When we’re open, we’re open to the public.” We put a sign on our door that says, “Free and open to everyone,” and it’s a philosophical as well as a logistical statement. It’s been a few years since anyone’s asked me that question, so I feel like we must be getting better.

Audience: Apart from when the Skidmore president spoke, there has been very little representation of the college or university administrations at this conference, and I’m wondering whether or not the Teagle grant asked for their involvement.

You’re all dealing with the issue of running a museum, and I know that resources from various colleges and universities are different— even whether or not you have a parking lot. But regardless, it seems like part of the work has to happen at the administrative level to connect faculty and incentivize visiting the museum.

What has been the college or university administration’s involvement in this work?

TA: Incentivizing is something that we have to always advocate for—but not only monetary incentives. Engagement with the museum should be recognized when faculty are going up for tenure or as part of their service work. We’ve had people who have collaborated with us and the work has resulted in awards and in tenure, but that is not set up at the beginning.

IB: Nor is it consistent across all the faculties and departments.

TA: That is problematic because we can’t really guarantee anything. We have decided

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to continue funding museum-based teaching through stipends not only because we have an endowment for that purpose but also because the feedback that we’ve gotten from faculty is that money does make a difference.

Even if our expectation is that they’re going to update their syllabus and update what they’re teaching regularly, this is still extra work. It shows that we’re invested in them and they’re investing in us. I do think that that is important, and I think it’s something that we all have to work on as, increasingly, part of the role that faculty should be doing includes engaging beyond the walls of the classroom.

Audience: I’m a dean at Hamilton, and it was such a pleasure when I came in: I found what seemed to be a fully fledged, fully functioning academic art museum with an absolutely eyepopping show and around forty-five student docents engaged in experiential learning of top quality, and a remarkable record of seventyseven classroom visits. That’s not an inconsiderable number; that’s a lot of students. But why does that matter to me? It matters because we have a strategic plan that says that we care about experiential learning. So I can point to those museum student docents and those class visits and say, “That’s what we mean when we say experiential learning.”

Hamilton has an open curriculum with no requirements except for some writing and quantitative expectations. Students fulfill eight educational goals in this freeform set of course choices.

One of those eight goals is aesthetic discernment, and it’s not always obvious to faculty in departments outside the arts as to how aesthetic discernment is happening in their disciplines— although I contend that it often is happening everywhere. When you’re designing a poster for a science presentation at a national conference, I daresay there’s some aesthetic discernment going on. Nonetheless, those numbers from the Wellin are my most robust numbers of anything I can collect, including things like all the music and theater tickets that the ticket office dispenses to students. The Wellin numbers beat all the other numbers.

But a big part of what administrators do, if they’re doing their work properly, is to show up, and the showing up is probably the largest and most heavy hammer that we have for influencing decisions about things like budget and choices later on. Because if you don’t turn up, then it’s much harder to actually make the case when those moments occur.

IB: It’s important to say also that as much as our administrators may not be in the room or participating directly, there is a very, very important ground of support that comes from our home institutions. Each of us is a department within a larger institution, and it is a choice of our administrations to keep us going. This grant in particular was a choice: the Teagle Foundation approached our administrators and someone at that level then suggested the museum as the right place for funding.

So there is very important and critical support there. Part of our job as museum directors is to work on communicating the value of what we do and giving our colleagues in all parts of our enterprise the stories and language to support us and love us and help us ask for things. There will be frustrating, individual moments like budget cuts, loss of staff, not getting to build the thing you want to build, and those will always be part of the choices of a larger institution, and we will be on both sides of those decisions from time to time.

But I think we can rest assured that projects like this make a big difference to proving the value of our work. How many times do we hear that the classroom experience in a gallery provides something specific and distinctive that’s different from all other kinds of classrooms?

That’s a great takeaway for faculty and administrators to hear us say, “We were providing a distinctive experience for our students here.”

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Appendix A The following exhibitions were used for courses during the Teagle Project.

SPRING 2017 Colgate University, Case Library Tsunami scroll permanent installation Curated by Elizabeth Marlowe, Associate Professor of Art and Art History and Museum Studies and Teagle Project Faculty Liaison, Colgate University

A permanent display of a painted scroll depicting the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami by Momi Chitrakar, with commentaries by a dozen faculty from across disciplines exemplifying the myriad perspectives and ways of knowing that can be applied to objects.

Colgate University, Picker Art Gallery Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photography Curated by Veronica Passalacqua, C. N. Gorman Museum, University of California, Davis; organized for the Picker by Sarah Horowitz, Curatorial Assistant

This photographic exhibition featured works by Indigenous artists from the United States, Canada, Peru, and New Zealand.

Hamilton College, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art Julia Jacquette: Unrequited and Acts of Play Curated by Tracy L. Adler, Johnson-Pote Director

This solo exhibition featured paintings, drawings, and sculptures commenting on consumerist culture through imagery drawn from quotidian and luxury print advertisements depicting food, swimming pools, liquor, and other commercialized objects of desire. The exhibition also featured original gouache drawings from the graphic memoir Playground of My Mind, about adventure playgrounds in New York City from the 1960s and 1970s.

Skidmore College, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery Sixfold Symmetry: Pattern in Art and Science Curated by Rachel Roe-Dale, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, and Rachel Seligman, Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator; in collaboration with Lisa Aronson, Professor Emeritus of Art History; Grace Burton, Associate Professor of Spanish; Michael Eckmann, Associate Professor of Computer Science; Rebecca Johnson, Associate Professor of Psychology; Elizabeth Macy, Visiting Assistant Professor of Music; Josh Ness, Associate Professor of Biology; Gregory Spinner, Teaching Professor of Religious Studies; and Sarah Sweeney, Associate Professor of Art

A wide variety of objects—including contemporary art, musical instruments, and scientific data— presented ways that humans discover, create, and manipulate pattern, revealing it as both a natural phenomenon and a deeply rooted human impulse.

FALL 2017 Colgate University, Picker Art Gallery Landmarked: Selected Landscapes from the Permanent Collection Curated by Nicholas West, Curator of Collections

This exhibition examined how artists have depicted natural and built environments and how their perceptions of landscape were structured by the philosophical, social, political, and economic contexts within which they operated.

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Hamilton College, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions: The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Five Years: Highlights from the Permanent Collection Curated by Katherine Alcauskas, Collections Curator and Exhibitions Manager

This exhibition featured approximately 140 works selected for their interdisciplinary interest and representation of diverse mediums, cultures, and eras from 1300 BCE to the present.

Skidmore College, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery Opener 30: Njideka Akunyili Crosby—Predecessors Curated by Ian Berry, Dayton Director, and Steven Matijcio, Curator, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, in collaboration with the artist

This solo exhibition presented a series of large-scale works by Nigerian American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby that engage with issues of race, gender, family, intimacy, and memory.

Other Side: Art, Object, Self Curated by Rebecca McNamara, Associate Curator

This exhibition explored the interconnections and elusive boundaries between concepts like life and death, seen and unseen, loss and hope, artifice and truth through contemporary art from the Tang collection.

University at Albany, University Art Museum When We were Young: Rethinking Abstraction from the University at Albany Art Collections (1967–present) Curated by Corinna Ripps Schaming, Interim Director/Curator

Looking back at highlights from the earliest years of the University at Albany Art Collections, this exhibition shined a fresh light on late-Modernist abstraction as it relates to current trends in contemporary art.

Cameron Martin: Abstracts Curated by Corinna Ripps Schaming, Interim Director/Curator

This solo exhibition explored the generative role of abstraction in a new body of non-objective paintings by an artist best known for large-scale, photographically based landscape painting.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty: Gloves Off Curated by Andrew Ingall, Curator, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York at New Paltz; organized for the University Art Museum by Corinna Ripps Schaming, Interim Director/Curator

In this kaleidoscopic view of contemporary culture on the edge, the artist explored her ongoing fascination with domesticity, the body, consumer culture, and stand-up comedy.

SPRING 2018 At all four campus museums: This Place Curated by Charlotte Cotton; organized by Chronicle of a People Foundation Inc., New York; tour managed

by Curatorial Assistance, Pasadena, California Organized for the Picker Art Gallery by Nicholas West, Curator of Collections Organized for the Tang Museum by Rachel Seligman, Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator Organized for the University Art Museum by Corinna Ripps Schaming, Interim Director/Curator Organized for the Wellin Museum by Tracy L. Adler, Johnson-Pote Director

Each of the four institutions presented work by four of the twelve acclaimed artists whose photographic exploration of Israel and the West Bank composed the exhibition.

Hamilton College, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art Margarita Cabrera: Space in Between Curated by Tracy L. Adler, Johnson-Pote Director

This solo exhibition, featuring more than twenty-five soft sculptures depicting desert-like plants embroidered with stories of immigrants’ passages to the United States, explored the economic, labor, and cultural relationships between the United States and Latin America.

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University at Albany, University Art Museum Hank Willis Thomas: Black Righteous Space Curated by Corinna Ripps Schaming, Interim Director/Curator

In this audio-activated multimedia presentation, the artist overlayed evocative imagery with the voices of more than fifty speakers, singers, and spoken-word artists who shared their observations on racism, equality, injustice, and life in America.

SUMMER 2018 University at Albany, University Art Museum Younger Than Today: Photographs of Children (and sometimes their mothers) by Andy Warhol Curated by Corinna Ripps Schaming, Interim Director/Curator

This exhibition featured over sixty Polaroids and photographs taken between 1974 and 1985 related to childhood, sibling relationships, and the maternal.

Triple: Alex Bradley Cohen, Louis Fratino, and Tschabalala Self Curated by Corinna Ripps Schaming, Interim Director/Curator

This exhibition presented three young artists who are redefining the contemporary portrait in paintings that celebrate the complexities of identity and personal relationships.

Mickey Mouse has grown up a Cow Curated by Joe Mama-Nitzberg

Videos by artists Yoshie Sakai, Frances Stark, and Abbey Williams presented differing points of view on the representation of children and parenting.

FALL 2018 Colgate University, Picker Art Gallery and Longyear Museum of Anthropology Embodied Curated by Sarah Horowitz, Curatorial Assistant, for the Picker Art Gallery

A group exhibition from the Picker collection presented representations of the human body from different cultures and historical periods in Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

Not a Costume Curated by Christy DeLair, Curator, for the Longyear Museum of Anthropology, in collaboration with six students and members of the Colgate community who identify as belonging to Indigenous communities of the Americas

This group exhibition examined issues of identity, stereotypes, and cultural appropriation connected to contemporary Indigenous fashion of the Western Hemisphere.

Hamilton College, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day Curated by Tracy L. Adler, Johnson-Pote Director

This solo exhibition reflected on the artist’s Native American heritage and queer identity as well as on broader issues of race, sexuality, religion, and gender.

Skidmore College, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery Give a damn.

Curated by Rebecca McNamara, Associate Curator

This group exhibition presented work from the Tang collection by artists exploring ideas of freedom, equality, justice, representation, and understanding.

3-D Doings: The Imagist Object in Chicago Art, 1964-1980 Curated by Ian Berry, Dayton Director, with Chicago-based curators and scholars John Corbett and Jim Dempsey

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This exhibition focused exclusively on the sculptural work and dimensional paintings of a group of Chicago-based artists who incorporated popular culture, crafts, comics, and everyday material objects into their work.

University at Albany, University Art Museum 2018 Artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region Juried by artist Jean Shin; organized for the University Art Museum by Corinna Ripps Schaming, Interim Director/Curator

One of the longest-running juried regional exhibitions in the country, this exhibition featured seventyeight works by thirty-nine artists living within a hundred-mile radius of Albany.

Flow: Works by Alumni Artists from Mohawk Hudson Region Exhibitions 2009-2017 Curated by Corinna Ripps Schaming, Interim Director/Curator

This exhibition presented a wide range of work by University at Albany alumni drawn from prior iterations of the regional show.

SPRING 2019 Hamilton College, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art Theaters of Fiction Curated by Katherine Alcauskas, Collections Curator and Exhibitions Manager

This group exhibition featured work by seven contemporary artists who explore the physical space of the theater to examine themes of spectacle, illusion, fantasy, and power.

Skidmore College, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery The Second Buddha: Master of Time Curated by Elena Pakhoutova, curator of Himalayan Art, Rubin Museum of Art, New York; organized for the Tang by Rachel Seligman, Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator

This exhibition explored the visual and material world centered on Padmasambhava—the Indian master who helped to bring Buddhism to Tibet—through sculpture, Tibetan scroll paintings (thangkas), textiles, and manuscripts from the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries.

Like Sugar Curated by Rachel Seligman, Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator, and Sarah Goodwin, Professor of English; with Skidmore faculty Nurcan Atalan-Helicke, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies; Trish Lyell, Teaching Professor of Art; and Monica Raveret Richter, Associate Professor of Biology

This group exhibition explored both the problematic and the joyful aspects of sugar through artwork by contemporary artists, historical materials, and material culture.

University at Albany, University Art Museum we are here. Nicole Cherubini Curated by Corinna Ripps Schaming, Interim Director/Curator

This solo exhibition challenged the conventions and expectations of sculpture by offering different frameworks and vantage points for viewing ceramic artworks.

Carrie Schneider: Rapt Curated by Corinna Ripps Schaming, Interim Director/Curator

This solo exhibition featured video- and photography-based projects that draw attention to women as authors and readers and invited visitors to peruse books by female artists.

Louise Lawler: Birdcalls 1972/81 Curated by Corinna Ripps Schaming, Interim Director/Curator

This audio recording, installed in the museum’s entrance and lobby, raised questions about gender and power in the art world.

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Appendix B The following courses were taught with the exhibition This Place at Colgate University, Hamilton College, Skidmore College, and the University at Albany.

American Studies Historic Preservation Anthropology Heritage and Communities Visual Anthropology Arabic Advanced Arabic Intermediate Arabic Societies of the Middle East Art History Architecture as Political Communication Art and Theory 1950–1980 Art and Theory 1980 to Present Curating Contemporary Art History of Photography History of Photography 1970 to the Present Images and Issues of Diversity in the Visual and Performing Arts Museum Exhibitions: Design, Rhetoric, and Interpretation Photography and Political Conflict Documentary Studies Narrative Journalism Participatory Democracy through Socially Engaged Art and Community Media Principles of Documentary Dance Modern Performance Workshop Education Studies Alternative Education: The Quest for a Different School Experience English Literature and Writing Immigrants and Comics Introduction to Creative Writing Introduction to Writing in English Studies Introductory Workshop in Creative Writing Literatures of Witness (Re)Discovering Latin America in Literature Tribe Writing in the Tang Environmental Studies Environment and Development in the Middle East Global Warming

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French Labor in French Cinema Power French Geosciences Common Ground: Geology and Art History Architectures of Occupation and Resistance Making of the Modern Middle East The Politics of History Women in the City Interdisciplinary Legacies of the Ancient World (core curriculum) This Place: Writing and Photography (co-taught in English and Studio Art) International Affairs Introduction to International Affairs Journalism and International Affairs Jewish Studies Experiencing Judaism Journalism Global Perspectives on the News Philosophy Ethics Political Science Transnational Politics Psychology Introduction to Psychology (taught on two campuses) Religious Studies Religion and the Contemporary World Religion, Art, and Visual Culture Wandering Jews and Zionists The World’s Religions Sociology Sociology of Culture Sociology of Religion Studio Art Advanced Photography (taught on two campuses) Beginning Drawing Contemporary Darkroom Practices Digital Photography Intermediate and Advanced Digital Imaging Introductory Photography Introduction to Photography and Related Media Three-Dimensional Design Theater Global Theater

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Contributor Biographies Angel Abreu is an artist, writer, educator, and longterm member of South Bronx–based artist collective Tim Rollins and Kids of Survival (K.O.S.), restructured as Studio K.O.S. in 2017. He serves on the Education Committee of the Bronx Museum of the Arts in the Bronx, New York, and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Tracy L. Adler is the founding Johnson-Pote Director of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College. She has curated major contemporary art exhibitions at the Wellin Museum and elsewhere. In 2017, she was awarded first prize by the Association of Art Museum Curators for her publication accompanying the exhibition Yun-Fei Ji: The Intimate Universe (2016).

Katherine Alcauskas is the former Collections Curator and Exhibitions Manager at the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College and currently serves as the Chief Curator at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin– Madison. She holds expertise in modern and contemporary drawings and prints.

Nurcan Atalan-Helicke is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Sciences at Skidmore College. Her research interests include the conservation of agricultural biodiversity, access to healthy food, and critical pedagogies and sustainability. She is author, most recently, of “Markets and Collective Action: A Case Study of Traditional Wheat Varieties in Turkey” (2019).

Owen Barensfeld is an artist whose photographs and installations aim to disrupt the conventional distance created between an artwork, viewer, artist, subject, space, and medium. He is former Instructor of Record in Photography and Related Media at University at Albany, State University of New York.

Ian Berry is Dayton Director of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery and Professor of Liberal Arts at Skidmore College. His research and teaching interests include underrepresented modern and contemporary artists and the intersections of race, gender, and identity in art and museums.

Katherine Brown is Associate Professor of Physics at Hamilton College. A theoretical physicist, she studies cosmology and fundamental quantum mechanics and is interested in the interdisciplinary nature of physics, including its convergence with art.

Timothy A. Byrnes is Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Colgate University. His scholarly research focuses on transnational politics and the relationship between religion and politics. He is the author, most recently, of Reverse Mission: Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of US Foreign Policy (2011).

Susan E. Cahan is Professor of Art History and Dean of the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. Drawing on her experience as a museum educator and curator, her research focuses on contemporary art and the history of museums.

She is author, most recently, of Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (2016).

Anja Chávez is the former Director of University Museums at Colgate University and currently serves as Director of the Tweed Museum of Art at the University of Minnesota Duluth. With an extensive background in curatorial work across numerous scholarly institutions and major museums in Europe and the United States, Chávez is committed to the ideal of a diverse, interdisciplinary teaching museum. She serves as a Board Member/Secretary at the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG).

Jennifer Cholnoky is Visiting Instructor of Geosciences at Skidmore College. She has a background in geochemistry and gemology, and her teaching explores the intersections of geology and visual art.

Daniel Goodwin is Associate Professor of Photography and Related Media and Director of the Studio Art Program at the University at Albany, State University of New York. His photographic work examines the contemporary US military, security, and intelligence ecosystem.

Siobhan Hart is Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Skidmore College. Her research interests include heritage practice, the politics of community recognition, and collaborative object-based research in the American northeast. She is author, most recently, of Colonialism, Community, and Heritage in Native New England (2019).

Mimi Hellman is Associate Professor of Art History and the Charlotte Lamson Clarke ’53 Chair in Art History at Skidmore College. Her research interests include visual and material culture, social practice, and modes of perception in eighteenth-century France as well as the cultural history of decorative art, interior design, and domesticity.

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Robert Knight is Associate Professor of Art at Hamilton College. He seeks to explore the relationship between contemporary culture, domestic space, and communities through photography, video, audio, and installation work.

Alexandra List is Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of Neuroscience at Hamilton College.

Her research interests include understanding how we perceive and attend to visual, auditory, and haptic information in our environment. She is the recipient of a National Institutes of Health National Research Service Award.

Elizabeth Marlowe is Associate Professor of Art and Art History and Museum Studies at Colgate University. She specializes in ancient Roman art, Roman imperial monuments, and the repatriation of cultural property and antiquities.

Michael Marx is Associate Professor of English and Director of Expository Writing at Skidmore College. His research and scholarly interests include environmental literature, rhetoric and composition, and writing and technology.

Rebecca McNamara is Associate Curator, formerly Mellon Collections Curator, at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. She is coeditor, most recently, of the awardwinning three-time annual publication Accelerate: Access and Inclusion at the Tang Teaching Museum (2017–2019).

Jason Ohlberg is Assistant Professor of Dance at Skidmore College. A self-defined artist/scholar, his work focuses on dance from both artistic and theoretical frameworks. He has danced internationally and keeps an active creative profile, making new works for companies and festivals throughout the country.

Jenna Reinbold is Associate Professor of Religion and Native American Studies at Colgate University. Her research interests include the relationship between religion and law, and more specifically, controversy surrounding the separation of church and state in the United States as well as the correlation between secularism and the expansion of universal rights.

Corinna Ripps Schaming is Director and Chief Curator, formerly Interim Director/Curator, of the University Art Museum at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Schaming has organized hundreds of contemporary art exhibitions throughout her approximately fifteenyear tenure at the museum.

Rachel Roe-Dale is Associate Professor and Department Chair of Mathematics and Statistics at Skidmore College and faculty liaison for the Tang Teaching Museum’s Mellon Seminar program for faculty engagement with museum exhibitions and collections. Her research interests include mathematical biology and medicine as well as the modeling of various physical systems.

Rick Savinon is an artist, designer, and long-term member of South Bronx–based artist collective Tim Rollins and Kids of Survival (K.O.S.), restructured as Studio K.O.S. in 2017.

Edward Schwarzschild is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

He was a recent New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Fiction and his new novel, In Security, will be published in 2020.

Rachel Seligman is Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. Her curatorial practice focuses on interdisciplinary, collaborative exhibitions that explore important issues such as democracy and citizenship, social class, activism, civil rights, and art/science connectedness, among others.

Tom Shapiro is the founder of Cultural Strategy Partners, an advisor to museums and cultural organizations on strategies for expanding their impact. He works with numerous civic and campusbased museums across the country and coauthored the University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center study “Campus Art Museums in the 21st Century: A Conversation” (2012).

Janna Urschel is a Creative Writing PhD candidate and Graduate Assistant in English at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her work is especially interested in exploring nonanthropocentric narratives and incorporating new materialist literature theories.

Petra Watzke is Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Skidmore College. Her research interests include nineteenth-century literature by women, early German film, and the role of disability in the German classroom.

Nicholas West, formerly Curator of Collections and now Curator of the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University. He has a background in classical archaeology and his research interests are in the reception of antiquity and the history of collections.