Projects
Below you will find a selection of my projects related to museum education, audience evaluation, and other areas within the field of museum studies. My evaluation of seasonal events, special exhibitions, and educational programming ensures museums remain engaging and relevant within their communities. Audience needs and DEAI principles drive every aspect of my work.
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"In the emerging museum, responsiveness to the community...must be understood not as a surrender but, quite literally, as a fulfillment. The opportunity to be of profound service––the opportunity that museums truly have to use their competencies in collecting, preserving, studying, and interpreting objects to enrich the quality of individual lives and to enhance their community's well-being––must certainly outdazzle any satisfactions that the old salvage, warehouse, or soda-pop business could ever have possibly offered." –-Stephen Weil's From Being about Something to Being for Somebody (1999)
Wee Wonders
Newfields' preschool program, Wee Wonders, is offered 1-2 times per week and lasts about an hour. In the winter, the program is facilitated over Facebook Live, but during the warmer months, we head outside for Wee Wonders in the Wild. The program has different themes each month and consists of an activity, storybook, art hunt, and art project. In the fall of 2021, I prepared art activity kits for the program, assisted with the facilitation of 12 Wee Wonders programs, and personally facilitated two other iterations of the program. In the spring of 2022, I assisted with the facilitation of 12 more Wee Wonders programs and personally facilitated one iteration of Wee Wonders on Facebook Live. I also worked with the Studio Programs Manager, Katy Denny, to plan Wee Wonders for fiscal year 2023. This involved brainstorming different themes, assigning those themes to different months, and then finding children’s books, art-making activities, and artworks in Newfields’ collection that correspond to each theme.
Audience Evaluation
My experience with audience evaluation has involved the creation of evaluation instruments; conducting evaluation through the administration of surveys, interviews with museum visitors, timing and tracking, and informal observations; compiling data into Excel and analyzing for percentages and themes; and presenting findings via PowerPoint. During my time at Newfields, I assisted Rockman Et Al with the evaluation of The LUME, The Clowes Pavilion Reimagined, and Embodied: Human Figures in Art. For the annual Harvest Nights dress rehearsal, I worked closely with the Director of Audience Engagement, Tiffany Leason, to analyze 93 staff surveys, identifying key themes throughout, and compiling the results into a PowerPoint presentation. I independently evaluated Juan de Pareja: A Painter’s Story, conducting 50 timing and tracking observations, 26 interviews with visitors, analyzing the data, and compiling findings into a PowerPoint presentation. I also evaluated Newfields' second iteration of Art in Bloom, conducting 40 informal observations, 30 interviews with guests, and administering 30 surveys.
Homeschool Day
After a two-year hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Homeschool Day at Newfields made a dramatic comeback with a record 207 participants on May 11, 2022. The day's theme, "Moving and Grooving with Van Gogh and Friends,” focused on The LUME and the connections between art and movement. For this event, I wrote three activities for inside Newfields’ galleries (Drawing to Music, Search and Find with Artivive, and Strike a Pose!) and developed resources to accompany each. Resources included a chart of musical instruments with their names and QR codes so participants can listen to each; three poems that act as hints for participants to find three paintings in Newfields’ galleries that I augmented using Artivive and Photoshop; and samples of the Drawing to Music activity. I also edited and refined the outdoor activity descriptions (Capture It, Write it Out, Sound it Out, and Take a Closer Look). I submitted the work orders and signage requests for the Marketing Department to properly format these documents as well as a bi-fold brochure of the day’s activities. I worked with Greenhouse staff to develop the various Write it Out activities which consisted of nature journaling and decorating/writing postcards.
Augmented Paintings Using Artivive & Photoshop
Presentation on Best Practices for Diversifying Docent / Tour Guide Programs
Considering museums’ ongoing application of DEAI principles to their collections, exhibitions, programming, and stakeholders, these concepts should also extend to their docent and tour guide programs. According to Docent Diversity Initiative (2020), “Docents are integral to our day-to-day activities. They’re the ones routinely facilitating experiences and connecting guests with the Museum” (Hendershot and Marsh, para. 4). However, as Sophie Haigney reports in Museums Have a Docent Problem (2020, para. 5), docent corps tend to “skew toward a certain demographic.” This lack of diversity within docent corps is largely unconscious and due to how docent programs are structured. To achieve diversity within docent and tour guide corps, there are two main options: either revise the existing programs to remove barriers or end these programs and rebuild from the ground up.
Exhibit Planning & Label Writing
The temporary exhibition SHIFT: What Can Museums Change? debuted at IUPUI's Basile Gallery on April 24, 2021. The exhibition highlighted four different museums that are working to right the historical wrongs of the museum field: the Tenement Museum, Te Papa, Pitt Rivers, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). For this exhibition, I worked with the NMAAHC team to research the architecture of the museum and its influences. Our section explored how a building can change the historical narrative to include marginalized voices. All labels in this section were written by me (edited by my wonderful team and designed by Emily Wilkes). I created the corona panel replica using pine, a scroll saw, several saw blades, and gold spray paint. The virtual exhibition can still be viewed on Matterport via the link below. Also, be sure to check out the accompanying audio tour––it was written and recorded by yours truly!
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Collections Management
Although my first full year of graduate school was spent on Zoom, I was able to practice object labeling, construction of artifact boxes, and condition reporting from the comfort of my own home. Special thanks to Dr. Holly Cusack-McVeigh for sending my cohort some wonderful lab kits to provide us with this much needed experience!
Presentation on Digital Immersive Art Installations
The first Van Gogh immersive experience opened as early as 2001, but there has been a dramatic increase in digital Van Gogh experiences in the past year. In 2021 alone, there were five different digital Van Gogh experiences offered in over 40 cities throughout the United States. While Newfields is “the first U.S. institution to go all-in on a dedicated [digital, immersive] space,” other museums, such as San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum (AAM), are rising to the occasion (Hosken 2021, 3; Asian Art Museum Press Office 2021). Clearly, the incorporation of digital, immersive art installations is not a current fad but the future of art museums. How then might these installations impact the museum field? What should art museums consider before adding these types of installations to their own galleries, and how do these installations maintain a sense of novelty in a world of unending technological developments?
