Dissertationen zum Thema „Humanities -> art -> museum studies“

This study is an overview of how museums utilize informal learning as a primary source of engagement to improve overall visitor experience while building community interest. For this study, it was important to look at the history and purpose of museums origin and the evolution of their function from an art institution to an educational institution. The top 3 Los Angeles based museums; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty and the Museum of Contemporary Art were all put under the various scopes to deduce if they are utilizing their education department to be the best of their ability to create meaningful experiences for their visitors. They were evaluated based on their use of technology, use of dialogue and the overall experience within the museum. Lastly, this study stresses the importance of public art to incorporate all three areas of informal learning.

This dissertation explores narratives that emerge from a community-museum collaboration while working with refugees in relation to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s (2011) concept of the boundary event. Within this study the boundary event is explored as moments of overlap where identity, experiences, knowledge, and processes are continuously being negotiated; by embracing or leaning into these moments, community-museum programs can develop multivocal narratives—where no single voice is heard as distinctly clear or separate. These co-created museum narratives stand in contrast to educational and engagement strategies that aim to instill knowledge and elevate community with the museum as the expert. In this dissertation 16 participant voices– of 15 refugees and one museum educator– mingle, coalesce, and complicate museum narratives. These narratives are participant-created (data presentation) as well as researcher-constructed (analysis and interpretation). Using the methodological lens of narrative inquiry and decolonization I investigated data collected from over a two-year period (summer 2013-summer 2015) including: content and wall labels collected from two exhibitions, one marks the beginning of the study in 2013 and the second in 2015 concludes the study; gallery activities collected over the course of the two-year study; and educator field notes from the 28 individual sessions. Ultimately, I argue that multivocal narratives, and embracing moments defined as the boundary event, complicate traditional hierarchy and expected stories of refugees and new migrants illustrating how difference can positively disrupt linear, static, and authoritative institutional narratives.

This thesis investigates how my representations of experience through arts-informed autoethnographic research are significant in establishing the pedagogical nature of place. I seek to understand how place-conscious education in a community setting can encourage students’ relationships with the spaces they inhabit and lend to a more just learning environment. Many educative tools are provided and analyzed which are derived from wayfinding and psychogeographic methods. Data was collected over two months throughout the Summer of 2015 while participating in the Onward Israel service learning program in Israel and Palestine. My digital photographs and excerpts of stream-of-consciousness style poetry serve as the data set to illuminate the rich sensory encounters and art making processes indicative of experiential learning.

This context-driven artwork encourages questions and dialogue about sociopolitical conflict and wars, migration and occupation. It is concerned with physical as well as psychological borders, checkpoints and boundaries. I utilized poetic and photographic inquiry as well as cognitive mapping to explore how concepts of travel are intricately linked to practices of self-reflexivity, community building and alternative curricula development outside of the formal classroom setting. This qualitative data is not a strictly defined set of interviews or statistics. Instead, vignettes of a more totalizing experience can be extracted, analyzed, dissected and/or rearranged. It is an exploration of identity, agency and untraditional ways of knowing the self/Other. I underscore how new pathways and possibilities for teaching emerge from a greater acceptance and validation of experiential knowledge and an attuned consciousness to place.

This dissertation is a case study, written from my perspective as a new museum professional and museum educator. The work explores the museum as an institutional and community space and demonstrates how museum educators may understanding their role and the roles of their peers in a relational way with the aim of increased productivity.

Using a contemporary university art museum as the setting, I and 14 of my museum colleagues, at least one from each department at the museum, discuss our understandings of: co-creation, collaboration, physical mental and social space individually and as a group. The questions that guide this study are:

• What do art museum staff members communicate about their understanding of their roles in co-creative and collaborative education programming and museum exhibition design in contexts of relational space in the museum?

• What indicators of internal dialogue are revealed in this exploration?

•  What do these conversations uncover about staff understanding(s) of the spaces that they work in as relational?

• What ideas arise regarding possible change for the museum’s approach to collaborative and co-creative education programming and museum exhibition design?

I utilize two methodologies, case study and auto ethnography, to create a relational accounting of my experience and how my understandings and perspective changed during this process.

I also incorporate a theoretical frame grounded in theories of relational space from Martina Löw and Henri Lefebvre to guide my research. To highlight my methodological frame, I collected observations and reflections about the one-on-one interviews and two large focus groups I facilitated in my research journal. I captured photographs of my colleagues’ work spaces to serve as visual aids for the readers regarding my process and interest in space.

Themes include those guided by the methods that focused on understandings of: co-creation, collaboration, physical space, mental space and social space. Participants also discussed additional properties that shape their understanding of these terms. They include: age, untapped staff talent, the impact of hierarchy in the museums’ internal structure, staffs' varied understanding of the museum visitor and power in different spaces.

From my perspective, these findings represent opportunities for new museum professionals and educators to strategically approach their transition from in-classroom learning to the workforce. These findings also present opportunities for museum educators to reimagine the formal and informal learning opportunities museums can offer those interested in a career in the museum sector and museum education.

Research on Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, (1974-79; completed with the assistance of more than 400 volunteers), is abundant and generally focuses on the monumental table of thirty-nine place settings acknowledging the contribution of women throughout Western history. Scholars have examined, praised and criticized the installation from various feminist and formal aesthetic perspectives. By contrast, this thesis considers what has essentially been overlooked until now, Judy Chicago’s curatorial framework for the entire The Dinner Party exhibition experience. Using my own interviews with the artist, team members, and contemporary curators, as well as consulting the artist’s installation manuals from Harvard University Archives, and examining the reception of the curation, I highlight the essential curatorial features that made The Dinner Party such an international phenomenon. The artist’s curatorial elements were research-oriented, inclusive and activist-leaning with interactive, multi-media structures to achieve her feminist message. Considering The Dinner Party’s current installation at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, my thesis argues that Chicago’s successful yet overlooked methods offer the most proactive, critical and approachable curatorial presentation. The current installation that has been stripped of these curatorial elements, while perhaps institutionally practical, compromises much of the message and feminist intent. This study contributes to the field by focusing on this notable exhibition, providing discourse into Chicago’s curating and offering considerations for contemporary curating practice, with the goal of contributing to the growing area of curatorial research focused on feminist artists and curatorial projects.

As a community-based art educator, I advocate for an arts-based educational environment that embraces postmodern tenets and encourages individuals to reflect on self and society in relation to the places in which they dwell and learn. This thesis is a dialogue on emplaced community-based art education. Issues of urban education, social justice, and critical pedagogy are considered in relation to participants’ enactments of place within two distinct community-based educational settings. In order to investigate the connections between a culture of place, place-based education, and the community-based programs of each site, the role of art and artifacts was carefully considered in building a sense of place and placemaking within the comparison of each case study. Data was collected over the course of a year and later analyzed through the lens of narrative analysis-a focus on how people spoke to personal values and social beliefs associated with their enactment of place-based education.

Early European travel literature was a prominent source from which information about the New World was presented to a general audience. Geographic regions situated within what is now referred to as Latin America were particularly visible in these accounts. Information regarding the religious customs and styles of dress associated with the indigenous peoples who inhabited these lands were especially curious points of interest to the European readers who were attempting to understand the lifestyles of these so-called “savages.” These reports, no matter their sources, always claimed to be true and accurate descriptions of what they were documenting. Despite these claims, it is clear that the dominant Western/Christian perspective from which these sources were derived established an extremely visible veil of bias. As a result, the texts and images documenting these accounts display highly flawed and misinformed representations of indigenous Latin American culture. Although it is now understood that these sources were often greatly exaggerated, the texts and images within them are still widely circulated in present-day museum exhibitions. When positioned in this framework, they are meant to be educational references for the audiences that view them. However, museums often condense the amount of information they provide, causing significant details of historical context to be excluded.

With such considerable omission being common in museum exhibitions, it causes one to question if this practice might be perpetuating the distribution of misleading information. Drawing on this question, I seek, with this research, to investigate how early European representations of Latin American culture in travel literature may be linked to current issues of misrepresentation. Particularly, my research is concerned with finding connections that may be present with these texts and images and the negative aspects of cultural appropriation. Looking specifically at representations of Aztec culture, I consult three texts and their accompanying illustrations from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries to analyze their misrepresentational qualities, and how they differed between time periods and regions. Finally, I use this information to analyze museum exhibition practices and how they could be improved when displaying complex historical frameworks like those of indigenous Latin American cultures.

Stereotypes of Indigenous peoples, formed according to Western notions of cultural hierarchy, as savage, exotic, and only existing in a distant past, are still prevalent in the popular imaginary. These stem from misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples that developed after contact between Indigenous peoples and European settler communities, and exist in concepts such as the noble savage, the wild heathen, or the vanishing Indian. In this thesis I argue that contemporary artist Gregg Deal (Pyramid Lake Paiute) successfully challenges and disrupts such stereotypes by re-channeling their power and reappropriating them through his strategic use of humor and irony in performances, paintings, and murals. Through these tools, Deal is able to attract audiences, disarm them, and destabilize their assumptions about Indigenous peoples. I frame Deal’s use of humor and irony outside the trickster paradigm, drawing instead on Don Kelly’s (Ojibway) theorization of humor as a communicative tool for making difficult topics accessible, and Linda Hutcheon’s theorization of irony as a discursive strategy for simultaneously presenting and subverting something that is familiar.

In a second line of argument, I foreground Deal’s agency as an artist through analysis of his strategies to reach audiences and gain visibility for his art. Contemporary Indigenous artists are often excluded from mainstream art institutions, and can struggle to find venues to exhibit their work. I argue that Deal’s strategic use of public space and the internet to show and publicize his art is significant. It has helped him to reach audiences and gain recognition for his work. He now exhibits and performs in university and state museums. I argue that the authority of museum space, in turn, gives him a greater opportunity to disrupt stereotypes and educate people about misperceptions of Indigenous peoples.

This dissertation provides an analysis of current multilingual practices among art museums in New York City. This study is located within the current theoretical analysis of 1) museums as sites of cultural production and 2) the politics of language, interpretative material, and technology. This study demonstrates how new roles for museums embracing multilingual exhibitions and technology may signal new ways of learning and inclusion.

The first part is a theoretical-based approach. The second part consists of a mixed-method research design using qualitative and quantitative methods to create three different surveys: of museum staff, of the general public, and finally my observations of museum facilities and human subjects.

Multilingual exhibitions are complex and require changes at all levels in a museum's organizational structure. Access to museum resources can provide more specific data about language usage. The survey responses from 175 adults provides statistics on multilingual settings and its complexity. The survey responses from 5 museums reveals the difficulty, and benefits, of dealing with this topic. Visual observations at 36 museums indicate that visitors pay attention to interpretative material, while production cost, space, and qualified linguistic staff are concerns for museums. Technology is a breakthrough in multilingual offerings, for it can help democratize a museum's culture to build stronger cultural community connections.

The study of an architecture of autonomy consists of theoretical investigations into the realm of building types where a sole use or purpose is manifest in a structure that could, site provided, be constructed. However, provisions that conventional architecture traditionally provide are not present in these explorations. Technological advancements such as indoor plumbing, electric lights, and vertical conveyance systems in the form of elevators and escalators are excluded. Platonic geometric form-making are instead thoroughly investigated, imagined, and manipulated for the purposes of creating new spatial experiences. The desired resultant is an architecture of singularity, an architecture of fantastical projection.

Through a series of two theoretical ritual-based investigations, three-dimensional form manipulation and construction of proportioned scale models, the essence of elements that compose a spatial experience contributed to a collection of metaphorical tools by which the designer may use to build a third imagined reality: the re-imagination of the archetypal museum. A building whose purpose is not solely to house ancient objects in a near hermetically-sealed environment, free of temperature, humidity and ultra-violet light aberrations, but is a re-imagined. A structure meant to engage the presence of two seemingly divergent communities: the local patron/visitor and the extreme distant denizen.

This paper also examines key contemporary global artists’ work and their contributions to the fragmentation / demolition of architectural assemblages for the purposes of re-evaluating the familiar vernacular urban landscape while critically positioning the rôle of both the artifact and gallery in shaping contemporary audience’s museum experiences.

The power of the internet and live-camera broadcasting of images utilizing both digital image recording and full-scale screen-projections enable the exploration of “transporter-type” virtual-reality experiences: the ability to inhabit an art work’s presumed original in situ location, while remaining in Chicago as a visitor within a vernacular multi-tenant masonry structure: vacated, evicted, and deconstructed for the purposes of displaying art amidst a new urbane ruin. The complexities of this layered experience is meant to simultaneously displace and interrupt a typical set of so-called a priori gallery expectations while providing the expectant simulacrum that video cameras and screens provide, whetting a contemporary patron’s appetite.

The growing diversity of museum visitors has shifted art museums? educational goals towards developing new ways for visitors to create meaningful experiences. Currently, the predominant method of instruction for adults relies on the lecture based format. The argument made in this study suggests that the interactive strategies used for children could be equally beneficial if applied to adults, provided these activities are designed specifically for adults. Based on the research, when interactive activities are made available to adults it is usually done through a ?multi-generational? approach, inherently geared for adults accompanying children. To address this concern, the study surveyed the educational departments and programs of eight museums in Southern California. The results explore current educational trends and conclude with suggestions how museums can begin modifying and implementing interactive strategies for the adult visitor.

An Egyptian archaeological textile, accessioned in the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) (Cat.No. 95/2444), from the Tomb of Hatnofer and Ramose, Eighteenth Dynasty (1550-1295 B.C.), Western Thebes was studied, with two textiles (Cat.Nos. 95/2443 and 95/2445) from the same tomb used as comparanda. The textile’s finely spun fibers, plain-weave balanced structure with selvedge fringes and lower edge fringes, and with various weavers’ marks, stains, and losses, provide invaluable historical data about finely woven, royal linens of Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt.

Scientific analysis used for this study include: visual annotations, polarized light microscopy (PLM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) including fiber diameter measurements, and carbon-14 dating. Closely examining a textile and its fibers can provide information about the condition of the textile, linen quality, weaving techniques, and the life of the textile itself. While the linen fibers in the Study Textile (Cat.No. 95/2444) and the Comparanda Textile #1 (Cat.No.95/2443) have been identified, it is still uncertain whether or not the fibers in the Comparanda Textile #2 (Cat.No.95/2445) are of a different quality linen or of a different plant material which is very similar to linen within the bast fiber family. Further studies would be required to answer this and several other questions that remain.