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ABSTRACT
How do you make art history and art museum library research exciting and relevant to an undergraduate studio art student? And, how can an innovative learning experiment lay the groundwork for future utilization of the acquired course knowledge and the art museum library resources? One answer, as we discovered, lies in creatively utilizing a special collection with the potential for direct application to the students’ present and/or future career goals. Through this case study, we present our strategies for connecting undergraduate art students to a unique art museum library archive on contemporary local artists. After an explanation of the project, we explore the project’s impact through student survey responses taken at three key points in the project, reflect on how the intersection of varied perspectives can create meaning for the student learner, and explore how the lessons learned in this museum-university collaboration could be applied by other museums to generate long-term relationships with audiences.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
About the authors
Madeline Rislow is Assistant Professor and Director of Art History at Missouri Western State University.
Amelia Nelson is Head, Library and Archives at the Spencer Art Reference Library, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
Notes
1 Maloney and Hill, “Museums and Universities,” 247.
2 Lang, “Artists’ File Initiative Documents Accomplishments of Kansas City Artists.” Ouyang, “Preserving Artist Legacies with Marilyn Carbonell.”
3 For an analysis of the importance of such an experimental process in which collaborators are open to critiques and failures see Kingsley, “The Practicum Course Model,” 250–61.
4 Official fall 2017 enrollment included 5321 undergraduates and 241 graduates. “Quick Facts, Admissions,” Missouri Western State University, accessed January 9, 2019, https://www.missouriwestern.edu/admissions/.
5 “Freshmen Admission, Academic Catalog 2018–2019,” Missouri Western State University, accessed January 8, 2019, http://catalog.missouriwestern.edu/undergraduate/university-information/admission/freshman-admission/. For a definition and list of Missouri’s “open access,” referred here as “open enrollment,” colleges and universities, see “Admissions Selectivity Categories,” Missouri Department of Higher Education, accessed January 8, 2019, https://dhe.mo.gov/policies/admissions-selectivity.php.
6 “Applied Learning,” Missouri Western State University, accessed January 8, 2019, https://www.missouriwestern.edu/appliedlearning/.
7 “Department of Art,” Missouri Western State University, accessed January 8, 2019, https://www.missouriwestern.edu/art/.
8 In 2018 MWSU received a donation from Dr William Eickhorst of c. 1100 prints. While a small gallery and storage space was constructed to house the prints, cataloguing is still underway and the collection does not currently have regular opening hours. Holtz, “Prints of a Man.”
9 Schonfeld and Sweeney, “Organizing the Work of the Art Museum.”
10 The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Education Division Impact statement in 2019, “All visitors find personal meaning in art, respect and appreciate world cultures, and experience new-found connections with Kansas City.” The impact statement was collaboratively developed in a series of Education Division Impact Planning workshops, the first was held on December 17, 2015.
11 “The Spencer Art Reference Library,” The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, accessed February 22, 2019, https://nelson-atkins.org/library/.
12 For discussion of the keys to such successful collaborations see Maloney and Hill, “Museums and Universities,” 247–9.
13 Students individually and collectively analyzed the scholarly quality of an article on Asheer Akram, one artist represented in the Artists’ File Initiative archive. See Pollman, “The Pakistani Cargo Truck Initiative.”
14 Our proposal “Researching Contemporary Artists” (Proposal ID 2906) was granted expedited approval by the IRB at MWSU on January 16, 2018.
15 We also asked them if they’d ever visited the library at the Spencer; those that had, had done so for a previous MWSU class project that involved another collaboration between us. There were six total questions on the pre-project survey. Identifying oneself was optional and a couple of students did not participate in each survey either by choice (survey completion was not mandatory) or due to absence on the day of distribution.
16 Kathy Liao, the only local artist noted by any student, is an MWSU Department of Art faculty member.
17 Kansas City Artists Coalition, https://kansascityartistscoalition.org; ArtsKC, https://artskc.org; Charlotte Street Foundation, https://charlottestreet.org.
18 Vygotsky, Mind in Society.
19 First Friday is a monthly arts event in Kansas City’s Crossroads District. “First Fridays,” KCMO Crossroads Arts District, accessed February 27, 2019, https://kccrossroads.org/first-fridays/.