Gallery Games and Mash-ups: The Lessons of History for Activity-based Teaching

ABSTRACT

The recent popularity of museum mash-ups exemplifies fatigue, if not dissatisfaction with “traditional” conversation, discussion, and dialogue-based interpretation that has become standard for many art museum educators. This article looks back at the late 1960s and early 1970s when a similar dissatisfaction with standard approaches resulted in a number of experimental programs using approaches emphasizing movement, the senses, and feeling. Such programs as Arts Awareness at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Susan Sollins’ gallery games at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, DC, left to the field a legacy of experiential, activity-based teaching. Probably every contemporary museum educator has created gallery activities as part of their own practice, variously labeled as games, activities, events, and experiences. But as the programs of the 70s taught us, good feeling is not enough. In order to build solid programs and pedagogy on the foundation of improvisation and experimentation we still need a theory of activities in the museum. What are museum education activities, what are they for, how are they generated, and how are they to be judged?

KEYWORDS:

• Mash-ups
• Arts Awareness
• the Sollins method
• improvisation
• the linguistic turn
• presence
• activity-based teaching

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the author

Elliott Kai-Kee has worked as an education specialist since 1996 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where he currently supervises the gallery education staff in the Museum Education Department. He received his doctorate in European history from the University of California, Berkeley. He has produced many talks and articles on museum education, and is coauthor with Rika Burnham of Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience (2011). He and Burnham cocreated the Teaching Institute for Museum Education, a professional development Program offered to educators worldwide from 2005 to 2018.

Notes

1 Murawski, “Museum Teaching Mashup.”

2 Ropeik, “Reflections on a Museum Experiment.”

3 “Museum Mashup Reflections.” The Engaging Educator, February 12, 2016. https://theengagingeducator.com/museum-mashup-reflections/.

4 The Art Ropeik, storify.com #museumedmashup at NAEA 2015 (includes tweets and images).

5 Ropeik, “Reflections on a Museum Experiment.”

6 Newsom, The Metropolitan Museum as an Educational Institution.

7 Friedberg, Arts Awareness II, 3.

8 Sollins, “Games Children Play,” 274–5.

9 Ibid.

10 Cooper-Robinson, Museum Tours for Children, 25.

11 Sollins, “Games,” 274.

12 Friedberg, Arts Awareness, 10.

13 Ibid., 1.

14 See Rorty, The Linguistic Turn; Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 263.

15 Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, 164.

16 Damisch, “Semiotics and Iconography,” 27–36; reprinted in Donald Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 236–42.

17 Baskin, “Experimental Museum Tours,” 18–21.

18 Williams, “Perception Games and Body Language,” 4–5.

19 Friedberg, Arts Awareness, 3.

20 Pitman, “Perception Games,” 1.

21 Sobol, “A Comparison of Two Methods,” 23.

22 Ibid., 38–9.

23 Parker, “The Art Museum and the Time of Change,” 8.

24 Murphey, “What You Can Do with Your Education Department,” 14, 16.

25 Williams, “Perception Games,” 5.

26 Friedberg, Arts Awareness, 3.

27 Cited in Burnham and Kai-Kee, Teaching in the Art Museum, 38.

28 Oleniczak, “Museum Mashup.”

29 Ropeik, “Reflections on a Museum Experiment.”