Brooklyn Museum | The Studio Museum in Harlem
Exploring the “Infinite Blue” exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum today was one of the most different experiences I have had in a museum recently. We were asked to explore the exhibit without reading the labels, and try to figure out the story the museum was trying to tell. I found this really interesting, mainly because of my own experiences as a museum educator. When I work with school groups, we encourage the kids to look at an object or a painting and tell us what they think its story was. When I work with adults, I feel that (in general), we don’t always ask them to be as creative with their thinking. Without being able to read the labels, I had to form connections between objects by myself. It forced me to look more deeply at individual objects that I might have just glanced at, trying to learn as much as I could from the object itself.
I also really loved using the Brooklyn Museum’s Ask app. Operating over the museum’s WiFi, the Ask app lets visitors take a picture of a piece and send it to an educator at the museum. I loved being able to ask questions and discuss the object with a museum employee, without having to actually see an educator in person. I like talking to people in museums, but sometimes I feel too anxious to actually engage in a conversation. Being able to do it digitally made me feel more comfortable asking questions, which I think is something that other visitors could struggle with, so this app can open up a new avenue of discussion between visitors and the museum.
Thinking about ways to open up dialogues between the museum and the public, I was really interested in the way the Studio Museum in Harlem is deepening their ties to their community, particularly in the face of the renovation that will leave them without a permanent physical space until the construction is completed. Part of this growth is inHarlem, a set of initiatives that aims to bring art out of the walls of the museum, and create content that can help people understand the ways they can understand and connect with art, even outside of the formal setting of a museum.
This idea of meeting people where they are (both in the physical sense of the community and in terms of existing familiarity with art) has been something that I have been noticing in the museums we have been visiting.
