Rethinking the Museum Tour

Isamu Noguchi, Core (Cored Sculpture)

This month, I've been participating in a tour training program at the Noguchi Museum under the auspices of Rebecca Herz, head of education for the museum and formerly the senior education manager of Learning Through Art at the Guggenheim.

So far, the focus has been on conducting meaningful tours for adults, a challenging and thought-provoking endeavor. 

During our conversations the majority of the participants, including me, copped to the fact that we generally avoid museum tours when we visit our peer institutions.  Most of us, as artists and art historians familiar with the process of critical analysis, prefer not to be spoon-fed the information that stereotypically constitutes such an encounter.  Our collective goal in the training, therefore, was to explore what a tour informed by current best practices would look like.  In a nutshell, the aim is an open-ended discussion in which the tour guide serves more as a fellow learner and conduit for visitor experiences than as a teacher.

To this end, we've observed tours by expert educators Georgia Krantz at the Guggenheim and Rika Burnham at the Frick Collection, as well as reading articles on the subject by leading voices in the field, including Burnham, George Hein, and Cheryl Mezaros.  Today we had the opportunity to field-test some of our new techniques, albeit for an audience of fellow museum educators.

Personally, I found it tough to break out of "instruction mode," especially after working with children for so long, but I'm confident that practicing these techniques will be worthwhile.

Spanish Drawings at the Frick

Jusepe de Ribera, Head of a Man with Little Figures...

First point about the Frick's latest exhibit, "The Spanish Manner: Drawings From Ribera to Goya": it's actually two shows neatly collapsed under a single title, one primarily featuring seventeenth-century religious works, and the other examining Goya's mature drawings, ca. 1800-1820.  The curators attempt to integrate these temporally disparate categories in their introductory text, claiming that continuity is born out of a similar national spirit, but the argument is not particularly convincing.

It's hard to see how Goya's social critiques of human folly and brutality descend from the serene Madonnas and contemplative saints on view here, particularly given the "strident anti-clericalism" the curators note.  Even when the subject matter is analogous, as in Goya's Torture of a Man, ca. 1812-1820, and Vicente Carducho's Martyrdom of Father Andres, ca. 1632, the enormity of their difference is clear: Goya's drawing indicts man's pointless cruelty to his fellow man, whereas Carducho's work exemplifies the Christian cultural crusade against the Ottoman Empire.  And Sebastian de Herrera Barnuevo's delicate pen-and-ink treatment of an auto-da-fe, ca. 1660, emphasizes not the horror of what is about to occur, as Goya might, but rather the festive nature of the spectacle. Onlookers peer from their balconies and gossip jovially in the plaza, one even hoisting a young child onto his shoulders to get a better view of the condemned men awaiting their fate on the platform above. 

That being said, the exhibition is stunning throughout, showcasing exquisite draftsmanship spanning more than two hundred years.  Ribera's playful lilliputians and grotesque, used in the promotion on the Frick website, are certainly memorable, but there are also a number of gems by less well-known painters that should not be missed.  The show will remain on view through January 9.