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Families are a critical audience for art museums and museums use many different strategies for reaching families, such as special family days and festivals, workshops, special tours, family backpacks and gallery guides, in-gallery materials or demonstration carts, and specific family galleries. Here is a practical guide based on research that helps art museum educators understand the role and value of spaces designed for families and helps them to create dedicated spaces for intergenerational play and learning. This book features insights, best practices, and lessons learned from years of experience in creating dedicated spaces for families in a wide range of art museums. Through case studies, in-depth stories, and engaging graphics and images this book identifies key issues that museum professionals need to consider when developing family spaces in museums. This book is a how-to guide to creating or updating an interactive family space. Everything you need to know, soup to nuts, from understanding your audience to hiring a designer and opening your doors to the public is here. Each section is situated within groundbreaking visitor research findings and how museum educators have used those findings to better understand the family audience and develop fun, safe, inclusive, spaces that inspire wonder and curiosity, as well as places for meaning-making and family bonding, all in the service of creating loyal and committed museum visitors.
My narrative case study focuses on how one family uses the exhibitions and educational resources at the Denver Art Museum. I gathered stories of the family's experiences at the museum in order to determine what their choices reflected about their family values and how they integrated those experiences into their daily lives. This study draws upon socio-cultural and constructivist learning theories by proposing that each family member contributes their prior knowledge and life experiences to the process of making meaning and drawing connections within the art museum. Moreover, even though the family acted as a social learning group, each member constructed personal knowledge in different ways from their shared experiences. I used narrative analysis and coding as means to interpret the meanings of the family's stories. In addition to identifying the family's values regarding art museum learning, findings pointed to the imperative need for museum educators to address preparing adult learning partners for visits to art museums with children. The lack of current research pertaining to family learning in art museums was a chief motivator for conducting this study (Sterry & Beaumont, 2006). Research of family interactions in museums has largely focused on non-art museums (Borun, 2002; Borun et al., 1998; Ellenbogen, Luke, & Dierking, 2007). Family art museum experiences are distinct and should be studied separately from those in other types of museums. Research, such as this study, that look specifically at how families use art museum exhibitions and educational resources will address the lack of literature and emphasize the value of art museum experiences for life-long family learning.
Here is will be a practical guide based on deep research that helps art museum educators understand the role and value of spaces designed for families and helps them to create dedicated spaces for intergenerational play and learning.
Visitor participation is a hot topic in the contemporary world of museums, art galleries, science centers, libraries and cultural organizations. How can your institution do it and do it well? The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to working with community members and visitors to make cultural institutions more dynamic, relevant, essential places. Museum consultant and exhibit designer Nina Simon weaves together innovative design techniques and case studies to make a powerful case for participatory practice. "Nina Simon's new book is essential for museum directors interested in experimenting with audience participation on the one hand and cautious about upending the tradition museum model on the other. In concentrating on the practical, this book makes implementation possible in most museums. More importantly, in describing the philosophy and rationale behind participatory activity, it makes clear that action does not always require new technology or machinery. Museums need to change, are changing, and will change further in the future. This book is a helpful and thoughtful road map for speeding such transformation." -Elaine Heumann Gurian, international museum consultant and author of Civilizing the Museum "This book is an extraordinary resource. Nina has assembled the collective wisdom of the field, and has given it her own brilliant spin. She shows us all how to walk the talk. Her book will make you want to go right out and start experimenting with participatory projects." -Kathleen McLean, participatory museum designer and author of Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions "I predict that in the future this book will be a classic work of museology." --Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums
My thesis explores the benefits that families with young children gain while learning from and through art in the art museum using story creation. Through the course of my research and reflection I have been able to better understand how young children make meaning out of art during a museum visit. This allows families and children to become more active in the museum learning experience and helps to develop important thinking skills. Some of the types of thinking skills developed are visual and critical thinking. The method I used to allow young children to access these skills is story creation, which is the act of a young child creating a narrative story about a work of art through verbal conversation and self created visual art work. Young children use their imaginations to think through the narratives that they see and begin thinking in new ways. I specifically look at the family learning experience, and how families can work together with museum educators to have enlightening, entertaining, and educational experiences during museum visits. To best understand my topic I used action research. I interned at two different art museums for a year and this allowed me to begin to understand the ways young children learn in museums, and how museum educators can best accommodate families with young children. One of the ways that I discuss using this type of approach to teaching in the art museum is through drop-in workshops. I aimed to discover what occurs when museum educators facilitate drop-in workshops that allow families to use story creation. Further, I look into what occurs when children interpret art on their own and make their own meaning, and the benefits that go along with this type of learning experience. I also aim to understand the best ways to facilitate this type of drop-in program in the museum. While my research specifically focuses on the drop-in workshop my research has allowed me to develop ideas about new ways to think about not only drop-ins, but classes, self guides, and other educational experiences that museums can provide families.
What does the transformation to a visitor-centered approach do for a museum? How are museums made relevant to a broad range of visitors of varying ages, identities, and social classes? Does appealing to a larger audience force museums to "dumb down" their work? What internal changes are required? Based on a multi-year Kress Foundation-sponsored study of 20 innovative American and European collections-based museums recognized by their peers to be visitor-centered, Peter Samis and Mimi Michaelson answer these key questions for the field. The book describes key institutions that have opened the doors to a wider range of visitors; addresses the internal struggles to reorganize and democratize these institutions; uses case studies, interviews of key personnel, Key Takeaways, and additional resources to help museum professionals implement a visitor-centered approach in collections-based institutions
A leading activist museum director explains why museums are at the center of a political storm In an age of protest, cultural institutions have come under fire. Protestors have mobilized against sources of museum funding, as happened at the Metropolitan Museum, and against board appointments, forcing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders to resign at the Whitney. That is to say nothing of demonstrations against exhibitions and artworks. Protests have roiled institutions across the world, from the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim to the Akron Art Museum. A popular expectation has grown that galleries and museums should work for social change. As Director of the Queens Museum, Laura Raicovich helped turn that New York muni- cipal institution into a public commons for art and activism, organizing high-powered exhibitions that doubled as political protests. Then in January 2018, she resigned, after a dispute with the Queens Museum board and city officials. This public controversy followed the museum’s responses to Donald Trump’s election, including her objections to the Israeli government using the museum for an event featuring Vice President Mike Pence. In this lucid and accessible book, Raicovich examines some of the key museum flashpoints and provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding conservative, capitalist values. And she suggests ways museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.