How Do You Museum?

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March 30, 2018
Dancer Looking at the Sole of her Right Foot, 1896–97. Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917). 1947.2028Public Domain

There is no right or wrong way to experience an art museum. On any given day, a visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art can result in endless insight into the human experience. Whether you’ve come to enjoy a special exhibition or your favorite work, here are some vehicles of exploration offered at the CMA.

Take a Closer Look

On average, a visitor spends seconds, not minutes, looking at a work of art. While that approach is successful for some, it’s also beneficial to slow down and take a closer look. When you spend an extended amount of time with a particular object, you’ll notice that there is much more to it than meets the eye.

Image courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art.

In the blog post “Embodied Attention: Close Looking at Dana Schutz’s Eating Atom Bombs,” Key Jo Lee, the museum’s assistant director of academic affairs, demonstrates the benefits of what she calls embodied attention. “Close-looking sessions are opportunities to dwell on an object or group of objects with embodied attention, which is a way to describe how we might build a relationship with a work of art even if we are not trained, in a conventional sense, to do so,” she says. “These sessions allow participants to examine art with depth and purpose, to experiment with new ways of seeing, and to ultimately draw new understanding from an object.”

From Close Looking to Calm Feeling

Launched in 2016, CMA in Your Neighborhood is a program through which teaching artists and teaching assistants visit community hubs to demonstrate art techniques and discuss the collection. During one viewing session of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese scrolls, teaching artists observed a noticeable change in the children’s behavior. Indeed, a close-looking approach to art can provide benefits beyond art exploration. With the attention to detail it demands, the technique may even promote a sense of relaxation.

For the first session, the instructor helped the students focus on the scrolls as a form of meditation. They examined each one by initially searching for larger objects, like mountains and bridges. But then a closer look revealed people walking and talking. “By having the children search and study the pieces, we saw a reaction in their behavior,” says Shelli Reeves, the museum’s community engagement specialist. “At first the children were unfocused, but this changed as they began to concentrate on the details. The process also prepared them for the art-making exercise.”

Image courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art.

Take a Tour

Museum tours are another way to experience art, allowing you to learn things that couldn’t possibly fit on an object’s wall label.

The museum’s interpretive planner, Stephanie Foster, says a group tour can be a fun and informal way to think about art from many angles. She often begins a tour with a visual-thinking exercise, asking her audience to respond to this question: “What do you see when you look at this painting or sculpture?”

Image courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art.

“There are no wrong answers, but the question does elicit fascinating responses,” she says. “Some may notice a detail in the background or in the corner. Others may focus on the composition. It’s interesting to me, as an educator, to hear other perspectives. I may think I know a painting really well, but then someone will point out an aspect of it that I never realized.”

Image courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art.

MIX at CMA is a great time to take a tour. The atmosphere is relaxed and tour topics, eclectic. At MIX: Soul, for example, Foster led a tour focusing on body movement. The group examined how dancers are depicted in works such as Edgar Degas’s Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot (on view in gallery 222). Foster also talked about artists who make art by moving, such as Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis.

Dancer Looking at the Sole of her Right Foot, 1896–1897. Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917). bronze, Overall: 46.35 x 21.59 x 20.32 cm (18 3/16 x 8 1/2 x 8 in.). Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection 1947.2028

“Krasner is an important abstract expressionist who uses very big movements, such as large, sweeping brushstrokes,” Foster says. “You can really see how she moved her body, especially her arms, in the making of Celebration” (on view in gallery 227).

Celebration, 1960. Lee Krasner (American, 1908–1984). oil on canvas, Framed: 238.1 x 471.8 x 8.25 cm (93 11/16 x 185 11/16 x 3 3/16 in.); Unframed: 234.3 x 468.6 cm (92 3/16 x 184 7/16 in.). Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund 2003.227 © Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Then there is Lewis, who flirted with the boundaries between abstraction and representation. With Alabama (on view in the Focus Gallery for the Recent Acquisitions 2014–2017 exhibition), you first notice the quick brushstrokes. The more you look at it, the more you start to realize something,” Foster reveals. “People often uncover different elements in the same work. In this case, one person saw a cave, while another saw a flickering fire. Someone else noted black and white contrasts. But if you put the art into context, you realize that through Alabama, which was painted in 1960, Lewis was most likely referencing the civil rights movement.”

Alabama, 1960. Norman Lewis (American, 1909–1979). Oil on canvas, Overall: 122.6 x 184.5 cm (48 1/4 x 72 5/8 in.). John L. Severance Fund 2017.1 © Estate of Norman W. Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

Docent Tours

Additionally, docent tours at the museum are a terrific way to see the collection and special exhibitions. Docents — volunteer tour guides — spend years polishing their practice with learning how to engage participants, and training in art history, and the museum collection. Months before a special exhibition opens, they are busy researching the featured artists and background material to make sure your experience is dynamic and enjoyable. Tours are offered daily at 1:00 on all manner of topics and provide fresh views of familiar objects and introductions to artworks that may be new to you. Check the website for additional times and opportunities for docent tours.

Audio Tour

Audio tours provide yet another way to take a closer look and learn new details about selected artworks in an exhibition. Often featuring narration and additional images, this type of tour makes you stop and experience a work for approximately 1 ½ to 2 minutes.

The current special exhibition Eyewitness Views: Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe is a good example of how and why audio tours can be beneficial. As the first exhibition to exclusively examine view paintings, which are depictions of a given locale or event, Eyewitness Views contains highly detailed works that benefit from a closer, guided look.

Image courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art.

Get the App and Learn about New Works

The CMA’s collection is dynamic and always changing, so it can be difficult to know what’s currently on view. Don’t worry. There’s an app for that.

Image courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art.

The CMA’s ArtLens App personalizes the art-viewing experience, sparking curiosity and deepening the relationship between visitors and the collection. Easy and free to download, the app includes high-definition images of every artwork on view at the museum, as well as interpretive content and more than 1,500 videos for selected works. All content is updated in real time, ensuring that users have access to the most accurate information.

The app empowers visitors to look closer and dive deeper into the CMA’s collection while never distracting from the art. It enhances the museum experience by providing the option to design individual tours, offering tools to better understand objects through augmented reality, and guiding users with interactive real-time maps.

The search bar at the top of the app’s landing screen allows visitors to search by artist name, artwork title, or accession number to discover objects on view from the CMA’s collection. By clicking the search bar, visitors can also find scrollable lists of “Recent Acquisitions,” “Collection Highlights,” and “Top 50 Visitor Favorites.”

ArtLens App Artwork Screen. Image courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art.

Whether you are scrolling through your phone or strolling through the museum, the point of tours and technology is the same — to bring you closer to great art, allowing for a transformative experience.