A little tip: If there’s a museum show you’re interested in, look for a “family guide” or “classroom guide” on the website. They’re often offered as free, downloadable PDFs and have good images and information without museum “artspeak.”
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3 tips for a better museum visit
I was intrigued by Gretchen Rubin’s Met Museum Experiment, in which she plans to visit the Met every day of this year that she’s in NYC. (She lives within walking distance.)
Her experiment and her goals — to waken her senses, to learn about art, to explore the building space, to see more clearly, though she doesn’t feel she’s a visual person — got me thinking about how I like to visit museums.
Here are 3 things I do that make my museum experiences much richer:
1. Draw, draw, draw! When you try to draw something, even with just a rough sketch, you really have to look at it, and you notice all kinds of things you don’t by just standing around gawking at it. I always have a pocket notebook and a pencil or two with me. (Many museums don’t let you use pen or marker in the galleries.) I stand and copy the art I like, often just swiping a detail here and there from different pieces. (I write more about drawing and “slow looking” in chapter 5 of Keep Going.)
2. Enlist a small child to guide you through the museum. Kids are alive to the world in ways we aren’t as adults. They’re also lower to the ground, so their perspective is literally different. (More on this: “The 5-year-old docent” and “Borrow a kid.”)
3. Don’t read the label before you look at the art. Watch people the next time you’re in a museum gallery. They almost always look at the labels first! Don’t do this. Use your own eyes first. Let yourself be drawn towards what is genuinely interesting to you. Spend time looking at a piece without having someone else’s words messing with your looking. (More on this in Edward Tufte’s essay, “Seeing Around.”)
Family circus at the museum
A fun Family Circus from 1972, shared by @KurtBusiek.
It reminds me of this spread from a 1963 LIFE magazine (see my post: “Borrow a kid”):
It also reminds me, with its subtle poke at modern art — and the supposed gap between “high” art in museums vs. the “low” art of the comics page — of Ad Reinhardt’s art comics collected in How To Look. (See some of them here.)
Here’s “How to Look at an Artist.”:
With comics now being accepted as their own art form, there are still those who need “high/low” distinctions of taste within it. A lot of folks — including me! — roll their eyes at Family Circus, but Lynda Barry drew a really beautiful appreciation in The Best American Comics 2008:
She says:
I loved Family Circus because I lived in a violent, difficult home. I used to look at that little circle and think, ‘Goddam! How can I get into there from where I am?
And tells this story:
I’d always heard that great art will cause people to burst into tears but the only time it ever happened to me was when I was introduced to Bil Keane’s son, Jeff. As soon as I shook his hand I just started bawling my face off because I realized I had climbed through the circle.
And how I did it was by making pictures and writing stories. To me the Family Circus has always been my wished for family. My soul family in the image world…
COMICS ARE MIRACULOUS!!! They are IMMUNE SYSTEMS! They are TRANSPORT SYSTEMS!!! They are TIME TRAVELING DEVICES!!
Drawing at the museum
I love these two dinosaur skeletons the six-year-old drew at the museum yesterday…
Doodles at the museum
Above: A notebook page drawn while visiting the (excellent) Cleveland Museum of Natural History this week.
Below: A notebook page drawn while visiting the (also excellent) Mütter Museum in Philadelphia back in 2012.
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