About the Collaboration with Smarthistory
How do museums encourage visitors to look closely at works of art and talk freely with friends about what they see? How do museums give people the license and confidence to wonder out loud about what a work of art means? With these questions in mind, the Portland Art Museum invited Smarthistory founders Beth Harris and Steven Zucker to spend two days in May 2009 with Museum educators, curators, and docents.
Our goal was to learn about Smarthistory’s own conversation-based interpretive method, and whether it might encourage a deeper and freer conversation for our visitors. Zucker and Harris began recording their own conversations about art to help their undergraduate students, and as an alternative to the art history textbook. The recordings were casual and unscripted, and unlike most audioguides, the speakers identified themselves—they weren’t the anonymous voice of the museum—and expressed personal opinions; and even disagreed sometimes—just like real conversation!
We wondered whether recordings like these might give our visitors more freedom to have their own conversations, and model for them some ways of talking together about works of art. We also admired Smarthistory’s low-cost approach and thought it might present a financially and technically sustainable approach to technology and media-based interpretation.
Find more on our workshop, and what we learned during it, on Smarthistory’s blog.
You can find the videos the Portland Art Museum and Smarthistory produced together in conversations about works of art. We’d like to know what you think of these. Click here to fill out a 2-minute questionnaire.
We will be evaluating the videos with Museum visitors this summer and posting what we find out in the Fall.
-Christina Olsen
Director of Education and Public Programs
Project Partners
Founded by Samuel H. Kress, the Kress Foundation has donated European art to more than 90 institutions across the nation, including the National Gallery of Art and the Portland Art Museum. The 25 works of art donated to the Museum are featured on The Kress Collection Web site.
Smarthistory.org provides a free multimedia web book exploring art history through open-ended conversation. Co-founder Beth Harris is the director of digital learning for the Museum of Modern Art. Co-founder Steven Zucker is the dean of State University of New York’s school of graduate studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
