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de Young Strengthens Art Education with New Facilities and Award-Winning Programs
3/1/2005 San Francisco, March 1, 2005--When the new de Young museum opens on October 15, 2005, visitors will have a chance to interact with art in new and different ways. The de Young’s stunning copper-façade building in Golden Gate Park, designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, will house 20,000 square feet of dedicated learning space and several innovative educational programs that will give audiences of all ages a multitude of reasons to become regular visitors.
The de Young’s commitment to learning is expressed physically through the creation of the Kimball Education Gallery, an interactive facility prominently located on the ground floor, in an admission-free zone of the new building. The museum will also invite visitors into the creative process with its Artist Studio program, which offers artists space in the building itself to work and interact with museumgoers.
Programmatically, the de Young works with Bay Area teachers through its Get Smart with Art curriculum and supports underprivileged youth with the Museum Ambassador Program, which recently won the prestigious Coming Up Taller award from the President’s Committee on Arts and the Humanities. The Friday Nights at the de Young series will bring the collections alive through music, food, dancing, lectures, and hands-on opportunities to create art of one’s own.
Friday Nights at the de Young
The new de Young will offer audiences of all ages a chance to experience art with all five senses. Every Friday evening, the museum will host different events designed to enhance viewers’ appreciation of the exhibitions. Friday Nights at the de Young will include live music, dancing, lectures, art exhibitions, artists’ demonstrations, food, drink and hands-on artmaking workshops. These dynamic evenings will bring the collections to life for visitors who want new ways to experience art; they will also serve as a vibrant community outreach program that turns the de Young into a resource for local artists, musicians, dancers, students, and faculty.
The de Young collaborates with a wide variety of Bay Area organizations to bring these events to the public, including the Art Deco Society, the Mexican Museum, La Peña Cultural Center, Galeria de la Raza, San Francisco City College, Academy of Art College, San Francisco State University, the Egyptian Consulate, the Guatemalan Consulate, the Mexican Consulate, the Polish Cultural Center and the Latino Film Festival.
The Friday Nights program has enjoyed tremendous success in conjunction with past exhibitions at the Legion of Honor. In April 2002, the museum hosted Dada and Surrealism Nights, which featured costume parties, silent films accompanied by the Hot Club of San Francisco, and Dada art performances. To complement the de Young’s popular Eternal Egypt exhibition in the fall of 2002, programs were offered each week with a different focus. Museumgoers enjoyed interactive art projects for both children and adults and learned about Egyptian fashion, food, music, dance, and henna art. May 2003 brought visitors Leonardo da Vinci and the Splendor of Poland, complete with dancing, artist demonstrations, Polish music and cultural activities, and artmaking opportunities. The museum presented ballet performances for the Degas Sculpture exhibition (October 2003), fashion shows and costume parties for the Art Deco show (summer 2004), and a film series and Dia de los Muertos celebration for the Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya collection (fall 2004).
The museum’s new building, designed by the award-winning Swiss architectural firm of Herzog & de Meuron, will serve as an exciting and engaging venue for upcoming Friday Night events.
Get Smart with Art
The de Young is the Bay Area’s only museum that offers arts education curricula for all grade levels. Get Smart with Art, specifically created to meet the California state content standards in language arts, social studies, and visual arts, is an interdisciplinary curriculum package that uses art objects as primary documents, sparking investigations into the diverse cultures represented in the museum’s exhibits.
“This is the city’s collection,” says Sheila Pressley, Director of Education for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “I want the children to take ownership of it.” In a time of cutbacks and budget shortfalls, the de Young offers much-needed support to public school students and teachers, with ready-made syllabi that are already designed for the appropriate grade levels. The program is flexible enough to support both school groups that visit the museum and those unable to do so.
The areas of focus are as follows:
Grade 1-3: Learning to Look at Art
Grade 4: California History: Native American Culture and Westward Expansion
Grade 5: American History: Colonial-Revolution
Grade 6: Ancient Western Civilizations
Grade 7: The Art of Africa and Mesoamerica
Grade 8: American History: Revolution-Reconstruction
Grade 9-10: World History: Creation Myths
Grade 11-12: American History: Reconstruction-Present
Get Smart with Art utilizes art objects as the jumping-off point to help students develop visual literacy, historical knowledge, artistic expression, and expository writing skills. The curriculum package includes art readers and online learning activities for students, visual classroom aids, professional development materials for teachers, and, of course, museum visits. The program is especially designed to support teachers who may not be familiar with arts education in their everyday classroom work by demonstrating how the arts relate to other aspects of the curriculum and providing clear instructions on how to incorporate the material into a lesson plan.
“The program is currently being tested and refined in San Francisco classrooms, and response has been very positive,” says Ms. Pressley. Get Smart with Art is closely tied to the new de Young’s collections and will debut when the museum opens.
Kimball Education Gallery
A colorful, interactive, electronic sign on the first floor of the new de Young will catch visitors’ eyes and draw them into the Kimball Education Gallery, a multimedia educational facility designed to introduce guests to the museum’s collection and to provide space for a wide range of hands-on activities and programs. The sign can welcome school groups by name, announce current activities in the Gallery, and highlight artwork by children and visiting artists. Visitors can get information about upcoming programs by using embedded “hot spots” in the sign to find out what else the museum has to offer.
The main purpose of the Kimball Gallery is to prepare audiences, particularly those visiting for the first time, for the experience of looking critically at art and learning about the rich cultural traditions represented by the museum’s remarkably wide-ranging collection and exhibits. Electronic kiosks will serve as a familiar conduit to the exhibitions for young visitors who have grown up surrounded by digital media.
The centerpiece of the Gallery will be the Collection Icons, three interactive installations designed to teach different ways of understanding art. The Icons, which are touch-activated, will contain layers of information that allow users to “drill down” and explore topics of their choice in greater depth. These exhibits will utilize about 10 minutes’ worth of video, text, animation, narration, music, and photography, all of which will be projected onto giant floor-to-ceiling glass panels, immersing children in the experience of art. The Icons are designed not only for individual use, but also to help docents introduce important themes when leading guided tours through the collections. Each installation will explore a particular work that is representative of the museum’s multicultural collection: a Yoruba divination bowl from Nigeria, an 8th-century stone portrait of a royal Maya woman, and Aspiration, a 1936 oil-on-canvas by African-American painter Aaron Douglas.
Artist Studio Program
The Kimball Gallery will also host the Artist Studio Program. Each month, the de Young will invite a different Bay Area artist to work in the museum itself and share the artistic process with museum visitors. Developed in 1999 and the first of its kind in an American art museum, this program gives the public access to the intimacy of an artist’s studio and engages them in the creation of artwork; visitors can view works in progress (as well as completed pieces, which will be on display) and get a better understanding of the techniques of various kinds of artistry. In return for revealing this deeply personal process, the artist gains a wider audience for his or her work.
“Artists are our greatest resource,” says Harry S. Parker III, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “Although many other art museums offer studio classes, the de Young’s Artist Studio is unique in that it is available to any museum visitor.”
The Artist Studio Program will involve a wide variety of different media, including photography, film, video, printmaking, textile design, weaving, sewing, painting, conceptual art, installation, sculpture, music and performance art. The first participant was noted sculptor Ruth Asawa, who created works of origami while visitors looked on.
The artists themselves choose how they prefer to work and interact with the public; some set up workshops or demonstrations, and others may transform the space to incorporate the elements of their work as it develops. The artwork and the artists will be accessible to visitors of all ages, with the idea that access to works in progress will help demystify the art-making process, and perhaps even inspire some visitors to try it themselves.
Museum Ambassador Program
First Lady Laura Bush presented a 2004 Coming Up Taller award, an initiative of the President’s Council on Arts and the Humanities, to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s Museum Ambassador Program on December 14, 2004. The Ambassador Program, which educates low-income youth about art and trains them to elucidate it for their peers and communities, was one of 17 select recipients honored at the Washington, DC ceremony.
Over 300 programs were nominated for the prestigious award, which recognizes outstanding arts and humanities programs that celebrate the creativity of young people and provide them with opportunities to learn and to contribute to their communities. Mrs. Bush congratulated the recipients “for the exemplary work they are doing and the outstanding opportunities they are providing to enrich the lives of young people.”
Founded in 1982--the same year that saw the creation of the President’s Council on the Arts and the Humanities--the Museum Ambassador Program hires local high school students from underserved communities and trains them to understand and interpret art as a means of building critical thinking and life skills. These students learn to give entertaining, informative presentations to groups of varying sizes that total over 10,000 people a year, both in and outside the galleries. In the process of educating others, they learn to develop their own public speaking skills, reasoning abilities, and teaching styles, as well as building their own knowledge about art and how to understand it. Ambassadorships are paid positions, so students also gain the kind of professional experience that is often denied to low-income youth.
“The program was designed with us in mind, allowing for a working environment in which we felt equal with each other and with the adults,” says Ambassador alumna Stephanie Caldwell, who completed the program in 2001. “This has given me an example of how to be a model employee in future job opportunities as well as at school.”
Museum Ambassadors are paired with college-age mentors who serve as real-life examples of the value of art and higher education in one’s life and career plans. This program was one of the first to use teenage educators in an art setting, and has been emulated by institutions around the world, such as the South Africa Fine Arts Museum. The de Young benefits tremendously from these students’ connections with a wide variety of communities, and underprivileged students are given the chance to explore new ideas and possibilities and to share them with others.
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