How the narrative behind works of art can open up a world of ideas.
By Matt Jennings
Bethany Holmes ’07 is talking to me as if I were in third grade.
“So, what do you see in this painting?” she says sweetly, drawing out each word as if to engage an eight-year-old.
I’m in the north end of the Overbrook Gallery, tucked away in the back of the first floor in the College’s Museum of Art, staring intently at an Erik Blegva illustration culled from the children’s book Hurry, Hurry, Mary Dear.
A tall, elderly woman—Mary, I suppose—her silver hair pulled back in a bun, fusses over a pair of old-fashioned wooden snowshoes in what looks to be the mudroom of a New England farmhouse. An oil can, the kind the Tin Man so desperately sought in the Wizard of Oz, sits at her feet.
I take all this in, my 36-year-old brain processing the information and then translating it into eight-year-old ese. “An old lady with a funny looking tennis racket,” I say.
Holmes suppresses a smile, barely. “Ohhhhhhkay, maybe those funny tennis rackets are actually snowshoes. What is she doing?”
The eight-year-old me takes the bait: “Oiling them! Because it’s snowing outside!”
Ramona Richards ’09, who has been standing off to the side watching our conversation unfold, has seen enough of me awkwardly playing the part of a youngster and mercifully steps in.
“So you see, VTS”—Visual Thinking Strategies —“is about creating a narrative, showing children what’s going on in a piece of art,” she says. “Kids will build a scaffold of a narrative using the ideas they have, and we work to connect the ideas.”
Richards and Holmes are museum assistants, two of more than 200 Middlebury students and community members who have participated in the Museum Assistants Program (MAP) since its founding in 1996. On a late spring afternoon, they were demonstrating how they interact with visiting elementary school students, encouraging them to engage with the art in the museum.
“This activity is really good for classroom learning —all classroom learning, not just art,” Holmes says. “It’s storytelling, and every child can engage with a story.”
Visual Thinking Strategies is part of an elementary school curriculum unit crafted by a nonprofit organization called Visual Understanding in Education, and the College’s museum assistants have been using the technique with great success for more than a decade. What they’re doing, Richards explains, is using art to enhance communications skills and visual literacy—“and in the process, the kids gain an appreciation for art. One of our main goals is to instill in children a feeling of comfort around art.
“We want them to be able to walk into any museum and be able to take in and appreciate what they see. I have friends, classmates, who are intimidated by the museum —they don’t ‘understand’ art. We want these kids to avoid that feeling.”
We walk across the floor to the Cerf Gallery and pause before The Umbrella Mender, a large oil on canvas by the 19th-century painter Henry Mosler.
“This is a great teaching tool, one of the best we have,” Holmes says. She’s in full teaching mode now, hands flitting through the air, her voice brimming with enthusiasm.
The Umbrella Mender: A balding gentleman, obviously the mender, sits at a workbench with an umbrella open before him. His spectacles are perched on the tip of his nose. Next to him stand two young girls; one has an armful of umbrellas.
“The students not only use what they see”—the workshop, the umbrellas, the mender, the spectacles, the kids—“they let their imaginations run wild,” Holmes says.
“And they back up their statements with evidence,” adds Richards. “They’re taking this visual information, adding their own critical thought, and then articulating their ideas. It’s amazing to watch.”
Richards, soon to be a junior, learned about the Museum Assistants Program in an art history class. The only prerequisite for applicants is an appreciation for art and the completion of one 100-level art history course. While it’s not uncommon for the assistants to be history of art and architecture majors, not all are; some, like Richards, also study teacher education. Holmes sees a commonality: “I don’t think there is anyone in MAP who doesn’t like kids.”
Both Holmes and Richards rave about Sandi Olivo, the museum’s curator of education and the founding director of MAP. Holmes, who just graduated as a double major in history of art and architecture and Spanish, served as Olivo’s teaching assistant last year, and she credits Olivo with inspiring in her not only a love of art but also a passion for teaching.
And just as Olivo has mentored Holmes, Holmes has mentored Richards. We’ve moved on to the front gallery, and Richards is talking about Arthur Rothstein’s iconic photograph Dust Storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma. In it, an Oklahoma farmer and his two sons are trudging through sand past a dilapidated barn. The dark gray of the gloomy surroundings—the sky, the ground—practically looms out of the image. The horror of what is unfolding shows itself in small details: A fence post, four feet tall or so, barely pokes through the surface of the sand; in another few hours, it must surely be devoured by the oncoming storm.
My eye takes all of this in, yet after listening to Richards for a few more minutes, I’m seeing things I hadn’t noticed before. For a moment, I become confused and tell Holmes that she’s had a great mentor to learn from. Richards quickly corrects me and says that it’s the other way around, Holmes is the mentor, she the mentee.
Embarrassed, I dig the hole a little deeper when I stammer, “Well, I would never have guessed…”
Holmes laughs, letting me off the hook. “Maybe I should be insulted that you think she’s as experienced as I am,” she says, still chuckling. “But I guess it’s flattering to learn that I’ve taught her so well.”
I nod, almost afraid to say anything else. “That’s…what I meant.”
Holmes plans on sticking around Middlebury for the summer, working at the museum. She’s applied for jobs both in the art world and in education, and is leaning toward teaching abroad next year. (She spent her junior year studying in Uruguay and Spain.)
In the fall, Richards will return for her junior year and her second tour as a museum assistant. After a year of being mentored and assisting with tours and programs, she’ll be stepping up to “MAP II,” which means she’ll become a lead assistant, training and mentoring new volunteers.
Richards is less demonstrative than Holmes, but no less enthusiastic about what she does. “My whole philosophy about the discipline is that I want to use art to discover ideas,” she says intently. “And I want to pass that along to others.”
Then she glances down at her feet—which are clad in black Danskos—looks back up, and flashes a quick smile. “And I want a job where I’ll still be able to wear Danskos to work.
After spending a few hours with Bethany and Ramona, Matt Jennings will never look at a work of art the same way again.