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Educator Resources: DMA Program Recordings for Artist Talks and Lectures

Published June 7, 2011 Resources Closed
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Finally, school is out for summer.  Now you can relax and sleep in, work on that special house project, take a trip, or read that book you just didn’t have time for during the school year. For a little intellectual stimulation, we invite you to add another item to your list.  Listen to DMA program recordings, a new resource on our Web site that holds an abundance of audio recordings and transcripts from artist talks, lectures, and special programs.  Topics range from the work of artist Renee Stout to the art of the Silk Road to the connection between Coco Chanel and the DMA’s famous Wendy and Emery Reves Collection.  Speakers featured in these recordings include visiting scholars, artists, and DMA curators.

To access the recordings, visit the DMA Web site and select “Research” on the top menu. Then select “Program Recordings” from the menu on the left side.

We also invite you to spend some quality time with works of art this summer and fulfill your professional development opportunities by attending a Dallas Museum of Art teacher workshop!

Nicole Stutzman
Director of Teaching Programs and Partnerships

Staff Spotlight: Tom Jungerberg

Published May 5, 2011 Art & Teaching , People , Resources , works of art 6 Comments
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Over the past two years, we’ve shared with you our exciting work with teachers related to Connect: Teachers, Technology and Art, a project supported by an IMLS grant.  This funding made possible a grant coordinator position that assists with various tasks related to the grant.   Tom Jungerberg quickly fit in with our department, and helped tilt the very uneven ratio of male to female staff ever-so-slightly in the opposite direction.

Could you trace the path that has brought you to the DMA?

I have Bachelor’s degrees from Florida State University in art history and English, and a Master’s degree from Boston University in English.  I’m originally from Florida and I lived there for two years prior to moving to Dallas. I worked at University of South Florida as a visiting assistant professor teaching composition, mostly, and expository writing.

My girlfriend began teaching at UNT Dallas last August, and that’s what brought me here. When I got here, I was excited to see an opening for the IMLS grant coordinator position since it seemed so suitable to my skill set. 

What is your role with the IMLS grant?

I serve as the liaison between Nicole and Jenny and the teachers – I correspond with teachers and coordinate meetings with them.  I write and edit some of the new online teaching resources.  I also participate in meetings, during which we discuss how we’ll approach the artwork as we develop materials and the steps we’ll need to follow to complete the project.

What has been the most interesting aspect of your work here?

I’ve really enjoyed everything, but it’s been especially interesting to observe teachers in the classroom. It’s great to see how people take the materials we’re preparing and apply them to their own curricula and lesson plans.  I appreciate being able to see the final outcome of these things that we’re making, and to see the different ways they’ll be used when they go public.

How do you spend your free time?

I just bought a house, so that takes a lot of my free time.  It was built in 1895, and legend has that it was built by one of the founders of TCU.  I also raise chickens, and I have a garden which I’m pretty excited about since it’s the growing season.  Yellow and green squash are coming in right now; I have also planted tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, spinach, some lettuce, bok choy, peas, and green beans.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

That’s hard, as this job is ending in September.  I enjoyed my time at University of South Florida, so I’d like to teach.  I think teaching, but if you ask me tomorrow, I don’t know.

We’ve invited Tom to be a guest blogger; look for posts written by him in the coming months.

Melissa Nelson
Manager of Teaching in the Community

Educator Resources: Five Outside Online Resources

Published May 3, 2011 Resources 1 Comment
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Several weeks ago for parts one and two of our Educator Resources series, I wrote about three wonderful DMA online resources and field trip grant opportunities.  For the third installment of our series, we wanted to introduce to you five phenomenal online resources from other arts institutions. 

1. Metropolitan Museum of Art Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

The Heilbrunn Timeline, produced by Metropolitan Museum of Art curators and education staff, presents maps, timelines, thematic essays, works of art, and indexes from prehistory to the present day.  Launched in 2000, the Timeline continues to expand in scope and depth and reflect the most up-to-date scholarship.

2. ArtsConnectEd

ArtsConnectEd, a joint venture between the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center, provides two key features: “Art Finder” and “Art Collector.”  Art Finder offers textual, audio, video, and interactive resources regarding works of art from the two collections, while Art Collector allows users to save and customize resources through comments, tags, and ratings. 

3. Art 21

Art21 produces Art: 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century, an Emmy-nominated PBS series that highlights contemporary art and artists, in addition to books, online resources, and public programs.  The mission of Art21 is to create a living history of contemporary art by presenting contemporary artists discussing their work in their own words.  This is done in hopes of ultimately increasing the accessibility and knowledge of contemporary art. 

Artists represented in our galleries at the Museum such as John Baldessari, Trenton Doyle Handcock, and Bruce Nauman have been featured in past series.

4. MoMA’s Modern Teachers

Modern Teachers is an online resource offered by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  The site provides educator guides, lessons, and images related to the Museum’s collection.  These resources span modern art of the 1880s, including Post-Impressionism and Symbolism, to recent 21st-century works.

5. ArtBabble

ArtBabble is an initiative of the Indianapolis Museum of Art that showcases video content from a variety of arts institutions, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Museum of Arts and Design, among others.

Enjoy exploring these resources, and please share in the comments below any additional resources you find useful when teaching about art in your classroom!

Ashley Bruckbauer
McDermott Intern for Teacher Programs and Resources

Trade before Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Published April 21, 2011 Art & Teaching , Museum Insight , People , Resources , works of art Closed
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Have you ever wondered how goods and services, such as spices, fabrics, and art, traveled from one part of the world to another before the use of planes, trains, and automobiles?  The Silk Road provides a great insight for understanding early trading among different countries. It is the most well-known trading route of ancient Chinese civilization that was used during the first millennium B.C.E through the middle of the second millennium C.E under the Han Dynasty. The Silk Road was a transcontinental network of land and sea trade routes that spread across Eurasia from the Mediterranean to China and Japan. Domesticated horses and cattle as well as marine vessels were used as transportation to carry such goods and services along these routes.

Dr. Anne Bromberg, The Cecil and Ida Green Curator of Ancient and Asian Art, organized The Silk Road, an installation which illustrates how this great route of trading developed.  This exhibition also describes the spread of religions from India to Central Asia during this time. One of the greatest benefits of the Silk Road that Dr. Bromberg wanted to emphasize was the spread of agriculture. Animals not only provided transportation, but they also provided food and a mechanism for cultivating crops.

                    

 Oxen and Cart, 2000-1800 B.C., Bronze
Dallas Museum of Art, Irvin L. and Meryl P. Levy Endowment Fund

A great deal of Near Eastern art similar to the Oxen and Cart traveled along the Silk Road. The Proto-Hittites were devoted to animals, which were vital to hunting and farming. Objects such as the Oxen and Cart were perhaps used as an offering to be left in a shrine, sacred caches or tomb. In addition,  the Oxen and Cart symbolizes the distinct moment when domesticated horses or cattle were first used as powered transportation on land.

The Silk Road provides a great opportunity to discuss with students the benefits and consequences of trading among different cultures. I’ve added a list of books and websites that will help you introduce the Silk Road to your students. These books and more can be found at the Dallas Public Library or the Museum’s Mayer Library.

Books:
Stories From The Silk Road by Cherry Gilchrist and Nilesh Mistry
The Silk Route: 7,000 Miles of History by John S. Major and Stephen Fieser
Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond by Kenneth Nebenzahl
Adventures on the Ancient Silk Road by Priscilla Galloway and Dawn Hunter
Silk Road: Monks, Warriors & Merchants by Luce Boulnois and Helen Loveday

Websites:
the Silk Road project:
http://www.silkroadproject.org/tabid/177/defaul.aspx

Silk Road Seattle:
http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/

Enjoy,
Karen A. Colbert
Teaching Programs Intern

Educator Resources: Funding for Field Trips

Published April 5, 2011 Art & Teaching , Resources 1 Comment
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One of the best ways to connect your students with art and the cultures they’ve been learning about in the classroom is to bring them to the Museum.  Each year Museum staff and docents tour hundreds of students from the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, and school tours are one of the most enjoyable aspects of our days.  The Museum is entirely FREE for students, teachers, and their chaperones on school tours, and the only cost to you is your bus.  We realize that even the cost of a bus can limit you and your students’ ability to visit the Museum.  So, we’d like to share several opportunities to subsidize the cost of your transportation to and from the Museum.

1. Target Field Trip Grants

Target launched its grant program in 2007 and has awarded almost $10 million in grants, allowing students and teachers from all fifty states to extend the classroom to the world of museums, historical sites, and cultural organizations.  Each Target store awards three grants up to $700 to K-12 schools nationwide.  Applications for the 2011-2012 school year open August 1st!

2. DART Transit Education

DART’s Community/Education Outreach Program provides support for public and private schools, grades 1-12 in thirteen DFW-area cities.  The program offers a twenty-minute on-site presentation about public transportation, safety, and rules of conduct.  Then, classes can be transported FREE to a number of different Dallas sites, including the Arts District and Fair Park.  For more information and to schedule a program, see the DART site.

The Museum offers both docent-guided and self-guided  tours, which can be scheduled online.  Museum visits for the 2011-2012 school year can be reserved beginning in August, and request forms will be available online.  The calendar does fill quickly, so please schedule programs as early as possible.  We look forward to seeing you and your students at the Museum!

Ashley Bruckbauer
McDermott Intern for Teaching Programs and Resources

Educator Resources: Sneak a Peek at New Online Teaching Materials

Published March 29, 2011 Resources 4 Comments
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Egungun costume; 1920 - 1950; Yoruba peoples, Nigeria; cotton, silk, and wool fabric, metal, leather, mirrors, cotton, and wood; Dallas Museum of Art, Textile Purchase Fund, 1995.35.

This Egungun costume from Nigeria is one of sixty-five artworks in the Dallas Museum of Art’s collection that will be part of new online teaching materials to be launched in Fall 2011. Education staff, working in close collaboration with curators, designers, and web developers, have been hard at work for over one year designing a new model for creating online resources for teachers that are easy-to-access and provide the following:

  • more and better-organized information
  • video and audio clips related to the artworks and cultures
  • contextual images and multiple views of the artworks
  • teaching ideas that could be customized by classroom educators

The project is officially called Connect: Teachers, Technology, and Art, and it is supported through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. When we started our project work in November 2009, we went straight to the audience we serve: TEACHERS.  The dialogue and partnership that developed with ten teachers who were selected to represent the minds, wishes, and needs of classroom educators everywhere has been crucial, as it led to a pivotal decision about the presentation of information and ideas about the sixty-five works of art.

These teachers helped us test current teaching materials to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and they showed us how they might use objects like the Egungun costume in a classroom experience with their students. Together, we analyzed and re-imagined what great teaching materials for DMA artworks could be and we are excited to reveal this sneak peek.

I reveal to you the new template for online teaching materials and the future of online resources for teachers and students at the Dallas Museum of Art.  Each work of art will have its own set of information, clearly organized according to tabs.  The “First Glance” tab provides introductory information about the object, similar to the information found on a label in the galleries.  It may serve as the hook to pull you further into an exploration of the artwork.  The “Extended Information” tab provides paragraphs of topical information that reveal more about the object.  For example, the Egungun costume information includes paragraphs about Death and Religion, Materials, and African Masquerades.  This text has been culled from new curatorial scholarship and existing interpretive resources.  A teacher will also find contextual images in this section.

The third tab, “Teaching Ideas,” is a section presenting questions, comparisons, and activities that any teacher could use to get started teaching a lesson using this artwork.  These ideas are a mix of resources generated by DMA education staff and K-12 teachers.  Finally, the “Media/Resources” tab provides extra resources in the form of books, audio and video clips, and additional web sites.  We are also working to provide as many pronunciations as possible for less familiar words, easy print capabilities, opportunities to view the images in larger sizes, and access to detail images of the art.

In April, we will begin testing this new model with a new group of ten teachers. Will they agree with the first ten in terms of needs and wishes?  That is exactly what we hope to find out. Each of the new teachers will design and implement a lesson using the teaching material template above, and we will ask them to tell us what works and what needs to be changed or added.  We look forward to this second round of crucial work because it will only make the online resources stronger.  What are your initial thoughts about this new look and presentation?

At the completion of the Connect project, we plan to have a wonderful new model, but we will only have converted sixty-five objects to the new teaching materials.  We have hundreds to convert!  A redesigned home page and teacher resources site will help us streamline the presentation of resources as we remain in transition mode and continue converting the existing resources to the new format.  I will be anxious to share the new site with you later this year and welcome your comments.

Nicole Stutzman
Director of Teaching Programs and Partnerships

Creating Narratives

Published March 10, 2011 Art & Teaching , Resources , works of art Closed
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Over the past few days, I have been thinking about the ways we communicate through words and images.   In grade school, we are taught to look for contextual clues to determine the meaning of unknown words.   We make the same application when we look at images that are both familiar and unfamiliar to us.   Images are all around us – in books, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and museums, just to name a few.

To make sense of what we see, we often create events in our minds about what we think the image is about.  For example, a work of art may suggest a story to us – the work could show the beginning, middle, or end of a story.  Some artworks may be more narrative than others.  Take a look at the following images by artists Charlie White and Gregory Crewdson.

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In the photograph Untitled (boy with hand in drain),  Gregory Crewdson encourages us to look closely at the scene of a young man reaching down the drain into a sinister-looking space below.  Using a sound stage or working on location, Crewdson directs each photograph as if it were a feature-length film, placing his models exactly where he wants them.   Everything in the photograph has a specific purpose from the Scope mouthwash on the sink to the soap in the shower to the light from the window.

In Inland Empire, Charlie White draws our attention to the lower left side of the photograph where a woman wields an iron pipe at a hideous monster.   Although the scene appears as if it is from a science fiction movie, it seems strangely familiar, like an urban American landscape that we have encountered at some point during our lifetime.   This computer-assisted photograph demonstrates the influence of special effects on the technique and process of photography and the motion picture industry.

The stage is set and ready for us to complete the stories.   What do you think happens next in either Untitled (boy with hand in drain) or Inland Empire?  Use all of the contextual clues in the photographs to aid in creating a new narrative.

To explore more photographs in the Museum’s collection, go to Picture This: 20th and 21st Century Photographs.

Until next time….

Jenny Marvel
Manager of Programs and Resources for Teachers

Artworks featured:

Gregory Crewdson (American, born 1962), Untitled, 2001-2002 Digital C-print, The Rachofsky Collection and the Dallas Museum of Art:  DMA/amfAR Benefit Auction Fund, 2002.45

Charlie White (American, b. 1972), The Inland Empire, 1999 Light jet chromogenic print mounted on Plexiglas, Dallas Museum of Art, Mary Margaret Munson Wilcox Fund, 1999.180

Educator Resources: Three Excellent Online Resources from the DMA

Published March 3, 2011 Resources 1 Comment
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As educators, we know you all are always looking for fantastic resources to benefit both you and your students in and outside the classroom.  However, these resources can be hard to come by, especially if you don’t know where to look.

So, we are beginning a series on Educator Resources to highlight some of the materials and opportunities available to you and your students.  This month, we will begin by talking about various online resources available through the Museum and accessible on our main web site. 

1. Teaching Materials

Under the “Educators” tab of the main website, select “Teaching Resources” and then “Teaching Materials.”  This portion of our website offers over thirty FREE downloadable “packets” of information, organized by theme, age level, or collection.  Some examples include Silver in America, A Looking Journey (4th grade), and Arts of the Americas.  These packets include introductory information, images of art objects, and classroom activities, along with bibliographies and printable materials. 

This portion of our online offerings is currently in a period of transition.  Through an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant, to be discussed here later this month by Nicole, the materials are being revamped to better suit teacher needs.  As we begin to add new and updated materials, the original materials and packets will still be online for your use.

2. Collections Online

Another fantastic resource to be found on the Museum web site are the Collections Online or Search Collections features.  Several of our staff are working tirelessly to present the over 20,000 objects within the DMA collection to online audiences.  Currently, over 6,300 works have been added to the online database and are searchable through the website.  When viewing these objects online, users have access to images, basic object information, and notes from the curators.  Objects can be sorted by collection area (i.e. African, Asian, etc.), artist, and object name.  Users can also create a FREE eMuseum account to group and save images in customizable packets.

3. DMA TV

Finally from the main website, you can access DMA TV.  This resource includes both videos and podcasts created by the Museum, ranging from interviews with curators and artists (i.e. this video interview with painter Luc Tuymans) to recordings of past lectures (i.e. Yale University Anthropology Professor, Michael D. Coe’s presentation: The True History of Chocolate). 

We hope that you will take the time to explore the many wonderful online resources the DMA has to offer and find ways to incorporate them into your lesson preparation or classroom teaching.  Don’t forget to check back in the coming months for posts about other educator resources, including online resources from other institutions, area adult learning opportunities, and local and national grants.

If you have any additional tips for your fellow educators, please leave a comment below!

Ashley Bruckbauer
McDermott Intern for Teaching Programs and Resources

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