Posts Tagged 'interactive experiences'

Friday Photos: Feline Good at the DMA

It’s been almost a month since Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt opened here at the DMA and it’s been purrfectly amazing how much our visitors have enjoyed the exhibition. In addition to over eighty ancient objects, the exhibition also features an educational space which offers interactive learning opportunities.

At the sound wall, you can listen to stories of deities in Ancient Egyptian mythology, courtesy of our favorite storyteller Ann Marie Newman.

bastet

The goddess Bastet, whose head is cat-shaped.

image-of-divine-felines

Images (left to right): Cat’s Head, Egypt, Roman Period, 30 B.C.E.–3rd century C.E., bronze and gold, Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 36.114; Sphinx of King Sheshenq, Egypt, Third Intermediate Period, Dynasty 22–Dynasty 23, c. 945–718 B.C.E., bronze, Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 33.586; Standing Lion-Headed Goddess, Egypt, Late Period or later, 664–30 B.C.E., faience, Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.943E

You can also smell the perfumes, oils and incense that played an important role in Ancient Egyptian daily life and the afterlife. Experience the scents a Pharaoh might have encountered in an ancient temple, or those the embalmer might have smelled while preparing a mummy for the afterlife.

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Reading Area and Scent Bar

You can also find a selection of objects in this area that are part of the Museum’s own collection, so be sure to hunt down the felines we have present all across the Museum!

A selection of these works can be found in our Cats Across the Collection self-guided tour and our Feline Friendly Family Guide. And don’t forget to check out all the upcoming exhibition programs here. We’re not kitten around when we say a visit to the Museum is the purrfect fall activity for all our cat-lovers out there!

Marta Torres
McDermott Graduate Intern for Visitor Engagement

Friday Photos: Visitor Exvotos

Made with inexpensive materials like tin or sheet metal, exvotos are devotional paintings offered in gratitude by everyday people. Individuals who experienced everyday miracles–being cured of an illness or saved from an accident–expressed their gratitude by creating an exvoto composed of both a visual and written description of their experience.

Retablo Dedicated by Rosendo Gonzalez, January 1, 1907, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Marcus Foundation

After the Center for Creative Connections installed eight exvotos from Mexico as part of Maria Teresa Pedroche’s Staff Point of View, we invited visitors to reflect on their personal experiences and prayers by creating their own exvoto in the Interactive Gallery. Visitors can take their creation home with them or add it to C3’s collection of visitor exvotos by placing it in a binder for others to read.

Since we first launched this activity in December 2015, hundreds of visitors have made exvotos expressing gratitude for their family members, their smartphones, their pets, their city, their schools–the list could go on and on! Take a look at a few of the recurring themes that we’ve found in some of our visitors’ exvotos:

Food

Nature

Art

Personal Relationships

Obstacles

What are you grateful for? Create your own exvoto the next time you drop by the Center for Creative Connections, and share your creation on Twitter or Instagram using #DMAexvoto.

Paulina Lopez
McDermott Graduate Intern for Visitor Engagement

Intern Project: Introduction to Me & My World

Me & My World is an hour-long education program for first graders. We offer it as a docent-guided tour as well as a Go van Gogh classroom experience. Both programs introduce students to artwork in our collection with:

Both programs give the first-graders an opportunity to create artwork to take home with them at the end of the museum visit or school day. The overall goal is to assist the students in looking carefully at various works of art and making personal connections to them.  Because the settings are different (Museum galleries vs. school classroom) the experiences with works of art vary. Here is an example for Mary Cassatt’s Sleepy Baby from Go van Gogh:

Sleepy Baby, Mary Cassatt c. 1910, pastel on paper, Dallas Museum of Art, Munger Fund

Clues: a piece of a pink blanket, a pacifier, and the arm gesture of rocking a baby

After a conversation about the mother and baby (“Have you ever held a baby? Do you have a baby brother or sister at home? Have you ever sat on someone’s lap? How did it feel?”) a brief poem is read aloud to the class:

Human Pillow
By Sondra Falck

A sleepy head lay yawning,
Quietly on my chest,
His little legs were tired,
Needing a bit of rest.

Little boy, face filled with dreams,
Of all he planned to do,
Games to play and trees to climb,
Before this day was through.

 Busy dreamer, sound asleep,
Had to find the softest lap,
To be his human pillow,
So he could take a nap.

As a class, we discuss connections between the poem and the work of art. Then, we create a poem of our own, by asking the students to finish the sentence “Babies are ___”. When completed, it will look something like this: 

Babies are _soft_.
Babies are ­­­_sweet_.
Babies are _loud_.
Babies are _smelly_.
Babies are _squishy_.
Babies are _sleepy_.

Here is an example of Romare Beardon’s Soul Three from the Docent Tour:

Soul Three, Romare Bearden, 1968, paper and fabric collage on board, Dallas Museum of Art, General Acquisitions Fund and Roberta Coke Camp Fund

Soul Three, Romare Bearden, 1968, paper and fabric collage on board, Dallas Museum of Art, General Acquisitions Fund and Roberta Coke Camp Fund

 

Clues: Detail of cloth from the collage, a foot tapping, and a tambourine

There are two themes that can be brought up during this conversation: one highlights what the students see in the painting (patterns, shapes, colors, figures) and the other explores the relationship of the people and the activity that they are participating in.

After this conversation, the students are encouraged to create a story about these three friends by considering the following prompts:

  • Give each of the gentlemen and the lady a name.
  • How did they meet each other?
  • What kind of music do they like to play?
  • Where are they playing their music?
  • Who is listening to them play? Are there other people around?
  • What happens when they stop playing their music?

The activity encourages the students to pose like one of the figures in the work of art and then choose one part of their body to move when the docent claps out a rhythm. Since we love working with children of all ages, we have decided to revise both of the Me &  My World programs as our McDermott Intern Project. We are still in the brainstorming stage, and we would love your help!

What are some of your favorite works of art from the DMA collection to use with young visitors? Has our collection inspired any fun activites that you use with your students? Tell us in the comments!

Jessica Kennedy & Hannah Burney
McDermott Interns for Teaching Programs and Partnerships


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