The Brooklyn Museum has a large audience of school-age visitors and their accompanying adults. Scavenger hunts have turned out to be an easy and dynamic way to engage them.

Last June, our colleagues in the Education Division invited ASK to participate in the annual “Bring the Cool” Family Festival, a day-long event organized in collaboration with local non-profit Cool Culture. The festival includes art-making activities and creative play for young children and their families, and it’s always a lot of fun, so we were happy to join in.

Since this year’s festival theme was “Color My World,” we put together a scavenger hunt with eight stops around our American Art galleries. We wrote a set of eight simple color-themed clues for eight varied works in the collection, from a Coclé gold disk embossed with a face to a nineteenth-century Brooklyn landscape painting. When users downloaded the app at the hunt’s starting point, we could guide them exclusively through our ASK exchange in either English or Spanish. We invited them to send photos of the works and to share personal answers to related questions.

The kids who tried the scavenger hunt seemed to enjoy it so much that we thought it was something we should try again. Meanwhile, as we moved into the summer and schools let out for vacation, our ASK Ambassadors reported an increasing number of museum visitors asking for “something to do with children” during their visit.  Responding quickly to this seasonal shift in attendance, the ASK team invited younger children to try the American hunt but also started compiling clues for favorite objects around the rest of the Museum.

Attendance was high in “Georgia O’Keeffe: Modern Living” during the summer and the ASK team came up with rhyming clues to interest young visitors in the show.

These family- and child-oriented chats turned out to be really popular. We chatted frequently with young museumgoers in the special exhibitions “Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern” and “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Woman 1965-85” as well as the permanent galleries for Ancient Egyptian Art, Decorative Arts, and more.

As the opening date for the fall exhibition “Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt” approached, we were hearing more and more conversation around the Museum about ways to engage families and children with this show. We offered to create a hunt itinerary specifically for “Soulful Creatures,” focusing even more on providing interesting educational facts as follow-ups to the clues.

Several children of staff members took time from a summer afternoon to test an early version of our “Soulful Creatures” hunt in the Egyptian galleries.

Since “Soulful Creatures” wasn’t installed yet, we decided to “beta-test” our script in the permanent Egyptian galleries, with the valuable assistance of several staff members’ children. These young volunteers did a run-through of the hunt and chatted with us afterwards. They gave extremely helpful feedback about the instructions they’d received, the difficulty level of the questions, and the choice and spacing of the objects. They also had some great questions about ASK in general, and we took notes for any future project involving younger visitors.

Each object has a clue as well as facts to share once the user locates it.

When “Soulful Creatures” opened on September 29, we were ready to go. The ASK team had selected ten objects in the show and written a script with two sets of clues, one for beginner readers (about ages 4-7) and one for more advanced learners (ages 8-11), as well as entertaining facts to share about each object once the user had located it. Our ASK Ambassadors were prepared to pitch the hunt to visitors entering the show and to provide assistance with downloads and getting started.

So far, we’ve guided young “mummy-hunters” ranging in age from four through twelve years old, and almost half the hunts have included two or more children together. Some users completed all ten clues, while others (depending on available time or attention span) were satisfied after finding four or five works. Our Visitor Services department is also offering a family packet for this exhibition, so various options are available for kids—we’ve just asked our ASK Ambassadors to pitch the ASK hunt only to families who haven’t already taken advantage of the packet.

We’re often happily surprised when our young users include themselves in their  “I found it!” photos.

Like all our work, this process of shaping and expanding ASK scavenger hunts has been a team project, and it’s turned out to be a team favorite as well as a popular option with visitors. We’ll be thinking about new hunt ideas for the new year as we continue to connect with some of our youngest museum visitors.

Photo by Shapeways (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The first objects explicitly 3D printed as art happened were created some time in the late 90s, using a 3D printer the size of a refrigerator with a price tag bigger than a yacht. In the decade that followed, the RepRap project introduced the idea of a desktop 3D printer, eventually leaving us in the present day, where a 3D printer can cost less than a smartphone. With 3D printing in the hands of an increasing number of artists, 3D printed art is proliferating along with long-established forms or art-making with long-established methods of learning their craft.

Every summer, our Education department’s Gallery/Studio Program brings in kids from around the community to join in workshops led by a professional teaching artist to learn how art is made and create works inspired by a work in our collection. This year, we launched Forward Thinking: 3D Printing, a class for tweens which incorporated 3D scanning and printing along with traditional clay work to create 3D scanned and printed works inspired by Fred Wilson’s Gray Area and the Beaded Crown (Ade) of Onijagbo Obasoro Alowolodu, Ògògà of Ikere. This class was sponsored by Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation through their Art & Emerging Technology grant program, which advances the usage of interactive technologies in cultural institutions.

Students used 3D scans of their heads to create busts, which they decorated with headpieces of their own design. We used more of the low-cost 3D Systems Cube 2 printers for printing with the 123Dcatch app on iPads for scanning and Tinkercad for 3D modeling to keep the costs of continuing to make art after the class reasonably low and accessible.

In addition to learning about 3D scanning and printing for our set of printers and software, the class was visited by working artists who got a chance to show how they make art and what it’s like to try making a living from it. Earlier this month the class also took a field trip to the Shapeways Factory of the Future in Long Island City, where they saw high-end printers in action transforming digital designs into SLS nylon, dyed gypsum, and other advanced materials.

After building their own individual works, students also got a chance to work together to create a collaborative work inspired by Gerrit Rietveld’s Doll’s House and the museum’s own Studio 1 room, which is being processed for printing in full-color sandstone at Shapeways at this very moment.

The students’s artworks will be on display in the Con Edison gallery on the first floor this fall starting September 13th, so be sure to check it out! In addition to the display in the museum, the crew behind Forward Thinking: 3D Printing will be presenting on the class at World Maker Faire in Queens on September 20th to the 21st. We hope to see you there!

Since April we’ve learned quite a bit about what makes an ideal scan and have spread that knowledge to our resident camera wizard, Bob Nardi, who I teamed up with for this project. We already had scans of the Lost Pleiad and the Double Pegasus, so we added them into the mix as the Queen and Knight, respectively. We also found the best candidates for the remaining pieces:

• Pawn (Egypt): Lion-Headed Gaming Piece
• Rook (New York): Rook [from a Wedgewood chess set]
• Bishop (Japan) : Emma – o, King and Judge of Hell
• King (Egypt): Senwosret III

We worked with our conservation staff to get access to the pieces which weren’t on view, including the roughly 3,000+ year-old Egyptian gaming piece Bob and I were a little nervous around. Using the same software combination of 123D Catch and Meshmixer, the scanned models were then generated and cleaned up and made watertight for printing.

Having the 3D models ready to print, I worked on resizing them as chess pieces, making sample prints with some unsightly lime-green PLA we had laying around. Chess pieces have been remixed a lot over it’s history, varying from the small magnetic sets you would find in travel stores to the more elaborate Frank Gehry set. By and large there’s no universal standard for the size and proportions, but the US Chess Federation has some guidelines on the proportions relative to the board which were [partially] adopted in the final design of the set.

In the past, we’ve only printed pieces on a one-by-one basis. Since there’s 16 individual pieces to a chess set, that method quickly became impractical. Using the software for our Cube printer, we were able to add multiple models onto the platform and have the software automatically space them out. Marveling at the efficiency of this plan I made a test run and walked into the room our 3D printer resides in only to find that I made glitch art.

The aforementioned room is generally great due to it being more or less soundproofed from the rest of the office, but due to other equipment which share the space, it’s kept at a crisp 60F degrees. Since there’s not much movement happening in the room’s air that doesn’t tend to affect the prints, but it does seem to make the glue used to stick the prints to the platform and the plastic web between the pieces when they’re being printed stiffen faster, so some individual pieces would be just attached enough to each other to cause them to be yanked off the platform mid-print and eventually turn into Katamari Damashi.

I managed to work around the temperature issue by turning on the raft option in the Cube Software settings. A raft in this case is a grid which is printed on the platform before the models are printed on top of it.

A raft keeps smaller pieces from detaching from the platform since it expands it’s connection to the platform beyond its otherwise tiny base size. The grid needs to be manually cut off around the edges after the print is complete, but that’s usually a quick process akin to peeling or shucking a really plasticy fruit or veggie.

After peeling it makes for a nice set ready to be shipped a whole three floors down! Sadly, I won’t be on this side of the Atlantic on Saturday due to other fun stuff, but if you want to see 3D printed chess in action, stop by and have fun in my place!

Just like our previous scans, we’re releasing the latest models under a Creative Commons license which you can download and print on your own 3D printer.

Download all models used in our chess collection (CC-BY-3.0) on Thingiverse

In our use it made sense to start with the Sensory Tour, our monthly tour for visitors with visual impairments as well as anyone who wants to experience art using more than just their sense of sight.  We continually had great success using raised line drawings (they’re just what they sound like; the lines are literally raised from the surface of the paper) to help people feel contours of two-dimensional art.  Why not try the same thing with one more dimension in the mix?

It took some creative thinking and interdepartmental teamwork to figure out an appropriate object and Lost Pleiad hit all the right marks. So, armed with a few 3D prints of Randolph Rogers’ sculpture in our teaching bag, we hit the galleries in the capable teaching hands of Megan Holland and Brigitte Moreno to “explore lines of ink on paper, lines of movement, and lines of poetry in our most recent exhibition, Fine Lines: American Drawings from the Brooklyn Museum.”

So, how did it go, you’re probably wondering?  Did having these touchable models deepen participants’ engagement with the artwork?  Did people walk away feeling like they’d had a satisfying tactile experience with this sculpture?  Is 3D printing going to usurp the place of the statue in museums?  These are all things that were on the minds of the educators as we stepped into this new semi-charted territory.

As with most complicated issues, the results were mixed. Visitors were visibly, physically excited by the prospect of our inclusion of this technology.  They paid careful, detailed attention to the surface of the sculpture and all of its contours. They held up the 3D models and compared them to the original sculpture in front of them.

They looked at the 3D prints from all angles (more than they were able to do with the original, and not unlike the animation commenter Sebastian Heath made from the Thingiverse files David shared in his last post).

During this Sensory Tour, we also passed around samples of marble in various finishes and scarves to think about the contrast between the dense stone and the diaphanous fabric.  People gave them similar amounts of time and attention as they had the 3D prints, but the stone and scarves seemed to spark a wider variety of conversation and brought people’s focus back to the sculpture more quickly.  Not that this is all on the technology, of course, but as educators we’re pretty comfortable using material like the stone samples and scarves to get quality audience conversation going.

The 3D prints are new tools for us to play with, and we need to work with them more to get more comfortable. What are the best kinds of questions to ask people when we put these into their hands?  As blogged about by Alastair Somerville, does it work better to manipulate the image for emphasis, rather than staying strictly true to the original?

In our post-game conversation, the education team behind the Sensory Tours agreed that 3D prints are great tools to help people feel the weight and balance of a sculpture.  They’re “a new way of making lines; a digital brushstroke,” said one educator, and since this month’s Sensory Tour was focused on lines, we couldn’t think of a better place in starting this project.

As part of an internal program within the Technology department, we’ve started a series of developer led R&D projects; developers propose what they want to experiment with and we set aside time in our busy work week to foster that creativity. In our first round of experiments David Huerta wanted to work with 3D printing; he’s incredibly passionate about this and has been following the 3D printing projects in the industry and beyond.

Irwin S. Chanin (American, 1891-1988). Double Pegasus from the Coney Island High Pressure Pumping Station, 2301 Neptune Avenue, Brooklyn, 1936-1937. Limestone, granite, 48 x 24 x 48 in. (121.9 x 61.0 x 121.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Lent by The City of New York, L2003.7.2.

I’ll say I needed some convincing; even in asking the team to experiment, my own thoughts tend to take me toward practical applications and, while 3D printing is whiz bang cool and a lot of people had ideas for applications, we just were not seeing much materialize just yet.  But, you never know where a project can lead you, so David started his project by working with the Double Pegasus—an object from Coney Island which greets visitors in our sculpture garden.

David Huerta with his 3D print of the Double Pegasus.

When he showed up with his 3D print, we were pretty excited and that little physical simulacrum got me thinking about practical applications and how something like this might be used to help our educators with their own goals in helping visitors who are blind or partially sighted.  After speaking with Rachel Ropeik in our Education department, she immediately saw the possibilities and wanted to experiment; David and Rachel are now working on a cross-departmental project to bring 3D printed objects into our series of Sensory Tours.

We consider this a fast, iterative project that aims to get the output right into our visitors hands as we report back on our findings.  We’ve had plenty of bumps in the road—just finding an object that was appropriate for their tour combined with our own ability to capture it was challenging. In the coming week or two, David will blog a lot more on the technical ins and outs of the project and Rachel will be reporting about education goals and visitor reaction. The Double Pegasus is just the start.

Mickalene Thomas (American, born 1971). A Little Taste Outside of Love, 2007. Acrylic, enamel and rhinestones on wood panel, Overall: 108 x 144 in. (274.3 x 365.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Giulia Borghese and Designated Purchase Fund, 2008.7a-c. © Mickalene Thomas

The reason why Mickalene is an art historian/studio teacher’s dream come true is because of all the references. The title of the exhibition itself, Origin of the Universe, is a direct reference (or perhaps I should say response) to an 1866 painting by Gustav Courbet called L’Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World). Thomas often puts her work into conversations with art-historical cannons, with examples such as her piece Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires, responding to Gustave Courbet’s Le Sommeil (Sleep), and her painting A Little Taste Outside of Love, part of the Museum’s permanent collection, often finding visitors puzzling about where they’ve seen something like it before (if this has happened to you, the answer is usually Ingres’ Grande Odalisque, painted in 1814).

Ingres’ Grande Odalisque, painted in 1814, now at the Louvre.

Of course, mixed in with the art-historical references are social and racial conversations which are too complicated to get into in a blog post (just Google the word “Odalisque” to get started), but which will make for stellar class discussions and studio projects. At the end of the day, Thomas’ visual conversations are simply a great example of just what our Gallery/Studio program strives to do: Start with the work hanging on the museum wall, and build a bridge from it to you. Find your own connections to it, and make it yours.

Looking Back: Art History to Studio Practice starts on October 7 and runs Sundays from 1-3pm.  If you are interested in joining us you can register for this new class.

Page from Keith Haring's journal NB-0 c.1971 (age 13). The Keith Haring Foundation is uploading a page a day to Tumblr.

In the exhibition there is one room towards the back of the gallery set apart as a place to draw, sketch, or doodle. The goal of this room was to allow visitors to think and respond visually to the work on the gallery walls, to experience, in a way, the artist’s process. Haring’s journals are filled not only with words but also with marks familiar to many of us, artists or not: doodles. Doodles often get a bad rap as being signs of distraction, when in fact they are often one of the best sources of creativity. In art school I was once given an assignment to doodle until something good emerged, even if that meant drawing for hours and hours. For most people in my class, the work that came out was some of the most interesting of the term. The symbols that emerge, and reemerge, when you are not trying to make a perfect drawing often tell us a lot about what’s in our heads. Think of doodling as a form of communication, as a conversation between your dreams, your thoughts, and your pencil.

Pause Play Play Prev | Next

This past Saturday I went to peek in on the people drawing. The space had a calm yet busy energy; it was quiet despite being filled with people. The drawings on these boards are temporary; they will disappear at the press of a button, so I think it’s more for the experience of drawing than the outcome that visitors spend time in this room. To me, it felt both meditative and really challenging to draw with no specific outcome in mind. I saw moments where drawings stood on their own, the spaces around them blank, and places where drawings came together, touching at points, or spread across many boards at once. I wonder if this is how Haring felt when working; I wonder if his drawings are like records of conversations he had with himself.

Behind the green doors, educators install the Student Exhibition of the Gallery/Studio.

If they doors are open, you might see some works of art on the far wall. If you step through the doors you will notice many more artworks filling the gallery. There are sculptures and paintings, artist books, prints, digital photographs, videos, models, and sometimes (for example this January) even interactive works that ask for visitor participation. This is the Student Exhibition of Gallery/Studio, the Brooklyn Museum’s in-house studio art program.

“You should let more visitors know about the student exhibitions and art classes. Untill I took a course here I had no idea what was going on behind those green doors.” - Suggestion from comment book in the Con Edison Education Gallery

The youngest artists of the group are 6 years old, but the program also offers courses for adult students, as well as for every age in between. Some of our artists paint, some print, some try their hand at wire sculpture, stone carving or life drawing. All learn how to use the Brooklyn Museum’s collections as inspiration for their own artwork, discussing artist’s choices and processes in the galleries and bringing that knowledge to the studio to merge with their own life experience and creative expression. A Teaching Artist guides each group of students through a theme or medium over ten weeks, working with them through blocks and breakthroughs, and finally celebrating their journey at the opening of the Student Exhibition.

Installation in progress in the Con Edison Education Gallery on the 1st floor.

Have you ever installed a gallery show? The last show I installed in a non-museum gallery showcased 15 artworks. The average GSP Student Exhibition has between 150-200 pieces. Our challenge is to make sure each artwork shines, while also telling the story of process by showing how different artists within a class interpreted the same Museum piece, or what each artist took from a class-wide project. This involves discussion, more discussion, arranging artwork, changing our minds, more discussion and, well, I think you get the picture. It’s a process.

Measure twice, hang once. Educators install the Gallery/Studio show.

For two weeks before each Student Exhibition the green doors are closed, though visitors are still welcome to peek in and see what we’re up to. Our team can often be found holding a piece up on the wall and trading places so each person can contribute their opinion. We measure things often. Think artists don’t have to do math? Think again. Then comes writing. Each Teaching Artist comes up with an explanation of what students did for the project on display. What artwork did they visit in the galleries? What did they talk about when they were there? What did they do in the studio? How did their studio work incorporate the discussion from upstairs? The info is written up on a label that accompanies each group of artworks. It’s hard to say everything about the process in only two paragraphs, and even our best try sometimes leaves some fun details out.

Come see for yourself. You can find the show behind the green doors starting January 14th!

Join us every third Thursday of the month for drawing in the Museum’s galleries. Each workshop is led by a skilled teaching artist and focuses on a different object from the Museum’s collection, combining conversation with drawing to inspire engagement with art in new ways.

I spent a recent Saturday at an inter-disciplinary conference on drawing. I began the day thinking (as an artist) that I knew what “drawing” meant, and left both more confused and more excited than I had expected. One presenter was a plastic surgeon who thought about what he does with his scalpel as a sort of drawing. He collaborates with a fine artist who follows his hand movements and translates them into marks on paper which become beautiful in a way that only great abstract mark-making is. Another artist made a robot that can draw faces. I’m serious; the robot draws. The drawings are quite good, in fact, leaving out just enough information to convey the hand-drawn (or in this case robot hand-drawn) nature of the work. During the conference a textile artist was knitting responses to research papers about drawing, while a room full of teachers, academics, and artists discussed lines, gestures, marks and media.

I attended this event because we are starting a new evening program at the Museum based around drawing as an artistic and social experience. We’re trying to bring drawing into many different museum experiences in order to explain or record your thoughts and as a way to work though them. We know that drawing helps you see an object differently, but it can help you think differently as well.

Unfortunately, as adults we can sometimes forget to draw. Even for those of us who stick with drawing can forget the joy of it as we spend night after night in our studios, by ourselves. So one night a month we’re hoping to fill one of the Museum’s galleries with people drawing. There will be an instructor who will run though techniques and provide information about artworks, but there will also be you, hopefully lots of you, or people like you, or people unlike you, but people who are all willing to give this experience of looking, talking and drawing a shot. It’s this interaction, this feeling that drawing should be something fun, that will make this program great.

So come join us. And draw something.