Object Encounters in the Art Museum

Project Director

A series of videos that considers the ways that audiences engage with art in one of its institutional contexts: the museum. Each 8 minute video focuses on a single artwork, drawing on interviews which undergraduate students conducted in Fall 2018 with visitors to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Students asked visitors what they noticed about an artwork, what meaning they made of it, what questions they had about the artwork and what they took away from the object label.

Collectively, the videos highlight:

How audiences - whether pursuing an aesthetic, formal or informal learning experience - engage with art and the interpretive frames and language that art-history uses.

What helps learners and what jars and frustrates them.

How anxiety about who belongs in a museum and worry about knowing enough to appreciate or understand art manifests and what reinforces those concerns.

The assumptions museums and teachers make about the background and cultural references of our audiences.

The shared cultural expectations that shape how we understand art from different time periods and places.