One of the best things about university museums is how they focus on teaching, using their collections, their knowledge and their facilities to reach young people in all majors. If you read our blog regularly, you already know that faculty across the campus of the University of Georgia use the museum as a teaching resource, whether they ask their students to attend programs, come for gallery tours or request that we pull objects from the collection for close-up study. But what about the people who work at the museum and know it best? Do they ever teach classes? You bet they do.
This fall semester, four museum staff members are teaching UGA classes, and each of them is using the museum in a different way to make their classes more enriching.
Noelle Shuck, the museum’s graphic designer, is teaching ARGD 2030 (Introduction to Typography in Visual Communication). This class is for students who are not majoring in graphic design but can benefit from learning more about how to set type, such as students in the Grady College of Journalism who may be focusing on advertising and public relations. Shuck has taught this class and several others in graphic design before, and she always likes to find real-world examples close at hand to illuminate her lessons. This semester, she’s using Erik Spiekermann’s “Stop Stealing Sheep & Find out how Type Works” as her main text and hopes to have her students visit the museum to view works of art and then complete an emotion expression exercise from Spiekermann’s book. In other words, she’ll ask them to figure out which typeface best expresses their selected work of art.
With the retirement of Shelley Zuraw from the Lamar Dodd School of Art, Nelda Damiano, the museum’s Pierre Daura Curator of European Art, stepped in to teach ARHI 4210 (The Renaissance in Italy) this semester. This is the first time Damiano has taught a class at UGA, but the territory isn’t unfamiliar. Her specialty is Italian Renaissance art and she wrote her dissertation on the Italian Renaissance artist Francesco Salviati at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Having recently managed the reinstallation of the museum’s Samuel H. Kress Study Collection in its permanent collection galleries, she plans to have her students visit the museum to study that collection several times over the course of the semester.
She says, “I am hoping they will see tangible examples and applications of what we discuss in class. In other words, how the styles, artists, movements, themes, and places we talk about are represented in the collection. For example, we looked at an unfinished Leonardo da Vinci painting of the Adoration of the Magi and we have in the Kress Gallery a drawing of the same subject by a different artist, produced one century later, which presents a different composition. So, even if we don’t have a Leo, students can looks at different interpretations of the same subject.”
Damiano’s class is part of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences’ Writing Intensive Program, courses that “aim to teach students that writing is a mode of learning and a process. Further, teaching writing in the discipline-specific classes means helping students learn the processes and conventions that shape academic writing in the disciplines.” She plans to focus on museum writing as part of the course, both for museum catalogues and for wall labels. Writing a compelling label for a work of art within a space of only 50 or 60 words can be very challenging.
“This is a WIP class so writing is an important component of their apprenticeship,” Damiano said. “Formal analysis is also an important part: how to look and describe an object.”
She also said that she loves having the museum next door to where she’s teaching. “It is such a great supplement to the theory, reading, and image looking we do in class. If anything, it is quite useful for scale! When we read about paintings for private devotion and then see our Simone dei Crocifissi small triptych of a Madonna and Child with Saints, it helps wrap our head around the concept.”
Callan Steinmann, the museum’s head of education and curator of academic and public programs, is teaching FCID 5010/7010 (Introduction to Museum Studies) for the 6th time. Introduction to Museum Studies is part of the core curriculum of the Museum Studies Certificate Program and provides a broad overview of the museum field, introducing students to the history of museums, current theories and contemporary issues and the principles and practice of museology. Students not only read about museums and have their class in our museum, which they use as a learning laboratory, but also visit other museums in the Athens area, including the Special Collections Libraries, the Georgia Museum of Natural History and the T.R.R. Cobb House. Museum registrars, exhibition design, communications and other staff serve as guest speakers.
Students in Steinmann’s course work in groups to curate their own pop-up exhibition using works from the Georgia Museum of Art’s permanent collection, combining the theory and practice of museum work in a hands-on, experiential and collaborative project. Past pop-up exhibitions the class has generated include 2023’s “Through the Decades: 75 Years of the Georgia Museum of Art” and 2022’s “A Glimpse of Athens,” both of which are available online. Each group selects objects for the exhibition, researches works of art and artists and crafts interpretive text and object labels. They also develop a survey or other evaluation tool to assess the success or effectiveness of the exhibition, which will be reviewed by their peers in the class.
Finally, Steinmann’s students participate in hands-on field experience by helping at one of three Family Day programs at the museum. This program takes place once a month and serves several hundred children and caregivers in the Athens area through gallery activities (both self-guided and directed by interns, staff and volunteers) and a hands-on art project. Steinmann says that helping out at the event gives students “a unique opportunity for hands-on field experience with community public programming in a museum setting.” After helping at the event, students complete a written reflection in response to their field experience.
The museum also shares Parker Curator of Russian Art Asen Kirin with the Lamar Dodd School of Art, where he is professor of art history. This semester, he’s teaching two classes, one of which will focus on an upcoming exhibition at the museum that he is curating. ARHI 8400: Socialist Realism is a graduate-level seminar that will take as its topic the exhibition “The Awe of Ordinary Labors: 20th-Century Paintings from Ukraine,” on view at the museum January 18 through June 1.
The class has a similar thesis to the exhibition. Although most people view the 20th-century art created under communist rule (i.e., socialist realism) as communist kitsch, it in fact had a high level of artistic achievement, with profound insight into life under political oppression. The works that make up the exhibition are part of the museum’s permanent collection, enabling these graduate students to study them before the exhibition opens to the public. Students will visit the museum to see the paintings and conduct sustained research on them over the course of the semester, with the goal of producing publishable papers. They will also learn to give guided tours of the exhibition and present those tours after it opens.
All four of these classes taught by museum staff make use of our resources in different ways, whether teaching students to articulate their thoughts about works of art, letting them study directly from original works of art, having them use art as an inspiration, asking other museum staff members to share their expertise or giving students the opportunity to do hands-on field work with museum visitors. We’re proud that our staff members are providing all these enriching experiences to University of Georgia students.
Authored by:
Hillary Brown
