Maeve Day 22

On Wednesday morning, I finished up my blog posts before heading downstairs to lurk around the galleries. I marked all of the new ArtSplash features in Look Again on the map of the exhibit. It was 11 AM, so there was an ArtSplash tour going through the exhibit. I followed them to get a sense of what they're doing on these tours. At first, it seemed as though the families on the tour had just been brought in to look at the Kota figures as an explanation for the studio project, but then I realized it was actually an organized tour. The tour guide repeatedly stressed that she didn't really know much about anything in the exhibit, focusing her talk on the materials and aesthetic properties of the masks--she actually had to read the tombstone label on the wall to tell the group where the masks were from. She also brought the group to the power figures and the power bundles, where she basically repeated the information on the plaques and flip labels in the sections. She asked the children to guess what the different sizes of power figures might have been used for (or who they would have been used by), what kind of animal they would use in a power bundle (to "harness its powers"), and what they thought the different pieces of the divination kit might mean together. The last stop on the tour was the Vlisco exhibit, where she stressed the story of the Mama Benz, the motif of travel, and the range of expression allowed by the prints. She acknowledged that the company is European, and when a mother asked, "so it's not really even African?," she pointed to the fashions in the center as being African designs and said, "I think that's why it's so interesting to have them here, because they're such a huge part of African fashion, and it makes you think about what counts as African!" Throughout the tour, she emphasized the importance of reading labels to both children and parents, saying that if they ever wanted more information, the labels had "more of the story than I could tell you."
After the tour, I walked through the other galleries to see the ArtSplash activities and check out how many families were in each exhibit. I had lunch around 12 and then went over to the main building to photocopy the maps. I waited for Dani for a little bit because I wanted to make sure we agreed on methodology and were covering everything we needed to cover as I'd missed the Tuesday meeting. I hung out in the reading room for a little bit while a family with three kids read some of the books, and overheard one of the mothers talking to her daughter about the book she was reading. The book featured houses with the same type of corrugated metal featured in the photography exhibit, and the mother talked to her daughter briefly about the photographs they'd seen.
When Dani arrived, we came up with codes for the new behaviors we wanted to track:

PQ - parent asking child question

K - kid asks parent question

B - bringing someone to an object, either physically or by pointing to it and calling to them

We went back into the exhibit around 1:45, though the first person I tracked came in at 2:08. We decided to keep tracking all visitors to the exhibit and not just families, as there were still a lot of childless visitors coming in--many of whom used some of the ArtSplash additions! It's really difficult to track families. We usually decided to represent the path of the mother on our maps, adding notes when parts of the group split off or did completely different things from their family members. I tracked 9 groups/individuals, three of which were families.