Research

For those of you who questioned the decision of Alice Walton to plunk down an art museum in what to city-dwellers seemed the middle of nowhere — which I never did, being from someplace that didn’t have all that much art — it’s time to eat some crow.

Not only has Crystal Bridges exceeded attendance expectations — more than 1 million people have shown up since its opening on 11/11/11 — but also the museum has now released results of a study that is an indication of its positive impact on schoolchildren.

Researchers from the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions conducted the study, tracking 10,912 students and 489 teachers from 123 schools. Announcing the results, the museum said:

Each school visit includes a one-hour guided tour of the museum’s permanent collection, a discussion and activity session around a theme, and a healthy lunch prepared by Eleven, the museum’s restaurant. Teachers are able to choose from several themed tours, each designed to connect with Common Core standards at a variety of grade levels in art, history, social studies, language arts and sciences.

“Since Crystal Bridges is in an area where an art museum had not previously existed, and because the field trip is free to schools, we had high demand for the tours and decided to select participants via a random lottery,” said Anne Kraybill, Crystal Bridges’ school programs manager. “In initial meetings with the University of Arkansas, it became clear that this lottery system would provide the right conditions for conducting research.”

Surveys of paired treatment and control groups occurred on average three weeks after the treatment group received its tour. The surveys included items assessing student knowledge about art, as well as measures of student tolerance, historical empathy, and desire to become cultural consumers….

The team also collected critical thinking measures from students by asking them to write a short essay in response to a painting that they had not previously seen. Finally, they collected a behavioral measure of cultural consumption by providing all students with a coupon good for free family admission to a special exhibition at the museum to see whether the field trip increased the likelihood of students making future visits.

And what happened? Researchers discovered that the kids remembered a lot of factual information. A few exampled:

• 88% of those who saw Eastman Johnson’s At the Camp—Spinning Yarns and Whittling recalled that it depicts abolitionists making maple syrup to undermine the sugar industry which relied upon slave labor.
• 82% of those who saw Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter remembered that it was about women aiding the World War II effort by entering the workforce.
• 79 % of those seeing Thomas Hart Benton’s Ploughing It Under recalled that shows a farmer destroying his crops as part of a Depression-era price support program.
• 70% who saw Romare Bearden’s Sacrifice knew it is part of the Harlem Renaissance art movement.
• 80% who saw Kerry James Marshall’s Our Town recognized that it offers an African American perspective of real and idealized visions of the American dream.

What about critical thinking?

All students from the 3rd through 12th grade were shown a painting they had not previously seen and asked to write short essays in response to two questions: “What do you think is going on in this painting?” and “What do you see that makes you think that?”

“We then stripped the essays of all identifying information and had two coders rate the essays using a seven-item rubric for measuring critical thinking,” said [Jay P.] Greene, [Century Chair in Education Reform and head of the Department of Education Reform]. “We express the impact of a school tour of Crystal Bridges on critical thinking skills in terms of standard deviation effect sizes. Overall, we found that students assigned by lottery to a tour of the museum improved their critical thinking skills about art by 9.1 percent of a standard deviation relative to the control group. Rural students, who live in towns with fewer than 10,000 people, experienced an increase in critical thinking skills of nearly a third of a standard deviation.  Students from high poverty schools (those with more than 50 percent receiving free or reduced-price lunches) experienced a 17.9 percent effect size improvement in critical thinking about art, and minority students benefit by 18.3 percent of a standard deviation.”

Researchers found similar results when assessing tolerance and historical empathy, and — here’s a good ticket — students who received a tour went back to Crystal Bridges at a higher rate than those who did not.

Now, there are few questions about this — are the measures used perfect? I am no expert, but probably not. What about this incentive — “each control group was guaranteed a tour during the following semester as a reward for its cooperation.” Did that have an inevitable impact on the results? Is three weeks long enough after a visit to make the results worthwhile?

On the other hand, the researchers say that “the first large-scale, randomized controlled trial measuring what students learn from school tours of an art museum.”

Whatever you may think, it’s a good start at answering these critical questions.

For more information, you can read the report in Education Next, review a supplemental study here, see the methodology here, and view the press release here.

 

Last April here, I spilled the beans on a new research program between MoMA and several universities called the Museum Research Consortium. It’s a four-year pilot program aimed at studying objects in MoMA’s collection.  Last Thursday, MoMA finally put out a press release with more details.

The museum announced the personnel involved from Princeton, Columbia, Yale, NYU-IFA and the Graduate Center of the City of New York, all under the direction of MoMA curator Leah Dickerman. Here’s the key component:

The program will unite the Museum’s resources and expertise with those of the five partners through the initiation of two complementary programmatic features: semi-annual Study Sessions and pre-doctoral Fellowships.

The study sessions will also include faculty and graduate students from the university partner programs, and other experts invited by MoMA. What will they study?

The topic of the first Study Session, to be held in January 2014, will be the work of Jean Dubuffet (French, 1901-1985). Joint research on objects considered during the Study Sessions will continue on an inter-institutional web platform designed to foster shared scholarship and to build, through the Consortium community’s common efforts, deep research files and commentary around studied objects.

MoMA owns many works by Dubuffet, including Grand Jazz Band (New Orleans), from 1944, shown here.

As I said when I broke the “news” on this, it’s great to put students in close contact with great works of art — not to mention a group of experts from different universities and outsiders with different perspectives.

It might even be called connoisseurship.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of MoMA

 

By complete serendipity, I stopped in to look at the Getty’s blog, called The Iris, today — and here’s what I found: a post from yesterday saying the part of the Knoedler & Co. Gallery archive is processed and “available for research.” Some finding aids have been posted online already.

The Getty purchased the Knoedler archive — 1,300 linear feet — just last October, and took possession in December. So this is speedy work. It covers the period from about 1850 to 1971, and included “letters, telegrams, albums, sales books, stock and consignment books, card files on clients and art works, rare photographs, reference photo archives, and rare books,” among other things. Here is the Getty’s description. The contents have organized as follows, and you can see what is processed (updates as they happen).

Series I. Stock books: Available now
Series II. Sales books: Available now
Series III. Commission books: Available now
Series IV. Inventory cards: August 2013
Series V. Receiving and shipping records
Series VI. Correspondence: In process
Series VII. Departments
Series VIII. London and Paris offices
Series IX. Other financial records
Series X. Photographs
Series XI. Research files
Series XII. Catalogs and ephemera

So what has the archive revealed so far? The Iris post, by Karen Meyer-Roux, focuses on Knoedler’s representation of Andrew Mellon in the purchase of treasures from the Hermitage.

From Leningrad to Washington, via New York (Knoedler), London (Colnaghi), Berlin (Mattiesen Gallery), and Moscow (Mansfeld), agents and dealers communicated by telegrams and negotiated the collector’s purchase. Stock books and sales books document the purchase of the 21 paintings that Mellon acquired through this chain of intermediaries. The entry in the sales book shown below [at left here] lists a commission charged by Knoedler for two paintings in the sale, Botticelli’s The Adoration of the Magi and Rembrandt’s Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife.

There’s more tale where that came from (including the reluctance of Hermitage staff to part with van Eyck’s Annunciation, though I think it merely shows documents for things we already know from biographies of Mellon. But the post has wonderful pictures, and a welcome promise in the last line:

The GRI plans on digitizing a portion of the stock and sales books to increase their access for research.

 Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Getty

The National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, which I wrote about favorably here in February, is out with its first survey of the health of the “arts industry,” and I must say I am a tad disappointed. For two reasons.

But first, here are the results: After surveying arts leaders in all disciplines, the study found that they in general have a positive outlook for the future of their organizations in areas like attendance, earned revenue, donor support, program quality and so on. For example, although only 30.2 percent of the participants said that “overall conditions for the cultural sector” in their local market were better (including slightly better) today than they were a year ago, 48.3% expect them to be better in the coming year. While 44% percent said attendance was better or slightly this year, versus last, 55.7 % expect it to improve in the coming year. That pattern continues, as you will see if you look at the results.

You can probably guess the first disappointment — this sounds a lot like wishful thinking to me. This questions are about sentiment, and there’s no evidence to back them up. Too, we don’t know if these leaders have a good forecasting sensibility and track record, because this is the first survey. Call me a skeptic on these results.

Secondly, the participants themselves are disappointing, from my point of view. The biggest number came from theater groups (23%), while only 7% came from “visual arts organizations.” That doesn’t sound representative to me. Moreover, 47% of participants came from groups with a budget of less than $250,000. While there are more small groups around the country than large ones, I wish the survey included more large ones. $3 million or more is the largest budget category — that’s just not big enough.

I still hope that this Center lives up to my expectations. This is just a start, and it does say it will continue to probe. But I wonder if coming out with something so flimsy to start was the right move, reputationally.