The Essence of a Gallery Cart

This past week I had the opportunity to work with some of our young volunteers to design a gallery cart for our temporary exhibition. The kids were at first apprehensive about everything, which was strange because they had all been enthusiastic during their interviews. After a couple days, they were all deeply engaged in the process of developing the cart.

As I mentioned in previous posts, I have been inspired by new ideas emerging from activity carts. Currently, I'm working with a student to update all the carts in our galleries. Since we were working with teens, I thought they would come up with some extremely different ideas than what was already available. However, I noticed that at it's essence, gallery carts are really an opportunity to show and tell. The kids were mostly excited to have the opportunity to share their knowledge and they did a great job coming up with talking points.

In some ways, I think we limited them. We had limited time and basic supplies, but also, we provided them with very traditional examples and set parameters based on established ideas. As this was a first try, we have areas to improve upon. We now know the pace of how the teens work. They needed time to get to know one another. We could also have more supplies available or at least have an idea of where to get certain supplies. It would also be nice to work with graphics to make some of our activities look sleek and I think this would help the kids to think of their project as something that "belongs" in the museum.

The most important change will be to change the parameters. Instead of giving them a set of objects and a list of things that must be done, we will provide examples of more innovative carts and lists of ideas for types of activities. The kids were very stuck on certain topics. We will provide more variety in their training.

Next year we have an art exhibit. My idea is to give them an object from one of the animals in the exhibit and ask them to develop an activity or craft and talking points about the animal. This will help to expand the knowledge of the teens and visitors about the animals in the paintings.

Soon I'll be compiling data with my intern and hopefully we'll have more information to help us revise the program!