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USEUMS ARE MADE TO BE VISITED. Museums are designed through countless hours and combined efforts to deliver transformative experiences to their visitors. This is why outreach programs may seem counterintuitive, if not intimidating. How do you deliver a museum experience while venturing outside the curated institution?
BEYOND THE BUILDING: RETHINKING MUSEUM ACCESS
Outreach is often a necessary step in fulfilling a museum’ s educational mission. The first step to reaching and impacting new visitors may be to go out and meet them where they are, rather than wait for them to come to you. By mobilizing that transformative museum experience, museums can actively expand their impact and audience while increasing their visibility and connection to their community.
If museums are shaped around their artifacts, then outreach is shaped by the local context of targeted communities. The first steps to building a successful outreach program are recognizing how a museum can serve its community within its localized context, identifying stakeholders who can support or advocate for programming, recognizing roadblocks, and delivering programs that make an identifiable impact.
CASE STUDY: VAN GOGH OUTREACH PROGRAM
One case study of successful outreach shaped by the local context is the Van Gogh Outreach program from the William King Museum of Art( WKMA) in Abingdon, Virginia.
Despite its name, this program doesn’ t teach about the postimpressionist painter, but is rather named for the vehicles that deliver art lessons to elementary students in rural Appalachia. Instructors from the WKMA pack their Van with supplies and Gogh to schools.
The Van Gogh Outreach vans are wrapped with colorful decals that represent and promote the program. Inside are large wheeled totes that allow instructors to pack and carry all of the supplies needed for the program between the museum, car, and school classrooms. Instructors bring all of the art supplies and tools for an art project, as well as props and large laminated images used for a matching history lesson. This allows instructors to deliver the same lessons to different classrooms with varying layouts and equipment. These lessons combine the visual learning from objects that takes place inside the museum with a hands-on art project for a comprehensive and enriching art experience. Van Gogh Outreach visits third-grade students in 12 counties, as well as second-grade students in 10 of those counties. With 160 third-grade and 128 second-grade classrooms visited three times annually, the program makes 864 classroom visits in 53 schools every year. The program is run by the Youth Education Director( Kelsie Christain), Assistant Youth Education Director, and four full-time Outreach Instructors. This team also manages field trips to the museum, after-school art lessons, and a summer camp.
IDENTIFYING A NEED- HOW A PROGRAM IS SHAPED BY LOCAL CONTEXT
The WKMA is a small art museum in Abingdon, Virginia. The small town of 8,000 is nestled in the Appalachian Mountains and close to the borders of North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky. This region is historically impoverished, home to generations of workers in coal mines and lumber mills who rarely benefited from the profitability of these industries. For example, the median household income in Lee County, which is visited by Van Gogh Outreach, is $ 42,269 according to the 2019-2023 census data. The overall median household income in the USA for the same period is $ 74,580. Additionally, over 25 % of the population in Lee County live below the poverty line. Over half of the schools visited by Van Gogh Outreach have no art teacher.
The WKMA is the only AAM-accredited museum in Virginia west of Roanoke, making it the only museum accessible to a geographically wide service area. The many rural schools in this region struggled to allocate the time and resources to make field trip visits to the museum. WKMA leaders recognized that this was a challenge for their service area, and thus founded Van Gogh Outreach in 1999 to deliver the art and history lessons from the museums directly to these students.
Van Gogh Outreach was developed in collaboration with local schools, government officials, and the Virginia Board of Education. This outreach program is inspired and shaped by the needs of the population the museum seeks to serve, and developed with the input of the local stakeholders.
IMPLEMENTATION
The Van Gogh Outreach lesson plans align with Virginia Social Studies Standards of Learning for second and third-graders. Basing these visits on the existing curriculum makes it easier for schools to fit the visits into their busy schedules. The visits include a 30-minute history lesson with props and visuals, and a 90-minute hands-on art project. Third-grade visits cover Ancient Greece and Rome, Ancient China, and Ancient Mali. Second-grade visits teach about Native Americans in the Eastern Woodlands, Plains, and Southwest regional cultures. Beginning in 2022, Interdisciplinary connections to math, science, and
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