Sara Marcus in Conversation with Zoe Silverman
Zoe Silverman has worked for more than a decade as an education specialist and program coordinator at a multitude of arts and cultural institutions such as The Harvard Art Museums and the Hammer Museum at UCLA before becoming a doctoral candidate in Learning Sciences & Human Development at UC Berkeley. Her previous MA from the University of Leicester in Visitor and Learning Studies in Museums and Galleries puts her in the unique position of understanding both the US and the UK’s approaches and progress in museum education. Her research engages video-based interaction analyses during facilitated education programs to illuminate how humans and objects interact with each other. Moreover, her most recent paper explores the concepts of proxemics (cultural patterns in the use of space) and epistemics (the relative and relational access to knowledge in a particular domain). I sat with Zoe to discuss her research and pick her brain on the future of art museums.
Portrait of Zoe Silverman. Photo Courtesy: Zoe Silverman and Berkeley School of Education.
Sara Marcus: Your research particularly analyzes how humans and objects in museums collaborate with each other. May you speak a little more on that?
Zoe Silverman: I suspect that a lot of my instincts around objects in museums comes from watching Sesame Street’s special, “Don't Eat the Pictures.” Grover is talking to some medieval armor, calls it his friend, tells it jokes, and kind of waits for it to respond. The adult human comes by and tells Grover that it’s not a person, it’s just some armor. The adult walks away, and Grover turns to the armor and says he knows that it’s really a person. I don't think I'm the only person in the world who has a sense of objects having some sort of animacy or presence. So that’s really what I'm interested in, the animacy and life force of objects in museums and how in interaction, people orient to that.
Don't Eat the Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, directed by Jon Stone (1983; Random House Home Video, 1987), 24:30 min. Photo Courtesy: Internet Archive.
The method that I use in my research looks at the micro level of interaction dynamics. I use video-based interaction analysis to look at not only line-by-line how people are using language with each other, but also their gaze, gesture, and spatial dynamics to see how they're educating each other's perceptual worlds in verbal and nonverbal embodied ways. I've looked through video data about students learning to handle objects in classes and children interacting with touchable artifacts in museums, and I've noticed that there are these subtle, but very real relationships between people and objects, and I'm trying to figure out how to represent that in my data.
SM: Speaking of animating the inanimate: for obvious reasons, art museums deal in tangible objects. However, many objects, especially from non-Western cultures, have intangible value that is now beginning to be recognized in the 21st century. Do you see the future of museum education exploring a sort of three-way relationship between the human, the object, and the intangibles the object embodies?
ZS: Yeah, definitely. British museums have been some of the leaders in tangible, tactile encounters with objects. Thinking specifically of indigenous artifacts in museums and the collaborative work and various forms of partnerships between descendant communities and curatorial and education departments, there's been some strides, but miles to go. But, since NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), there’s been a turn to more intentional relationship building with museums. There's been a lot of interest in new kinds of programming, storage technology, and curatorial displays that are attending to the sensorial dynamics of objects and the living presences that are embodied. One project that I have been working on looks at the ways that the Oakland Museum specifically has been using tactile objects in collaboration with their native California collections for inspection and participation with visitors. At the Oakland Museum, they invite you to touch a whole abalone shell while you're looking at a skirt that has abalone shell beads on it, but my argument is that the descendants and community of Yurok and Native Californians alive today tell us that sound was the most relevant sensory modality through which this skirt would be experienced, and it's lying here silent in a vitrine in a museum.
Klamath River woman’s dance skirt in vitrine. Photo Courtesy: Zoe Silverman, May 13, 2023.
The museum is trying to do some sensorial design, but my snarky, overly critical argument is that we are kind of replicating colonial dynamics when we over inscribe our sort of cutting edge sensory design without really attending to the objects first and the descendant communities who tell us pretty explicitly how these objects are to be experienced.
SM: I appreciate you mentioning both a British and an American institution because I’m curious if you’ve noticed any key differences in educational programming between British and American art and cultural institutions based on your experiences in both of those spheres.
ZS: I did an MA at the University of Leicester on UK Education Standards and Relationships Between Government and Museums and Schools and I was working full-time at the Hammer Museum and at the Skirball Cultural Center while doing my MA through distance learning. It might be different if you work somewhere that has a closer tie to state and federal government, but for a lot of the nonprofit museums I worked at, education and the relationship between schools and museums felt like a little bit more of a nice to have. We were constantly developing what we thought were really rich resources for teachers without listening too closely to what teachers actually wanted. We were constantly trying to bring people into our institutions without stopping to do a lot of listening to be like, “well, do they want what we're making?” We were spending a lot of time making these beautiful, rich resources that we had no idea how to track if people were using them.
SM: So, would you say in the UK they are more closely connected to the school system?
ZS: I do think that some of the most interesting, large-scale studies of education have come out of the UK. The UK is doing some really cool stuff around mindfulness and sensory programming. They always seem to be about 10 years ahead of where museum education is in the United States in terms of which modalities we're going go for next. Touch tours (exhibition tours for blind or partially sighted people) started in the UK and came to the United States, so I would say the UK feels a little bit ahead of the curve compared to where we are in the US. It’s fun to see what the small, publicly supported museums and galleries in the UK are doing so you know what is coming to us next.
Abalone handling object and Klamath River woman’s dance skirt. Photo Courtesy: Zoe Silverman, May 13, 2023.
SM: In the 1990s, the Getty Museum identified what it called “the art novice”. It defined this hypothetical visitor with 9 distinct characteristics including curiosity and motivation to learn, but lacking confidence in their ability to make sense of what they see and having underdeveloped perceptual skills. Given your research on positioning, epistemics, and proxemics, I am curious to hear your thoughts on this concept as it relates to guided museum tours.
ZS: A lot of my research talks of the way that educators and visitors position themselves or other people as knowledgeable or not knowledgeable in the context of a guided art museum tour. A lot of the sort of institutional talk that museums do to and about visitors is about educating visitors to think like museums think. There's this desired outcome that through, perhaps, exposure to certain sort of program experiences that “the novice museum goers” will become more like museum professionals. That strikes me as really paternalistic and chauvinistic, and it carries with it some serious blind spots that prevent institutions from learning from visitors. There's also an assumption that certain people with certain social presentations or bodily orientations are also art novices. I mean, even children are bringing their own ingenuity to the ways that they are making meaning out of the objects, which I think is equal and sometimes more valuable than the ways that museums are making meaning from them. When I ran a touch tour of artifacts at the Skirball, we would bring out deaccessioned, broken pottery that the museum couldn't ethically display, but we invited people to come touch them and talk about what they saw and felt. I had this curriculum written where we were going to talk about archaeology, but immediately people started telling me about their grandmother who was a potter, or kids would really want to talk about how we know it's not a dinosaur bone. That project was really transformative for my own approach to museum education and it really forced me interaction after interaction to stop and be like, “I can keep resisting, I can keep not listening to what the visitors are telling me about the worlds that they're unveiling to me, or I can listen and participate in the game that they're playing”. If I kept not listening to them because I thought they're doing museums wrong, I would be missing a lot of learning that I could be doing.
SM: We’ve seen from Yayoi Kusama Infinity Rooms to the immersive Van Gogh shows that the experience economy is forcing museums to rethink their purpose. How do you view the impact of museums attempting to remain relevant through shifting their focus towards becoming more marketable and Instagram-able in educational programming?
ZS: I will say fortunately for the field of education we're not the first generation to deal with this. In the 19th century, there were anxieties about people going to these world's fairs and going to the pleasure grounds and messing around instead of learning. I understand that there are a lot of motivations for visiting museums, and I don't think that one is morally superior to another. I think that there's some value in the Instagramming of museums, and souvenir taking has also been a cultural practice that goes back to medieval pilgrims. I am also convinced by arguments about the attention economy and I feel the yearning myself for sanctuaries of attention, and museums historically have been sanctuaries of attention. The more we allow the attention economy and the attention fracking to infiltrate museums, I think that it is shrinking spaces that are available to us publicly to have sustained moments of attending to the world in ways that are different from our day-to-day distracted lives. I'm trying not to be too judgy, but I feel the lost narrative in my own life when I look around a gallery and realize that people are on their phones, and then I'm also on my phone, and like, “oh no, what has happened to all of us!” I'm really impressed by projects that are interested in re-training our attention, and museums have wound up being some really rich sites where they are doing new attentional experimentation and mindfulness programming.
SM: Finally, based on your research, what do you think will be the largest shifts we see in museum education programs in the next 10 years?
ZS: I really think that we're deep into the body turn in the social sciences. We've been experimenting with multi-sensory engagement, and thoughtful sensory design is kind of where things are going. We have come to understand that knowledge and authority rests not only in institutions, but also in all sorts of people. In education and in other kinds of spaces, there's been more of a turn toward what people have called “epistemic justice.” Valuing the sort of “non-experts” and their intelligence, ingenuity, knowledge, and lived experience is something that has an increasing attention toward. We're seeing members of the community, cultural experts, and students getting to put their voices up next to the curators. We will see a lot more museums where all facets of the community have more of a voice and feel like that is their space.