The museum’s University Open House, held a couple of weekends ago, provided the perfect opportunity to reconnect with old faculty friends and students and to welcome new educators to the museum. There was a sense of warmth and solidarity among those intrepid souls who ventured to the museum despite the severe weather on Saturday–high winds and torrential rain–to take part in some exciting educational programming.
Marcos Stafne kicked off our afternoon educational program with a lively Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) demonstration in the galleries. A diverse group of educators explored how this innovative educational method can be used for engaging, inquiry-based discussions.
As covered by Marcos in two earlier blogs, VTS group discussions rely on three simple but powerful questions shared by a facilitator with a group: What’s going in this picture? What did you did see that made you say that? and, What more can we find?
Gaurav (Mike) Bawa, a Baruch College Graduate student, shared personal reflections on how visiting the museum and studying our collections has been a transformative experience in his talk, Punarbhava: A Rebirth through the Baruch-Rubin Museum Project.
Tashi Chodron led a well-attended Highlights of the Collection tour in the afternoon that addressed the meaning and function of prayer wheels in the lives of Tibetan Buddhist practitioners.
Andrew Buttermilch’s Teaching with Touch Objects program explored how working with material culture, from spinning prayer wheels to crushing minerals to make pigments for paintings, can help faculty and students connect deeply with the museum’s art and ideas, as well as with each other.
No visit to the museum would be complete without taking home a Rubin Museum of Art button, hand-crafted by one of our wonderful volunteers. Many thanks to Sarah Bachelor, pictured here, and all those volunteers who helped make our University Open House such a friendly, informative, and fun event.