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It is currently part of the mission of art museums to actively involve children in learning experiences and empower them through a variety of programmes – including developing text panels specialized for children. To date, we have only a limited understanding of the semiotic resources in audience-sensitive exhibition text panels. Drawing upon Systemic Functional Linguistics, this paper analyses and compares 56 text panels in an exhibition from the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia. They are comprised of two versions of text panels for 28 artworks, targeting different groups of audiences, respectively (children and adults). It is found that the children's texts have been recontextualized to evoke interest in learning to paint, while the adults' texts focus on aesthetic appreciation. The comparative analysis shows that audience-sensitive text writing is interrelated with its social context in view of field, tenor, mode, and genre. This paper further explores how the production of audience-sensitive text panels contributes to the pedagogic, commercial, and community value of art museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Do they read? Oh, yes, they do," was the conclusion of a paper identifying the proof of label use in visitors' in-gallery conversations versus the difficulties of observing them reading. This paper -methodologically refines this research question by asking how exactly exhibit labels are used. Answers are derived from an empirical study that analyzed viewing behavior both before and after the reinstallation of a museum's collection through mobile eye tracking (MET), subjective mapping, and questionnaires. As the introduction of interpretive labels was one of the major changes implemented, the paper demonstrates differences in visitors' responses to the artworks with or without contextual information. Analytical emphasis rests on the exploration of patterns in the process of decision making (differentiating between visitors' reading affinities); visual engagement (analyzing the combined activities of looking and reading); and memory (echoing label texts in visitors' artwork reflections). Our findings show that all visitors read, albeit to very different extents, the majority being medium-affinity readers; that the basic viewing pattern "art-label-art" becomes more complex with more text and more -visitors on-site; and that art interpretations deepen and differ through additional information. The power of labels to guide eyes and thoughts suggests their intentional use in museum and curatorial practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within an art exhibition, the disposition of space is fundamental in experiencing artworks. A study of the exhibition space as discourse enmeshes art within a framework of relationship and processes instead of viewing art as an isolated and autonomous object. This paper features the case study of Art '76, the inaugural exhibition of Singapore's first large-scale institution of art, the National Museum Art Gallery (NMAG). The NMAG's opening in 1976 had been much anticipated by artists and the art audience since the 1960s, it was also an important milestone in the National Museum of Singapore's process of modernisation and revitalisation. During Singapore's post-independent period, the National Museum began to redefine itself as a civic museum focussing on Singapore's history and culture, shifting away from its previous incarnation of a research-focused colonial institution, the Raffles Library and Museum. Singapore was not alone in exploring the role of modern art in nation-building, as neighbouring Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand also began to moot for their own institution of modern art around the same period of time. Art '76 and the NMAG represent a case of distinct spatial typology that arose out of unique institutional and socio-political dynamic in post-independent Singapore. In analysing the legacy as well as the relationships and contentions that shaped the spatial articulation of Art '76, this paper studies existing visual and oral archive, as well as critically evaluating the concepts of space as a subject of historical study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluates the exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin, 'Picasso: working on paper' and 'The Barry Joule archive, works on paper attributed to Francis Bacon.' Curator of the Picasso exhibition, Anne Baldassari; Comparison of the two artists; Comments from IMMA director Declan McGanagle.

Mobile technologies are transforming the ways in which we experience arts and heritage sites, and galleries and museums are facing increased pressure to provide stimulating, alternative technology-based solutions for enriching visitor experiences. Focusing on the opportunities afforded by augmented reality (AR), this paper critiques the role this technology plays in providing visitors the opportunity to experience art and exhibitions through a series of dynamic, small-scale micro-mobilities. We propose that AR creates curated spaces of mobility in galleries and museums and in doing so, visitors become empowered through spaces of agency, autonomy and dwelling as they negotiate these spaces and encounter art through technology-mediated forms of wayfinding, interpretation and personal curation. Through negotiated agencies of human and non-human, visitors become emancipated, active agents in a process of co-production. Such positioning is further critiqued as the paper investigates the opportunities afforded by augmented reality to create alternative spaces of connection and interpretation through conceptualisations of dwelling and we suggest technology holds the potential to facilitate an enriched, deeper and more personal connection to that experienced in art gallery and exhibition spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is broadly concerned with community engagement as a facet of museum practice. The paper offers a reading of a community exhibition entitled Curious, held at St Mungo’s Museum of Religious Life and Art in the city of Glasgow. I take the reader on a tour of the exhibition, offering insights into its form and function. I show how community exhibitions can pose challenges to traditional museum practice by disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions about curatorial authority, and I emphasize both the range of meanings that can be attached to museum objects and the radical potential of including non-expert knowledge in the creation of displays and exhibitions. I also argue, however, that community exhibitions may be understood as poor relations to traditionally curated exhibits, and that curatorial authority is still key to the production of museum displays. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public visual spaces, populated by a blend of community murals, unauthorised street art, and historic painted mercantile signs, are often the mark of an urban environment that is both progressive and eclectic. Changes in the aesthetic and cultural value of these urban mural forms have led to an increase in the appreciation and, in some instances, promotion of their artistic merit and cultural significance as examples of public art. However, examining the significance of these works, with a view to implementing a conservation approach is problematic. This is due to a number of practical and theoretical considerations that are primarily a result of the ephemeral existence of urban murals outside conventional exhibition spaces, and issues associated with their often fragmented ownership and uncertain authorship. Consequently, larger thinking on the interpretation, conservation assessment, and advocacy for the conservation of urban murals are required. Key to defining and implementing such strategies is contextualising the public visual spaces that these murals occupy and, as part of this, the local and wider communities’ perception of these murals as culturally significant objects as well as fostering awareness and understanding of appropriate measures aimed at their conservation. This paper examines the role of citizen science, or crowd-sourcing, of local community members in establishing a conservation dialogue and generating conservation- relevant data on urban murals. It looks specifically at a project involving a collection ofin situhistoric painted mercantile signs — also known as ghost signs — in the City of Port Phillip, Melbourne, Australia. The project fostered the establishment of an informed and open dialogue between conservation specialists and participants from the local community on the significance of local ghost signs whilst transferring knowledge on conservation processes and assessment methods. Working directly with community members, a programme was designed in which conservation and community knowledge of these urban art forms, could be collected and exchanged across digital platforms. This enabled researchers to examine how citizen science can be utilised as a research tool as well as a means to advocate for the conservation of collections of urban murals. It created the opportunity to consider the role of non-specialists and shared authorities in the collection and collation of conservation- relevant data and how information generated from what we call citizen conservation projects, can inform the way in which conservators evaluate and prioritize the conservation of urban cultural heritage. The data gathered and interpreted proved to be the most effective means of ‘conserving’ these often ephemeral forms of cultural material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the idea of the exhibition as a living laboratory in the making and curating of interactive art. It suggests that museums can act as living laboratories where curators, artists and audiences collaborate in real-world settings. Such laboratories are shown to be essential for the study of the audience experience of interactive art, a key part of understanding interactivity as a medium. The paper describes Beta_space: an experimental public exhibition venue and research environment for interactive art. It places this initiative within a historical continuum of transversal cultural display and the use of the museum as laboratory. It identifies an emerging phenomenon of hybrid research, production and exhibition spaces, and argues that such initiatives work to overcome the continued distinctions, within traditional cultural institutions, between art, science and technology, object and experience, creation and consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Field, in 1968, was the first exhibition held at the new National Gallery of Victoria. The exhibition made a bold modernist statement: seventy-four abstract paintings and sculptures by forty young Australian contemporary artists.The Fieldwas a controversial undertaking because it was clearly derived from contemporary New York avant-garde styles. This paper considersThe Field's impact and legacy based on the numerous exhibitions it has subsequently inspired. It focuses onThe Field's efforts to align Australian art with the international modernist tradition and argues that the exhibition established a new role and identity for the art institution in Australia. The modernist values introduced byThe Fieldhad a considerable impact on the Australian art world, far greater than the avant-garde style for which the exhibition is known. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The first museum blockbusters in Australia were not conceived to support the local interests of tourism. The circumstances that gave rise to the earliest exhibitions were quite different from the situation today. Of these interests, cultural diplomacy was a key rationale behind the Commonwealth's involvement in major art exhibitions, or so-called “blockbusters”. This paper concentrates on the period in the 1970s when art blockbusters first attained national significance. It reveals some of the issues and challenges that followed the Commonwealth's foray into art, focusing on the roles of the various national agencies tasked with managing these events, namely the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, the Australian Art Exhibitions Corporation, the Australian Gallery Directors' Council, and the International Cultural Corporation of Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper we present a multi-touch tabletop system for browsing image databases, conceived for museums and art gallery exhibitions. The system exploits an innovative image browsing paradigm and image retrieval functionalities to perform natural and intuitive user interaction: users can explore the image database by handling digital pictures by means of touch gestures or by the use of a predetermined set of physical objects; once one of these objects is placed on the table, it is automatically recognized and the associated function is triggered. The set of objects and the function associations can be dynamically configured. An innovative feature of our application is that users can interactively create and manipulate image clusters where images are grouped according to their pictorial similarity. This is achieved by placing one or more specific tangible objects on the table surface. The system has been evaluated on a collection of photos organized in groups according to the UNESCO picture categories. The usability tests, performed considering different user categories, show that users consider the application to be attractive and interesting. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The phrase 'back of house' often refers to art gallery processes that are rarely seen by visitors. These include the processes of acquisition, cataloging, conservation, the development and production of exhibitions, and the planning of related public programs. This paper proposes that a psychoanalytic consideration of 'back of house' art gallery processes can provide important insights into the nature of trauma that is manifested through creative efforts. It explores some of the psychoanalytic aspects of a unique project concerning the art by survivors of the Holocaust. It highlights transgenerational trauma and how a thoughtful process of acquisition and exhibition can facilitate the working through of a collectively painful experience in a traumatized community. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The main purpose of scheduling exhibition projects for art museums is to provide the visitors with more exhibitions and to utilize the galleries as fully as possible. Because the combinations of possible exhibitions for all galleries at any given time are numerous, it is difficult for the art museum’s planner to make an optimal decision. Therefore, this paper developed a decision support model with genetic algorithms, called SCHEMA ( SCH eduling E xhibitions for M useum of A rt). In the model the galleries are the resource which the exhibitions utilize in the sequence of their priority values. The model’s evaluation shows to be significantly effective in planning time, percent usage of the gallery, and the number of exhibitions scheduled. Because all the complex computations are done by the model, the decision making process of the scheduling stage is speeded up considerably. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article focuses on artist Norman Lewis who founded the Cinque Gallery in New York City along with artists Romare Bearden and Ernest Crichlow. Topics include Lewis friendship with artists such as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt; views of Lewis on German Expressionism, Mexican mural painting and African sculpture; and the exhibition "Norman Lewis: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1934-1979" at the University of Connecticut from March 17-April 10, 1980.

This article presents an interview with Martha Wilson, director and founder of Franklin Furnace, an institution that provides gallery for art exhibitions and installations in the U.S., regarding her decision to sell the artist book collection of Franklin Furnace to the Museum of Modern Art and the decision's implication to the institution. According to Wilson, the decision was the right thing for the collection since she believes that the largest collection in the U.S. of artist books published internationally after 1960, made of paper, should not be stored in a loft made of wood, with no climate-control, no museum conditions. In addition, the institution was unsuccessful at raising money for conservation of individual artists' books. As discussed further, Wilson said that though artist books are now recognized by the art world as a whole category in its own right, there was no term artist books in 1976 and just of evolved out of the mud, as the term performance art also evolved during this same period, to describe whatever it was the artists were doing.

Art galleries are increasingly staging special events as part of their programs and visitor research has shown that a result of this trend is a change in the demographics of the people who visit galleries. Audiences have become more mainstream and consequently galleries have begun to conceptualise theft visitors as tourists who have specific needs and motivations. This paper explores the literature that frames, and is thus relevant to research about short-term art exhibitions. It provides an analysis of the current literature, with a particular focus on the motivations of visitors attending short-term art exhibitions. The literature supports the argument that short-term visual art exhibitions should be recognised within the scope of special cultural events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the value of a task-based approach to engaging with original works of art and focuses in particular upon the experiences of a group of PGCE Art and Design trainees when they visited an exhibition entitled, Air Guitar: Art Reconsidering Rock Music, to carry out given tasks. The extent to which a task-based approach might creatively disrupt trainee teachers' thinking and the nature and significance of such thinking within an educational context is considered, as is the impact of the tasks on their developing understanding of the need for a diversity of approaches to critical engagement. It draws extensively upon selected responses to the tasks and the trainees' subsequent reflections on the experience. Comparisons are made between trainees' responses to particular works and references to these works that are detailed in the exhibition catalogue. This is undertaken with the intention of examining the interrelationship between understanding and knowledge when reading and responding to works of art in the gallery context. A further concern is to generate debate and challenge assumptions regarding the nature and dynamics of gallery based activities and contribute to a process of development and innovation in which all participants can play an active part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The difference between 'artistic and literary fields' and universes such as architecture usually recognized as 'art professions' but which enjoy a far lesser 'degree of autonomy' than such fields seemingly constitutes an obstacle to the broader application of the notion of a 'field of cultural production' sought by Bourdieu in his Rules of Art . The author of this paper overcomes this obstacle by employing his notion of the 'field effect', with the architecture competition serving as the test case. Following Bourdieu, the author replaces the notion of profession with that of the field, for the former is a representation fostered by professional groups themselves. Architecture is a field, but, because architects require clients to construct and realize their works, one unlike the artistic and literary fields, which are markets of symbolic goods where 'distinterest' reigns and an autonomy unthinkable elsewhere is enjoyed. However, much like artists and unlike any other 'professionals', architects enter competitions, suggesting that this practice is an analytically relevant indicator of the field effect. After defining several of the elements of Bourdieu's relational conceptual matrix (field, illusio, collusion, doxa and space of possibles) and demonstrating that the Baptistery competition in Florence (1401) conforms to Bourdieu's historical beginning point for the process of 'autonomization' of artistic production, I examine a number of competitions from 1401 to 1989 (Berlin Jewish Museum) along with the general properties of competitions (structure and organization, publication and exhibition of results, competitors' economically irrational behaviour, practices of designers and jurors and the associated universe of beliefs), analysing them as those of an artistic field. It is concluded that when architects enter competitions, architecture, at least provisionally resembles an artistic field, for there is a field effect shown by a high degree autonomy, disinterest and the creation of an upside-down world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview number of the key conservation issues and challenges that ephemeral media have presented at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. A discussion of the impact that light, temperature, humidity, oxygen, and the unpredictablity of materials and media that are used in ephemeral art have on the ability of museum conservators to protect ephemeral art from deterioration or adverse chemical reactions, is presented. The role that museum conservators play in the documentation of artists' materials and techniques is discussed.