Imagine what a magazine of the future would like with EDITION29 THE MUSEUM, an app that we oohed and awed over! It’s an exciting new visual magazine for the Apple Inc. iPad platform. This highly collectible magazine is a visual diary of the art that surrounds and influences us, and the stories behind the people who create these marvels that fill museums and galleries. It’s like a new editorialized catalog for any museum visitor, art enthusiast and collector. It contains audio, animation and commentary.

The New York Museum of Modern Art is using custom photography, not just taking photos from books and posting them on their website. The site allows you to zoom in close to see the brushwork. Here is a video that Art Docents might find interesting! Learn about FRESCO.

This same type of style is featured in grades 1, 3, and 4 of The Art Docent Program. Archival film footage shows Rivera demonstrating his methods at the 1939-1940 Golden Gate International Exposition. Go to the site and take a look at eight murals from the current Rivera exhibit.

Explore the murals via “hotspots” which allow you to click and see more detail and information such as the name of the building, the person and historical photos. If you have an iPad and projector in the classroom, you could show these images and video to your students to enhance your next Art Docent presentation!

Linda Rooney, deputy superintendent of Rocklin Unified School District, wrapped up the panel by noting that these kinds of resources from museums will help students meet the new California Common Core Standards. However, it is a challenge for schools to train teachers and to acquire the technology.

Rooney explained how the Art Docent Program gives students the means to learn how to use these tools and create and learn about art. She introduced us to the audience as the daughters of the creator of the program and she displayed our website and several lessons on the enormous screen in the room. After the presentation, we were greeted by several individuals interested in knowing more about our program. The curator from San Francisco’s MOMA, Museum of Modern Art, was especially interested and helpful.

We hope you will take advantage of these and other apps and websites to learn more about art, art history and to enhance your classroom presentations. We will continue to pass along our research to you to help you become even better Art Docents!

MacWorld: Expert Fingerpainter

As we drove across the Bay Bridge on a sun-drenched Friday morning, admiring the meringue-like fog covering the bay, we weren’t sure what to expect at our visit to MacWorld/iWorld, the all-things Apple Inc. convention and exhibition. Our digital partner, Art Authority, was exhibiting its best-selling app and would host “tech talk,” a panel on technology, art museums and art education. We wanted to hear what the speakers had to say. We hoped to meet some people who would help promote the online version of our Art Docent Program. We also thought it would be fun to see so much new technology and so many apps all in one place!

While it was entertaining and informative to see the exhibits, including a man who was one of those expert finger painter hired simply to amuse  the crowd, the highlight of our day was listening to the panel of museum curators. It was clear that art museums, like the rest of us, are scrambling to make use of the Internet and new technologies. While everyone else in the room took notes on their iPads, I did it the old-school way, with pen and paper.

Here are a few things we learned from curators from San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum and Linda Rooney, administrator of Rocklin Unified School District:

Classic Art is Going Viral

Art museums are beginning to share their content online by posting images of artwork on their websites. It’s become so advanced that users can even zoom in and out and even rotate images in order to see greater detail. Museums are developing apps, but many are of low quality and have shown little activity by users. Last July, the Getty museum implemented an app called “Google Goggles.”

They also have “print on demand” so you can choose the artwork you want to print instead of just the best sellers in the gift shop. We also got a glimpse of how the Internet can dramatically help museums and other organizations in this brutal economy. Having an  online presence can:

1.Help raise much needed funds

2.Help fulfill the museum’s mission

3.Increase general awareness and public interest

4. Help a company ditch the “ivory tower” image

On the down side, it is expensive to put together apps. Not to mention, the resolution of beautiful classic art online just can’t compare to seeing these works in person.

Be sure to also take a look at the University of Virginia Art Museum online. The site features good quality photography and rotating animation of sculptures. It’s very kinesthetic and uses large font instead of small like most sites!

Check in next week for more from our visit to MacWorld!

Last week my children and I watched “Midnight in Paris” a movie that depicts some famous artists including Salvador Dali, the most prominent Surrealist artist.  Dali is featured in our Art Docent Program’s fifth grade lesson on Cubism and Surrealism.  He was such a character in the movie that we all wanted to know more about  him.  I found out that he was indeed a quirky guy!  Here are some fun facts about Dali to take into your classroom presentation:

• He wore his mustache in the exaggerated style of his idol, the Spanish artist Velazques, waxing the ends to hold the curl.
• Grasshoppers terrified him so much that he never walked on grass.  When traveling, he was known to attach canvases to his body with strings, for fear of theft.
• He said, ” The only difference between Dali and a crazy man is that Dali is not crazy.”
• He would leap into the air to get him noticed and once drove around in a white Rolls-Royce filled to the roof with cauliflower.  When he attended a party where guests were to dress up as their dreams, he came as a decomposing corpse.
• He spent his life cultivating his image of eccentricity and had a tendency toward big displays of exhibitionism.  One of his famous antics was appearing dressed from head to toe in a diving suit at the opening of one of his London Surrealist exhibitions in 1936.  Not only was the heavy helmet soundproof – no one could hear him – but no one noticed he was suffocating.  The audience roared with laughter and thought his gestures for help were meant to be funny.  Fortunately, he was rescued.
• “It is very difficult to shock the world every twenty-four hours.” Dali