Monday, January 23, 2012

MTS Visits the Guggenheim

This week, the Museum Teen Summit was at the Guggenheim to work on our three main goals of Outreach, Community, and Research.

Before we settled down to take care of business, we took a quick tour through the museum led by Sharon Vatsky, the director of education, school and family programs. The museum is currently going through some renovations to uninstall Maurizio Cattelan's All, a retrospective of his often political and provocative works, individually hanging from the ceiling of the rotunda. 

If you were to watch the above video in reverse, you'd get a good feel as to what's going on at the Guggenheim for the next few weeks. 

We were able to view some of the long-standing galleries, and found out a lot about the architecture and history of the museum itself. Sharon pointed out the geometric shapes and changing ceiling heights throughout the museum that makes it so unique. Did you know that in all of the Guggenheim that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, there are no right angles? 

After our brief and informative tour of the museum, we got down to business to discuss our three main goals, and set some deadlines. 

Outreach

MTS is always looking for new and better ways to spread the word about teen programs and events, as well as reach a wide audience of teens and teen programmers. 

We focused on the social networking portion of outreach for this week. We are working on using different platforms to fit our needs, and relay information more efficiently. We spent some time discussing options for blogs and social networking such as event sharing on Facebook, creating a more permanent site such as the blog you are currently reading, and compiling a database of teen programs throughout the museums we all represent. 

One of our goals in Outreach is to get 100 likes on our Facebook page by Valentines Day, so help us reach our goal by visiting our page and clicking like. Feel free to browse all the events we have shared, comment on our pictures, and write on our wall! 

Community 

During the fall term, MTS hosted it's first meet-up at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. 

One of our community goals is to continue to sponsor teen "meet-ups" at various museums to create a fun atmosphere for like minded teens to hang out and learn something new. These "meet-ups" are events run by the teens at MTS and give you a chance to explore the museum with your friends and discuss artwork with other like minded teens. We want these events to be as interesting to museum-going teens, as to those who rarely are involved in the arts. 

We are planning out our next MTS Museum Meet-Up, so stay tuned for more information.

Research 

MTS is currently working on combining all of our knowledge of the various teen programs at our respective museums as well as those we are in contact with to create a database of these programs. Updated by MTS, this list will give you a view as to what programs are going on in museums around the five boroughs in one place, as well as a description of each program and eventually testimonials and reviews.