Making Art Matter

How Julie Charles and SFMOMA are turning on a new generation

If not for a scheduling conflict, Julie Charles could have been an automechanic. Well, perhaps that is a bit of hyperbole, but that day in high school really did represent a turning point in her young life. Julie wanted to be journalist in high school, but as she finished out her class schedule, her last slot was a conflict between art history or auto mechanics. She asked her English professor which she should take, and the response was the art history class. She wound up neither in an auto shop or journalism

It was a trip that took her from the Bay Area to Washington, D.C. and then back to San Francisco. And along the way she fell in love with art, fell in love with a crazy group of museum docents, and figured how to turn afternoons in museums in Washington D.C. into new community programs in San Francisco.

Growing up in Foster City, just south of San Francisco, Julie always loved going to museums. As a ballet dancer she was always drawn to the paintings of dancers by Degas. As a result, her after school program turned out to be at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). She immediately fell in love with the idea of museums as part of their communities, as more than just static art on the wall. And she got involved herself as a part-time graphics intern.

Her education continued as an art history major at UCLA. When her family moved to Washington,D.C. she did her graduate work at American University, where she was a 20th century art major. When the time came to do her masters, she recalled her thoughts about the connections between art and community, and her mind drifted back to the Bay Area. She did her thesis on the murals throughout the Mission District in San Francisco.

Upon graduation, Julie was faced with yet another fork in the road. No, this time it was not autos or art. She had an inkling that she wanted to go into museum education or party planning. And then the inspiration hit home, culminating everything she had done to date. Who said she couldn't do both? Who said she couldn't take the enthusiasm and hands-on qualities of party planning and apply them to the stodgy world of museums? In the end, both were about getting people's attention, right?

She bit the bullet and decided to become the head of the docent program for SFMOMA. To say that she was thrown into the deep end would be an understatement. Here was a 27-year-old fresh out of school suddenly with 250 volunteers under her control. All of them looking at this young whippersnapper with her crazy new ideas. Well, she didn't know how to run it but she certainly seemed nice. And why again had she picked the docent program? At first it was just about the opportunity, but also she realized that the docents worked with all the programs, all the art, and all the visitors. They had their collective hands in every artistic pie. Suddenly she realized that, through her docents, she could serve thousands of people in brand new ways.

Julie wanted more from her docents and more from the program. The experience and age of her crew were vast. They ranged from 27 to 87 years old. And they didn't have to be doing this; they had jobs, they were not being paid, and yet they go through in essence a year of school training to get prepared. The first thing she put into place was continuing education requirements for her pack of docents. She arrived at an innovative way to move the program forward. Certain people were doing certain things really well, so she had those docents show the other docents how they were doing it. And she set standards that they should all strive for.

The innovations quickly began to flow, moving past just giving lectures to games, to manipulating objects around them. It grew from simple Mondrian puzzles to the always popular "string drop" activity where visitors would let inspiration come from the simple act of dropping a length of string. Names for these pieces included "Snake Lake" and "Frog of a Ring." Their techniques led to teaching classes that were tuned for different groups of people from children to walking tours. And they started collecting data on the best ways to inspire different age groups.

The culmination of all this effort was the school tours. SFMOMA was determined to end the solemn, no-talking procession of school children through the museum. Now the kids get to sit on the floor in galleries before the museum opens and get to do art. They get to be inspired by art, something that was not available when Julie was growing up. And the fact that they can sit on the floors makes the experience more personal and relaxed.

Julie and the museum are trying to bring a little playfulness into the experience, to be more relevant to people who come visit. All the people who work in museums believe that art really can change people lives and believe that art is important to our daily existence. You have to feed the mind as much as the body. They just needed to find the right vehicles to communicate this to the outside world and families. Along the way the 200 docents became almost a surrogate family for Julie, a bunch of aunts, uncles and parents.

Hard on the heels of her success with the school programs, Julie received a battlefield promotion to associate curator of education. She now gets to do new programming for families, and empower the continuing involvement of adults. And she has the advantage of already knowing the ins and outs of the docent programs. She is looking to create a spirit of inquiry, discovery and participation. This year, the big push at SFMOMA is family programs: they want to double the family program participation.

One of the more popular new programs is Family Studio, which has guest artists leading projects. They weave in storytelling, and work in a new community gallery, where part of what you create you get to take home, and part of what you do stays with the gallery to be shared with the community. It gives their visitors the chance to create more "hands on" moments during the day, but still have the opportunity to see the end results and their art.

They also printed a family guide that parents will able to look at while taking the kids through the galleries. And she went back to her pack of docents, asking them what they tell about each piece and what questions get the visitors talking. All those questions and inspirations will be compiled and released next year. Finally, harkening back to Julie's childhood, they are looking to avoid charging families, and to make Sundays free for all families.

The final step was to transport their programs out to the community. They have taken some of their family programs out of the museum and to events such as the Yerba Buena Garden Festival every year. Docent tours for students now start with a presentation at the schools before they come to the museum. More importantly, for schools that can't afford it, they bring the museum to them, showing pictures and slides for their presentation, and then do the same projects in the classroom. Julie has even drafted organizations such as like YMCA to deliver the arts into the communities. She sees this "multiphase" approach giving the children the most opportunities to be exposed to this great art.

Why the push to get the art to the children? One of the frustrations for Julie is the perception that art is an extra or a luxury or not for them. And Julie is constantly looking for programs and partners that will break down those barriers and make children aware that painting is just as much a form of communication as the music they hear or magazines that they read.

Artists such as Brice Marten have volunteered to help push these programs through. For instance, SFMOMA did a treasure hunt with the pieces of the Brice Marten show, and then the students had to write poems about the art. Each person did one line, then they put it together. Then they went to Zeum, a neighboring art and technology museum and they did claymation of the poems. They showed the animations at the spring party and Brice spoke about his inspiration and theirs. All of a sudden the children saw the ripples of the art in other parts of their lives like stones in a pond. Comments like "I had no idea what this piece was" changed to "Can I participate again?" and "I never knew this was here." Marten found himself mobbed by the kids asking if they could get his autograph or a picture together. Julie realized that the kids were treating Brice more like a cool sports star and not some boring artist.

Julie is constantly in the hunt to create this connection, and she encourages others in her field to look for co-conspirators in other fields. At one party, Julie hooked up with a group of people from Pixar. Plans were hatched and months later she did an event with them. The Pixar animators wound up helping out with the presentation, and explained to the children how much of the research for their movies involves studying other art forms. It came as a surprise to the kids that the same art they thought was boring and irrelevant was winding up on the screens of the movies they adored.

It is these experiences and realizations that Julie is trying to invoke in visitors to SFMOMA. After tours people tell her that they look at things differently in the museum, that they experience a residual effect when they go back out into the world. The rhythms, colors and patterns of the art they see in her museum replay on the streets outside. Art isn't just what you view on walls of a museum but what you see in the world every day.

Julie Charles, the little girl who loved acting as a museum tour guide for the family, has turned out to be the tour guide for the children of San Francisco. And the wonderful part is they have no idea where she is leading them next.

 

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