Co-Creation Activity from NAEA

 

During the recent NAEA museum pre-conference day in Fort Worth TX, attendees participated in a co-creation exercise in the galleries of the Modern Art Museum. It was so much fun I had to share it. Liz Lloyd from the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio TX passed out little pieces of content on paper to each attendee, all related in some way to Mark Bradford’s Kingdom Day. We looked at the Bradford and tried to make connections with our content, then we paired up, compared content and looked again, this time talking with our partner. Next each pair paired up, shared their content and discussed, and so on and son on. In the end, we were all talking as a big group about the discoveries we’d made. It was as if each of us was given one piece to a puzzle, and gradually we all joined up and put the puzzle together.

Liz said that she had great success doing this exercise with teachers, they know it as Think, Pair, Share (Lyman 1981). Since we were museum folks, as a wrap-up each of us got to say what work from our museum’s collection we would include in an exhibit with the Mark Bradford piece. I think this would be a great activity for any tour group, maybe especially adults. I’ve included the kind of content we used for the Mark Bradford below, as you can see it’s not all text, which made it challenging and even more fun. As always, comments welcome. – Kris Wetterlund