by Fredo Rivera, PhD candidate in art history at Duke University
I started all my tours of Miró: The Experience of Seeing with the Surrealist artist’s large painting Woman, Bird, Star (Homage to Pablo Picasso) from 1966/1973, a playful, vibrant portrait of mythical ideals. Geometric forms, bright primary and secondary colors and delineating swaths of black work together to create a joyous image, one where the shapes almost seem to bounce out of the partially primed canvas background. I opened my tours with this painting not merely because it beckons us from the exhibition’s entrance, but because of its effusively joyful energy. We approached the canvas and start to interrogate the forms and colors, how they relate, and the sensations they trigger. It is an ideal precept for the rest of the Miró exhibition at the Nasher Museum, where the use of color and form came to reveal a consortium of emotions and imaginings.
The Miró exhibition reminded me of why I love my work as a guide for undergraduate and graduate students, where the goal of a tour reaches beyond the explication of works of art through formal analysis and historical context. Beyond providing my expertise as an art historian familiar with the museum setting, the tours focus on the visitors. A great tour is one where the full group participates, where we are interpreting the works together and everyone feels comfortable sharing their own impressions regarding works of art and their display.
I started as an Academic Programs graduate teaching assistant with the Nasher Museum in the fall of 2013, having since led tours for myriad exhibitions. I tailor my tours to the classes they are being offered to, attempting to relate the art to their course materials. For example, for Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (September 19, 2013-February 2, 2014)–an exhibition themed on the question of how borders and lines impact our geographical and personal understandings of ourselves and the world–I led a variety of groups specifically interested in the question of borders. My tour for a course on Korean literature at Duke challenged me to reread the exhibition in a manner that took literary perspectives into account, while also acknowledging that the students had read an essay from the exhibition catalogue that incorporated works not included in the Nasher’s iteration of the exhibition. Each tour allowed me to rethink my approach to engaging the exhibition, to reroute our path through the sometimes politically potent works. Nonetheless, the goal remained the same, whether I was giving a tour to engineering students at Duke or art students from Piedmont Community College. I aimed to get the students engaged with the works, to a point where they felt comfortable analyzing the works in relation to their studies and themselves. In this process I have often learned a lot myself. I often leave my tours with a better understanding of the exhibitions and their art works, as well as a greater knowledge of how art can impact the educational process.
Miró: The Experience of Looking in particular reminded me of the value of looking closely. The exhibition encouraged observation and engagement with the works of a world-renowned artist and with the expressive qualities of painting, drawing and sculpture. But it is also about the wondrous pleasure of art. In front of the exhibition pavilion is a Miró sculpture on loan from the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Caress of a Bird from 1967. It differs from the other monotone, more oxidized-like colored sculptures within the exhibition hall in its employment of vibrant colors, akin to the many canvases featured. Yet it draws from the same technique of the other sculptures, recasting common objects into bronze. In Caress of a Bird the objects rise up to form a figure-like totem, with each bronze object brightly painted–the red turtle shell resembling a ribcage-like stomach, the sunshine yellow sombrero recalling the geometry of a head, the vivid blue bird atop this supposed head, the buttocks like soccer balls placed alongside one another. Many students immediately recognizd how the abstract forms recall a human figure. Others highlight other, more far reaching resemblances, like that of a scarecrow, or a cartoonish flower. We come to terms with a work that recalls an infantile joviality, an utterly playful sculpture that can lead any group to great speculations.
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