Our AGO Field Trip...

This was a really wonderful afternoon... some of our class members had not been to the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) since childhood field trips... for others, this was their first visit.  Many had been a number of times, and a reminder of free Wednesday nights at the AGO - http://www.ago.net/visit - seemed to provide an incentive for making time in their busy student schedules for some return trips.  Some students shared stories of travel - visiting the Louvre, or the Chicago Art Institute... some didn't know what to expect, as our co-instructor, Arts Specialist Patricia Gora - http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/patricia-gora/17/863/b37 -, led us on a tour throughout the galleries.  (Patricia... one of my "creative heroes" (Schirrmacher & Fox, 2009, p. 12)... an inspiring artist and 'creative disrupter'!)

Patricia is the ultimate arts role model - immediately disrupting stereotypes or traditional ideas, if any of our students thought that viewing fine art would be stuffy, stodgy, formal, or sedate!  Buzzing us through a number of galleries in quick time, Patricia brought us directly to some 'high interest' artwork - The most expensive painting in the gallery...  The most popular sculpture...  The latest exhibit... - Handing out art "collector cards" (like hockey cards!), Patricia describes/models how to guide children toward making personal connections to artwork of all kinds... how children (and adults) may respond to nudity within artwork... And also offered us 'behind the scenes' explanations as to the galleries design and history...

My favourite moments?  Visiting the Maharaja Exhibit with a small group of students making personal connections to the names, places, and images...  ("This is where my family comes from..."  "My family is related to these people - my father could tell you all the stories and knows all the names...") and "ooo-ing" & "ah-ing" together over the beautiful jewelry and textiles/clothing.

Entering a gallery toward the end of the exhibit, a huge wall mural took my breath away... when I stood at an angle, I could imagine myself a spectator at a royal procession - beautiful colours, and a grand procession!  What it must have been like to have been there!!... then, viewing the image more closely, it was chilling to realize that the leaders of the procession were white, British elite/colonialists - and I read more about the complicated history of colonialism and power relationships... these were personalized within the final gallery, depicting 20th century Maharajas as wealthy, modern, privileged, sexy/romanticized individuals - the struggles with power, privilege, racism and colonialism seemed lost in the splendor of this final collection of artefacts.  I wonder how school children and youth will make sense of this exhibit (free to people under 25 years of age)...

Role Model... the role of the teacher: "It is important that the teacher personally invest the time and effort to become aesthetically responsive" (Schirrmacher & Fox, 2009, p. 161).