Artistic Visions

As a dynamic teaching museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art pairs accessibility with opportunity, inspiration with rigor. Almost every Andover student encounters the Addison through their coursework. Over 2,500 students from Lowell, Lawrence, and the greater Merrimack Valley visit each year as well.

This scholastic commitment is seen in the more than 25 free public programs offered annually— and in the work of the museum’s education department, which partners with Andover faculty to complement and enhance course syllabi. History classes walk the halls. So too music classes, and even physics classes.

The result? Distinctive learning experiences that unite the Addison’s renowned collections and the Academy’s scholarly talents.

Students discussing an exhibit at the Addison Gallery

Exploring the crossroads of art, literature, and social justice, the Addison’s Head of Education Jamie Kaplowitz Gibbons guides women’s studies students in a discussion about the exhibition Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950.

At an exhibition opening, Addison Community Ambassador Kelly Song ’20 gives a pop-up talk about her personal connection to a recent acquisition, William Wegman’s Looking Over (2015). The ambassador program is yet another way the museum inspires, educates, and breaks down barriers between young people and formal art spaces.

A Lawrence High School student practices “close looking” in the exhibition A Wildness Distant from Ourselves: Art and Ecology in 19th-Century America. This technique helps to uncover layers of meaning, access prior knowledge, and develop critical thinking skills and visual literacy.

In the Museum Learning Center, History 300 students study photographs documenting oppressive living conditions in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890), a book pulled from the Addison’s collection.

Originally printed in The Vista: Views from the Knowledge & Goodness Campaign, spring 2020.

May 28, 2020

Artistic Visions

Categories: Philanthropy

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