2. The Inquiry Hubs: Collaborative Play with a Purpose

The Weatherspoon Art Museum’s two-year initiative Leading with Objects: Engaging the Community in Institutional Change explored the transformative potential of an art collection to cultivate meaningful social connection and sustained dialogue. Museum staff sought to reposition the institution in its relations with the surrounding community and learn from our participants’ engagement in self-guided and facilitated activities in two interactive galleries (fig. 2.1). This essay explores the different forms of collaborative play within the two spaces we called the Inquiry Hubs: respectively, the Space for Engagement and the Space for Creativity. It also documents the visitor engagement and feedback that informed our curatorial practices and programming strategies between January 2021 and December 2023.

Inquiry Hubs: An Overview

The Inquiry Hubs were modeled to engage visitors and establish a strong communication system between the museum and the community. We invited visitors to investigate the museum’s American art collection through hands-on play, sharing their impressions through the Inquiry Hubs’ various creative outlets. The Space for Engagement opened on January 11, 2022, and remains to this day as a semi-permanent feature of the museum. Over the course of the two years of the project, we converted an exhibition gallery into this flexible space for drop-in activities for all visitors, literally making room (alongside the project’s concluding exhibition of the same name) for our campus and community to study, teach, and host informal and scheduled meetings, and for the museum to better accommodate both public programs and personal reflection. The active embrace of this prototype space shaped the design of the additional in-gallery hub, the Space for Creativity, which was open from August 1, 2022, through April 1, 2023.

The Space for Engagement featured rotating salon-style hangs of artworks from the museum’s collection (fig. 2.2). Its design included four long tables with twenty-four chairs in all—ample seating for visitors to sit, write, and reflect on their museum experience. It now also serves as the site of the Weatherspoon staff’s monthly in-person meetings and is used to introduce community and UNC Greensboro students to the museum in various ways (fig. 2.3).

Due to its versatility and relative quietness, the space readily encouraged free expression and evolved into a place for both spontaneous and scheduled meetings where people could gather and spend quality time. It set up very well for faculty discussions, pre-tour orientations, community and faculty workshops, and classes. For example, it hosted freshman seminars for the First Year Experience (FYE 101), workshops for Lloyd Honors College students, and educational programs in celebration of International Student Week. It also helped the museum host summer college access programs for Latinx and Hispanic high school students through UNCG CHANCE (Campamento Hispano Abriendo Nuestro Camino a la Educación) (fig. 2.4). These experiences included elementary- and middle-school class tours and faculty events such as the “Art of Health” poetry reading. Many of these workshops and tour groups used the Weatherspoon-designed card game You Choose! (described below) as a means of engagement with the collection while they were there.

Museum staff solicited feedback from all these participants in the form of comment cards, journals, and a post-it response board called How Do I Look? The response board asked, “In what ways do our experiences, likes, and dislikes shape how we see? Take a moment to share your tips for looking at art.” Thousands of visitors wrote their thoughts on sticky notes and placed them on the board (fig. 2.5).

The design for the Space for Creativity was a little different from the Space for Engagement. Every wall featured an activity to capture visitors’ creative processes and feedback (fig. 2.6). Elements included a small stage, a typewriting station, a post-it response board, and a card game accompanied by a maquette of an exhibition gallery. Two of the walls also featured a rotating selection of works of art from the museum’s collection.

Space for Creativity Activities

Inquiry Hub activities were all designed to encourage close looking at the works on view. At each of the following five stations, we incorporated multiple prompts to spark visitors’ imaginations, participation, and collaboration.

The Say-It! stage was designed to be a platform for community pop-up events, including poetry workshops, live drawing programs with artists, music and dance performances, storytelling, and life modeling (see Appendix A and Appendix C below for a representative list of Inquiry Hub programs and an in-depth report on a collateral program separately sponsored by the Weatherspoon Art Museum, respectively). Pop-up events on this stage showcased the diverse voices and talents of students and community members, providing participants with an exciting opportunity for self-expression.

The Type-It! station included two manual typewriters with blank index cards and a clothesline/pin system to facilitate collaborative poetry writing among visitors.

The Post-It! response board provided sticky notes and pencils for visitors to write and share their perspectives on the art installed in the gallery (fig. 2.7).

The Sketch It! journals were placed in seating areas in both hubs and throughout the museum to invite visitors to draw, write, and otherwise reflect on their personal experiences at the museum or respond to prompts pasted in the journals or on nearby table tents.

Finally, the Weatherspoon staff designed a card game, titled You Choose!, based on works of art from the collection (figs. 2.8 and 2.9). Visitors curated their own exhibitions by displaying the cards in a model gallery and sharing their thoughts on the experience with museum staff by filling out a response form.

Designing for Interaction

The Inquiry Hubs initiative was grounded in curatorial and educational research, workshops, and advisory group discussions that informed their development as well as their active monitoring and adjustment. Over a span of eighteen months, museum staff changed the artworks on display in the Inquiry Hubs three times and introduced new sets of corresponding prompts while keeping the activities themselves consistent. Staff strategically refined the hubs’ hands-on activities to serve as productive research tools to shed light on how participants interpreted and engaged with art, individually and collectively.

Two early examples of visitor use of activities in the Space for Creativity demonstrate the ways in which we needed to remain flexible to best realize the hubs’ potential. With the first installation of art in the Space for Creativity, we prompted participants to describe how they connected with family, friends, and the community in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The Post-It! activity provided sticky notes, pencils, and a set of prompts so participants could leave their responses on a large display board, while the Type-It! activity invited participants to type individual verses to build a collective poem. The questions we asked them addressed what obstacles they faced while making human connections, which artworks in the room evoked a feeling of isolation, and how art could help them link past and present.

We found that questions about both the social connection and the isolation that were precipitated by the health emergency elicited direct feedback and high levels of engagement from our visitors on the Post-It! board. Participants responded to the prompts related to, for example, Kate Gilmore’s Wall Bearer by sharing stories about love and loneliness (see fig. 2.10) experienced during the first year of the pandemic.

The very tactile Type-It! activity saw very high visitor engagement, with 927 typed statements left for the community at the museum and many more taken away as private mementos. Type-It! was initially designed to be collaborative, while Post-It! was meant to accommodate individual reflection, but we soon found that the opposite occurred: people tended to type personal statements, sometimes unrelated to the artwork on view, while the Post-It! board became a highly communal forum. So, while the typed notes provided relatively little feedback for museum staff regarding how our visitors were engaging with art, the sheer popularity of the typewriter itself added a lot of fun (and a lot of interesting noise) to the overall creative experience of the hubs. Staff ultimately chose to leave the typewriters installed purely for the enjoyment of our visitors, despite the ways in which their results had strayed from our initial expectations.

On the other hand, one artwork installed next to the Post-It! board yielded multiple levels of active engagement over time: Jacob Lawrence’s screenprint The 1920’s . . . The Migrants Arrive and Cast Their Ballots (fig. 2.12).

The associated prompt started with a quote by the artist and then invited reflection: “‘Among the many advantages the migrants found in the north was the freedom to vote. In my print, migrants are represented exercising that freedom.’ The artist depicts a scene of African Americans voting. How does this image reflect both the past and the future?”

Participants discussed the ways in which significant historical and political events such as those depicted in Lawrence’s painting shape their understanding of their own cultural identity and social perspectives. Visitors considered the work’s historical context and engaged in deep conversation about past and present political decision-making, its negative impact on Black freedom, and the prevalence of inequality in America today.

The most common words in the many responses were “vote,” “freedom,” “time,” “people,” “family,” and “Black,” indicating that responders stressed the importance of voting, had strong family and community ties, and self-identified as part of a racially marginalized group. Noting these meaningful exchanges with Jacob Lawrence’s painting, the museum staff developed further prompts for it that reflected the values we were seeing and encouraged even deeper engagement. Visitors consistently used the Post-It! activity as a discussion board rather than a trove of standalone responses. They commented on previously posted notes, sharing similar connections or interpretations of the artworks on view, and voiced their support to people who said they felt stressed, sad, or depressed—kind and uplifting messages such as “You can do it!,” “I believe in you!,” “Love yourself,” “Black is beautiful,” “Vote!,” and “Black Lives Matter.” These conversations peaked during the 2022 voting season and toward the end of each semester at UNC Greensboro from 2021 to 2023 in a further demonstration of community support and unity.

In contrast to both the Post-It! and the Type-It! activities, the Sketch-It! journal inspired self-reflection and more private responses, as it was designed to do (fig. 2.13). This activity, then, became less about data collection and more about providing an outlet for visitors to construct their own narratives or simply draw freely.

From December 17, 2022, to August 12, 2023, in the Space for Engagement, we displayed Redeeming Memories: Portraits of Pioneering African American Artists, a group of twelve portraits by Dr. N. Frank Woods Jr., emeritus UNCG professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies (AADS). These paintings, on public view for the first time, featured key historical figures and self-described “artist heroes” of Woods’s such as Edward Bannister, Robert Duncanson, and Martin Luther King Jr. (fig. 2.14).

To provide visitors with an opportunity to respond to the artwork, we added prompts to the Sketch-It! journals:

• Drawing prompt: Draw yourself in the style of a portrait by Frank Woods.
• Edward Bannister, African American painter, supported himself as an artist by working as a barber and a photographer. In what ways do you support yourself in pursuit of your passions/interests?
• Name a historical event that you learned about outside of school. Did this new knowledge affect your understanding of the history you had already learned?
• Pretend you can time travel. What question(s) would you ask these artists?

Visitors most frequently shared information about what they learned outside of school and how they followed their individual passions; many also drew self-portraits in the style of Frank Woods. The popularity of both the portraits and this activity convinced the staff to extend the run of the exhibition, originally planned to close in March, for five additional months.

Over the course of the Inquiry Hubs initiative, museum staff collected about five thousand responses in the form of 2,800 post-it notes, 927 typewritten poems or notes, 400 journal entries, 513 visitor comment cards, 269 card game recording sheets, and 87 qualitative interviews. This remarkable community input continues to inform museum practices such as educational workshop building, curatorial activity, in-gallery activities, acquisition strategies, collection study sessions, gallery tours, and community events.

You Choose! Creative Play with the Collection

Early in the development of the Inquiry Hubs, the Weatherspoon’s Leading with Objects team developed a simple card game based on the museum’s collection with which visitors could learn about the museum’s curatorial practice. Museum curators and the visitor engagement team prototyped several iterations of the game, called You Choose!, in the Space for Creativity, after which it was made available for both drop-in and facilitated play. This highly interactive experience centered on over three hundred images of works of art from the Weatherspoon’s collection, one per card (fig. 2.15), and it ultimately generated great insight into visitors’ individual and shared interests, values, ideas, and perspectives regarding the Weatherspoon’s collection (see Appendix B below for a spotlight on sample usage cases).

You Choose! exercises players’ visual-analysis and critical-thinking skills to deepen both personal and collective engagement with art. In the hubs, the card game could be played independently by walk-in visitors or facilitated by museum staff (fig. 2.16) positioned in the galleries to guide participants. Through playing the game, visitors would make connections between cards to curate an exhibition of their own.

The game prompts groups of players to look for similarities or differences, patterns, and relationships among artworks. Eventually, each team agrees on five cards that members think best represent the topic or overarching theme they chose (fig. 2.17) for their exhibition.

Next, they fill out a sheet to record the cards they chose, assign a title and topic to the exhibition, and describe the learning and curatorial process they undertook (fig. 2.18).

At the end of the game, players are encouraged to arrange the cards and miniature wooden figures inside a maquette gallery to “install” their exhibition and share their creative process with others (fig. 2.19).

The Leading with Objects team facilitated 269 card games with student groups and community members over the project period, documenting participant observations and collecting the completed recording sheets for analysis. Of all the Inquiry Hub activities, the card game’s feedback was some of the most valuable regarding how people responded to the Weatherspoon’s art collection. Staff reviewed popular words and themes to better understand how people interpreted and connected with the art based on its visual content alone (the You Choose! cards did not include identifying information about the artist, title, medium, or genre, in the hopes that people would focus on the work’s visual qualities alone).

In this analysis, the team looked at the recording sheets to identify the top thirty artworks across all the documented games. Then we gathered a list of the words most frequently used to describe the artworks on the cards people played, the learning experience offered by the game, and the themes, titles, and topics people chose for their exhibitions. In this way, we began to discern general tendencies in how players made connections between different objects to tell different stories and, importantly, describe their life experiences, creative ideas, perspectives, and individual and shared identities, emotions, and values.

We discovered that participants most often made connections among artworks they felt represented (shared) emotional states, ideas, and personal narratives, and they curated exhibitions about life and human experiences, cultural, social, and gender identities, strong emotional reactions, and collective values (fig. 2.20).

Finally, we discerned six overarching themes and fifty-seven subthemes (fig. 2.21) in the words and artworks that were used the most. The themes spoke to these important aspects of the game experience:

• how people made personal connections to and between different artworks,
• what stories people were most likely to tell,
• what aspects of the art resonated with people the most,
• how people emulated their individual and collective life experiences using art, and
• how people built relationships with their teammates during gameplay.

In all, we found You Choose! to be a flexible and responsive teaching tool that is useful for exploring and introducing new ideas in brainstorming sessions and icebreakers, telling stories, identifying players’ values, and facilitating educational workshops, among many other things. During participant observation, staff found that players who engaged in sustained dialogue most often connected artworks to tell a story or describe a value they shared. To allow staff to continue to experiment with the card game across a variety of platforms, the Weatherspoon acquired a Creative Commons license for the card game.

Quality Improvement Feedback

In tandem with the Inquiry Hubs, staff developed a set of comment cards for people to fill out when visiting the museum, as well as a structured quality-improvement interview for museum staff and visitors. From December 2022 through December 2023, visitors left 513 cards (fig. 2.22). This written feedback showed us where people were visiting from, why they were visiting, which exhibitions they engaged with, which artworks they took pictures of, and what they did during their visit. Their voluntarily provided zip codes helped us understand where they resided as well.

From February through May 2023, the visitor engagement fellow and interns conducted interviews with staff and visitors as part of a quality-improvement assessment connected with Leading with Objects: Engaging the Community in Institutional Change and approved the UNCG’s Institutional Review Board. We gathered valuable insights into how the diversity, inclusivity, and accessibility of the museum were perceived by the fifty interviewed visitors and thirty-seven interviewed staff and volunteers.

The testimony shed light upon how the museum functions as a creative resource for our visitors and stakeholders while highlighting both particular strengths and areas for improvement. The interviews explored visitors’ engagement with the art collection and gallery spaces and surfaced different aspects of the museum environment that make them feel welcome. While the data will be used to inform a variety of upcoming visitor-related quality-improvement projects involving the building, wayfinding, and programming, among other things, quick captures of this information, like word frequencies (fig. 2.23), helped us to immediately visualize what was most referenced in these interviews.

This word cloud was colorfully displayed on a wall in the entryway to the museum to acknowledge the impact of visitor and staff member feedback and encourage it to continue.

Conclusion

Over the course of eighteen months, input gathered from the Space for Engagement and the Space for Creativity provided the Weatherspoon staff with valuable insights into how we could engage with our visitors in new and meaningful ways, and how those who spend time in the museum perceive the art in the collection and experience the environment. Together, the initiative’s activities also helped us identify which methods best engage our communities and might be used in the future—for example, the journaling activities are now a permanent addition to the museum’s gallery spaces, and You Choose! will continue to be used for facilitated group engagement, including student seminars and collection study sessions. The team is beginning a new project to gather keywords shared by visitors in activities such as these and input them into our collections database to increase the accessibility of the art collection online.

The Inquiry Hubs’ programs, engagement, and resultant feedback analysis form a strong foundation for future visitor-experience strategies, one that concretely advances the museum’s commitment to visitor-inclusive transformation through learning. The museum staff’s understanding of community values and the specific ways in which visitors perceive and engage with the art collection and gallery spaces has grown as well. This knowledge will help the museum staff make informed decisions when assessing the art collection, installing artworks, writing labels, and planning community events and programming. Above all, we learned that inviting museum visitors into the creative process makes room for different ways of learning, knowing, and interacting in the art museum, validates what individuals and groups bring to the table, and offers the possibility of the museum becoming a space for mutually responsive dialogue, adjustment, and change.

APPENDIX A

REPRESENTATIVE LIST OF INQUIRY HUB PROGRAMS

• September 22, 2021, 5:30–7:00 PM: Sounds and Movement Inquiry Hubs Event, UNCG Improvisational Dance and Vocals (School of Dance, Music, Mark Engebretson, Carole Ott, Clarice Young, CoWAM students)
• November 16, 2021, 12:00 PM: Student Dreaming Sessions
• November 17, 2021, 12:00 PM: Student Dreaming Sessions
• Dance and vocal students performed in Gallery 7 on separate occasions during working hours
• Storytelling with two UNCG students and pre-K children
• October 11, 2022–October 1, 2023: Card game facilitation in the Inquiry Hubs
• October 27, 2022, 5:30–7:00 PM: Observation and Drag Queen Sketching
• November 10, 2022, 5:30–7:00 PM: Science Center and Poetry and Wordplay and Drawing
• February 16, 2023, 12:00–2:00 PM: Say It! Stage Pop-Up Event in the Space for Creativity: UNCG Interdisciplinary Social Practice Class Visit with School of Art and Greensboro Project Space Director Caitlyn Schrader: improvisational activities (reading love letters and live drawing)
• February 1–June 1, 2023: Leading with Objects: Engaging the Community in Institutional Change quality-improvement project interviews with visitors and staff
• February 16, 2023, 6:00–7:30 PM: Live Improvisational Drawing and Music with Peter Deligdisch (UNCG MFA student) and Sketches Duo (two trumpeters: Geoff Mckay, UNCG music graduate student, and Parker Thompson, UNCG BFA musician)
• February 22, 2023, 11:30–1:00 PM: Say It! Stage Pop-Up Event in the Space for Creativity: UNCG Interdisciplinary Social Practice Class Visit with School of Art and Greensboro Project Space Director Caitlyn Schrader: circle, improv storytelling
• February 25, 2023, 6:00–8:00 PM: Live Improvisational Drawing and Music with Peter Deligdisch (UNCG MFA student) and Sketches Duo (two trumpeters: Geoff Mckay, UNCG music graduate student, and Parker Thompson, UNCG BFA musician)
• March 17, 2023, 12:45–1:45 PM: Choral performance in atrium
• March 18, 2023, 3:00–4:00 PM: Say It! Stage Pop-Up Event in Space for Creativity: artist model event with Malanah Hobgood (UNCG Art History alum, McNair Scholar, and former WAM student employee)
• March 22–August 22, 2023: Leading with Voices Radio Program on UNCG College Radio: WUAG 103.1 FM (Blake-Lee, Visitor Engagement and Research Fellow, Hannah Phillips, UNCG MA in Public Health; Sarah Hanlon, UNCG BA in Art Administration, Living with Objects Student Intern Fellow; Angelica Henry, UNCG BFA in Art History, Head Living with Objects Student Intern Fellow)
• March 23, 2023, 4:30–6:30 PM: Art of Health Provost Faculty Event: poetry reading in Space for Engagement and Space for Creativity by three UNCG MFAs
• March 23–April 1, 2023: Culture Mill Residency When We were Queens… with Murielle Elizeon and Shana Tucker
• March 27, 2023, 12:00–2:00 PM: Culture Mill artists’ life drawing sessions and group conversation with Murielle Elizeon and Caitlyn Schraders’s Social Practice Class in the Weatherspoon courtyard
• April 22, 2023, 2:00–4:00 PM: Living with Objects Pop-Up Event with Tyler Jones (UNCG BFA student, Co-WAM member, WAM student employee): live oil pastel drawing in the Weatherspoon courtyard
• July 27, 2023, 5:30–7:30 PM: Making More Room: an outdoor, fun-filled, family-friendly community pop-up event featuring ongoing card game play, the opening of the Making Room galleries, a food truck, and indoor games in the Space for Engagement.

APPENDIX B: ACTIVITY SPOTLIGHT

You Choose! Variations and User Stories

Based on the thematic findings described in the essay, Weatherspoon staff updated the instructions and facilitation methods for You Choose! throughout the project period. Each gameplay (fig. 2.25) facilitates participant learning and provides data to the staff that are tailored to specific objectives. These variations helped us understand the values that players associate with artworks and unravel group narratives and emotional connections that emerge from their interactions with the game.

Storytelling Game

Teams use artworks from the museum’s collection to create a story. The facilitator places one card in the center of the table to start a conversation. Players take turns describing what they see, think, and feel when looking at the work of art depicted on the card. After each person has shared something about the starting card, each player is dealt five additional cards. They take turns putting down one card at a time to build a story based on their interpretation of the images. Each card can represent a word, idea, character, or scenario. This gameplay helped museum staff to understand the stories players like to tell and which artworks players use to structure a narrative.

Value-Based Game

This gameplay often began student and community workshops. It was used effectively during the project period for First Year Experience (FYE) at UNCG, a course for incoming freshmen to learn about how to find themselves and make connections with other students during their first semester of college.

Ice Breaker

This game is fun and engaging for groups of colleagues or students; it helps people get to know one another or begin a discussion. It provides a platform for people to talk about individual thoughts and feelings about specific artworks and share personal preferences and perspectives before shifting to the more formal part of the meeting, agenda, class, or workshop.

Brainstorm

This game was used by museum staff as a quick way to get creative together before a group curatorial or programming project. It is a great tool for art students, professional artists, and faculty members to teach the art of curation and critique or develop new concepts or ideas. Scaled gallery models are effective in this gameplay to practice exhibition layout.

You Choose! Stories: Two Examples

There were many instances where the visitor engagement fellows stationed in the Space for Creativity observed walk-in visitors curious about the game. Sometimes, these visitors welcomed the offer to play from the staff and found themselves around the table together. Two of these gameplays illustrate how the game actively prompts people to develop empathic connections with the art and one another.

Example 1: Story of Love and Loss

One day, a couple of friends came into the space. They read post-its stuck to the How Do I Look? response board, flipped through a few pages of the journals on the tables, and then landed at the card game. They were curious about how to play and asked the visitor engagement fellow about the objective of the game. The staff member facilitated the game and prompted the players to respond to the artworks from their own individual points of view.

After exchanging perspectives, the visitors chose five cards to tell a fictional story of love and loss over time. The first artwork shows a couple holding a child, all three seemingly happy (287). The next card was interpreted as the couple growing apart (257) and divorcing, although both parents still loved the child and spent time with him separately but argued about what was best for him. The narrative continues with the third card (240), which illustrates the child experiencing a terrible accident that leads to his death. This tragedy brings the mother and father back together in their shared grief, and they eventually remarry and grow old together. This event is represented by a photograph of an elderly wife feeding her husband with a spoon (261).

At the end of the story, the players curated their cards inside the gallery model, introducing a fifth card (252), a photograph of a young boy. The players interpreted this figure as the deceased son looking at his parents from the afterlife. They positioned the cards in such a way that the son (252) faces his parents growing old together (261) and sees that they are happy together, but he is sad because he cannot share that same love.

The friends indicated their surprise at how the activity brought up such strong emotions for them. They did not expect to have an emotional experience when they walked into the gallery but got in touch with strong feelings by creating and developing a story with characters from their own imaginations together. They also said that they learned how to ask and answer questions without revealing information about themselves. They thanked the fellow for an interesting, fun learning and thinking exercise and later returned to play the game again.

Example 2: Unity

A family in the Space for Engagement began exploring the You Choose! deck. The visitor engagement fellow noticed the family and approached them to explain how to play. The children’s guardians were at first unsure if the game was suitable for their children, but the fellow eased their concerns and invited them to play a round together.

The children were initially captivated by the vibrant colors of two works that resonated with them. As the game processed, the family reported feelings of “unity,” “surges of joy,” “explosions,” “silliness,” and “peace in looking at cards with ‘soft’ and ‘peculiar’ shapes.” The family appreciated the bright and colorful artworks, noting that they made them happy.

After playing, the children put the cards into the model gallery. The grandmother’s face lit up when her daughter turned her wheelchair around to view the exhibition they had created together, which they named Smile, Be Happy, You’re Not Alone in This World. They expressed gratitude to the visitor engagement fellow and were excited when told that one of the two works of art they chose was on display in the upstairs galleries as part of Making Room, the exhibition associated with this project.

The ongoing facilitation of You Choose!continues to help Weatherspoon Museum staff understand visitor interests, values, and perceptions of the art collection. This data taught us what works align with our community’s values and led us to develop more detailed data collection methods and new approaches to play and facilitation.

APPENDIX C: PROGRAM SPOTLIGHT

WHEN WE WERE QUEENS…

Mei Mendéz and Haley N. Blake-Lee, with contributions by Murielle Elizéon

Who: Culture Mill artists in residence: Murielle Elizéon and Shana Tucker

What: When We were Queens… Culture Mill Artist Residency

When: March 23–April 1, 2023

Where: Weatherspoon Art Museum

“What do we do that gives us value? What do we give value? What is the value of a piece of art and who is it valued by?”

The Weatherspoon Art Museum hosted a nine-day residency in collaboration with African French choreographer and interpretive dancer Murielle Elizéon and renowned African American vocalist, cellist, and songwriter Shana Tucker. The multidisciplinary African Diaspora artists of Culture Mill explored the concept of value by performing live dance and music in the museum as part of their ongoing performance project When We were Queens…

A conversation between Weatherspoon Director Juliette Bianco and Elizéon about two of the museum’s significant projects laid the seeds for the residency. The Leading with Objects: Engaging the Community in Institutional Change project and the exhibition Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth became the set pieces for the living art created by Elizéon and her Culture Mill collaborators. The Gilded exhibition became the resident artists’ primary performance space. Every work of art in Gilded included gold leaf, and the show was intentionally curated to “reconsider value systems and show beauty in what is often overlooked and honor that which we so often throw away.” During the residency, Elizéon and Tucker intended to focus on the notion of value as women of color. They felt that performing in Gilded would become “a nice, embodied way to consider our bodies, our history, and our experience as an art form,” doing so “in a space where art is already deemed valuable” (fig. 2.26).

Throughout the residency, Weatherspoon staff actively encouraged museum visitors to watch, listen, and interact with Elizéon and Tucker as they performed slow meditative movements, African diasporic dances, and music in the gallery spaces. They started each performance by walking slowly and looking carefully at the art in the Gilded gallery while moving past visitors. “We have been doing very simple scores, walking very slowly, putting ourselves in contact with the art and slowing down,” Murielle said.

The two artists felt as though they learned complexities of “museum language,” in watching how visitors orient themselves around the artists. They received “very interesting reactions,” and discovered their on-the-floor performances to be influenced by visitor engagement. At times they experienced “invasions of space,” when people took pictures of them too close to their bodies. “It was very puzzling and unnerving and a little enraging,” Elizéon explains. However, the tension between visitors and artists proved to be “a powerful piece” to inform their bodily investigation of value and ask again, “What is the value of our bodies being in this space?”

As an extension of Leading with Objects, visitors engaged with the resident artists through creative exercises and critical thinking activities. UNCG students were invited to participate in life drawing sessions and guided, deep breathing meditations with Elizéon. She encouraged students to “think about how value is placed on objects and human bodies in the physical space,” then led students into the Gilded gallery to draw her while she demonstrated several dynamic poses.

After the drawing sessions, Elizéon, UNCG faculty and students, and Leading with Objects fellows had a group discussion to reflect on the experience. Students shared meaningful conversations about critical social issues, cultural differences, racial tensions, sex, and intersectionality. UNCG students spoke about having “visceral connections” and feeling narratives and racial “tensions” in drawing Elizéon’s powerful body movement. “I felt connected in a sense of sharing a female body,” a UNCG student said. “I felt give and take when I had permission to connect with a female body and the femininity of it—there is a moment to hold space for women of color.”

“I looked at this experience through a lens of this being an opportunity. The deep breathing meditation changed my perspective. I listened, felt, observed, and translated it onto paper,” said another UNCG student. “It was unlike anything that I have experienced,” and at the end they realized the session was “a gift.”

The development of When We were Queens… at the Weatherspoon Art Museum functioned as another visitor learning space that was outside the Inquiry Hubs but aligned with their purpose of learning through discovery and interaction. Yet, the Culture Mill artist residency also directly promoted the mission of the Leading with Objects project. In an interview for the WUAG 103.1 FM campus radio station, we asked Murielle to share what she took away from this collaboration on her last day. “There were so many different interactions and every time they were giving me feedback. And in speaking with Weatherspoon staff, it was the conversations of finding out how to work together in this new configuration that never happened before,” she responded.

The Weatherspoon staff focused on making room for the artists to engage with the museum, so Elizéon and Tucker had the chance to actively explore new ideas, challenge preconceptions of value, and bring attention to how value functions in an art museum. Elizéon and Tucker shared their artistic practice with us to encourage critical thinking and explore how value influences human experiences (fig. 2.27).

The Culture Mill artists felt it was important to be at the Weatherspoon Art Museum because they came to see the value in the relationships they built with the Weatherspoon community. “I had no idea I would be very interested in the relationships with the museum curators. I didn’t know how the artist residency would unfold because I have never done a residency before in this way. I think it’s the first residency that really put us on the track or journey or a treasure hunt for different things” involving When We were Queens… that they discovered by “inhabiting the museum for nine days.” The When We were Queens… then project traveled to other museums in North Carolina, and Elizéon, Tucker, and other artists continued to craft the story they want to tell about value, bodies, worth, and the African diasporic experience in traditionally white spaces. The final work premiered in February 2024 at the North Carolina Museum of Art.