Art Project: Fresh Eyes, Museum of Fine Arts Boston
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Project Description: Site Specific Installation
Paper, Museum Labels, Children's original artwork, tapes, sound dome. 15 x 45' Fresh Eyes is a collaboration between artist Hannah Burr, the museum, and roughly 100 middle schoolers, made possible by Boston Museum of Fine Art's Community Arts Initiative, that makes visible (and audible) the infinite possible responses generated between an artwork and an individual. This project explores themes of pattern, collection, and trusting your personal response to a work of art, created through a regular group activity of semi-randomly selecting works, tracking them down, and voicing personal responses in recorded conversations, notes, stories and drawings. Over four months, Hannah met with different groups of middle schoolers to discuss and capture their responses to eight specific artworks around the museum. Using the Visual Thinking Strategies open inquiry method, an audio recorder and a team of staff and assistants, these responses were categorized into descriptive words, associations, nouns, discoveries, theories, and stories. These, and the artworks students made in response to each work, were then installed in eight loose columns above a reproduction of the artwork referenced. A sound dome above the viewer played each participant describing what they saw. This work was exhibited for six months in the Contemporary Wing of the museum. |