We are working with three other contemporary art institutions around the United States.
Those are L.A. MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center
in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston.
And all of these museums have had intensive teen programs, sort of a teen council model
that welcomes youth into the institution and engages them kind of as ambassadors, giving
them the opportunity to lead tours and develop programs and events for other teens, interpretive
materials.
So, all of these institutions have had these programs operating since the early to mid-1990s.
And we are working together to do an evaluation of the continuing and long-term impacts of
those experiences on the participants, on the institutions, and then on the broader
communities.
And we looked for similarities among the programs in terms of structure, in terms of duration,
in terms of the sort of number of youth served, the kind of population that the museums are
working with.
So there are some kind of baseline shared variables that we thought were really important
to be able to compare the impacts.
But almost what seems more important is the conversations that we had with the programmers
about what outcomes they see as a result of their work.
You know, we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to do this work.
I think for a long time, we’ve sort of intuitively known about the value of the experiences that
we’re able to provide in these programs, but I think to be able to kind of turn that
we think it’s good, we think it’s really important, into substantive research that
can actually have an impact on the field is an incredible opportunity.
And just the sort responses we’ve gotten from other folks in the field-- colleagues
at other institutions, etc. has been overwhelmingly positive.
And there appears to be a lot of interest.
And so, we’re really happy to be able to almost fill a need within the museum community
by doing this work.
It feels good that there’s also kind of an interested audience.�