I LOVE Adult Tours!

I've recently realized how much I enjoy giving adult tours. Between last Thursday and this Tuesday I gave three:

Thursday: Modern Hightlights Tour
This was the first tour that I was allowed to give by myself though I was scheduled to give the tour with senior lecturer, Annie Morse. I pitched the theme of Modern and Contemporary Portraiture and I planned on doing two pieces, Picasso's "Mother and Child" and Hockney's "American Collectors." Annie decided to contribute a visit to Felix Gonzalez-Torres's "Untitled (Portrait of Ross)" for the final piece.

A few hours before the tour Annie called me to ask if I'd like to talk about the Gonzalez-Torres and just do the whole tour myself. My first thought: "OMG, WHAT!?! I can't do that!"...what I said to Annie, "Well, I'm brushing up on the other pieces right now, but I think I can handle it...can I tell you in a couple hours?" An couple hours later I felt sufficiently well versed on my other two pieces to tackle the FGT, which I had talked about before. Long story short: I did it! I tackled an adult tour by myself for the very first time!


Friday: Matisse in Nice Tour with Jen
Jen and I signed up for the Matisse in Nice tour without really knowing what he did in Nice and why we would have a tour specifically about that time. After a lot of studying we knew so much, not only about Matisse's Nice period, but about his entire career that we thought we should try to include every Matisse displayed in the 3rd floor....which we did. (Note to future interns: don't do more that 5 or 6 pieces on an hour long tour) Though we had a very successful tour, we later realized that we probably should have edited our selections down from almost 10 to half of that.

Tuesday: Highlights of the Museum Tour with Jen
Jen and I have spent most of our internship researching and touring later highlights of the museum from Post Impressionism to the present. We both love Contemporary Art and so it was a bit of a challenge to expand our oeuvre to include the earlier masterpieces in the museum's collection when it came time to plan our highlights tour.


Again, we were a bit ambitious and not only did we plan to do 7 pieces in an hour long tour, we also planned to take our group through 3 different wings of the museum. (Another note to future interns: take the distance of your pieces into account when planning the timing of your tour). We were fine for the first few pieces: Manet's "The Races at Longchamp" and Van Gogh's "The Bedroom," but we became a bit pressed for time and rushed by the time we got to Wood's "American Gothic" and Matisse's "Daisies." All in all, I think the tour went well and even though we didn't really have a theme to connect all of the pieces, by the time I got to our final piece, Hockney's "American Collectors" I realized how all of the pieces we looked at did have some sort of influence, whether direct or indirect, on our final piece.