To Industrialize or Not to Industrialize
Jan 20, 2011

In a recent YI Leaders session, we discussed how knowing your audience is key to planning a good tour. If you’re aware of how much your audience already knows about the topic, what they are trying to get out of the tour, and why they are at the museum, then preparing a tour becomes much easier. On Thursday, January 6, I gave my art history class from school a tour of the exhibition, Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time. We had been studying Hopper and his contemporaries at school for weeks; therefore I knew I had my work cut out for me. Instead of giving a tour on the importance of the early twentieth-century American artists or how to look at contemporary art, I chose to focus my tour on industrialization.

The early twentieth century was a critical turning point in American history.The country went through two world wars, suffered from the Great Depression, and saw an incredible growth in industrialization. Art was dramatically affected by these events, especially by the rise of industry. Some artists chose to make clear statements about their opinions on industrialization. For example, I showed my class Charles Demuth’s My Egypt, which visibly glorifies the machine, and Ralston Crawford’s Steel Foundry, which implies a critical view of industrialization. Other artists, like Hopper, chose to mask their opinions more. So, the question we were all struggling with at the end of the tour was: what does Hopper actually think about industrialization? My classmates made valid arguments on both sides and we eventually came to the conclusion that we will never know what Hopper was thinking.

Because I knew my audience had a clear understanding of the time period and the artists in the exhibition, I created a tour focused on a theme that wouldn’t normally be discussed in an art history class. I helped my classmates think about the artwork in a different way, which was possible because we were at the museum looking at the paintings in person.

By Katie