Research Resources

Cross Currents Tours

The Cross Currents tour was developed to allow more flexibility to museum visitors on the weekend. This tour is a melding of an Ask Me and a Spotlight tour assignment, and visitors are able to choose their own Mia adventure, traveling to as many tour stops as they like. As an added bonus, the Cross Currents format provides guides with a touring option that offered more engagement with visitors.

Each month, we use a different theme for the tour. The themes are broad, allowing plenty of options for selecting a key artwork or gallery to present throughout the museum.

For the tour, six to eight guides select a gallery and pick one object or a small group of objects to present around a general theme. For example, “Come to Your Senses” is a tour that explores how our senses help to tell the story of art. Guides would be stationed in their gallery for two hours and receive two credits.

The day of the tour, visitors are given a museum map with the locations of the stationed guides. Visitors move through the gallery stops in any rotation. Guides present on their object/s for about 10 minutes and then encourage visitors to move on to another stop. Additional tour maps will be available at each stop. Guides wear an “Ask Me” button and are encouraged to invite visitors to participate in the tours.

Here is a sample of the handout available to visitors on the weekends. Note this is a template that we adapt to each tour, depending on the theme and choices of the guides:

Cross Currents_Oct

The Fall 2020 CIFocus newsletter also included a great article by guide Bryan Peffer, outlining his experience of giving a Cross Currents tour:

CIFocus newsletter FALL2020

Statue of a lion, research resources

From CIF guide Nahid Khan, some researched connections to our Statue of a lion.

I was doing a bit of reading and came across images in different books of lion figures from Islamic arts, and it might be relevant for the golden lion statuette from Muslim Spain.
Lion figure, presumably intended as a fountain head, 11th century CE, Cairo, Museum of Islamic Art (4305)
Couldn’t find on museum web site; doesn’t seem to have a feature that enables searching for specific objects.
Published in Arts of the City Victorious: Islamic Art and Architecture in Fatimid North Africa and Egypt, by Jonathan M. Bloom. Yale University Press / Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2007 (p. 98).
Lion de Monzon, 1000 – 1250 CE, Monzon de Palencia, Espagne
bouche de fontaine
Musee du Louvre
(This one obviously seems especially relevant … )
Incense burner (feline), 12th century CE, Iran
Houston Museum of Fine Arts
Feline Incense Burner, 1100s, Central Asian region
Cleveland Museum of Art
Islamic bronze incense burner (feline), 11th century CE, region not specified (but I’m guessing Central Asia, because of similarity to the above objects with the exception of the one at the Louvre)
Phoenix Ancient Art (art dealer)
 Here are the links to the three feline / lion shaped incense burners from Iran at the MMA for the object file on the golden lion statuette from Muslim Spain:
Feline-shaped Incense Burner (of Amir Saif al-Dunya wa’l-Din ibn Muhammad al-Mawardi)
Dated A.H. 577 / A.D. 1181-82. Iran (Taybad).
Incense Burner (zoomorphic / feline).
12th century. Iran (probably Hamadan).
Incense Burner in the shape of a lion.
11th – 12th century. Eastern Iran or Afghanistan.

 

 

Tackling Tough Topics: IPE required training, January 26, 2021

Here is a link to the video of our required cultural fluency training on January 26, 2021, with guest speakers Michelle Edwards and Geoffrey Cohrs:

Tackling Tough Topics

Here are the PowerPoint slides:

TO COME

If you watched the video of the training, here is a link to the feedback form to complete the requirement:

Tackling Tough Topics feedback form

The National Museum of African American History and Culture has developed a great online resource:

Talking about Race

 

 

 

 

IPE Volunteer Anniversary Celebration, 12.9.20

Here is the video link for our anniversary celebration:

IPE Volunteers Anniversary Celebration 12.9.20

And here are the evening’s slides:

IPE 12.9.20 anniversary celebration

Here are Pujan’s slides from the presentation:

TO COME

And here are some support documents. One provides full text of photos and memories (which some had to be edited for time) and also Bill Wilson, Docent Class of 2015, has provided the full text of his wonderful poem.

Class 2015 docents Bill Wilson anapestic-poem

Here are some documents from Rose Stanley-Gilbert for the 25 year docent anniversary:

2020.12.9 WORD Class of ’95 – Docent celebration speech

Class of 95-WORD Docent Rememberances