This post is part three of three written by the Director of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Linda Duke, as a follow up to her director’s message featured in the Winter/Spring 2015 inSIGHT newsletter available at www.beach.ksu.edu.
Art is about the experience of being human, in our own time and place and in other times and places. Sometimes we have to slow down to discover this. Art doesn’t always give up its meanings to a quick glance. What appears at first self-evident in a work of art may reveal itself to contain uncertainties upon reflection. And sometimes it’s revelatory to hear someone else – not an expert, but a person who has looked carefully – describe what they see and what they think about it. Art usually sends not just multiple messages, but mixed messages. In that sense art is both about us and very like us. Interacting with it helps us understand ourselves and our species. I’ve learned these things about art from thinking about it myself and from hearing the observations of thousands of teachers, students, incarcerated teens, people in recovery and homeless transition programs, medical students, and others in Visual Thinking Strategies discussions. Most of these people didn’t know the artists’ names or the stylistic terms, but they knew how to look at art.
I learned from my own encounters that VTS isn’t just for school kids. And of course, neither is art.
-Linda Duke, Director