Tag Archives: slow looking experience

Slow Looking and the 19th Amendment in Asheville

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The Asheville Art Museum hosted its third Slow Art Day with a virtual slow looking webinar focused on three works by women artists in honor of the 19th Amendment’s 100th anniversary:

  • Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Playing Cards/Malcolm X) from the Kitchen Table II series, 1990.
  • Minnie Evans, Untitled, 2012.
  • Harriet Randall Lumis, The Little Red Bush, circa 1915.
Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Playing Cards/Malcolm X) from the Kitchen Table II series, 1990, printed 1999, gelatin silver print, edition 2/5, 26 ¾ × 26 ⅞ inches. Museum purchase with funds provided by 2004 Collectors’ Circle, 2004.24.04.91. © Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery.
Minnie Evans, Untitled, not dated, colored pencil on brown paper, 11 ¾ × 9 inches. Gift of Randy Siegel, 2012.08.42.
Harriet Randall Lumis, The Little Red Bush, circa 1915, oil on canvas, 24 × 28 inches. Given in honor of Dorothy Hamill on her birthday, October 12, 2000, 2000.14.21.

Master docent Doris Potash instructed participants to do three things before the webinar: 1) find a quiet, still space; 2) look at each of the three images for 15 minutes; 3) while looking, ask yourself the following questions:

  • What’s going on in each artwork? What details do you notice?
  • If you were in those places, what sounds would you hear? What textures and temperatures would you feel?
  • What memories and emotions do these artworks evoke?
  • Each of these artworks was created by a woman. Is there anything about the works that you would associate with a uniquely female perspective?

Doris then moderated a live discussion about the experience.

The two-part session was attended by 23 participants, who gave very positive feedback about the event:

“A lovely way to spend an hour of my social distancing!”

“…a much needed break during these trying times.”

“I was very moved by the art selections and benefitted from this experience greatly.”

Participant Quotes

The Slow Art Day event was well-received on social media, with over 100 likes on Facebook and Instagram. It sparked so much interest overall that the Museum has since added weekly Slow Art Friday sessions to its regular calendar of events! A recording of the original Slow Art Day session can be found here, and the weekly program description and upcoming fall programs can be found here.

Our mission at Slow Art Day is to inspire museums and participants to embrace slow looking every day. Thus, we are excited that this North Carolina-based museum not only produced a great Slow Art Day but now has made slow looking a weekly activity.

-Johanna and Ashley

TarraWarra Museum of Art Hosts First Slow Art Day

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For their first Slow Art Day The TarraWarra Museum of Art in Melbourne, Australia featured two very different artworks by Australian women artists: ‘Club Colours’ by Rosalie Gascoigne, and ‘He’ll Be My Mirror’ by Jenny Watson.

Rosalie Gascoigne, ‘Club Colours’ 1983, painted and stencilled wood from soft-drink boxes on plywood backing, 172.5 x 129.5 cm, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection. Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AO, Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2009, © Rosalie Gascoigne Estate.
Jenny Watson, ‘He’ll Be My Mirror’ 2013, Liquitex acrylic, Holbein pigments and haberdashery on rabbit skin glue-primed Belgian linen, 251.7 x 140 cm, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection, Acquired 2013.

To promote the event, Elisabeth Alexander, Marketing and Events Coordinator, created a short teaser ‘slow zoom’ video of ‘He’ll Be My Mirror’, and posted image stories on Instagram and Facebook.

On April 4, participants were directed to a dedicated Slow Art Day page on the Museum’s website to look slowly at full-size images of the two paintings. Shannon Lyons, Education Coordinator, then led an online discussion via the Museum’s social media channels, where participants were encouraged to share thoughts about the artworks and their slow looking experience.

Shannon Lyons shared with us her surprise at how well it went:

From an educator’s perspective, it was interesting to see how willing people were to both delve deeper and give voice to their wonderings online. They actively questioned why aspects of the artworks appeared the way that they did, and why particular elements of the artworks seemed to dominate, hold or demand attention far more than others.

Shannon Lyons

Their first Slow Art Day was a success, with over 5000 impressions and 100+ post engagements across Instagram and Facebook. Further, the average time spent on their dedicated webpage was 6 minutes – dramatically higher than the average time of under a minute for other pages on the site.

The TarraWarra Museum of Art had originally planned to host their first Slow Art Day in-person featuring their newly opened exhibition ‘Making Her Mark: Selected Works from the Collection‘, however Lyons and Alexander had to quickly re-imagine it as a virtual experience due to Covid19.

The whole Slow Art Day team has been impressed with what Elisabeth and Shannon were able to produce – given that it was not only their first Slow Art Day but, of course, also since the pandemic forced a last minute change of plans. We look forward to what they create for Slow Art Day 2021.

-Johanna

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Experimental Slow Looking Session with MART in Italy

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The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rovereto and Trento (MART), Italy, hosted its first experimental Slow Art Day session via Zoom.

The virtual session was attended by a select group of MART members who discussed 4 artworks from the museum’s permanent collection, including Osvaldo Licini’s Bilico (1933) and Fortunato Depero’s Chiesa di Lizzana (1923).

Osvaldo Licini, Bilico, 1933. Part of the Augusto and Francesca Giovanardi Collection: “La Magnifica Ossessione”, MART.
Fortunato Depero, Chiesa di Lizzana (Lizzana), 1923, MART, Fondo Depero. Photo: MART Photographic Archive and Media Library.

Five days before the session, Denise Bernabe, Membership Coordinator at MART, emailed participants images of the artworks along with a brief explanation of slow looking (without disclosing the artists or the titles of the works).

During the hour and a half session, Bernabe facilitated a relaxed discussion in which participants made personal and emotional remarks about the artworks based solely on their immediate slow-looking responses. All participants loved the experience and, as a direct result of this session, the MART is planning to continue integrating slow-looking with future events.

The event was instigated by local art enthusiast Piero Consolati, who has been a MART member for several years and frequently participates in museum events. The session was made possible through his interest in slow looking, which prompted him to approach the staff at MART about hosting an event.

Public engagement with both art and museums is something that Slow Art Day strongly promotes, and the MART event is a beautiful example of the important role art enthusiasts can play in initiating events and furthering the slow art movement throughout the community. At Slow Art Day HQ, we are very excited to hear about the MART’s slow-looking Zoom session, and are thankful to Consolati for reaching out to us with the details.

We look forward to hearing about future slow looking events hosted by MART — hopefully also for Slow Art Day 2021.

– Johanna

Rippling Recognitions

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Slow Art Day has asked its 2013-14 college interns to write short summaries of their own experiences looking slowly at artworks of their choosing. Jennifer Latshaw, Slow Art Day intern from De Paul University, writes here about her experience seeing the unexpected.

Looking at art slowly is not my typical way of visiting a museum. Like many others, I tend to quickly stroll through any special exhibits that are currently on display and then visit some old favorites without spending much time with any single work. As a result, when I visited the Art Institute of Chicago to complete my slow looking assignment, I decided to find a famous work that I had never really focused on before. While the impressionist collection is a highlight of the museum and a section I’ve visited many times before, I guessed that I could find a painting there that had only gotten the quick treatment from me before.

I chose one of the most popular and well-known paintings in the collection – Monet’s Water Lily Pond, 1917-1922. Of course, I’ve seen this painting before – so have many millions of people. It is such a familiar painting that I wondered if slow looking would reveal anything new.

I started the exercise by standing a few feet away from the painting in the gallery. Then after a few minutes I moved farther away. Eventually, I then got closer again. Not surprisingly, I saw different things depending on my distance from the painting. Up close the painting appeared to simply be smudges of color with no rhyme or reason to where they were placed. I noticed how it was thick in some places and sparse in others. I had not really noticed or thought about the thickness of the paint. Moving farther away from the painting, the larger image came into view. At my farthest from the canvas, I sat on a bench across the room and considered the entire painting at once. From this distance, the lilies appeared to be sitting on top of the lake with dramatic brush strokes of contrasting colors to the rest of the painting suggesting movement or reflection to give depth and dimension to the entire image.

Claude Monet, Water Lily Pond, 1917-22

Claude Monet, Water Lily Pond, 1917-22
(Image Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago)

Varying distance also allowed me to really reflect on the way the colors interact in the image. Up close I could see not just the relative thickness of the paints but also the individual pinks, reds, yellows, and purples. When viewed from farther away they came together to make greens and browns. I had never really taken the time before to see how colors change depending on perspective. It’s one thing to learn that in color theory class. It’s another thing to really experience it from a session of slow looking.

My original goal was to look for five minutes and then jot down some notes about the experience. Once I really started to look, however, I could not get enough of the painting. During the first minute or two, I glanced at my watch every 10 or seconds to see how long I had been looking. But after that, I found myself caring less about the time and caring more about seeing new things in the painting. And before I knew it, I had been absorbed in looking at Monet’s Water Lily Pond for 30 minutes.

One unexpected and surprising benefit was that slow looking is relaxing. By focusing on one painting I was able to stop multi-tasking and really pay attention. Everything else that would regularly consume my thoughts was gone and I was left only with Monet, his beautiful water lilies, and the ability to see so much more than I ever realized was there.

– Jennifer Latshaw, De Paul University

Claude Monet’s Water Lily Pond among other great works are available to view at the Art Institute of Chicago.  The Art Institute of Chicago is not currently a 2014 Slow Art Day venue.  Sign up to host here!

Looking Slowly, Again

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Slow Art Day has asked its 2013 college interns to write short summaries of their own experiences looking slowly at artworks of their choosing. Sylvia Faichney, Slow Art Day intern from the Art Institute of Chicago, writes here about her experience seeing the unexpected.

I’ve learned that through my practices of looking slowly that even after looking at a piece one, two, or even three times slowly I still may not have seen all that it has to show me.

Despite believing that looking slowly over several visits can yield ever more insights, I had the surprising recent experience of going to my favorite museum and looking at one of my favorite pieces of art and finding that there were significant elements that I had previously completely missed.

(Images Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago)

Let me explain.

Living in the city of Chicago I have access to multiple galleries and museums. The Art Institute of Chicago, however, is one of my favorites. I’ve visited multiple times and I have it almost memorized. I know it so well that I know what’s around every corner. Or so I thought before I did this slow looking exercise for Slow Art Day.

I chose to look slowly again at Gerhard Richter’s Ice 1, 2, 3, 4. I have seen it slowly multiple times – including for this recent exercise. I am entranced every time by its fluidity, by its color and by what I call only describe as its “togetherness.”

On my visits prior to the one for this exercise, I have sat and tried to understand why these four separate canvases are somehow cohesive. I previously have noted that although each composition is different there is a unity created by the colors.

Today, when I sit for my third time in front of this wonderful set of four paintings, I discover that not only the composition but the colors play a key role in creating the cohesion. When I look at it one way, I see chaos and separation. The paintings can appear to be disconnected. But, Richter in his genius somehow uses the chaos in a way to connect. Further, the emotional feeling I experience from this chaotic connected work is calm. I don’t know how he does that. He uses a wide variety of colors. The pieces are complex. The texture is rich and constantly yielding new insights.

A few minutes go by and I notice something I hadn’t before. What is that big streak of grey? The movement had always seemed so consistent to me and there in front of me was a break in the pattern created by this rather large diagonal grey streak. My eyes move along to the other canvases to where I find that there is another break in the pattern I had missed. There it was, a curved orange, green, and blue brush stroke that I had missed on my previous visits.

“How had I not noticed this on my previous visits?!”

I ask myself this question as I continue to look and follow the movement of these new-found curves. I become astonished – not only am I seeing these new patterns but I’m also seeing colors I had missed or misunderstood previously. For example, the color I had always assumed was grey in the compositions, appears in fact to be purple. This was a huge shock to me. An entire color in all of the compositions that had looked one way to me begins to appear as a different color. And this true color that I had just now noticed changes the tone of each piece. It’s quite dramatic. After realizing this I also discover undertones of other colors I had previously not noticed – a dark green, a yellow, different shades of blue all begin to reveal themselves. As I look closely, I see that they had been cleverly tucked away behind layers of more prominent colors. I can’t believe that after all of the time I have spent in the past with these paintings that I am seeing so much more – and so much that I had misunderstood.

Despite my surprise and shock, at the end of my slow looking exercise I feel that calm from Richter – so calm that I’m rejuvenated. I’m not tired. I’m not burnt out. I’m excited and my senses are heightened. I get up to leave but before I go I take a quick look at the description written by the curators. “…Impulses and contradiction of representation urging skeptics in the evaluation of the purpose and effect of all constructed visual phenomena.” I’m not sure what they mean but I think I agree.
When I’m back home and reflecting on my experience, I realize that I really thought that I wouldn’t experience anything new from looking slowly at these Richter paintings for a third time. Now I see that I may never be done learning, and that maybe there are certain art works that take many visits to fully experience. Even in my favorite corner of my favorite museum that I have been to many times, I now know that I can sit down and ask myself if I really have seen it all.

– Sylvia Faichney, Art Institute of Chicago

Gerhard Richter’s Ice 1, 2, 3, 4 among other great works are available to view at the Art Institute of Chicago.  The Art Institute of Chicago is not currently a 2014 Slow Art Day venue.  Sign up to host here!