My Senior Project: Hanging out with SAM’s Teen Advisory Group
My name is Angela Scoggins and I’m a senior at Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences. For 6 weeks I will be interning at the Seattle Art Museum working in the education department. You might be wondering why I am working instead of going to school. Well during the last 6 weeks of the school year seniors in our school have the opportunity to intern at any place they desire in Seattle. I am really into arts, particularly photography and guitar, and I hope next year I can continue learning and pursuing it. I decide to intern at the Seattle Art Museum. What better place to doing something with art than at an art museum? So far since I started I have been working closely with the Teen Advisory Group. TAG is a program where teens use leadership skills to plan tours and events at SAM. I’m looking forward to seeing what is still in store for the future.
In the last few meetings, the teens learned the dos and don’ts of giving a tour. We started with an activity called “Perfect Day.” Every teen drew a picture of their perfect day, then we put them on the board for everyone to see. The teens had the option to show their picture and explain their perfect day. Some had really fun ones such as going to outer space or riding a dinosaur through the streets of Paris. Others, such as myself, pictured a day on the beach in the sun or reading a good book on a rainy day. There were lots of laughs and humor as people explained their drawing. Having everyone explain their perfect day gave them a chance to act as if they were giving a tour. By knowing their art and being able to explain it they demonstrated skills in giving tours.
Once the ice breaker was over we moved on to another topic; the 5C’s of giving a tour: confidence, clarity, conduct, content and connect. The skits proved to be one the best parts of the day. Everyone split up into 5 groups to correspond with the 5C’s of giving a tour. Each group had to use their word and come up with a skit that showed a positive and negative example of the word being used during a tour. Most of the skits were pretty funny, especially the ones that included the Clorox box. One of the groups used a Clorox container they found in the art studio to show content or lack of it. To show content they talked about the Clorox box and its origins. They said Clorox was invented because it was so dirty in the past that they needed something to clean with.
At the end of the day the teens split up into groups of four, and hit the galleries to write about artworks that interested them. The majority of the teams decided to find works by their favorite artists, while other focused on a theme. Themes varied from the role of women in art to American Culture and featured works from the African, European, Northwest Coast, and Contemporary galleries.
I had an wonderful experience with the teen program the last 6 weeks. I got to do what I enjoy and be around people my own age who are also interested in art. My senior project was great. It was an amazing learning experience.