education Archives - SAM Stories

Access to Art: Rebuilding School Tours at SAM

Seattle Art Museum on Nov 11 2024

For most school districts, the 2024–25 school year began this past September. After a month of getting settled, we’re seeing school tours ramp up across all three SAM locations. Though we offer some type of school tour year round, our most robust offerings take place between late September through the end of June each year. Like many programs at the museum, supporting school tours is a team effort that spans across various departments. Through institutional collaboration, school tours have mostly returned to their pre-pandemic form after a few years of rebuilding from school and museum closures in 2020 and 2021.

Since I started working at SAM six years ago, interacting with students on field trips has always been my favorite part of the job. Their excitement for being in a new place and imaginative responses to the artwork on view always gives me energy, in spite of all the walking and vocal projection needed to lead tours. However, nothing drove home the value of an in-person museum experience more than when I was giving a dozen virtual tours every week during the 2021–22 school year. Though we tried our best to stay connected with schools, it just wasn’t the same to look at a work of art together on a computer screen instead of in the galleries together. For so many students, there is something about a museum visit that sticks with them, even if they don’t remember specific dates or materials used in certain artworks. We often hear from teachers that students still talk about their field trips months later. As we’ve rebuilt school tours at SAM, we’re reflecting on their impact. I wanted to share what they mean for students in our region.

Based on our 2023–24 school tour evaluations, 82% of educators agreed that their students felt welcomed and valued at SAM. This is especially meaningful, considering how many students who come on field trips have never been to an art museum before. It sets a positive tone for a possible lifetime of museum going and engaging with visual art.

Educators can choose to lead the group through the galleries themselves on a self-guided tour, or select a guided tour, which includes a tour led by a volunteer docent and an art workshop led by a teaching artist. Each SAM location has a different tour and art workshop curriculum that aligns with national, state, and district standards across a range of subjects. Those subjects include National Core Arts Standards, Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts/Literacy, Social-Emotional Learning, Social Studies/Ethnic Studies, STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math), and more. We work with educator advisors and school district partners throughout the year to make sure this curriculum is relevant and engaging for students.

In the 2023–24 school year, SAM served over 11,000 students across 339 tours total, with over 50% of these students coming from Title I schools. While we are not quite back at pre-COVID numbers, which saw peaks of over 20,000 students during the 2016–17 school year, for example, it is heartening to see the increase from the 2022–23 school year across our different locations. School tour gains can be largely credited to the reintroduction of hands-on art workshops led by teaching artists, which many educators voiced were needed in 2023–24 evaluations.

School tours at SAM are free for all public schools. We offer full or partial bus reimbursement for Title I schools, which means 40% of their students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. These initiatives contribute to SAM’s mission to make arts access more equitable, particularly for historically underrepresented communities. Though the creative economy of Washington makes up almost 10% of overall state GSP, Washington is ranked 45 out of 50 states in providing public funding for the arts, which includes arts education. This disproportionate funding impacts who is able to gain entry to this thriving part of our state’s economy. Creative Advantage Seattle notes that there are “significant barriers facing students in accessing quality arts instruction — especially students of color, those receiving free and reduced lunch, those in special education programs, and multilingual language learners.” Many of our Title I partner schools do not have visual art teachers, or they split one teacher between two schools. They also typically do not have funding through PTAs or district grants for specialized supplies or field trip costs. We are very appreciative that we can offer these learning opportunities free of charge to so many students.

Learn more and book a school tour for your students!

– Yaoyao Liu, SAM’s Manager of School Tours

Photo: Graphics: Naomi Chan.

SAM Through Kids’ Eyes: Book a School Tour For Your Students this Year!

Lily Hansen on Sep 28 2023

The 2023–2024 school year is officially in full swing! As students and educators return their classrooms, we’re taking this opportunity to share some information about how to book a guided or self-guided school tour at any of our three locations. Plus, we’ve included a few imaginative artworks created by students on a field trip to the Olympic Sculpture Park to give you an idea of the type of artistic activities your students will take part in while visiting any of SAM’s locations.

*Wake* by Richard Serra. Photo: Chloe Collyer.

All school tours at the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Asian Art Museum, and the Olympic Sculpture Park are image-focused and inquiry-based experiences designed for K–12 students. Guided tours are led by trained guides who encourage students to look closely, share personal perspectives, and build connections to their lives and learning. Following this in-gallery experience, students are invited to get creative through an art workshop supported by SAM educators, teachers, chaperones, and/or volunteers. Meanwhile, self-guided tours allow educators to customize their museum experience by leading their own tours through the galleries.

*Two Plan Vertical Horizontal Variation III* by George Rickey. Photo: Nathaniel Willson.

In the 2022–2023, we’re proud to have served more than 5,500 students across 235 school tours. Of these tours, 154 took place at the Seattle Art Museum, 36 took place at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and 26 took place at the Olympic Sculpture Park. This year, we intend to host more tours and provide even more students across Washington State with an exciting educational and artistic experience.

Ready to book a school tour for your classroom? Click here to check availability and plan your visit to SAM!

– Lily Hansen, SAM Marketing Content Creator

Making Museums Accessible to All: Emerging Arts Leader Isabel Amador Reflects

Seattle Art Museum on Jul 24 2023

The Seattle Art Museum could not have entered my life at a better time. In July 2022, I had “retired” from my professional ballet career and was planning to move to Seattle with my partner. I was in the precarious situation of moving to a new city and changing careers at the same time. I have always loved museums, and knew I wanted to be a part of this world in my second career—I just didn’t know what specific part I could play. One day, I stumbled across a blog post written by a SAM intern. In her post, she described how she was able to gain valuable work experience in a world class art museum while discovering how she could see herself fitting into the broader museum space. The opportunity sounded too good to be true, but a bit more research led me to the application for the museum’s Emerging Arts Leader Internships, and I applied right away. I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to join SAM!

Skipping to my first day at SAM, I was placed in the Education and Public Engagement Department working alongside the wonderful Erika Katayama, SAM Associate Director of Interpretation. She explained the ins and outs of her role and laid out the projects I would be working on. This included writing interpretive stops for the museum’s smartphone tour and verbal descriptions of artworks for low/no-vision visitors. This would kick off my three month dive into verbal descriptions, accessibility, and the relationship between visual art and the blind community.

How does a museum make visual art available to those who are low vision or blind? The COVID-19 pandemic greatly reduced the amount of tactile surfaces available to touch in an environment where touching was already discouraged. Audio guides provide background information on the art but typically do not explicitly relay the content of the art. That being said, much of what sighted people glean visually can be conveyed with words. That is where verbal descriptions come in. Verbal descriptions help to create a mental image of an artwork through a detailed narration. Visual art is a misnomer—so much more goes into art than paint on a canvas. Art can be appreciated in an equally valuable way through the other senses. SAM’s commitment to providing these options to visitors is a vital step toward making the museum a more accessible space. A significant part of my internship was spent researching and writing verbal descriptions for artworks on view in American Art: the Stories We Carry and Chronicles of the Global East. Completing this work grew my knowledge of what goes into museum accessibility significantly and changed the way I interpret art. Though SAM has tens of thousands of artworks in its collection, I am glad to have made even the smallest dent in increasing its accessibility to the public.

I am so proud to resume my work with accessibility by continuing to work at SAM over the next few months. This fall, I plan to attend grad school and find my place within the world of libraries, museums, and archives. I can’t wait to see what comes next for me.

– Isabel Amador, SAM Emerging Arts Leader Intern in Education and Public Engagement

Photos: Alborz Kamalizad & Chloe Collyer.

SAM Connects Students to Art for Free

Seattle Art Museum on Sep 12 2019

A new school year often welcomes crisp air, spiral notebooks, and pumpkin deliciousness. This school year brings one other exciting change: Seattle Art Museum school tours will now be free for all public schools at all SAM locations! Bus subsidies are also available for Title 1 schools. Offering free tours for public schools grew out of SAM’s mission and strategic plan to champion access and equity for all. The museum firmly believes every student deserves access to high-quality arts education and creative learning.

Even though the arts remain a required school subject by Washington State law, arts education is often one of the first programs to be cut. According to ArtsEd Washington, “In Washington State, 75% of elementary students receive only two hours, or less, of arts education each week.” Not only that, but Create Advantage Seattle notes, “Race, family income, and home language are all predictors of a students’ access to arts education in Seattle Public Schools.”

Research reveals that consistent arts education improves high school graduation rates, empathy, motivation to stay in school, critical thinking, voter turnout, and even raises math scores. Arts Impact says, “Arts-infused learning in reading and math eliminates the achievement gap between children of color and poverty and their white upper/middle-class peers.” Also, SAM’s Kayla Skinner Deputy Director for Education and Public Engagement, Regan Pro, strongly believes in furthering arts education. “Everyone talks about how they value things like creativity and innovation. If we are saying that but aren’t supporting arts in schools, then how do we expect those muscles to grow?”

Typically, school tours at SAM start with a warm welcome from a trained docent or tour guide and a teaching artist. The docent or tour guide leads the group into SAM’s galleries where students and teachers might stare into the eyes of a giant mouse sculpture, learn the history behind Kwakwaka’wakw house posts, or discover a treasure chest lock in the Porcelain Room. With three locations and art from all over the world, tours can complement and enhance any curriculum.

After the tour, SAM’s teaching artists facilitate an art-making experience based on the works that students just saw in the galleries. Students walk away holding their own work of art, such as a three-dimensional sculpture, a two-point perspective painting, or a self-designed family crest. Plus, teaching artists provide students with an opportunity to view potential career paths in the arts.

“Being in the art museum was a new experience for many of my students. They were intrigued and, to my surprise, were able to connect with some artists. I feared they would find the museum too “high-brow,” but the variety of art allowed most to connect in some way.”
– Educator

In addition to free school tours, SAM has continued to develop school partnerships. One of those partnerships, called “Drawing from Nature,” is now in its fourth year. Through this partnership, SAM offers all second graders in Highline School District a chance to explore the Olympic Sculpture Park. Building off these field trips, SAM provides lesson plans and professional development sessions to teachers. Furthermore, SAM is partnering with Seattle Public Schools on a new program at the Seattle Asian Art Museum when it reopens in early 2020. This partnership supports third through fifth-grade teachers as they build connections between art and social studies.

“This was an amazing experience and many of the themes were continued to talk about and apply in other subject areas.”
– Educator

SAM’s Senior Manager of School & Educator Programs, Anna Allegro, says school partnerships provide students with a sense of ownership of SAM. “We’ll work with a school for five years, the kids will come every year, and they just have this sense of ownership and comfort. It’s so different from when they first walked in where SAM might have felt like an intimidating kind of space. Our goal is that students know they can be seen and heard here.”

With SAM’s partnerships and free school tours, the museum is honored to support arts education and creative learning for all young people whilst continuing the goal to promote equity and access for all. As much as art museums play a role in advancing arts education, this mission extends beyond our four walls to everyone in the community.

“Everyone can be an advocate for arts education. If you’re a parent, talk to your principal. Talk to your PSA. Ask them how they are supporting the arts. How is that a part of their classroom? If you’re a grandparent or if you live in a neighborhood, understand what the public school is in your neighborhood and how you can help support it.”
– Regan Pro

Learn more and book a free school tour at SAM before they fill up!

– Lauren Farris, SAM’s 2019 Emerging Arts Leader Intern

Photos: Robert Wade

A Glimpse of Seattle Art Museum’s School Tours- Art Workshops

Seattle Art Museum on Jan 8 2013

After exploring works by many women artists in the Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou, Paris and Elles: SAM exhibitions, how can students be encouraged to make personal reflections? How can they explore the ideas and challenges provoked by these works of art? Can this reflection be a creative personal exploration of their own experience?

In SAM’s school tour art workshops, professional Teaching Artists engage school groups of all ages with these questions. Teaching Artists are employed by SAM to enrich our education programs with hands-on arts projects that provide an additional way of learning and understanding the art students see on their tours. These projects encourage students to take on art and creativity to express their own experiences. Each teaching artist holds a different background in art and in teaching. They are all professionally trained artists and teachers and come to SAM to join both art and education in one place. Here in our art studios students can explore their own artistic creativity with the guidance of working artists.

The art workshop developed for the Elles: Pompidou exhibition focuses on issues of identity, gender and stereotypes. Gender Stereotyping, or standardized portrayals of males and females, is something everyone witnesses in everyday life. In the streets, in a classroom, in our communities and homes there are images attached to certain gender roles. In the Elles art workshop students are asked to think about commonplace assumptions of the roles and images that can be attributed to women and men. Sometimes these standardized attributes can be hard to see and should be observed more closely to get to the root of how stereotyping has shaped our ideas of gender.

What better way to explore associated relationships amongst an assortment of stereotypes than in a collage? Students look through popular and vintage magazines to find images that speak to them about familiar gender stereotypes. They collage these images, advertisements and words onto a poster. The poster presents bold statements through eye-catching images, questioning media messages. Some collages contain vibrant colors and blunt phrases with pictures from women’s magazines. These collages explore challenges about what women are expected to be: a lady, a housewife, a mother, a cook, or a lover.

Images are taken out of their intended context to make us re-examine where we feel they belong and why. The collage collects art and experience into one gathering place and so doing, beckons us as viewers to question how we look and what symbols we associate to certain gender roles.

All SAM’s School Tours can be joined with an Art Workshop, each of which integrates a project related to the themes of the tour. All our Teaching Artists have been working at SAM for several years and are extremely experienced in presenting art in an encouraging, accessible way for students of all ages. Come by our Chase Open Studio on the Grand Staircase where many of the student art projects are showcased and where visitors are welcome to make their own art during their tour of the museum.

For more information on SAM’s School Tours & Art Workshops, email schooltours@seattleartmuseum.org

Behind the Scenes: Unconventional Portrait Workshop

Seattle Art Museum on May 19 2010

As SAM’s summer exhibitions Kurt and love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death—Andy Warhol Media Works opened last week, the Adult Public Programs team has been working hard to get ready for all of the affiliated lectures, performances, tours and June 4^th SAM Remix. The simultaneity of these two exhibitions is exciting from a programmatic standpoint because we have the opportunity to use educational experiences to explore some of the conceptual connections between works in both. One of the projects I have focused on developing in recent months is a set of three classes that are part of our adult workshop series “SAM Creates.”

Behind the Scenes: The SAM Remix Tattoo Parlor

Seattle Art Museum on Dec 10 2009

“Behind the scenes” responsibilities at an arts organization are not always the most glamorous work. In Public Programming at SAM, back-end work includes contracts, stage set-up, power point preparation, and many late-nights, among other things. The latest of my nights, but also one of the most exciting to work on, is the quarterly SAM Remix program. During Remix, my department has the opportunity to program the entire building in an effort to create a unique experience that engages audiences with the art on view through a more interdisciplinary and interactive approach.