Re-visualize the visual: Exploring visual arts with high-school students in art museum and beyond

Abstract

This study aimed to achieve a better understanding of the engagement of high-school students with art museums and contemporary art. I worked on this project for 5 months with 7 inner-city adolescents from Cyprus, investigating their formal and informal museum visits and their understanding of contemporary art.

The study employed participatory action research methodology and visual research methods to investigate three questions: how high-school students experience visual arts inside, in relation to, and outside the institutions (school and the museum); how these experiences inform the institutions on how to develop a sustained museum-student relationship; what action(s) does our research group suggest would make art museums more relevant to the visitors by taking into consideration their visit experiences.

An important conclusion of the project is that the proximity between the researcher and the participants, which was achieved through the participatory methodology, created a sense of community among the participants and promoted their active contribution to the research project. By framing contemporary art through the insights of high-school students and by drawing on their experiences and interactions in the contemporary art museum, the project also proposed an art game prototype which I designed with my research partners. Further, we examined the role of the school in relation to student museum habits.