An Invitation for Vibrant Conversations about Art
Connecting Visitors to the Collection with Daily Guided Tours
By Margie Moskovitz, CMA Docent
The Docent Program is a volunteer teaching service organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Department of Public and Academic Engagement. Docents interact with visitors and create lasting memories through tours of the finest artistic and cultural traditions represented in our collection. They act as an important liaison between the museum collections, visitors, and staff.
Each year, docents lead more than 15,000 visitors through the museum on tours that highlight the permanent collection and special exhibitions, as well as on customized tours designed for adult and school groups.
In this essay, CMA’s docent Margie Moskovitz explains why sharing the museum’s collection with visitors is so inspiring.
“It’s the viewer who makes the art.” — Marcel Duchamp
In 1998 Cleveland Museum of Art director Robert Bergman instituted a volunteer docent program inspired by a similar one at the Walters Art Museum, where he had previously worked. Now, 23 years later, about 70 CMA docents give tours highlighting the diversity and variety of artworks in the permanent collection and special exhibitions. Docents lead tours for school and private groups as well as daily tours for the public.
Being a docent gives me the opportunity to intimately know our collection and to think about the best ways to help the public experience the art and make their own discoveries. This involves a mix of sharing information about the artist, the work, and sometimes the provenance. We also engage groups with open-ended questions as they observe a particular object. At its best, a tour can invite vibrant conversations about art. Ideally the visitor leaves feeling more knowledgeable about and connected with the art in our collection.
I love the processes involved in preparing for a public tour, especially since we have the option to pick our own topic: researching, distilling the information, and discussing the artwork with the public. Following extensive training, we continue to conduct our own research at the museum’s Ingalls Library, and train with the curators and educators on a regular basis. For a special exhibition, docents can easily spend more than 60 hours preparing for their tours. With each exhibition— whether on Rembrandt, Alex Katz, Michelangelo, Gordon Parks, or the Valois Tapestries — a new world of learning and discovery opens up along with the unique challenge of finding ways to engage the audience.
Sometimes there are surprises. I remember giving a tour of American art and stopping to view A Woman’s Work by John Sloan, whose work is currently featured in the exhibition, Ashcan School Prints and the American City, 1900–1940. A woman began to cry as she observed the woman in the painting hanging her laundry on the clothesline outside the window. This scene, which evoked memories from her own childhood, exemplifies how art can elicit emotions.
On another occasion, when a large Romanian church group showed up unexpectedly for a daily tour of highlights from the collection, I guided them to Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s Male Torso. As we gathered around it and began discussing Brancusi’s way of capturing the essence of an object, it became clear to me that they were already familiar with the artist’s work and shared an ethnic pride. One of them recounted that he had served as a cantor in a Romanian Church in Paris and that several people in the group had visited Brancusi’s famous Endless Column in Romania. I was delighted to learn from them.
Free daily guided tours meet at the information desk in the atrium and start promptly at 1:00 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. Beginning October 5, an additional tour will be available on Tuesdays at 11:00 a.m. Reserve a time slot and join us on a tour; we’d be honored to have you.
Margie Moskovitz, a docent at the Cleveland Museum of Art since 2007.
