New Shows at Stanford's Cantor Center

Misrach and Friedlander in Cantor show

Richard Misrach

"Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana" shows a rusted pipe cutting through the swamp like a foreboding of environmental harm.

By Kenneth Baker

March 30, 2013

Timing could hardly be better for "Revisiting the South: Richard Misrach's Cancer Alley" and "Lee Friedlander: The Cray Photographs," concurrent exhibitions just opened at Stanford's Cantor Arts Center.

The shows complement each other not merely because they examine the human background to industry. Friedlander's series heightens our sense of history's acceleration by technology, intensifying the warning implicit in Misrach's work that the changes we fear most may come sooner than we can imagine.  

The Environmental Protection Agency reported this week that its survey of about 2,000 sites found more than half of the nation's rivers and streams unfit to support aquatic life adequately. Just try not thinking of this when you look at a picture such as Misrach's "Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana" (1998/2012).

Most of us may not know the look of a thriving swamp from that of an imperiled one, but the rusted pipe that cuts through Misrach's picture like a man-made horizon delivers to the eye only forebodings of harm.

26,000 miles of pipe

In a label text, Misrach notes that since the 1930s the oil industry has laced this ecologically sensitive area with an estimated 26,000 miles of pipe, upping exponentially the risk insinuated in the glimpse that his picture provides.

Read more: http://www.sfchronicle.com/art/article/Misrach-and-Friedlander-in-Cantor-show-4395225.php#ixzz2P3J0FAsV

Fine Arts Museums of SF hires New Curator

Fine Arts Museums hire Frick curator

Kenneth Baker and Sam Whiting

Updated 10:43 pm, Wednesday, March 27, 2013

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  Colin Bailey will leave the Frick Collection in New York City to be director of S.F.'s Fine Arts Museums. Photo: Lea Suzuki, Bill Zemanek

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In a move expected to boost San Francisco's international art reputation, the board of the city's beleaguered Fine Arts Museums on Wednesday approved the appointment of Colin Bailey, the deputy director and chief curator of the Frick Collection in New York, as its new director.
In addition to his work at the world-renowned Frick, Bailey has served at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. An expert on 18th and 19th century French painting, as well as an authority on Pierre Auguste Renoir, he has also organized exhibitions devoted to Gustav Klimt, Hans Memling and Rembrandt.

He starts June 1

"He's a star," said Dede Wilsey, president of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF). "It's time we had a leader who is really focused on the great collections within this museum." She was interviewed before she made the announcement at a news conference in the Piazzoni Mural room of the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, a conference which Bailey did not attend due to previous commitments.
Bailey, 57, takes over the long-vacant position on June 1. He replaces John Buchanan, who died from cancer in December 2011. Bailey, who has never been the director of a museum, has twice seen his candidacy for the directorship at the small, elegant Frick sidelined by the institution, which has a history of appointing directors from the outside.
Reached by telephone in New York, Bailey said that his first priority in the San Francisco job will be "to immerse myself. Of course, I've been closely monitoring radio interviews and news coverage of the museums. Museums are in some ways like families, regardless of size. The museums' staff and board have done a tremendous job maintaining the programming and membership that John Buchanan did so much to advance. And of course we want morale to be as high as it should be."

Reached by telephone in New York Frick said that his first priority in the San Francisco job will be "to immerse myself."  Of course, I've been monitoring radio interviews and news coverage of the Museum.  Museums are, in some ways, like families, regardless of size.  The museums' staff and board have done a tremendous job of maintaining the programming and membership that John Buchanan did so much to advance.  Of course we want morale to be as high as it should be."  

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Fine-Arts-Museums-hire-Frick-curator-4390372.php#ixzz2OrTeWJTm

Report on the Future of Museums

THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2013

Another Round of Technology and the Future of Education

Today’s guest post comes from Phil Katz, the Alliance’s assistant director for research and co-conspirator on many CFM research projects.

Tomorrow andBeyond

There’s nothing new about the prediction that technology is going to remake education, soon and dramatically: education reformers and tech entrepreneurs have been making this claim since at least the 1920s. Last week the Brookings Institution – a nonpartisan think tank based here in Washington, DC – joined the long march of predictions with a thoughtful and reference-packed report on Education Technology Success Stories. The report was produced by the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings with support from the Gates Foundation.

Brookings also hosted a public forum on the future of education technology last week, which you can watch athttp://www.brookings.edu/events/2013/03/20-education-technology. (Make sure you stay tuned to the very end, so you can hear me ask a question and introduce the word “museum” into the conversation!) The focus of both the report and forum is formal education, mostly in classroom settings. But the key questions at stake – “How can educators incorporate the latest technologies to improve education and assess what proves effective?” – apply just as well to museum education.

The report features five “education technology success stories.” For each story, theycould have added a museum variant:

• Robot Assisted Language Learning (RALL), in the form of kid-friendly interactive robots already being used to teach English to some young children in South Korea. (South Korea is also the world leader in robot docents for museums.)

Robot teachers in Korea

• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which nearly everyone these days is describing as a disruptive force in higher ed. (Including the team here at CFM, in our new TrendsWatch 2013 report, which looks at MOOCs through a museum lens.)
• Minecraft, a web-based “sandbox” game that students and teachers are using to create simulated worlds that model the laws of physics, chemistry and environmental science; the game can even be used to recreate historic sites. (The American Museum of Natural History has also used Minecraft to help high school-age visitors explore the science and politics of food.) 
• Computerized Adaptive Testing, touted as the latest replacement for old-fashioned multiple-choice tests, a way to relieve teachers from the burden of correcting bubble sheets or even student essays, and a tool for self-paced instruction. (OK, I’m not sure what the right museum analogy is for this one — any suggestions, readers?
• Stealth Assessments, i.e., formative assessments embedded in games, with no pressure on the players/students. At the public forum, Valerie Shute, an education professor at Florida State, described an experiment that used an off-the-shelf video game (Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion) to track problem-solving skills that are part of the formal curriculum. (How teachers will use the assessment information for student evaluation is an open question, and not every lesson can be turned into a computer game.) 

Gaming and assessment are two areas where the Brookings publication would especially have benefitted from looking at museums and building on the expertise of museum educators and evaluators (who have been tackling the problem of assessing relatively brief and bounded learning experiences for many years). Although the report begins with the traditional claim that “the next generation of education technologies is facilitating substantial change,” I think it makes a good case that the confluence of new presentation technologies, new assessment technologies and new technologies to recognize student achievement (like digital badges) could really amount to something ... well, new.

This became even clearer after the public forum, which still left me with two questions:

• Why are (nearly) all the examples of education technology success stories drawn from STEM subjects? Where are the examples of education technology that improves historical understanding and sharpens moral reasoning? And how would you assess that kind of learning?
• How do these innovations from formal education settings apply to informal learning? And does interactive technology make formal learning more “informal” (even museum-like).

Go to the videotape and watch the answers from the panel at the forum — but don’t get your hopes up. Can we provide better answers?