 Good morning everyone. Good morning. Thank you. If we've not met I'm Tom Collins. I'm the new Bauer family executive director and president of the foundation and it is more than the usual pleasure to welcome each of you online and those of you as the kids say IRL in real life to the to the bond I mean the kids to the to the barns Dimesia adult education programs annual the elect Dimesia lecture. Collectively the people in this room and the people joining us in the digital realm represent literally generations of barn students instructors close friends and dedicated volunteers across a variety of activities and you are all an important part both of the history of the barns but also essential to the life of the institution today. This event celebrates our educational mission with a presentation by in here I'm quoting the language from our invitation a speaker of significance in the world of art education aesthetics art criticism and or art history and as you will soon hear today's lecture by Rika Burnham a truly esteemed colleague a renowned scholar and practitioner of music museum education will I believe exceed every single objective that is indexed in that description. We share a core belief at the barns that art really does have the power to shape our individual and communal experience in positive ways to ameliorate our social and individual challenges and to bring us together and elevate us through shared experiences of the brilliant the beautiful and the sublime. Here at the barns we remain committed to the power of our mission which descends from Dr. Barnes founding of the institution in 1922 which focuses on explicitly both progressive education but also access to art and art education for all. Your participation and advocacy are essential to our success all of our successes and whether that means taking a class being a member volunteering as a docent donating to support scholarships for others in need or pledging as a member of the 1922 legacy society of which many of you I am very grateful to say are members please know that your involvement and service as ambassadors for the bonds foundation help ensure a vibrant future for the institution. So I thank you on behalf of all my colleagues here at the barns for all of your support in the many forms that it takes and now will you please join me in welcoming my colleague Dr. Martha Lucy who is our deputy director for research interpretation and education here at the barns. Martha. Thank you Tom. Good morning everyone. So nice to see everybody here. This is one of our favorite events of the year. We love this program. As you all know so well in 1922 Albert Barnes made the bold decision to charter this amazing place the Barnes Foundation and it was really it was a progressive project that was based on a simple idea and that idea was that art should be accessible to everyone and everyone has the capacity to appreciate it. This annual lecture honors the vital contributions of Violet Demacia to this progressive project. Demacia came to the barns in 1925 to study art and aesthetics and it wasn't long before she made herself indispensable as an intellectual partner to Albert Barnes and co-authoring books and eventually leading the education program and teaching. She was a legendary teacher and she taught for at least 50 years. Barnes and Demacia both believed that art and education could inspire us to live our lives in more meaningful ways and as alumni you all know exactly what i'm talking about. You know firsthand the magic of this collection and the transformation that can happen when you spend time looking closely at something and you know what a special community this is it's a kind of family that comes together around the love of of learning and around the love of this collection. We're very proud of the way that we have expanded Barnes's educational mission under Tom's leadership with our thoughtful exhibitions and programs and our expanding course array. We continue to teach on site but by adding courses online we are reaching more people than ever creating a kind of community that stretches around the world truly. It's very important to us that anybody who wants to take a class at the barns can do so and so as you may recall we launched the Richard Wattenmaker Adult Education Scholarship Program to support students who were interested in rolling in the certificate program. We also offer scholarships for individual classes and with your support we will continue to expand this effort. Our program this morning was made possible by the Noriega family who are here today. It has been a joy to get to know you Jay and your family through all of the many ways that you participate at the barns. You are all in for such a treat today. Our speaker is the best of the best and it is impossible to to oversell. So I will now, sorry Rika, it's a lot to live up to but I mean really it's um I um I you'll see. So now I'm going to turn the podium over to my esteemed colleague Bill Perthes who is our Bernard C. Watson director of adult education. Thank you. Good morning and thank you to Tom and to Martha and I want to welcome all of you here today. Excuse me I'm just so excited to hear and feel the enthusiasm in this room and to welcome more than a hundred alumnus who are joining us online. For those of you who I have not had a chance to meet as Martha said, I'm Bill Perthes the Bernard C. Watson director of adult education and it's my pleasure to be part of the Barns De Maisie adult education team. More so it's my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker Rika Burnham who will present it's all in the cards, Cezanne, Pedagogy and Purpose. Rika is a leading head of a leading theorist and practitioner in art museum gallery education. That gallery part of it is particularly essential both to her work as well as to her connection here with the barns and Rika is also a lecturer at Columbia University in New York. She previously served as head of education at the Frick Collection also in New York and project director for the teaching institute in the museum education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Many of you will be familiar with her work as a co-author of the book Teaching in the Art Museum Interpretations as Experience from 2011 which won the the prose award for the best education book from the Association of American Publishers and she will be featured in our forthcoming publication coming out that later this year entitled Barns Education Then and Now which features a transcription of the conversation that Rika and I had a spirited conversation at that. Following her presentation there will be time for a brief question and answer period and we want to encourage all of you for conversation and conviviality in the brunch that will follow upstairs but now please join me in welcoming Rika Burnham. Good morning. I'm so happy to add my welcome and to thank you for coming to the barns on this beautiful beautiful spring morning in Philadelphia and thank you to all of us who are joining online as well. A round of thanks to Tom Collins director, to Martha Lucy deputy director, to the wonderful Bill Perthes who just introduced me so wonderfully and to Nina Diefenbach, a long-time friend and colleague, to behind the scenes Alia Palumbo and Wes Bunch without whom this lecture could not have happened and further field to professor George Hine in Boston whose scholarship has inspired countless museum educators and to Elliot Kikey co-author of Teaching in the Art Museum in Los Angeles and to Vince Tallentino in New York. Thank you. Thank you all and above all to begin my thanks to Violette Demacia one of the great art educators of our time and one of the many great women in arts institutions who devoted their lives to education in the 20th century museum in America. We remember and honor Demacia today noting that she is one of the few women educators of that time whom we do remember most have disappeared from memory they're not they're their notes their classes their programs are not to be found in museum archives you can't find their names in the annual reports of museums. We know there were great women doing art education because it's word of mouth remember Miss Condit remember Mrs. Vansler and so on in any museum but Violette Demacia is remembered thanks to the Barnes Foundation and its profound commitment to honor its own history and she was a great part of it. I also want to sing a bit of a hymn of a praise for my mentor professor Maxine Green a follower of the teachings of John Dewey and in her lifetime she was affectionately called the philosopher queen of Teachers College. I speak to you today as a museum educator who humbly follows in the footsteps of Demacia and Green and an educator who had the great privilege of teaching in the Barnes some 20 years ago. It was an invitation that precipitated my lifelong love for the Barnes his collection its public its students and above all for its adamant stance for the centrality of education and the appreciation of the fine arts. I invite you now to join me to look closely at the card players by Cezanne one of the many great paintings in the collection of the Barnes. You can take a moment from wherever you are to see into the scene so focused so still so silent. You might begin by noticing the lush blues of the ample smock on the man on the right the bright red cravat of the standing man in the back the dark brown jacket of the man on the left the white smock of the center man. Their colors are softly echoed by the white and ochre pipes that have a place all their own on the wall behind. The opulent heavy curtain at odds you might think with the casual work clothes of the assembled group hovers over the blue smock and highlights the silhouette of a hat. Our eyes crisscross the composition from element to element and we find we are as spellbound as the card players themselves. It's a card game of course so obvious you don't say it and then it's not so obvious. Everyone at the table seems to have their eyes closed or at least their lids lowered so you can't see their eyes and where are the cards we wonder. One card is visible in the center of the table facedown with a pretty strong red. Maybe on a backgammon board? It could be as myrishapiro said collective solitaire. People at the table pipes on the wall one pipe being smoked one at the edge of the table three people with hats two without hats. We let ourselves lean into sea and suddenly we're at the edge of the table ourselves pulling up a chair and peering at the cards invited by the waiting pipe the space at the table and maybe the tantalizing drawer. We have joined the group. Your eye comes back to the yellow orange curtain with its curve resting on its opposite curve of the blue jacket. Our eyes shift to the standing man whose strong stance seems to balance the voluptuous curtain then we see the young girl her face white and intent. Does she belong here we wonder has she crept in? Is she seen by the others? As we look her white face increasingly whitens almost perfectly egg shaped it holds our attention. Maybe the space of the table is not for us after all. Our eyes shift to the soft evanescent blues reds lavenders of the table that suddenly seem at one with the luminous wall behind. Again we count six pipes five people four players three wearing hats two not wearing hats. Then you notice the rectangles of the table the drawer the frame picture on the wall the perspectival orthogonals of the table radiate toward us. We see a pyramid form of players what Barnes and Demacia called a pyramidal that embraces the group as a whole and as individuals. Duly noted we see and take pleasure in the upward rising triangle of the middle player wearing white the downward pointing triangle of his legs beneath the table. The noses of the two players in profile right and left their noses reiterate the down diagonal of the legs beneath the table and then we see their backs the diagonal suggested by their intently focused backs rising to meet in a triangulation within the mysterious artwork above an artwork that is unknowable an artwork that we see but we can't see this great Barnes painting which we know today as the card players was at one time called by Albert Barnes card players and girl and it is one of a series of five paintings Cezanne made exploring the theme of cards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is another card players it's also known as the card players a quick glance and it seems the same a slightly longer glance reveals that it is not in real life this is how they would hang side by side to scale we haven't seen them like this maybe one day we will but you can see from the slide comparison that the Barnes card players is about two and a half times as large as the one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as such is a majestic partner to the one at the Met and I move them into a scaled relationship here so that you can see them equally even though we must remember that in life they are not and I'd like you to take this moment to turn to someone next to you and you have three minutes to talk about the two hanging together and I'm going to time you please start I'm sorry I'm sorry to put a temporary halt to this generous conversation it's the it's the living embodiment of education is central to the Barnes and I hope that some of you if you're still interested in talking about the card players will join me at 1130 in the gallery to continue obviously there's so much to see and to say and to think and to feel and I can imagine from your conversations I wish I could have listened in on everyone that you will have explored how how this concept functioned as a stage for Cezanne for his experimentation and his imagination moving characters and props in and out the magic of the common place transfigured through his deployment of line color shape and form so thank you thank you for that the central practice of my many years as a museum educator has been teaching connecting people and art as bill said in the galleries like every museum educator who is here and every museum educator who has gone before us I am interested in this critical moment I'm interested in this critical moment when you stand before an artwork and decide to stay or to go or to move on to the next and the critical question for educators is how do we help our visit visitors how do we excite interest how do we encourage them to stay longer and go deeper why and what do we collectively see Albert Barnes Albert Barnes had a dream the dream of a common language and this term I borrow from an Adrian rich poem the dream of a common language for understanding the visual arts or indeed all arts a language that answers the statements we hear visitors make all the time I don't know anything about art Barnes and demesio would have said yes you do the promise is all you have to do is learn how to see inform your perception the rest is already within you Barnes said that the scientific observation of art will function like a spell that unlocks a secret door revealing how art works without the need of art history or an advanced degree opening works of art to everyone regardless of where you come from how much money you make what your background is what schools you went to in this scenario for Albert Barnes appreciating art takes its place in the American dream as a pastime and a calling accessible to all art is for everyone and so Barnes in believing that works of art could be appreciated through an analysis of their plastic forms such as color line and shape which we today call formal elements Barnes with the elect demesia constructed for their teachers for their educators a pedagogy known today as the Barnes method focusing on learning to see those formal elements enforced by the Barnes beautiful ensembles or wall pictures in 1917 Barnes met philosopher John Dewey at Columbia University and a lifelong friendship and collaboration ensued Barnes went to Dewey to learn about education Dewey went to Barnes to learn about art in 1923 Barnes named Dewey the first director of education at the foundation and Barnes dedicated his 1925 book art of painting to Dewey and Dewey in turn dedicated his 1934 book arts experience to Barnes the foundation open to the public in 1925 it would not be a museum but it would be a great collection of art it would be simultaneously an experiment a foundation and a school importantly for education John Dewey theorized the concept of Anne experience and when he wrote Anne experience he italicized the Anne Anne experience something that is separate and distinct from everyday experience Anne experience helps us understand what is possible when we look at works of art he described Anne experience in this way that Anne experience happens when you are pulled into the work of art when time seems to stop when you're fully absorbed when there is nothing else besides you and that work of art as we experience we interpret and as we interpret we experience we search for meaning that opens up within us John Dewey called this doing and undergoing we are simultaneously doing that is acting upon the artwork and undergoing that is receiving the artwork doing and undergoing becomes an unending cycle that only rests but never concludes in this way artworks are inexhaustible and invitational to our infinite curiosity we have a sense of harmony and fulfillment Anne experience doesn't happen on demand it is memorable it is alive and it is unpredictable so in that particular moment when you stand in front of an artwork in the museum and you decide whether to stay or whether to go you may find sometimes as James Elkins the art historian says the object stares back or it may send you to its label or ask you to tick through the art historical classifications into which it might fit for example is it post-impressionism or proto-modernist and then you move on or maybe you take a photo to think about it later but sometimes the work of art invites you in what is it the educator says that beckons you and gets you to stay probably if you stayed on you had a glimmer of possibility that there was more that some kind of experience possibly even Anne experience was at hand or in the words of Kenneth Clark the artwork promised it would relate to our own lives in some way so as to increase our energy of spirit we learn in this moment to let a work of art settle down so we can begin to see in we attend we ask and listen to our own questions we encourage curiosity we imagine we privilege talking to and with the work of art and to and with each other as you just did many have wondered how a lifelong friendship between the sometimes irascible barns and the rhapsodic duly could have happened but it did and it has been remarkably chronicled by George Hyne what they shared besides a deep intellectual life was a commitment to social justice and educational reform and the promotion of the arts and education and they were consonant in an understanding of a rich theory of radical pictorial investigations and to education as essential to democracy turning to myself as a museum educator profoundly impacted by both barns and duly i have often wondered what barns and duly talked about over lunch we think of barns the collector who lectured on a rigorous scientific objective method for looking at art duly on the other hand was the philosopher who advocated art as experience how did a cool how did a cool pedagogy coexist with unfettered imagination and possibility how to understand the estranged outlier barns with the celebrated and widely accepted duely duely's work was introduced to me by maxine green philip jackson and george hyne and increasingly duely's philosophy underscored all my own teaching in the museum with elliott kai key we redefined art museum teaching in terms of and experience and theorized a practice that had largely been an improvisation with duely's help we now had coherence and teaching this gave our work new purpose not what to think about art but how to think about art in a spirit of freedom if you let demesia work closely with barns as martha described in her introduction and after barns's death in 1951 the elect demesia became the steward of education and the method in 2003 i directly encountered the method and met the venerable teachers of the barn's traditions course at that time mr safari and mr church they were welcoming but wary and i found them a bit doctrinaire and perhaps for good reason because outside the barns the method was whispered about as eccentric aberrant peculiar and secret it seemed that the method over time had become isolated some said even to the point of tedium i always suspected that there was a secret methods handbook somewhere in the barns and i suspected there might even have been a certification system but george hind and i defer to george suggests it was an oral tradition i think that sounds exactly right which may explain why people had heard about the barns method but few in the larger world of education actually knew what it was you had to live it to understand it when i taught at the barns in 2003 it was my students who taught me about the barns method and persuaded me of its riches and i have to acknowledge that one of them is here today tom could you stand up thank you we haven't seen each other for 20 years but we shared one beautiful evening after another at that time and it was you tom you and the other students who taught me the riches of the method how deep it was and how you would immerse yourselves of an evening in the method and the next morning you'd wake up to breakfast and there'd be a coffee cup on the table and you'd see its circular rim and and the dark coffee in the middle of the circle and you'd look out the window and you'd see the fading full moon in the early morning sky and you would see a consonance between the two or you'd look at the rumpled tablecloth with delicate etched shadows defining strange lines weaving back and forth and again you'd look out the window and see the same pattern in the branches of the trees with the early morning light dappling through and it became clear to me that what the barns method was offering was a way to live with art a language not restricted to the museum but a language that extended into the world and it described the pleasures of attentiveness of slowing down and of experiencing harmony but still from from my my perch in new york as an educator i i kept proceeding perceiving dissonance between dewey's inspirational beliefs and the practice of the method as i had seen it and since that time i've been seeking a kind of reconciliation between the two the rhapsodic ideas of dewey the tough analytic approach of barns this is not to suggest that barns and dewey need a reconciliation hardly but as a gallery teacher whose spirit has been shaped by both i did so my proposal for your consideration today is this that barns gave educators a pedagogy the formalist approach we know today and dewey gave education an elegant purpose barns gave everyone a way to attend to the artworks dewey gave everyone a sense of the possible barns gave us the visible verifiable world of forms dewey gave us the invisible the ever renewing world of experience imagination and possibility together in recent years for me i have understood and come to adore the two seeming polarities as making a beautiful whole it was maxine green who would talk about the mystery of an experience in practice how you couldn't have one just because you wanted one that it was more like a visitation and furthermore that it was compounded by the phenomena that you couldn't know if you had had an experience until afterwards maxine would say if you think to yourself oh my i'm having an experience you've already fallen out of it she said you would only know when you had experience with an artwork when you couldn't stop thinking about it later that night or when the next day it flashed into your mind's eye or 20 years later when you are surprised to remember it yet again even john dewey was surprised i think when he had an experience he described this phenomenon in a letter to barns in 1918 after his first visit to see barns's collection he wrote i want to thank you for the extraordinary experience you gave me i've been conscious of living in a medium of color ever since friday almost swimming in it barns had awakened dewey to seeing dewey had had an experience and this is exactly what we want to happen for our visitors seeing as experience lingering not wanting to leave telling us they never knew how to look at a work of art before but they do now swimming in it and now the paradox when educators press maxine green she would say no you cannot you must not teach with experience as a goal but you can teach towards experience by creating the conditions for experience and this is precisely what the barns method did it gave you the conditions to make possible experience the collection the ensembles the programs the teachers all making possible experience the foundation is an ensemble of thinkers and art all making experience possible when the barns says education is central it really means it we return now to the galleries we began with the pleasures of diagonals and rectangles and curves the interplay of colors the harmony of the whole the conditions for experience were set the door to the artwork opened and our imagination as dewey promised began to move in imagination and interpretation as i heard happening in this room it is where the action is we play in we play ourselves in we play our ideas in each idea each imaginative speculation is an individual card we play into the game of interpretation it seems there are three positions for us we can stand opposite that man with the red cravat diagonally looking in we can join the young girl and peer over her shoulder we can pull up a chair and find ourselves face to face with the others we suddenly have a sense of having entered the pictorial action the pictorial thought we are dreaming while awake things jostle for position and relation energy attentiveness juxtaposition and joy are all on the rise sezon is said to have said i will astonish paris with an apple and we believe him he astonishes us today with a card game we've pulled up a chair we pick up the cards as we look the faces of the players redden and notice in this detail the marvelous brushstrokes of red and how they key us in to seeing the whole person and the red on his hands the center person his reddening face and finally the man on the left whose reddening face disappears into shadows the cards they hold the cards are blurred are they being secreted from our site by sezon or are the players shuffling them or possibly they too hiding them from us we do not know if we are watchers or players we remind ourselves that an experience releases us from the predictable a card game we could contend does the same releases the players from mundane cares absorbs the participants but in a card game there is also intrigue and desire there is chance a hand is dealt cards are played in relationships shift to winners and losers chumps and champions bravely we decide to play we become players this painting is not about nothing advises art historian richard shift and as such he plays a first card into the game we're not sure about the other cards on the table they might be snippets they might be disappearing as the one on the top left is actually into the surface we look for the hands of the players they look like they are hiding cards but we can't see the cards of either man either the man on the left or on the right are they being shuffled or secreted from sight the central man holds tightly onto his cards which are quite defined is it his turn we wonder then someone in our group plays in a card and says hey this might be a setup these players might be card sharks is the standing man with the red cravat working it again we see the pipe waiting we move in close and then we move back we return to the face down card red white blue someone says wait a minute blue blanc rouge could it be france the republic she had thrown down a card we had to consider the painting as a social political statement this could be a serious game she said there could be high stakes maybe the future of france it's it's a game of destiny and fate but not all cards are equal some cards are best held close to the chest others will change the game a student says curiously it looks like saizan painted this picture from under the table ha we said we love the idea even if we don't quite get what you mean but we hold on to it she had played in a high card we wait then we see the picture in the gold frame at the top in the center the picture that is unknowable that is in the process of becoming always in the process of becoming like our understanding the pipes glow on the wall the drawer below waits the knob to open it beckons maybe there's a hand of cards inside the drawer for us then the knob on the drawer darkens the drawer shifts it squeaks it settles the child comes in again spectral some of us wonder if she's a ghost she's like the moon she's pale she's expectant is she an angel a symbol she seems to see all we find ourselves having crept up to the table peering in as she does another apocryp apocryphal story about saizan when he was asked what he wanted most saizan said certainty what do you want most mr saizan certainty ha says someone not in this game and so we pick up the cards every time a card is played in a card game the game changes some cards are better than others in this game a long time ago in the barns it was this card that i'm going to tell you about that changed the game for me one of the students said it's a slight of hand the whole picture is a slight of hand we will never know we will only dream and that was the conundrum and the joy of that day and with that the interpretive card she played in changed saizan's card players for all time and so now you were given a card when you came in i'd like you to pull out that card and you should have a pencil and it's your turn to play in an interpretive card into saizan's card players so i want you to play an idea that you have about this painting by writing it down on the card and imagine that you're going to come in and put it down on the table and for all who are willing we would like to collect these as you leave you have one minute yes so at this point you probably have your own idea about what's going on in the card players i'd like you to write that down and imagine you're going to put your idea on the table of interpretation okay 30 more seconds okay and stop hold on to those and please give them to us at the very end we'd love to read them and think about them and add them to add them to the interpretations that paintings collect over time because we attend to them and i would like to say by way of closing that the joyous roar of conversation of before shifted now to the intent tiny scribblings of your pencils all constituting perhaps and we won't know till later an experience in the barns and so a final word to the gallery educators here in this way works of art live in the present and they are relevant not because of what they were but because of what they are to us now today in this moment it's an endless play of possibility giving us access to the heart where someone is singing words we can't quite hear but somehow do at the end of his life john dewey said it's education plain and simple thank you thank you very much i now am inviting Bill Perthes up to talk to me a little bit about some of these thoughts and to take questions from all of you so i'll start and i preface this by saying we talked a little bit yesterday about this but one of the things is i've been thinking about our previous i'm putting us back in the gallery sorry there we go that feels better home is where the heart is um our from our previous previous conversation as well as thinking about your topic today is knowing both gallery education art education and the barns method to what degree have the two crossed to what degree i think many of us often wonder has the barns method found its way into other institutions and other approaches has the barns method is this on has the barns method found its way into other museums and other approaches and i would say not enough and i i want to tell you a little story i was teaching a class every day for for five weeks in in my dewy inflected style and on the third day i had this feeling that people weren't seeing and i used actually a street as an ensemble and i pointed it out the looking and the attending to the lines the shapes the colors and the forms and i felt like i was dr barns in that moment and at the end of the five day at the end of the five days several of the students came up to me and said that was the best day that was the day we really learned how to look and i think and and and that's why i kind of went through this gymnastics today of barns and dewy because i don't want to lose what barns gave us a kind of clarity um about seeing that i think especially when you are in the museum on and on and on you you kind of forget those principles they become innate but when you're bringing people in for the first time or the first year they should never be forgotten they're absolutely foundational to to experience and you find that we often have students that could that come back year after year or semester after semester would have you and we're fortunate to see that evolution of being able to to see and look um this is an unfair question but do you get more pleasure in that initial spark or years later as they've learned the the task of looking and are better able to articulate their experiences is is the one you prefer over the other you know i kind of think the barns method is a way of attending of slowing down of seeing the magic of of art and life unfold is the alpha and the omega that you begin with it in some kind of way it's what you notice and it scaffolds jumps into these ideas as with the card players into these um you know places of of of destiny and fate and fortune and ghosts and but in the end you come back and the pleasure returns of the attending the slowing down and the looking and i think that's what john do we was talking about that the artwork is never exhausted you just rest and then you begin again so it's really a cycle bill i think i i'm appreciate that you mentioned two of my mentors uh harry so farby and barton church who were incredibly gracious as i was finding my way stumbling my way into understanding the method and something that struck me i met them after each of them were approaching teaching 50 years at the at the barns and regularly as i was struggling to put together a lesson plan for the coming week they were in the galleries looking 50 years later still looking and i very keenly remember in particular mr church saying look at the pictures look at the pictures and that's where that's where you learn just by constantly seeing new things you know the alpha and the omega right look at the pictures uh one final thing i martha and i were talking uh when you put the when you asked us to talk about the the two card players um one of the things that struck us was and i appreciate how you scaled them and so we got a sense of just how different the size of those pictures are it's something that not all viewers i think take into consideration how impactful the scale of the picture can be um from your experience uh what are some of the differences in in being in front of those two pictures both pictures which you know well sorry sorry you know i i i actually became acquainted with the barns card players first and it has stayed with me as as like one of the most important artworks ever in the entire history of the world and i always thought the the met card players was a bit of a disappointment we won't tell them because i've always felt that it needed that spectral young girl appearing in and and yet i recently took students at the met to the card players and you know what it was pretty magical and i shared them with i brought a reproduction and i cut them to scale and i brought a reproduction of the barns and it was interesting that the original work of art just triumphed over over any reproduction they couldn't really see the magic of the barns in a reproduction and so i know that it's sort of an invasive to answer bill but it's being in front of it and seeing that brushwork and seeing the color and feeling the life of the surface and the ideas that are that are part of that that universe of that artwork um do we want to take some i think we should hey bill uh i have a question from online please uh so actually rika um roman who's a gallery educator here at the barns asks what your favorite memory from teaching at the barns and what was the most challenging for you um my favorite memory was walking in the door of the barns in the evenings to teach my class and to find my students waiting um anticipating the time that we would have together and there was a it was a potent moment so full of what was to come so i think i think i could i could say that and uh the most challenging was i was terrified because my work has been mostly focused on one work of art at a time and i was terrified about whether or not they could be seen and understood separate from the ensembles and so i remember in the class that i did we did a lot of drawing to kind of focus in and i thought that would be a a great challenge but in the end the art triumphs and we were there and we found those works one by one so we have a catch box that's a microphone so the people online can hear i've heard it can be thrown it can be thrown thank you very much uh i think i can't imagine how many lectures this crowd has sat through for me that was probably the most transformative i've ever heard congratulations on that thank you i do have a question and that is is that the two uh images that you just the two paintings you just juxtaposed uh were very different uh and i agree with you the barns is far superior uh which is a good thing for philadelphia the question that i have though is that was say son's experience evolving was he uh his whole process changing in terms of how he is evaluating what he wanted to put in that frame um did ever everybody heard the question was says on um practice evolving right for between the two card players the interesting um art historical uh fact that we know that may or may not help is that we don't know which was painted first they were they were painted between 1890 and 1892 and there have been proponents for each which is why i did that fade to see what happens when you move things in and take them out because it may have been even and this is what i've started to personally suspect is that he was doing them simultaneously thank you for the question thank you good morning and thank you so much for that lecture it was most um elucidating i really enjoyed it you just sort of answered my question i was going to say was the smaller one at the met which is subsequently different in line and especially color a study for the big one because it doesn't give you any of this same value and impression that the one that we have here i mean there's so much more variation in color so but if we don't know which one was painted first i don't know if one could be a study no but i think your observation is right the color is much more saturated and um other people have proposed that the met painting is a study for the barns but other people then have said no the barns which is slightly sketchier in hand and in style was actually the study and that barns consolidated compressed increased the color and took out the distractions we have a question from online all right one more online hi rika i have another one from online okay um and so they ask how did demazia fit into the barn's dewey relationship may i turn that to bill that's a great question um as rika mentioned mr. masia came on board in 1925 as a originally as a french tutor began taking classes and then very quickly evolved into being an instructor herself and then co-author and barns writing to dewey in talking about demazia compared her mind as equal to to his which is a pretty profound comparison i think the the role that she played my my suspicion is that for as strong a personality as barns had he enjoyed the interplay with intellectual um equals um and we see this and i don't say that out of nowhere we see this in in the manuscripts for instance for for the texts that both for the art and painting the subsequent editions of that as well as for the four subsequent books that the hands that um that added to it are not merely barns or demazias but others the mullen sisters in particular lara geiger that he uh that he realized that he benefited it is understanding benefited from talking and conversation and working through ideas with people who he uh whose opinion he uh he admired and uh felt were equal to his so to the short answer is i think that she mr mazzi was central to clarifying for barns what he thought and then certainly after barns's death um we owe so much to her uh as she took the method and continued to refine it um and i'll just add to that another thing that came out of our conversation yesterday is that i don't see that process as ever ending is that one of the things that barns repeatedly castigated against was academicism anything that falls into a kind of codification in which the strictures don't allow for continued growth um and you know building on the philosophy of doing life is constant evolution and development and as such how we understand the method and how we how we apply the method itself has to constantly and continue to grow which is why i'm i'm so grateful to have colleagues that we continue to talk about it and push the boundaries and question each other the foundations remain the same the the importance of the concepts remain the same but how we understand them in our own you know and now in the 21st century as i said we don't look at works of art or our world the same way that you know barns did in the early part of the 20th century even mr mazzi did in the middle and latter part of the 20th century and so by necessity we have to continually um evolve our understanding of the method as well thank you um first i want to say um first i want to say that um i appreciate and and continue for you both rica miss rica and mr bill to continue in museum education um i am a priority of i lived in brooklyn low social economic urban area and because of public art and opening up of public arts museums and libraries i was introduced to art and when i moved to philadelphia i was an adult and married a philadelphia and then grew and raised my children here and when the barns came to philadelphia i was here and the barns um education program and the museum itself even before i took a class i have taken a class allowed me to really understand art i didn't have access to our education i didn't have you know the formal education of what museum art was and i was always intimidated going into museums um i was well into my 40s when i first uh came into the barns and i was fifth in my mid 50s when i took my first class about the um impressionist so i always saw those pictures and um in books and in the museums and felt that i was not welcomed in that space the barns has uh made uh folks like me feel that they're welcoming this space this space is for us too to learn to enjoy to see that's why my question is in but is is there truly still you get this feeling like there's the right or the wrong way to look at a picture and interpret art um the answer is probably yes and no but that all anytime you look at a picture is the right way but the best way is when you when you stay with it and i think it's getting increasingly harder for us with our cell phone activity and our laptops and our ipads and our our visual attentiveness is i think um getting more rare and and so anytime that you can stand in front of a work and i even clock myself sometimes okay i'm going to stand here for five minutes and not take a photo not check my text messages i'm just going to look and i think i think that's the right way um is and then and then after that it's it's your it's your adventure it's your journey um the Dewey and the scholar um Bill up Jackson used to say you have to remember looking at artwork is a spiritual gym and you go into the gym and you see where it takes you um there was a question right here um is that Olivia yes Olivia thank you uh i just want to remember Mr. Masia as one of the unique people who would answer questions at everyone's level people would ask what you might think of as a dumb question but she would come on to that level to find a way into the question and maybe that's the solution to the two pictures that each has to come from their own level thank you was a lovely talk thank you thank you for bringing Mr. Masia back to us in that way thank you last question rika my name is Jan Ostrov and i was also privileged to be in the class that you taught at the barns in 2003 um and if i could share just briefly a memory from that class um as you did today you involved us actively in participating and one of the things that you did was you would have us copy paintings i had never had any art education did not consider myself to be an artist it was well into my adult life and you had us copy um Gerard David's crucifixion and i myself taught for 40 years and when i presented my work to you i did what so many of my own students had done i apologized for it i said oh this is the south park jesus for those who are familiar and you said to me oh no jan it's the gaugan jesus 20 years later i'm here to say thank you i had never forgotten that class thank you thank you jan i have to say i think our hearts are truly singing for joy um and i can feel the energy in the room and i'm so um excited that there were still hands raised because our morning is going to continue um but before we do that i just want to extend our um deepest thanks to you rika as you said in the beginning to see to say to think to feel um and that art is inexhaustible and invitational and that is something that i know each one of us carries forward in our hearts in our conversations in our in our celebration today so i just want to close by saying thank you for all your participation by taking a class here or in the arboretum for looking and exploring and talking about the art and what it does in your life and the life of your family and community and we are thrilled that you're part of the barns um demacia education community we hope that you're a member of the barns we hope that you consider supporting the wanton maker scholarships to ensure other adults can participate in these programs to think about your legacy joining the barns and violet demacia and dewy um by joining the legacy society or even considering a gift to the campaign so the invitation is yours we want you to delight in the barns wherever you will be fulfilled and find most meaningful and so with that i invite you to join us for the reception um upstairs in the annenberg court where you can um meet a new friend reconnect with old fellow classmates and also delight in our special exhibition um which is on view right now at sue williamson and leba hang hanye tell me what you remember that's open in the robert's galleries and of course the collection which we know and love is yours to delight in and as rica said at 11 30 you can revisit the card players together so with that let us continue thanks