Successful (Art) Museum Visits
Prior to arriving at Tufts/SMFA, I infrequently visited art museums—the National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery in Washington, D.C. marked my only museum conquests for several years. However, my enrollment at SMFA generated an unprecedented interest in museum/gallery attendance. Fortunately, Tufts offers students the opportunity to attend several Boston art (and other) museums free of charge during their time at the university—the ICA, Isabella Stewart Gardner, the MFA, the Harvard Art Galleries, the TUAG (Tufts University Art Galleries), and the SMFA, among a few others, are excellent options for your future museum visits.
In my experience, museum visits require three-stages: planning, positioning, appreciation. Beginning with our first stage: for students considering attending any museums in Boston, I would highly recommend planning your trip—pedestrian and vehicular traffic can impact your travels. If the museum closes at 5:00pm, such as the MFA, for instance, I would plan to arrive an hour before last entry (4:30pm). In my opinion, a successful and rewarding museum visit requires, at the very least, 45-minutes to truly appreciate the artwork. If I were planning to visit the MFA on Saturday afternoon…perhaps, 2:00pm…depending on transportation choice, I would add 10-to-15-minutes extra to account for traffic both on route as well as inside the museum.
After receiving entry into the museum, we enter the second stage of successful museum visits: positioning. Even the simplest of museums offer maps to visitors—when you find yourself enthralled with the artwork, sometimes navigating can prove difficult. Fortunately, most museum maps coordinate with signage along the walls that help direct your exploration. In the event that you find yourself irreparably lost, museum staff (including guards) are well-equipped (and happy) to guide you to your destination. Now, the second stage—positioning—refers not only to navigating the museum, but also to navigating the artwork. Most museums implement guardrail, string, or motion-detection systems to ensure that museum goers maintain a safe distance from the artwork—minding these limits will prevent any accidents which result in your removal from the museum.
The final stage—appreciation—refers to experience both during and after your museum visit. Firstly, as I have found, thirty-second glances at artwork provide hardly enough time to truly appreciate—in classes which require museum visits, professors will often request that you spend 15-to-30-minutes analyzing (a singular) artwork. In the event that you find yourself low on time, photographs (if permitted) should capture the essence of the artwork. Either way, a successful museum visit generates a long-lasting appreciation that, in my experience, informs several aspects of life. Even for engineering or mathematics students, a quality visit to an art museum might revolutionize how you perceive your research…you never know. So, for any rising first-years, I would highly recommend attending one of the many free art museums in Boston as provided by Tufts--your mind might be blown before you even know it.