<strong>Art on the Move: A Public Humanities Project at Johns Hopkins University</strong>

Art on the Move was an outcome of the course “Behind the Scenes at the Walters Art Museum: Material Migrations,” offered at the Walters Art Museum through the Program in Museums and Society [link to M&amp;S here: http://krieger.jhu.edu/museums/] at Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 2009. Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman were co-instructors and, with the technical guidance of Reid Sczerba, Senior Programmer Analyst in the university’s Center for Educational Resources, devised and oversaw this project. The course and project were funded by an Arts Innovation Grant from Johns Hopkins.

<strong>Except from course syllabus:</strong>

The goals of this class can be broken down into several categories:
<ul>
	<li>investigating the various ways/means/motives for the circulation of objects, and considering how meaning is shaped by context, from antiquity to the present and including the museum itself;</li>
	<li>conducting in-depth, independent research on objects in the Walters’ collection;</li>
	<li>experimenting with different styles of writing and narration;</li>
	<li>learning about different areas of museum practice, including curation, conservation, registration, and education;</li>
	<li>applying these experiences to the production of interpretative tools for public audiences of the Walters, in the form of Google Earth itineraries.</li>
</ul>
Each student will choose two* objects from the Walters’ collection to research, focusing on the “trajectory” of the objects and their shifting significance in different contexts. Research will involve studying the objects and object files at the museum as well as work in the Hopkins library and on-line. That work will be analyzed, interpreted, and gathered into a Google Earth Map “itinerary” for each object. Why? To share what we are learning with the public. This is a fundamental task of museums . . . in this course we extended that mission to the undergraduate classroom.

(*The seven students worked on two objects each; a selection of these was made for the final presentation on the Walters website.)