Since opening its doors at the end of August, the new Art Museum of West Virginia University has been hosting a large number of students and other groups eager to learn about art.

It has been a busy time for Heather Harris, the museum’s educational program manager, who joined the museum staff a mere one week before the opening. Harris, a Morgantown native, spent 15 years practicing and studying arts education across three continents.

“When I saw that a new museum was opening its doors in my hometown and they were looking for someone to lead their education programs, I jumped at the opportunity to return to a place that I love and continue the work that has stimulated my scholarship and practice as an arts educator,” she said.

Some of the visitors to the museum during the first six weeks included elementary and middle school students from Monongalia and surrounding counties, and WVU students studying art history, education and special education. Elementary classroom teachers also visited to learn about promoting creativity in the classroom.

Harris designs a special program for each group touring the opening exhibition, titled “Visual Conversations: Looking and Listening.” Her goal is to engage with the visitors and help them understand the works of art that speak to them.

She also trains the Art Museum’s docents, who lead interactive tours to help groups and individuals learn about the works of art on view. She organized a group of students and community volunteers who signed on during opening week and they are now stationed in the galleries.

Her background is actually in theater. Harris first became interested in arts education while working at Theatre Royal, Bath in England as an undergraduate and then earned a master’s degree in Educational Theatre from New York University.

She has performed Shakespeare in schools in New York City, studied with students of renowned theater artist Augusto Boal in Puerto Rico, and taught improv to elementary school students.

Eventually she began teaching full time, first in a middle school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and later at a combined middle and high school in Harlem. She also spent a year in Buenos Aires, Argentina, working for a touring theater company that performed plays in English to help Spanish-speaking students learn the language. With this group, she traveled throughout the continent, crossing the Andes in a white cargo van that doubled as a tour bus, sometimes performing three shows a day before packing up and heading to the next city.

So how does all of this experience in theater lead to a career in art museums?

“While teaching in Harlem, I grew more and more frustrated with the role of the arts in schools,” Harris said. “I saw them being increasingly marginalized in the face of heightened emphasis on standardized testing, and I was upset when I saw students being pulled from their art, music, and drama classes for remedial math and reading sessions.”

To increase her capacity as an advocate for the arts and broaden her influence on arts education policy, Harris decided to pursue a doctorate in Curriculum & Instruction, with an emphasis on aesthetic education, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“I wanted to find ways the arts can help both students and teachers move beyond the walls of the classroom to engage with the larger world,” she said.

As a doctoral student, Heather designed a research project focusing on a partnership between local elementary schools and the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois. The feedback she provided based on her research resulted in her teaching and administering school programs at the museum, including a recurring weeklong residency for third, fourth and fifth graders, as well as more in-depth professional development for teachers.

Harris now brings all of this experience to the Art Museum of WVU, which offers a variety of educational programs, most of which are free and open to the public.

“I am excited to design new educational programs and partnerships with K-12 schools, institutions of higher education, and the larger community in West Virginia,” she said.

“We want to make the Art Museum a welcoming space for everyone to experience the power and intimacy of viewing art in real life.”

For more information on the Art Museum’s educational programs, contact Heather Harris at Heather.Harris@mail.wvu.edu or phone 304-293-5267. More information is also available on the Art Museum website at http://artmuseum.wvu.edu.

-WVU-

cl/11/03/15

CONTACT: Charlene Lattea, College of Creative Arts
304-293-4359, Charlene.Lattea@mail.wvu.edu

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