Cool Culture Guest Blogger: Rachel Ropeik of the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA
This piece was originally posted on Cool Culture’s blog, as part of a series of guest bloggers who worked in various ways with the organization.
I grew up in a land of local history museums. Concord, Massachusetts: home of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond; the Old North Bridge, where the Revolutionary War’s “shot heard round the world” was fired; and the houses (and graves) of Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and more. So, of course, there was much local museum-going when I was growing up. I remember a lot of it, and I’m sure that early exposure fed into my art history degrees and my love of museums.
In all of those visits, there were two that I can link directly to the fact that I’m a museum educator today. One was a series of third grade trips to Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House (pictured above), where not only did costumed educators show us around in character as the Little Women sisters and their friends and family, but where, right in the house’s living room, my class performed a play written by Jo March–er, that is, Louisa May Alcott–herself. It was my first inkling that museums could be places for performance and participation.
The other early museum trip that sticks with me to this day was a visit to the Concord Museum (they’re also on Twitter) that probably did include some gallery visiting, but in my memory is all hands-on. We tried carding wool, we saw what a room looked like lit by lantern, and we made silhouette portraits. Colonial times were fascinating! Museums could be places where we went beyond looking at things and actually made them!
