Uncovering Cultural Infrastructure: Tour & Workshop on Cleveland’s Cultural Founders

Creating Cultural Infrastructure: Founders Day at the CMA

Spend an afternoon in Cleveland’s University Circle for an experience that is part tour, part public history storytelling workshop, and part discussion of intergenerational communication.

Art historian and Cleveland historian, Holly Witchey, will lead us in an overview of the history of the Doan Brook, Wade Park, University Circle area (warts and all) before heading over to the newly 100 year old Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA).

The founders of the Cleveland Museum of Art–men and women who played significant roles in the creation of the larger cultural infrastructure of the city as well–are more than names on a wall. At the museum participants will be broken up into teams. Each team will be presented with a packet of information about the CMA and the name(s) of an historical figure(s) associated with the founding of the museum and other cultural institutions. Teams will have two hours to access readily available resources (online, printed, and human) and explore the museum. The goal: a 10 minute lightning presentation that introduces us to the history of an individual(s) and how digital story-telling and gaming techniques might be used to better understand the past and encourage intergenerational empathy in a new generation of museum visitors.

Schedule:
12:30pm – Bus leaves the Conference Hotel (Hilton Downtown). *You can choose to take your own transportation to get to the meeting site for lunch on your own. At Cleveland’s University Circle, Holly recommends Happy Dog (http://www.happydogcleveland.com/about-hd-euclidtavern.php–a 10 minute walk from Case Western Reserve University’s Tinkham Veale Center (http://case.edu/universitycenter/).
1:00pm-Participants reconvene [ in Tinkham Veale Lobby] by the big screen where they will be met by Holly Witchey and divided into teams before taking a short walking tour of Wade Park/University Circle in Route to the Art Museum.
1:30pm – Teams will be give packets of information and set loose in the art museum to consider how best to tell the history of the “subject(s)” of their packet.
3:30 – Teams reconvene in CMA Atrium to begin the Lightning Presentations – 5 teams, 10 minutes per team with coffee/tea and pastries.
5:00 – Bus picks participants up at CMA

This tour requires 12 people to run and is limited to 28 people.

Bibliography:
Van Tassel, David and Grabowski, John, eds, "The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History," Online Edition (http://ech.cwru.edu/)
Rarick, Holly. "Progressive Vision: A History of Downtown Cleveland, 1903-1930)" (Indiana University Press and the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1986)
Witchey, Holly Rarick. "The Fine Arts in Cleveland: An Illustrated History" (Indiana University Press, 1994)