Joyce J. Scott Kickin' It with the Old Masters was the culmination of an unprecedented joint venture between two of Baltimore's leading arts organizations - The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and The Maryland Institute, College of Art (MICA). The profoundly exciting project transformed the traditional model of the museum exhibition and underscored the importance of collaboration.

In the following excerpts from an interview conducted at the Museum, Doreen Bolger, Director of the Museum and Fred Lazarus IV, President of the Institute's College of Art, reflect on what the project has meant to both organizations and to the community.
On Attracting Diverse Audiences

On Lessons Learned from the Exhibition

On Building Connections with the Community

On the Exhibition's Impact

On Re-opening the Museum's Front Doors

On Attracting Diverse Audiences

Doreen Bolger: The potential of a project that would involve artists and bring art to the larger community to engage new audiences was very exciting. Engagement is intensified by actually having contact with an artist -- one who lives in your community, who has some of the same challenges you face, who brings up things that are difficult to address but that we have to face.

This is as important for the traditional museum audience as it is for new audiences. What we wanted to do with this exhibition is to bring both audiences together. They each have something to learn from the other; there are things they can experience together.

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On Lessons Learned from the Exhibition

Fred Lazarus: It's quite wonderful that, to get in and out of the exhibition's activity room, you must walk past the African collection and the room with Asian art. All of those things distract you in a healthy way. There are other elements, too: the fact that the materials used in Joyce's work are often related to items that are in the permanent collection. So people enter those spaces and find themselves engaged in ways that don't happen with the usual temporary shows. In those, you typically walk up the escalator, you're in the space, then you work yourself around as quickly as possible, and out of the building. Here you really are forced to get lost a little bit, which is really wonderful.

Doreen Bolger: With the success and impact of Joyce's show, we have a real impetus to do more in the future. When we reopen the Cone collection next year, we will have a display of modern French art with emphasis on the work of Matisse and Picasso. We might bring in a contemporary artist who's been inspired by Matisse to do an installation. We'll have all these same sorts of things going on throughout the building.

Fred Lazarus: When we look at what's happening today in terms of the World Wide Web, it's clear that this kind of multilevel layering is how the younger generation thinks. This provides opportunities to reconsider the whole nature of the way one displays and installs work...to think multidimensionally. What you have is something that's three-dimensional, multilayered and interactive, where many things are happening simultaneously, and they're all interfacing to collectively make the whole. No more can you point to one piece and then say these pieces interact with it. That's basically the old way of looking at it, and it doesn't work any more.

Doreen Bolger: It means that, in terms of any exhibition that comes to the museum, there is no such thing as a pre-packaged show. I don't think we'll ever be at that point again.

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On Building Connections with the Community

Fred Lazarus: There's been a lot of work done in the last five or six years on programming that, by its nature, reaches out and brings in non-traditional audiences. What people sometimes find, however, is a lack of overlap. New audiences often don't return because no synergy is being created.

What Joyce and the others have done is to build these connections so that people who come to her exhibition because of one motivation find something that's worthwhile and important to them. They'll come back for another reason, and they'll be engaged. It's a much more complicated process than basically putting an exhibition in a space and then pulling it out again...it's more than just creating an advisory committee for the exhibition. It's using that exhibition as a way to get people engaged in art and in the art form, and through that find things that interest them that they've never thought about before. In this regard, we're rarely as creative as we need to be. All of us have a lot to do to make this work. And it's going to force us to really rethink the way we do things.

Fred Lazarus: Focus groups, or community response teams, were very important for us in the late formative stages of the exhibition. This was not an "advisory committee" per se, which I usually think of as designed to help you develop audiences for a predetermined product. This community response team was really intended to provide substantive input for many aspects of the exhibition.

The team included a broad group, primarily of African Americans: teachers, religious leaders, a psychiatrist, a social worker and one of the guards who is one of our graduates. At this time, the exhibition was shaped enough so that people could respond to it but not shaped beyond the point where things couldn't be changed. They reviewed the layout of the exhibition and issues related to sensitivity and programming. They considered the intended consequences and helped us ensure we realized our intentions. Those kinds of inputs are important - even how we label the art. Occasionally, something might happen that will totally change the shape of a project, but, in this case, because we listened beforehand, it was more a subtle "tweaking."

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On the Exhibition's Impact

Doreen Bolger: The exhibition has been a layered success in the same sort of way that the experience is layered. It's been successful internally in getting us to think about how we work. It's been a success artistically. It's been a success educationally. The programs have been incredibly well attended. For example, Joyce's performance at the museum sold out both nights it was here...and with a very diverse audience in terms of background, race and age. Mostly it's been a success because of the people it's attracted and the kind of experience it's created for them.

Fred Lazarus: This exhibition became a tremendous opportunity for the community to really understand that Doreen brings a special philosophy to the institution. Because of this, people do see the museum differently. There is an understanding now that things will be different, and this is really a representation of those differences and changes. That's happening in lots of elements of this community. It doesn't get inculcated into the culture with one exhibition, but it certainly has been a dramatic step forward.

Doreen Bolger: The layered aspect of the exhibition also invited a layered response. You don't just want to write a review of it, you want to write an interview with Joyce. You want to talk about the programming; you want to talk about the relationship to the permanent collection. We even had an article on the art's relationship to the building.

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On Re-opening the Museum's Front Doors

Doreen Bolger: What did opening the front doors for the exhibition symbolize? In some ways it became a metaphor for opening the museum to people in a new way.

The doors were closed 20 years ago when a new entrance with handicap accessibility and visitor amenities was built. This design changed visitors' relationships to the museum in a very tangible way. It sent visitors directly into temporary exhibition space and made it possible to see a temporary exhibit and never see the permanent collection. The intention was to welcome people, but it actually had an alienating effect.

Now there are practical reasons why we can't maintain those grand front doors as an entrance. But it has shown us that people appreciate a sense of arrival...of ascending into some sort of an experience. When Joyce was a child, those doors were open, and Joyce went up that staircase with her mother, passed Rodin's "Thinker" into the museum, and she remembers that experience. It's that sort of memorable experience that she wanted to create with her installation. It's a statement also about Joyce as an artist, as a person of color, being in the heart of the museum. Being right there in the grandest and most wonderful space.

The doors being opened is about accessibility to people. Not only to audiences of color, but to artists in the community who now see other artists in what could be described as the most elevated status of the museum, a sort of temple of art.