Voices of the Past
Emily: What did you enjoy about being, well, - or what have you enjoyed about being the Education Specialist as well as, you know, manager of Kid’s Place?
Lauren: My biggest joy is getting people excited about stuff. So if that’s an adult tour, it’s getting them excited about Remington content. You wouldn’t believe how many adults come into the museum and think, ‘Oh, I thought this was the Remington typewriter museum for Remington typewriters.’
Emily: Oh! [quiet laughter]
Lauren: Or, ‘I thought this was the museum for Remington rifles.’ [laughter] So, another thing I really enjoy about the adult audience is, they look at me and they see a young person. Some people think I look younger than I am. And they kind of wonder, they have to feel me out. Like, ‘How much is she actually going to be able to teach me?’ [laughter] It’s really fun when I can surprise them with a lot of facts and fun information. I love sharing the good juicy stuff about Remington. Not just the, ‘dot dot DOT. Remington was born in 1861.’ [quiet laughter] I like to share the really juicy stuff like, you know, Remington was a really heavy guy, but he portrayed himself as this young active cowboy [be]cause that’s how he would sell more magazines. Or he made this picture seem ominous and creepy by painting it as a night time scene when it really took place in the day time. Um, I love the lost wax bronze casting process. As Education Specialist, I worked with my old professor at SUNY Potsdam and I recreated every step of the process using, um, clay, then to Plaster of Paris, to wax, to – I used aluminum – and redid ‘The Savage’. I redid a Remington piece.
Emily: Oh, the Savage! Is that the guy sitting out front –
Lauren: In the lobby.
Emily: - that people – that everyone can touch?
Lauren: Yeah. So I recreated that from start to finish. And I had a whole hands-on kit for kids, and adults, the adults love it. I love showing that. I love combining my curriculum with, like – I love showing videos based on that and I love the hands-on, passing all those materials out, and I love going through the process. So I like to combine my approaches to teaching. And I get to do that there. That’s for the adult tours. For the kids, it’s like the same thing. I like to get the kids in the galleries and I like to sit them around a piece and I like them to like – there’s this one piece called, um, ‘Coming Through the Rye’ – and it’s four cowboys on four horses and they’re galloping. You can picture they’re galloping through the open plains. The cowboys have their guns up in the air and their mouths are open and the horses, they’re like, the reins are being pulled back and their mouths are open. Um, and you can just hear them whinnying and you can hear the cowboys going, ‘Yehaw! Yehaw!’ So I like to get a whole group of kids around that piece and I like them to count how many horse hooves are actually touching the ground. And, um, it’s amazing because out of sixteen horse hooves, there’s only –
Emily: There’s only six [hooves on the ground]. [laughter] I remember.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: I, um, used to do the same thing with people coming through the museum.
Lauren: Yeah?
Emily: When I worked in the main museum.
Lauren: Did you?
Emily: Yeah.
Lauren: And then, they get excited. They’re like, ‘Well, how did he, you know, connect this piece to that piece and, and, elevate all of these little parts?’ And then I get them all, like if there’s a group of nine, I’ll split them up into groups of three. So three of them are going to go like this: [galloping noise with her hands against her thigh]. [laughter] So then you can hear the horse hooves. And then I get three of them to be cowboys, so they’re saying, ‘Yehaw’. And then I get three more to go, ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’ [laughter] And before you know it, the docent who’s like, on gallery duty is looking over and there’s a whole herd of cowboys like, They can just… [galloping noise] ‘Yehaw!’ [laughter] So I like, um, like ah, what do you call that? You bring movement and action into the, I know there’s – there’s – you know, so it’s not just static. So I like that part about working at the museum. And I like to get kids to really think about what’s going to happen next in Remington’s artwork. [Be]cause he was great at freezing something, like, as in, as if he took a photograph of a horse bucking up in the air. What happened first? This is what happened in the middle. What’s going to happen next? So I like to make it exciting because people come into an art museum and they probably don’t think, like, Remington’s work can be as interactive as it is, but it’s very interactive. So I love that. And then ah, as far as Kid’s Place goes, um, I like the lively atmosphere. I like it when kids come in and they see some art supplies around and you’ve got your whole idea. ‘Well, this is how you glue this on that and staple this on here and this is going to make this project’. And they somehow create like something totally different. And you’re like, ‘I never would have thought that!’ But, [be]cause kids – it’s not like a regular art room where you come in, the kids sit down, you do a lesson, and the learning outcomes are exactly as you predicted. This place gives kids autonomy so they come in and they can do whatever they want. So I like that too.
