Night at the museum (no, not the movie)

I have plenty of past experiences in museums. I went to the MET, the Natural History Museum and many science museums (because who doesn’t love playing around with the interactive games there). I love museums. Its a place for fun and education. So when I first heard that the Macaulay class of ’17 will go and visit the Brooklyn Museum, I thought that it would be a great experience to have the whole museum to ourselves and to hang out with friends. But I never really experienced a museum the way I did on that Tuesday, September 3rd.

The instructions were to record ourselves discussing the details and the mysteries that are behind the art pieces that we were looking at. At first I was a little skeptical about recording myself talking about what is and isn’t of the art piece- it would be boring and difficult. I was just holding on to the recorder waiting for my group to decide which painting/sculpture to choose. As we roamed around, we stopped at an Egyptian carving and one of my group members already started discussing the details of the huge piece of stone. And then, another group member had a comment about what the other guy said and he wanted to add in some of his input. And I thought, this is exactly what we need to do, and its coming out naturally! So I clicked the button on the recorder without the group realizing and after two minutes- just like that- we had gold!

Once we became “pros” at this, the second and third one was a piece of cake. Once my group was done recording, we continued to roam around the museum a little longer. As I was aimlessly scanning all the paintings on the walls, I realized that I was paying more attention to the details in the paintings. How the characters in the painting were facing a certain direction, or how the wrinkles on a character makes him look weak. This experience helped me both achieve a keener eye and meet new people.

Adiell Melamed