We invite faculty members from all academic disciplines seeking to enrich student learning outside the classroom to partner with us in the museum’s new Focus Gallery.
The Focus Gallery provides an intimate space to engage with a select group of artworks from the museum’s collection. Museum staff will work with you to develop a Focus Gallery installation related to your course.
For fall installations, please submit by April 15; we will respond by May 3.
For spring installations, please submit by October 15; we will respond by November 6.
Start the conversation by completing the form below!
FAQs
The Focus Gallery is located near the museum entrance on the first floor. It is approximately 250 sq. ft. and can hold six to ten artworks, depending on size. The gallery can comfortably accommodate 15-30 students. Larger classes can be divided into smaller groups.
The Focus Gallery is open during regular museum hours and accessible to the general public.
We will post signage to alert the public that your class is in session and when you are not using the gallery, the space will be open to all our visitors. The museum is closed on Mondays, but open Tuesday through Saturday 10am – 5pm and Sunday 1pm – 5pm.
The number of installations will be determined by what we can accommodate each semester.
We would appreciate photographs from your class visits that may be used for publicity and museum publications. We also welcome input and feedback to help us further develop Focus Gallery initiatives.
A successful proposal will be feasible and articulate how utilizing the museum’s collection will positively impact your students’ learning experience in ways that cannot otherwise be achieved.
Museum staff will coordinate an initial meeting to view the Focus Gallery and discuss your project. Following this meeting, we will work with you to determine what artworks will be displayed, gallery layout, wall text, and timeline.
Recent Focus Gallery Installations
For a five-week, one-credit-hour microcourse on German art, German professor Dr. Karin Schutjer selected prints from the museum’s collection representing two significant eras in the history of printmaking: the early 16th century and the early 20th century. The resulting installation, “German Prints across the Centuries,” juxtaposes these two periods through linked themes, such as love and eros, unjust suffering, and femmes fatales. From Albrecht Dürer to Käthe Kollwitz, the installation includes leading figures in the history of European graphic arts. To get a better sense of the medium, students also tried making prints of their own. In addition, the class created a scavenger hunt with descriptions of artworks on display in the Focus Gallery for lower-division German students to practice their language skills in the museum.
During the Fall 2024 semester, students in Dr. Carol Rose Little’s linguistic semantics course explored notions of time and aspect, conveyed in English with things like the past tense -d or the present progressive -ing, in artwork. What techniques does art use to represent these nuances of time and events? Perhaps black and white in a comic strip conveys past tense, or different stages of an ongoing action may be superimposed on top of each other to show progression. Artworks were selected from a variety of genres, cultures, and time periods for students to explore and analyze, and they also experimented with creating pieces of their own.
In conjunction with the Spring 2023 Presidential Dream Course, “The Artists’ Bible, From Mosaics to Graphic Novels,” museum staff partnered with the Schusterman Center for Judaic Studies on an installation of works from the museum’s collection to support class themes. The undergraduate course is organized by two Bible scholars, art lovers, and faculty members in Judaic Studies and Comparative Literature, respectively: Dr. Alan Levenson and Dr. Yael Lavender-Smith. The course explores major events, characters, and themes presented in the Bible as expressed in the visual arts.
During the Fall 2022 semester, the museum’s Learning + Engagement staff collaborated with the OU Biology Department to develop an interdisciplinary assignment for university students enrolled in Concepts in Biology, a general education class for non-biology majors. The students discussed Patrick Nagatani’s photography series Nuclear Enchantment and the role visual art can play in highlighting social issues. Nagatani’s work provided the perfect vehicle for this conversation as students contemplated his depiction of the nuclear industry in New Mexico and its profound effect on the environment and the people living there. After studying Nuclear Enchantment in the Focus Gallery, students created their own photographic images in the style of Nagatani to summarize an environmental issue of their choosing.
