Project Description
The Mulvane Art Museum in 2005 secured a generous grant from the MetLife Foundation Museum Connections Program to support a collaborative hands-on project involving artist and children’s book illustrator Shane Evans and fifth graders from four Topeka elementary schools. In the first phase of the project, facilitated by Evans, Topeka fifth graders will illustrate and write their own books. When completed, the children’s work will be shown in the Mulvane Art Museum along with work by Evans and related art work from the museum’s permanent collection. To enhance the accessibility of the museum to a broad audience, hands-on art activities will be included in the museum. These activities will serve to introduce visitors to the art on view and provide an opportunity for visitors to engage in the creative process firsthand.
Because formal art education is either lacking or nonexistent in Topeka elementary schools, a large number of children are under-served in the arts. Often, the lack of art education hinders the accessibility of these children and their families to the art museum. The perceived barriers of race and social class exacerbate the problem, as does poverty. Topeka has a high number of students with economic challenges--60% of Topeka public school students qualify for free or reduced price meals—so many children who do not receive art education in public school cannot afford to obtain it in other ways and there is little hope for improvement in the near future. The Topeka Board of Education is expected to approve a 2004-05 budget at their August 19, 2004 meeting that will reflect approximately $5 million in reductions from 2003-4. District-paid field trips, such as those to the art museum, are among the items scheduled to be cut (www.topeka.k12.ks.us).
The goals of the Mulvane Art Museum project are to minimize the real and perceived barriers that limit accessibility to the art museum, to engage a broad section of the community in a thoughtful dialogue about art, and to establish a precedent that the Mulvane Art Museum is a site open to everyone for the exercise of creativity and the free exchange of ideas. These goals will be achieved according to the plan described below.
In October 2005, artist Shane Evans makes one on-site visit to each of the four participating elementary schools to initiate, with the help of Mulvane Art Museum staff, a book illustration project. During this initial visit, Evans will discuss his extensive world travels and their inspiration on his art. He will also introduce students to the creative process he uses when illustrating a book. His working method includes five stages:

(1) planning;
(2) sketching;
(3) integration of one’s ideas with the ideas of writers, editors, designers, and art directors;
(4) development and research; and
(5) refining and completing a finished work.

Under Evans’ guidance, Mulvane staff visit each school during the following three weeks to execute the project. During these visits, Mulvane staff introduce the students to the basic elements of art (line, shape, color, form, texture, space, composition) while helping each child to create a book of their own using the method described by Evans in the earlier session. Three weeks from his first visit, Evans returns to each site for a second session in which he will help the students to refine and complete their books. Mulvane staff visit each class once, following Evan’s second visit, to conclude the project and administer evaluation forms before mid-November 2005. Mulvane staff are responsible for preparing pre-visit materials and for working with fifth grade teachers at the four schools to integrate the project into the fifth-grade writing curriculum. The outcomes for this first phase of the Mulvane Art Museum project are that students will demonstrate a familiarity with the basic elements of art (line, shape, color, form, texture, space, composition) and two-dimensional illustration media (drawing pencils, pens, markers). Each child shall write and illustrate a book of his or her own design.
The second phase of the project (January through May 2006) involves displaying the work produced in phase one in the Mulvane Art Museum with wall text to describe the project. With Shane Evans’ supervision, work stations are set-up to allow museum visitors of all ages to engage in hands-on art projects of their own, free of charge, using the children’s art on view as inspiration. An exhibition of Evans’ art is mounted in the Mulvane Art Museum to allow viewers access to examples of this professional artists’ work. In addition, an installation of works of art from the museum’s permanent collection relating to book illustration is hung in the gallery adjacent to Evans’ work, thereby relating Evans’ work and the activities carried out by visitors to the larger history of book illustration. Self-guided audio tours and gallery activities motivate visitors to think about and respond to the art on view. These audio tours and activities encourage viewers to find specific objects for purposes of comparison and present them with questions or exercises designed to broaden visitors’ perspective of objects on view in art museums.
By comparing works of art from different times, cultures, and different artists, museum visitors sharpen their analytical skills, which leads to a deeper appreciation of visual art. The process of comparing works of art by artists with varying levels of training and experience, when guided by specific questions, de-mystifies visual art for those visitors who are not yet comfortable in the art museum. Visitors come to realize that art-making, regardless of the level of sophistication, is a form of problem-solving that can be understood and described once one has a grasp of the basic art vocabulary (line, shape, color, form, texture, space, composition).
Hands-on activities give visitors the opportunity to apply the basic elements of art and experiment with new concepts gained during their museum visit. Samples of hands-on stations include, but are not limited to: a magnetic layout board to rearrange a book cover or page design; a stand-alone computer with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator installed; a station at which visitors illustrate a single letter of the alphabet as in an illuminated manuscript; a station for experimenting with marginalia and text, such as poetry; an exercise in storytelling solely through a sequence of images as with fifteenth century Biblia pauperum (Poor Man’s Bible); a reading corner with board books for small children to allow parents to introduce their children to basic art terms like texture, shape, color; a “Now & Then” table to compare the length of time, the process, and work involved in producing books in the past vs. today; a drawing station with photographs taken by Shane Evans on his world travels to use as inspiration for drawing; a table-top letterpress with printing blocks to explore early forms of printing and the integration of image and text; a free-drawing station where visitors could draw any subject of their choosing using a variety of art media. Other related activities include a book-signing event featuring Shane Evans, a well publicized Museum Family Day in April 2006 to attract additional viewers and a guided tour of Barker Printing, a local printing business, to allow visitors to see how an artist’s idea becomes a finished printed product.
The outcomes of the second phase of the project, described above, are to attract a more broad and diverse audience to the museum, to expose this audience to art of different times and cultures, to familiarize visitors with the basic elements of art, to stimulate artistic creativity in the museum’s audience, to generate in these viewers a level of interest in and comfort with the museum sufficient to attract them back in the future.
The Mulvane Art Museum project will serve the community by bringing a significant professional artist to Topeka to provide outreach art instruction to children who are currently under-served in the arts. Evans is good choice to present the material because he has traveled widely, he approaches his work from a global perspective, and he has collaborated on book projects with celebrities like NBA stars Shaquille O’Neal and Magic Johnson, whom children admire. By displaying the art resulting from Evans’ outreach project in the museum, we hope to attract other members of this community, including the parents, family, and friends of the children whose work is on display. Displaying the children’s work in a museum context along with the art of Shane Evans and art from the museum’s permanent collection disregards traditional museum hierarchies, which many people find exclusionary and sometimes discriminatory. Hands-on activities, gallery activity sheets, and audio tours facilitate audience engagement with the work on view. Book illustration is a particularly accessible subject for general audiences because most people have at least a basic exposure to books, even if they have never studied book illustration as an art form. We believe that this project, which combines outreach, on-site art-making, art exhibition, and objects from the museum permanent collection, can serve as a successful model for the planning, execution, and evaluation of future projects in the Mulvane Art Museum or in other museums interested in expanding their audiences.

Description of Organization
The Friends of Mulvane Art Museum is a not-for-profit corporation whose mission is to provide services to the community through the Mulvane Art Museum at Washburn University, to foster interest in art and artists through educational means, and to encourage art in the everyday life of the community. While Washburn University maintains the museum facility and pays the majority of staff salaries, the Friends of Mulvane Art Museum support most general operating expenses, particularly with regard to museum education programs.

Evaluation and Sharing of Information
Each phase of the Mulvane Art Museum project will be evaluated through written response forms. At the conclusion of the initial outreach phase, participating students and Mulvane staff will complete age-appropriate questionnaires that will allow us to assess the overall effectiveness of that portion of the project, to determine whether the stated outcomes were met and most importantly, to identify reasons for the results we obtain. Likewise, in the second exhibition phase of the project, visitor surveys will be provided to obtain feedback regarding the effectiveness of the hands-on activities, audio guides, and gallery activities. Optional demographic questions will be included in the visitor surveys to provide more information about our audience. Museum attendance will be measured against previous exhibitions. A report of our conclusions will be compiled following the completion of the project, at which time we will post a thorough description of the project and the results on the museum web site. An illustrated full color exhibition catalog, which describes the project, and assessment report will be available to anyone who requests them, excluding postage. A press release notifying interested parties of the information available through the web site will be sent to the members of the Mountain Plains Museums Association and the Association of College and University Art Museums and Galleries.