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All my best freinds are here Rosemary Agoglia is right at home in Amherst's fabulous new museum

Faye Wolfe

THE EDUCATION CURATOR AS PIED PIPER: Rosemary Agoglia ’71G leads students from Hatfield’s D.M. Breor School through the main hall of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. (photo by Ben Barnhart) STANDING AT THE TALL FACADE of glass that is the front entrance to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, you can look straight through the vast main hall filled with light from soaring floor-to-ceiling windows along one side to the equally towering wall of glass at the opposite end. And beyond, into an archetypal New England landscape of apple orchard and blue-humped hills. Such transparency is hardly typical of New England architecture (think hunkered-down white clapboard capes), but it is revealing about what this new museum, which opened last November, is up to. In showcasing and exploring the nature of the oh-so-familiar – children’s picture books – it aims to offer insight into a subject opaque to many: visual art. There is a pleasing symmetry at work: picture book art serves as a means of demystifying other forms of art, while the museum setting shows picture book art in a new light, revealing its inner workings, its layers of meaning and its importance. As the museum’s curator of education, Rosemary Agoglia ’71G is a keeper of the keys. Whether she is overseeing the studio within the museum, where children can make art after seeing art, or putting together the volunteer program, Agoglia’s efforts are not just the peripheral fun-and-games attractions of the museum, they are integral to its mission. She is charged with coming up with ways, both simple and nuanced, to unlock the significance of the work on exhibit, sometimes through such basics as writing the gallery labels. Agoglia also creates the self-guided tours, including “treasure hunts” where children look for various objects in artworks on display. (For the inaugural Maurice Sendak show, for instance, one such search asked children to count how many times his beloved pet dog, Jennie, appeared in his book illustrations.) Gallery searches are obviously designed to entertain, but they also promote engagement with the work and foster a sense of connection with the artist. The Jennie quest, for instance, asks visitors to think like Sendak for a moment and figure out how they might “honor” someone important to them. A big part of Agoglia’s job is handling school groups: scheduling them, devising programming for them and acting as a guide. (As of mid-January, the museum was booked solid for school visits through May.) On any given day, you might see her, sitting cross-legged on the gallery floor in a semicircle of children and talking with them about what they notice in the pictures on the wall. During one such gathering, Agoglia asked a boy to repeat an observation he had made as he compared a page in one of Carle’s books to the original in the gallery. He told the group that the original, an illustration for The Mixed-Up Chameleon, looked more “crayonish” than the book reproduction. Agoglia complimented him on the word, and before the session was through, had managed to elicit from the class key elements of Carle’s work – vibrant color, texture, technique – that in turn serve as a base of information for looking more generally at art. In other words, Agoglia’s a pro. She makes handling a group of squirmy, easily distracted 6-year-olds look easy, the way an Olympic figure skater makes triple axels look easy, and her enthusiasm for what they have to say seems fresh and genuine, despite the fact that she’s been listening to young children for more than three decades. After earning a master’s degree from the UMass School of Education in 1971, Agoglia started out at the Amherst Nursery School and Kindergarten on Henry Street, then moved down the road to the Common School, a private elementary school located by the Hitchcock Nature Center on South Pleasant Street. She was there for 27 years, teaching 3- and 4-year-olds, then 6 to 8-year-olds. She speaks warmly about her tenure – not only did she work there, but her two children, Matthew, 30, and Rachel, 26, went to school there – as one of “professional enrichment, community, a formative time.” But then one day, she decided that she wanted “one more adventure” in her working life. When the director of the Common School asked her what she was going to do, she said, “I really don’t know.” The answer was just a ways down the road, on 7.5 acres of land transferred from Hampshire College, where the Eric Carle Museum was about to take shape. Agoglia’s first contact with the museum was through a project she had created for her students on shapes and structures. She thought a field trip to the building site might be instructive. About the same time, the museum planners invited her and some other teachers to a brainstorming session to talk about how they might use the museum for teaching purposes. Not long after, on a Christmas shopping trip with her family, Agoglia had a brainstorm of her own. She stopped in at the museum’s interim offices in Northampton and came out with the job description for curator of education. She remembers reading it as she walked down Main Street and saying, “I could do this!” While the position has so far offered more than enough challenges to qualify it as the adventure she sought, Agoglia has also found herself right at home. “I’ve always loved art. I always used it in my teaching,” she says. She notes there’s also something special about being present during “the infancy of an institution – the energy, the vitality of articulating someone’s vision draws people together.” She adds, “And of course I feel good about the place, what it’s trying to do.” With good reason. Since its opening November 21, museum attendance has been greater than expected and the response even more positive than hoped for. “In our first two months, we had 20,000 visitors,” says Agoglia. “Our projections were 25,000 visitors for the first year.” “None of us realized the impact it would have. No one realized what would happen to the families who came here,” Agoglia continues, explaining that Eric Carle “wanted to honor his colleagues and create a place for his art, a ‘real museum,’ like those he’d visited in Japan,” where there are 20 museums devoted to children’s book art. “And he wanted to use art that is very familiar and that people are comfortable with as tools to encourage people to be more comfortable with museums and looking at art in general. “We expected to interact with families, but the comments we have gotten have sometimes brought us to tears. A 5-year-old who came here said, ‘All my best friends are here!’ In the museum, we have grandparents reading books to parents, parents reading to their children, children reading to their parents. They cuddle up with books, they make art in the studio together. We expected people to stay for an hour to an hour-and-a-half – they’re staying for two, two-and-a-half hours. They go into the galleries to look at the art, then they go to the studio, then they go back to the galleries, then they go to the library. They’re taking it in, they’re absorbing it. As Nick Clark, our director, put it recently, ‘We’ve institutionalized quality time.’” Wonderful art, kid-friendliness, a beautiful building, an array of attractions: These elements combine to engage the museum’s visitors. Yet another way in which the museum seeks to enrich the experience is through the use of “visual thinking strategies.” Based on the work of cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen and museum educator Phillip Yenawine, these strategies, aimed at enhancing visual literacy, include posing three questions – which Agoglia calls “elegant and profound in their simplicity” – to the museum-goer: What’s going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? and What more can you find? “My job,” says Agoglia, “is to bring these visual thinking strategies to people.” Before she came to the museum, she had not heard of this specific approach. When she was introduced to it, Agoglia says, “It really resonated with me, with the way I’ve always taught, the way I helped my students to construct knowledge and reflect on their own learning. I’m very much at home with it.” Using these questions with children, according to Agoglia, “makes them good listeners. They don’t get silly or goof off the way kids do when they think they can’t possibly have the right answer.” These questions also work for adults, even “art-challenged adults,” as one museum visitor described his group, because they put the focus on the observer, encourage listening and allow for many answers. Explains Agoglia, “Different people might have a different focus on the same image. A group of librarians was very interested in the mother-son interaction in one picture. The children were excited about the cat that was about to scratch the boy’s leg!” Agoglia thinks that the museum’s appeal is due in part to the respite it offers from the driving pace and many distractions of modern life. “We made a very conscious decision to have no computer here. I think people have appreciated being able to slow down, to stop and look. Looking is a slow process.” Keeping up with the effects of the museum’s greater-than-anticipated popularity has required some fast thinking on the part of the museum staff. May Emery, the museum’s art studio educator has had, for instance, to make sure that the studio has enough activities and materials available to accommodate more people and longer visits. Even small surprises can be significant. No one thought that visitors would be so moved to touch the artworks, which can be damaging despite the glass between it and them. But Agoglia has converted this potential problem into an opportunity. Of course, she says, “the images are so familiar, and kids are used to touching them” in their books at home. “So we tell the school groups that they have a detective job, to find out the difference between an illustration in a book and the corresponding original work of art. We send them out on a mission.” When they see that the original is “the only one in the world,” Agoglia says, then they can be helpers, understanding that you have to look “with your eyes” at art, treat it differently from the picture in your book. Somewhat ironically, the walls of Agoglia’s office were still bare in January – she hadn’t had time to hang up pictures. In the absence of art is a dramatic view from her desk that looks to the Holyoke Range on the western horizon. Given the hours she keeps (workdays that run 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., work weeks that spill into weekends), Agoglia has been treated to more than a few spectacular sunsets. Despite the demands of her new career, Agoglia obviously feels she’s in the right place. And on opening day, she says, she had a sense of things having come full circle; among the visitors was David Day, her UMass School of Ed advisor. Day was instrumental in helping Agoglia create her own master’s program, focused on early childhood education. “I did internships with lots of schools: in Ware, at the Kellogg Street complex in Amherst, at Mark’s Meadow.” Agoglia arrived at the School of Ed at a tumultuous time. “It was,” she recalls with a wry smile, “like walking into the middle of a family argument.” She hadn’t planned to design her own program, but she made the best of it, and has been making the best of her hands-on education ever since. When Day saw her at the museum, she says, he exclaimed, “Rosemary! What are you doing here?” Teaching, learning, having a ball.

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