Screen Education: Using Exhibitions to Research Museums in Movies and Learning through Film

Abstract

This thesis paper explores the relationship between museums and movies, as well as movies as teaching tools that construct worldviews and knowledge about museums and museum studies. I discuss the exhibition I curated, Screen Education (January 23- February 3, 2023), in the Lionel Rombach Gallery at the School of Art, University of Arizona. For the exhibition, I looked at three films, Black Panther (2018), Museo (2018), and Russian Ark (2002), which also act as my review of the literature to better understand how movies function to teach viewers critical museum studies and history. The exhibition displayed and presented my research to the public, but I also collected data through gallery participation. However, the exhibition does not just act as a container for the research; as I argue in the paper, it is actually situated within arts-based research methodology. I analyze participant responses discovering the kind of worldviews that participants constructed from movies and television shows related to museums and art, and beyond. The visitor participation and interpretation created emergent points in the research process that led to new questions and avenues for study. I use Hein’s constructivist learning theory and Hall’s reception theory as a framework to analyze the relationship between museums, movies, and visitors/viewers. Keywords: museums, movies, visual culture education, arts-based research, reception theory, emergent methods