Very sadly, Abigail Housen passed away this week of a long illness. This is a loss for many of us personally but for all of us collectively. We are deeply pained.
As many know, VTS originated when I was director of education at MOMA and, prodded by trustees, needed to find out whether or not our visitors benefited from our many programs: did people learn what we taught them? After many less-than-satisfying attempts to answer that question, I was introduced to Abigail Housen who patiently explained how she studied people thinking as they looked at works of art. I suspect it was during our first conversation that the earth began to move under my feet. Abigail introduced me to her empirical research method and what she learned from it, and for me there was no going back.
After interviewing people who participated in MOMA programs and analyzing the findings, Housen determined that the skills we hoped to nurture weren’t present. It wasn’t that there was no impact; it just wasn’t what we had in mind: growth that would allow visitors to find meaning and pleasure in looking on their own. We saw that we engaged our visitors but found little evidence our programs empowered or enabled them to enter into a deep dialogue with works of art without our assistance.
While this was depressing, the news also created an opportunity—like many disasters. As Abigail and I talked, we decided to see if we could use her data to create teaching that would stick. She knew how our visitors thought—what skills they came in with—and as we stumbled toward a strategy that would produce lasting change, we found out how to strengthen those skills and build on them, providing challenges that were within reach and growth that stuck. VTS was the result. It took over a dozen of years to refine it, using Housen’s invaluable tools to understand how VTS enlarged viewers’ thinking and how new skills developed to produce the shifts that can be termed “visual literacy.”
Housen’s scholarship offers an incomparable body of data and a theoretical framework to guide how we think of and use museums as sites for meaningful education. Her understanding of aesthetic thought could be the basis of far more than VTS, too, if mined by others for what her work indicates about the development of critical thinking broadly. Her insights suggest an important role for art and museums in education and in our society.
I am grateful for her partnership in creating VTS and for how she changed and enriched me as a person. I’m sure that countless others feel similarly.