Innovative Thinker Lecture Series

SITE Santa Fe welcomes Rika Burnham, a leading theorist and practitioner of art museum gallery teaching. Burnham serves as Head of Education at the Frick Collection in New York and project director for Teaching Institute for Museum Educators/TIME at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Previously, she was a museum educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and adjunct professor at the School of Professional Studies and Teachers College at Columbia University.

To describe her approach to pedagogical strategy in the museum, Burnham writes,

“At the heart of every meaningful encounter with a work of art is a moment of truth.  The museum visitor is no longer spectator but participant, the art work is no longer still and inert, but active and alive.  We seek the transformative rather than the prescriptive and the formulaic. We seek the intense encounter with a single object rather than a casual glance at a hundred artworks. And finally, we seek experience and risk. Sometimes encounters are negotiated through our words, sometimes through our dreams.”

The Innovative Thinker Lecture is an annual presentation established in honor of SITE’s former Director of Education, Juliet Myers. This lecture highlights the significant work of a visionary educator in the field of contemporary art. The Innovative Thinker Lecture is supported by the Gale Family Foundation in recognition of Juliet Myers.

This special event is free for all SITE members, Museum Educators as well as students and seniors; please check in at will call desk upon arrival. General Admission is $10.