Nancy Weekly on Teaching Burchfield in Brazil

Teaching in Brasil

Travel to Brasil to teach?

What an incredible opportunity! I want to tell you about my amazing opportunity to see the art world in the Southern Hemisphere, in a country that is rich in agriculture and natural resources and fast becoming a global economic power.

Every year Brasil honors its museums by sponsoring la Semana Nacional de Museus (National Museums Week), and this year I was given the privilege of being invited to teach a 20-hour course in Uberlândia, which means “Fertile Land” in Portuguese. Artist Paulo Lima Buenoz, who is the director of The Museu Universitário de Arte-MUnA (University Art Museum) and a professor at the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (Federal University of Uberlândia), invited me to teach a museum studies course from May 14 to 18, 2012. It was just after the semester ended at Buffalo State College and my grades were posted for my new course, MST 622, “Researching and Presenting Museum Collections,” so I could dive right into a unique international teaching experience.

Paulo and I both felt there are interesting parallels between Buffalo State College and the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (UFU) and the mutual relationship between our museums and contemporary art. I planned to link both worlds, using my experience of teaching museum studies for the college from the vantage point of an art museum curator. Also, because there are no museum studies courses at UFU, we both thought I could offer some critical information to art students who were eager to learn more about museums. So I prepared “Museums & Society,” an intensive, week-long course in which I would lecture with PowerPoint presentations about current issues in American museum practices, especially regarding the function of museums as public institutions that play a role in their communities, including the interpretation of collections, educational strategies, and development of exhibitions. Of course, I would start with the arena of my specialty—Charles E. Burchfield, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, and Buffalo State College—as a means of introduction. In preparation, though, I uncovered many interesting art events linked to Brasil (yes, that’s how they spell it) and other international countries—so I broadened the scope to make the material even more accessible and exciting and relevant for my students.

With this blog, I will start a travel journal to provide an overview of this remarkable experience and introduce you to some of the unique sights—and even a few Portuguese words—so you can see why I can’t wait to go back.

—Nancy Weekly
Email Nancy at weeklyns@buffalostate.edu

Nancy Weekly is the Head of Collections and the Charles Cary Rumsey Curator for the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the world’s only museum dedicated to American watercolor master Charles E. Burchfield and artists of the Buffalo Niagara region. She also serves as an adjunct lecturer in Museum Studies for the Department of History and Social Studies Education at Buffalo State College

Since September 1981, Ms. Weekly has organized exhibitions on an extensive array of subjects including historic and contemporary art, photography, craft art and decorative arts, with a specialization in Western New York artists. She is recognized as the world’s leading expert on Charles E. Burchfield, having organized nationally touring exhibitions of his work with accompanying catalogs, as well as a wide range of publications. She assisted Robert Gober and UCLA’s Hammer Museum staff in developing Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, and contributed an essay on Burchfield’s unusual Conventions for Abstract Thoughts. Her essay, “Color and Sound: Charles E. Burchfield and the Question of Synesthesia” was published in the exhibition catalog,Sensory Crossovers : Synesthesia in American Art. Her most recent essay, Storyboard: The Sexual Politics of Jackie Felix, appears in the catalog for a retrospective exhibition of Felix’s provocative art that represents topical social issues, such as female identity, popular culture, and sexual politics within the context of feminism and late 20th-early 21st-century art.