Category: Museum Events

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In Case You Missed It Museum Events

In Case You Missed It: STITCH DIY Embroidery Night

By Michaela Brant, class of ’23

Photographs by Caitlin Park, class of ’24

STITCH and the McMullen teamed up to host a Do-It-Yourself Embroidery Night on Tuesday, February 22. The McMullen provided the supplies and STITCH brought the expertise. Among Martin Parr’s photographs in the second floor gallery, participants gathered around tables strewn with embroidery hoops, fabric, needles, and thread of every imaginable color. Experience levels were all over the board, and many attendees were seen scrolling on Pinterest trying to find an attainable yet visually pleasing pattern for their beginner skills. By the end of the night, many were introduced to the art of embroidery and invited to future STITCH meetings, and everyone got to take home their beautiful embroidery projects.

Students gathered around tables in the second floor gallery and worked on their embroidery projects.
Participants followed instructions from the packet provided or went with their own designs.
STITCH members instructed and chatted with attendees throughout the gallery.

Keep an eye out for the next McMullen and STITCH collaboration, Crocheting on the Quad on May 3rd and 4th!

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In Case You Missed It Museum Events

In Case You Missed It: Spring 2022 Lunar New Year Celebration

Photographs and captions prepared by Sunny Lee, class of ’22

On Saturday, February 5th, 2022, the McMullen hosted a Lunar New Year event with Boston College’s Asian student organizations. This event was open to the public, and it was fabulous to see many students and members of the local community enjoying their time in the festive halls of the Museum. The Asian Caucus, Chinese Students Association, Korean Students Association, Taiwanese Cultural Organization, and the Vietnamese Student Association presented New Year’s food from various countries, games, and opportunities to make New Year’s decorations to celebrate Lunar New Year. The games played were Go, Mahjong, and Feilong. Additionally, attendees tried their hands at decorating red envelopes, fortune-telling, origami, and making Chinese lanterns and New Year’s knots. 

Board members of the Vietnamese Students Association (VSA) Gina Yoo and Vivienne Le smile for the camera while preparing to serve Vietnamese cuisine.

Left: The mouthwatering dumplings the Chinese Student Association (CSA) brought were a popular hit among the attendees. Right: The Taiwanese Culture Organization (TCO) brought delicious egg tarts and crackers that are popular staples at Asian supermarkets.

The button-making machines worked by McMullen Student Ambassadors allowed participants to create their own button pins.

Right: participants in the game room busied themselves with the various traditional Asian games provided, such as Mahjong and Go. Left: attendees used their artistry and dexterity in creating paper crafts such as a Chinese lantern ornament.

If you did not have the chance to catch our TikTok video on social media, you can watch it here!

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Harvard Art Exchange

By Kate Oksen

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On Friday, November 9, student guides and staff members from the Harvard Art Museums came to the McMullen Museum to complete the second component of our exchange program. Harvard students were greeted in the atrium by Professor Nancy Netzer before heading to our first floor conference room.

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Sophia Cocozza, co-chair of the Education Committee, had the opportunity to delve a little deeper into the specific roles and responsibilities of a McMullen student ambassador. The co-chairs of each of our six committees presented an overview of their main projects and goals for the semester while using visual aids to showcase components of our website, 3D-Vista tours of past exhibitions, an inside look at our database, and more.

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The Harvard students were split into two groups and brought on tours of the second and third floor galleries of the museum. The tours were facilitated by members of our Education Committee, who each conducted extra research on components of Strategies of Engagement to inform Harvard’s student guides about Carrie Mae Weems herself and pieces from her vast array of work. Interacting with other student workers, conversing about the exhibition and discussing the differences and similarities of our experiences working in art museums coupled with the actual trips to these unique spaces has been such a positive endeavor for all involved. We are so happy to have had this exchange and so grateful to have had the Harvard student guides participate!

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Museum Events

Harvard Art Museum Exchange

By Michael Kratochvil

On Friday October 19, a number of McMullen Museum Student Ambassadors made their way over to the Harvard Art Museum for a collaborative meeting with some of their student tour leaders.

Nestled in the middle of the hip and bustling city of Cambridge, the museum’s ambiguous exterior gave way to a breathtaking interior, with countless pieces of art and various artifacts from a plethora of eras.

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To kick off the day, we met with some of the Harvard Art Museum’s best staff and students in a quaint and beautiful conference room, which had been brought over from New York City in thousands of pieces. After introducing ourselves, we broke off into groups, embarking on various specialized tours of some of the finest and most intriguing art in the museum.

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Each group’s tour focused on a specific topic, chosen by the Harvard tour guide, and provoked extensive thought and reflection when looking at a piece from the lens of the tour’s subject. One of the tours featured Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ Raphael and the Fornarina (1827), sparking conversation on such themes as love, the model’s perspective, and Raphael’s artistic commitment.

After about an hour of engaging discussion and analysis of highlighted works on tour, we were free to roam around the museum and get lost in the countless pieces of priceless artistry. The four extensive floors of art opened up the opportunity for exploration amidst galleries dedicated to Greek, Roman, Medieval, and Modern Art.

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Unquestionably a student ambassador favorite, one of the galleries houses a special exhibition entitled, Animal Shaped Vessels from the Ancient World: Feasting with Gods, Heroes and Kings. The exhibit displays nearly 60 vessels—most made of silver, bronze, and gold—taking the form of different animals and shapes. From horns with majestical griffins to donkey head mugs, these “party animals” were the life of the museum!

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The end of our exchange came around rather quickly, leaving us with an appetite for more and an incentive to return.

We look forward to hosting Harvard’s tour guides and museum staff at the McMullen on Friday, November 9.

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Darkroom Photography Workshop

By Sydney Bernal

It isn’t often that I ventured into Devlin, and even rarer that I find myself in the basement. However, if you plan on entering Boston College’s darkroom- that’s exactly where you will end up. With the makeshift negatives created in advance from digital files, we were introduced to the process of developing photos and set out to develop our own.

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We entered the dark room through a chamber designed to keep the light out, and once in the room with the exception of the special lights that blanketed the room in an orange and red glow, we were in darkness. Each of us got set up at our own station, stationed between two small walls, as to not let our light bleed onto the paper of anyone else. Then, we got to work, mere seconds of light, 30 seconds in the first solution, agitate, a minute in the next, agitate, three in the last, agitate, then rinse. Now, I know magic isn’t real. But, watching my pictures appear on paper after being placed in what looks like water, after seconds of being exposed to light – feels pretty close.

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It was inspiring to see the vast and varied creativity that exist within Boston College students, from the pictures of dogs, family members, places, stuffed animals, adventures, to the creative liberties that were taken in the creative process. People were creating as well as reproducing.

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It felt both very strange and very romantic to develop photos by hand. I felt instantly like I had entered another world. A world that exists in movies, an analog world. A more careful, precarious world. Unlike, with digital. There was no undo. You can’t be sure of quality until after the fact, and it almost feels more special because of it.

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Museum Events

In Case You Missed It: Trickster’s Eve

By Annabel Steele

The McMullen Museum celebrated the Halloween season on Friday, October 19 with a Tricksters’ Eve-themed Art After Dark. Students flocked to the museum for an evening of fall-themed refreshments and activities.

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Students were greeted with a variety of refreshments in the lobby upon entering the museum. There were assorted types of apple and cheese to sample, as well as hot apple cider to drink. Anyone looking for a sweet treat could also try apple cider donuts and pick from bowls of candy around the lobby.

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The mask-making station was on the first floor. Students used scissors and glue to construct large animal masks out of paper templates, which they could then wear around the museum. There were shark, sheep, rabbit and elephant masks.

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On the third floor, students enjoyed popcorn and horror movies. Throughout the night, the movies “Sorry to Bother You” and “You’re Next” played on a projector outside on the terrace, lending the evening a spooky vibe. While students enjoyed the movies, they painted pumpkins, showing off their individual artistic styles.

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Throughout the evening, the galleries were open, showing off Carrie Mae Weems’s semester-long exhibition. Weems has incorporated a trickster figure into her art before, notably in “Lincoln, Lonnie and Me.” As students basked in the Halloween-themed evening, Weems’s art provided an appropriate backdrop for the night.

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There was also an opportunity to let loose and enjoy games of Ghost in the Graveyard on the McMullen’s front lawn.

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In Case You Missed It: Open Mic Night with SLAM! + The Laughing Medusa

By Katherine Oksen

On Thursday, October 11th, the McMullen Museum collaborated with SLAM! and The Laughing Medusa to host an open mic night.

With the room filled with the smell of hot coffee and tables laden with macarons, pastries, and baked delicacies, a gorgeous night of poetry and prose began. SLAM! (Soul, Love, and Music) is Boston College’s own spoken word group, and The Laughing Medusa is BC’s only women’s literary and arts journal (striving to bring feminism to a publication near you.)

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Members of each group performed at will, showering us with poems and pieces about love and life and hurt and hate. Despite the rainy weather, providing those darling melancholy vibes, the atrium of the museum was filled with students there to perform, support their friends, and listen to what their fellow peers had to say. The McMullen provided an open, safe space for students to share their words with a kind of fervor, intensity, and passion that cannot be replicated in the typed or written form. Snaps were heard all around in response to beautiful and powerful lines woven from experiences pulled from the full spectrum of human emotion, including abuse, racism, misogyny, ignorance, and heartache.

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Miya Coleman, president of SLAM!, and Taylor Puccini, editor-in-chief of The Laughing Medusa, did an incredible job both performing their own works while also facilitating the entire event and encouraging the audience to to speak their minds.

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The McMullen is hoping to continue hosting events like this, perhaps collaborating with these student groups again in the spring and even making this an annual event each fall. Thanks to everyone who came out to support all of our aspiring poets!

 

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In Case You Missed It: Trivia Night

By Annabel Steele

On Thursday, September 27, the McMullen Museum played host to a fierce competition as teams battled it out over visual culture trivia.

The stage was set with free pizza and drinks out on the third floor terrace. When all of the teams were fed and watered, the showdown began. There were five rounds, each with five questions apiece. Each question had a visual component, testing students’ knowledge even more than the average trivia night. For example, people might be able to name the ten most popular herbs found in the average grocery store—but at visual culture trivia night, they had to name all ten and match them up with the correct photo.

The questions tested students’ knowledge on a range of topics. Categories represented included sports, art, fashion, architecture, marine biology, anatomy and geography, among others. Some questions had only part, while others included multiple components, allowing teams to earn partial points even if they could not correctly answer the entire question. Each question was displayed over a projector, and teams had anywhere from a minute and a half to 10 minutes to write out their answers.

For most of the night, almost all the teams remained locked in tight competition. Eventually, one team of graduate students, English Experts, began to pull away and build a comfortable lead. Even so, by the final question, the scores were so close that it was anyone’s game. In the final question, teams were asked to name national parks and match them to their location on a map of the United States.

In the end, English Experts held on for the first-place finish, earning McMullen t-shirts, umbrellas and catalogues for their win. The second and third place teams also received prizes.

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In Case You Missed It: Fall 2018 Student Opening

By Annabel Steele

The McMullen Museum kicked off the new year with an Art After Dark event on Friday, Sep. 7. Students enjoyed refreshments and participated in activities while learning about the semester’s exhibitions, Strategies of Engagement by Carrie Mae Weems and Not There, Not Here by Boston College professor Hartmut Austen.

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Weems’s work encourages us to critically examine American society and identify and acknowledge imbalances of power and miscarriages of justice. Accordingly, many of the activities touched upon themes of social justice and American identity.

In the first floor conference center, students were able to take selfies of themselves and write down what America or American identity means to them on the photos. The photos were then clipped up in a room while one of Weems’s videos played in the background. Meanwhile, the button-making station proved to be highly popular, as students designed buttons from templates and from scratch. One of the most popular slogans from the evening was “Bring Back Late Night.”

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On the third floor, students identified the topics they are most passionate about by putting stickers on posters, creating a visual representation of the issues that concern the student body. On the terrace, students enjoyed the late-summer golden hour over Boston and watched Dear White People and Random Acts of Flyness.

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Throughout the night, students enjoyed performances from groups such as the Beats, Sexual Chocolate and F.I.S.T.S in the museum lobby. They also wandered through the second floor gallery, observing Weems’s works as the exhibition officially opened for the semester.

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In Case You Missed It: Lunar New Year Celebration

By Echo Zhuge

The Chinese New Year has celebrated the spirit of communities and  families for thousands of years. The traditions, rituals, and decorations leading up to Lunar New Year remain to this day, traveling beyond cultural borders. The McMullen Museum celebrated these long-held traditions this past Saturday, February 10, 2018.

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In light of contemporary Chinese artist Cao Jun’s spring exhibition, Cao Jun: Hymns to Nature, at the McMullen Museum, three cultural clubs–the Chinese Student Association, the Korean Student Association, and the Philippine Society of Boston College–came together and co-hosted a celebration of the upcoming Lunar New Year, which begins on February 16, 2018.

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In the conference center, freshmen representatives dressed in qipao and indigo silk blouses presented the history and cultural significance of the New Year to visitors along with Chinese scallion pancakes and Korean seafood pancakes. After this presentation, guests were invited to watch a lion dance performance. The museum was buzzing with the thunderous sound of a drum and jubilant movement.

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After the lion dance, guests were invited to participate in numerous arts and crafts throughout the museum, including making Chinese knots, paper-cuttings, lanterns, and dragon puppets. The Chinese Student Association handed out red envelopes with chocolates to children and families who came to celebrate with the museum.

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