Whatcom Museum docents educate, inform the public

Whatcom Museum’s docent tours are a bit like program notes for a concert: you’ll learn details about the artists, information about their works, and the context in which they were created.

Docent tours are offered at 1:30 or 2:30 p.m. Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays at the museum’s Lightcatcher Building, 250 Flora St., depending on the exhibition. The tours, which run about 40 to 50 minutes, are open to the public and are free for museum members and are included with admission for non-members.

Private tours for groups of six or more at $6 per person can be arranged by calling 360-778-8938.

Loraine Boland has been active at Whatcom Museum for more than 20 years, and became a docent when the Lightcatcher opened in November 2009.

“We are volunteers with the specific mission to help educate and give insight to museum patrons about the particular exhibit they are seeing,” Boland says.

She’s currently a docent for the “Unhinged: Book Art on the Cutting Edge” exhibit.

“One of the wonderful byproducts of being a docent is that we ourselves learn so much in the process,” Boland says.

Becoming a docent is not as simple as it might sound. First, docents make a 12-month commitment to lead gallery tours.

Then there’s the training.

“We usually have a three- to four-week period prior to the exhibit where we have a weekly class,” Boland says. “Marilyn Burns, our docent educator, assigns each of us topics pertaining to the exhibit to investigate. We then write a report that we share with others in the class. It’s a great way to learn.”

Burns, who was hired in July 2009, says docents love all kinds of art, as well as interacting with the public and providing a service to the community.

Training is two-pronged, Burns says: Learning to look at art with an educated eye, which includes in-depth research on artists’ styles and techniques and art history; and honing writing and presentation skills to develop interactive tours that attract and engage an adult audience.

Joan Ofteness, who has been volunteering as a docent since 2010, says Burns emails various documents to the docents, such as a checklist of works in each exhibit with images, artists’ backgrounds, and other pertinent text relating to the exhibit.

Each docent creates his or her own tour, Ofteness says. She says the docents’ tours provide biographical information about the artists, a historical context for their works, insight into the various media employed, along with analysis of selected works.

Boland says the number of people in the tours vary with the exhibit, the time of year and the weather.

“On the weekend and in the summer, we have many people from out of town or up from Seattle,” she says.

Burns says that as ambassadors for the museum, docents strive to engage the audience in a conversation about art, helping viewers expand their own level of visual literacy.

“I try to give an overview of the exhibit and then focus on some of the pieces that I particularly like,” Boland says. “I explain why I like the piece and give as much background as I can. I also try to get those in my tour to talk about the piece or elaborate on something I have said. I think conversations, rather than lectures, work best for the tours.”

This story was originally published November 4, 2015 at 4:01 PM with the headline "Whatcom Museum docents educate, inform the public."