Docents at new museum make art accessible to all
As docents for the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Susan Day and Tobin Sparling craft tours meant to spur curiosity and contemplation.
“A museum by itself is just a bunch of objects,” Sparling says. “It’s the human interaction with those objects that makes them come alive and that’s what our job is — to help those objects come alive in the eyes of the people who are looking at them.”
As docents, Sparling and Day lead tours for groups of 15 or more people.
“It can be school groups, church groups, book clubs, whatever,” Day says.
Tours generally must be scheduled, but drop-ins are available at 1 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays as well as during Wednesday Spins, starting at 6 p.m., when there are also cocktail specials and music in the museum’s Cultural Living Room.
“When we do tours, we try to focus on a theme that is of interest to us,” Day says. “I’ve got a few different things right now, depending on what’s going on in the galleries.”
Day, whose professional background is in biotechnical research and pharmaceutical sales, has crafted tours around the theme of injustice, using artwork to examine the imprisonment of Black Americans, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as well as unconventional materials and works by women.
She first applied to be a docent 12 years ago, after reading a story about it in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
“I’ve always enjoyed art,” she says. “I’ve really enjoyed going out and going on tours.”
Sparling worked in the rare books department at the Yale Center for British Art and in the print collection at the New York Public Library before studying art law. He was a commercial litigator and then taught at South Texas College of Law.
He moved to Little Rock in retirement to be near his partner’s family, just as the pandemic began.
Day’s initial training was four hours per week for 12 weeks.
“It started out with art history, vocabulary, reading about different periods of art — you know, what is cubism, what is modernism, what is realism. How do historical things [affect] art, like with the camera, the focus became
“The wonderful thing about the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts is that it’s free so that you don’t have that financial barrier to come in and enjoy it.”
— Tobin Sparling
less about doing a realistic painting,” she says.
There was a different format for Sparling’s more recent training, with shorter times in class and more independent work. Museum staff brought in a docent from the Museum of Modern Art to talk about how tours are led there. Museum docents are also encouraged to shadow other docents.
“Everybody comes at it a little differently, Day says. “When you practice and when you watch other people you see things that they do and you’ll think, ‘That’s great. Let me do that.’”
She and Sparling remind visitors and other docents alike that the museum “is not a library.” People are encouraged to discuss what they see. Sparling even incorporates noise into school tours, likely to the surprise of shushing teachers and chaperones.
“We’ll talk about what noise do you think this piece of artwork makes,” he says. “They make a noise, and it’s usually very quiet, and I’ll say it needs to be louder and louder and louder until you make a great big noise that just rocks the museum. They love it and it makes the museum more approachable. It’s fun and it’s exciting and that’s what I try to bring to the schools.”
There is a social aspect to the docent program beyond mingling with museum visitors, including periodic speakers and a book club for museum docents.
“They had three speakers recently whose artwork is in the gallery, so we get to further our art background that way,” Day says.
Sparling spent many summer afternoons as a child strolling alone through the Hyde Collection in Glen Falls, N.Y.
“It was so welcoming and inviting that it really set me on the path to enjoying the fine arts,” he says. “The goal of being a docent is kind of to replicate that experience for others.”
Sparling’s father, a high school English teacher, gave impromptu “tours” of the family home in upstate New York to Sparling and his brother.
“We would get up on a Saturday or Sunday morning and my father would take us on tours of our house and point out the different types of antique furniture. We would always end up in the kitchen for Mom’s breakfast,” Sparling says.
He encourages museum visitors to set aside their inclination to look at something quickly and move on and to, instead, take time to examine art.
“Sometimes you can get them to look at it, they come up with such profound observations about a picture or a sculpture or whatever they’re looking at and precisely the kinds of things that a professional art historian can go on about, but they’ve come up with them. It’s so gratifying to see that that process is happening.”
His main objective is encouraging people to come back, he says.
“The wonderful thing about the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts,” says Sparling, “is that it’s free so that you don’t have that financial barrier to come in and enjoy it.”