You Belong Here
Volunteer museum educators connect the RISD Museum with the community.
Tacked up in the office of Mariani Lefas-Tetenes, the director of school and teacher programs at the RISD Museum, are handwritten notes and colorful small-scale recreations of artworks from the RISD Museum’s collection. They come from local students and others who have been guided through the museum by staff and by volunteer museum educators, also known as docents.
To the countless K-12 students they have led on tours, the docents are the gateway to surprising finds, new favorite works of art and new aspirations, like one day making art that is included in the museum’s collections. (The docents also, according to the notes, are “cool,” “nice” and “make school days fun.”) To the museum, docents are essential partners in carrying out its mission of educating students and the public in the creation and appreciation of works of art and design.
“The individuals who volunteer as docents help the museum fulfill its commitment to learning,” says Sarah Ganz Blythe P 22, deputy director of exhibitions, education and programs and the museum’s interim director from December 2020 to October 2023. “The docents are crucial connectors between the museum and the communities it seeks to serve. In this role, they commit to ongoing training, sometimes for decades, and together function as a learning community within the museum, propelling our work through their boundless curiosity and fervent sense of responsibility.”
Among the most well-known docents is the late Pearl Nathan, a Providence resident who volunteered with the RISD Museum from 1946 to 2016. Known for her zest for life and her commitment to educating young people, in 2008 she won an award from Providence Public Schools for her volunteer work.
Now, art lovers can gather in the museum's Café Pearl and the Pearl and Ernest Nathan Gallery, a lively community space established via the generosity of the Nathan and Gerson families upon Nathan's retirement.
Being a docent “was something that was meaningful and important for her,” and that provided her with a network of friends who were also knowledgeable and passionate about art, Pearl’s son Alan Nathan says. “She didn’t do it for glory. She did it because it mattered.”
The RISD Museum counts among its docents many who make long-term commitments to their volunteer work, like Janice Libby, a Providence resident who led her first tour in 1970 and retired in the spring of 2023, shortly before her 90th birthday.
Libby’s relationship with the museum began with a membership. Over time, she became a Radeke Circle patron, supporting the RISD Museum’s core curatorial, educational and community activities, and joined the Museum Associates, a nonprofit dedicated to stimulating public interest in and support of the museum. Ultimately, she became one of its longest-serving docents, leading tours for countless young visitors and helping them engage with and learn about the collections.
Asked what kept her volunteering for 53 years, Libby says, “I enjoyed it!”
Over the years, Libby has led tours for K-12 students as well as preschoolers in Rhode Island’s Head Start program. She helped 3- to 5-year-olds learn their colors by handing them pieces of colored paper and asking them to find those hues in nearby paintings. She responded “yes” when a group of 8-year-old boys asked if they could all hold hands and walk together through the galleries, and she has helped older students gain an understanding of history by guiding them through immersive exhibits.
“There used to be a keeping room exhibit, a replica of a 17th-century New England house,” Libby says. “The children would sit on a bench in the room and talk about how people must have lived.”
That exhibit is no longer on display, and since 1970, Libby has seen the RISD Museum expand and grow to include new galleries, wings and spaces as well as new works and areas of focus. The docents’ work evolves in tandem with the museum, Libby says.
Docents take two-hour classes at least three times a month in order to maintain a deep understanding of exhibits and collections, and to hone their communication and teaching skills. Lefas-Tetenes, the director of school and teacher programs, says docents, like staff educators, are trained to be self-reflective, culturally competent and inclusive.
They aim to meet students where they are and ensure that everyone feels comfortable and at home in the museum.
Kajette Solomon, museum social equity and inclusion program specialist, says the museum is committed to helping docents “tell the true, accurate, factual, whole story” of works of art. The RISD Museum organizes trainings on how to talk about race and how to leave biases at the door.
This makes the quality of students’ experiences with the RISD Museum very high, Solomon says. “The end result is that students have learned, participated and had their perspectives heard.” For Jane Koster, a retired teacher and RISD Museum docent since 2002, listening for those perspectives is key.
“What we learned to do was to not start talking immediately,” says Koster, a Jamestown, RI resident. Given the opportunity, she says, students encountering a work of art will speak first, sharing everything from facts—that the Nile flows north, for example, while touring the Egyptian galleries— to their impressions and their views on the history, myths, legends and folklore depicted in the works.
Koster makes a point of repeatedly telling every tour group—as well as people she meets in the supermarket or in the course of her daily life—“the RISD Museum is your museum” and encouraging them to visit and bring family and friends. That echoes the museum’s unofficial motto “you belong here,” featured in a 2018 installation by Trustee Tavares Strachan 03 GL.
Libby says that Koster’s attitude is shared by the docent group as a whole, and that while she was ready, after 53 years, to step back from volunteering, she is excited to welcome the group of 17 new volunteers who joined the docent program in the summer of 2023.
“It’s a community of love for art,” Libby says, “that always wants to make sure people have a terrific time at the museum.”
To learn more about volunteering with the RISD Museum’s docent program please contact Mariani Lefas-Tetenes, director of school and teacher programs, at teachers@risd.edu. To learn about scheduling a visit with the group tours program, visit risdmuseum.org/groupvisits.
AN ONGOING TRADITION
Established in 1914, the RISD Museum’s docent program is the second-oldest in the country, after that of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and predates the museum’s Education Department. It has evolved over 109 years from a series of Sunday gallery lectures to a robust program of guided visits for K-12 students from all over the state; afterschool, camp and youth groups; college and university students and adult groups. In 2021-2022, the museum saw post-pandemic in-person attendance rebound strongly, and guided programs served 10,000 individuals, more than a quarter of them K-12 students.
