Giving Shape to Our Creativity

Giving Shape to Our Creativity

Last winter it felt like my creativity was buried deep. A seed, I hoped, not a corpse. All my energy was going towards surviving, staying afloat, and there was nothing to spare to make anything new. My energy had to be used to keep what was already there alive. Last spring brought the itchiness that comes when creative energy is building […]

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Learning How to See

Learning How to See

This photo was taken in 1883 by Thomas Eakins, a painter who used photography to study the human form. Here, two of his art students stand in front of a relief, in poses that echo the sculpted figures. Eakins used photos as a tool to help him make his paintings feel closer to life: “the camera was a teaching device comparable to anatomical […]

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Fresh Eyes On The Writing Process

Fresh Eyes On The Writing Process

I’m in a phase of my PhD journey where I am writing, writing, writing. Until recently I was in a place where I was plotting out what I would eventually write, but now I’m actually writing. Real sentences that real eyes will read. When I sit at my computer with my document open on the screen, my fingers poised at the keyboard, I […]

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7 PhD Lessons, as seen in The Met Museum

7 PhD Lessons, as seen in The Met Museum

I just finished my first year as a Museum Studies PhD student at the Université du Québec à Montréal. I took all of the program's classes in this first year (!) and I've started research for my thesis on storytelling using digital media. It's been a very full year... Here are some of the lessons I learned [...]

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Museum Fitness

Museum Fitness

The Metropolitan Museum of Art wants visitors to work on their museum fitness. The Museum Workout is a 45-minute workout session covering two miles of the The Met before it opens in the morning. Two dancers, dressed in sequined dresses and tennis shoes, lead participants through group exercises and stretches, including yoga in the sunny [...]

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Imaginibus Year in Review 2016

Imaginibus Year in Review 2016

2016 brought some exciting developments to this blog, including the launch of a new product line of creative prompts for visiting museums: MusEmvelopes. The two available themes are Love and Voyages. I also started a newsletter, which you can subscribe to below! I've had so much fun this year exploring [...]

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Museum Hack’s Un-Highlights Tour of the Met Museum

Museum Hack’s Un-Highlights Tour of the Met Museum

This summer, during my three-day retreat in the Met Museum, Museum Hack invited me on one of their Un-Highlights Tours. I had heard intriguing things about their museum tours, and I was excited to finally see for myself what all the buzz was about [...]

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Spending an Hour with Vermeer’s Sleeping Maid

Spending an Hour with Vermeer’s Sleeping Maid

Is there anything more luxurious than slowly absorbing a sublime work of art? I can easily forget this. When I visit a new art museum, I can get in a manic state. I don’t want to miss anything, so I am tempted to methodically make my way through every gallery. And by seeing everything, I see nothing. So, when I gave myself three days to retreat in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I made a conscious effort to [...]

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Alexander Hamilton in the Metropolitan Museum

Alexander Hamilton in the Metropolitan Museum

Alexander Hamilton played a major role in my three-day retreat in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As I wrote about here, I was nervous as I approached the Met on the morning of the retreat's first day. I literally started getting panicky as I crossed Central Park, feeling overwhelmed by the vast collection of the Met and worrying that I wouldn’t be able to structure my time well. That’s when [...]

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Fancy French Bows in the Metropolitan Museum

Fancy French Bows in the Metropolitan Museum

Do you ever find yourself in a museum, looking but not seeing? This happened to me recently on my three-day retreat in the Metropolitan Museum. On my second morning, I was wandering from gallery to gallery, and I couldn’t quite register what I was seeing. I was so inundated with beauty that it was all blurring together. That’s when I decided to go on a photo safari, a trick in my museum toolbox that [...]

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Creative August: Play

Creative August: Play

August's museum theme is PLAY. My favorite museum memories involve some sense of play. It can be such a great way to appropriate a museum visit and to claim the space as your own. But, as an adult, thinking of ways to play can be a lot of work! I find myself tapping into a childlike energy when I am playful; it makes me think of the quote by Picasso: “Every child is an artist. The problem is [...]

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Technology in the Met's Court and Cosmos

Technology in the Met's Court and Cosmos

I visited the Met’s exhibition Court and Cosmos in a very particular way. This month’s museum theme is TECHNOLOGY, and I wanted to give myself the constraint of visiting an exhibition with this lens. Court and Cosmos turned out to be an apt choice of exhibition, with technology evident in both the objects and their display. Have you ever heard of the Seljuqs? I definitely hadn’t, although they were the [...]

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Twitter as a Tool for Visiting Museums

Twitter as a Tool for Visiting Museums

It was 9:50am and I was freaking out. The Metropolitan Museum of Art would open in ten minutes, marking the beginning of my three day visit of its galleries. But I had absolutely no idea where to start or how to structure my time in the museum. I felt blocked like an artist in front of a blank canvas. That's when I decided to tweet [...]

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