· Research and development of exhibitions that contribute knowledge and added value.

“Feasting on Paris. Picasso 1900-1907” (2011). Self-Portrait with Palette, Picasso, Paris, 1906 |  “Picasso Looks at Degas” (2010).

Forgetting Velázquez. Las Meninas (2008). Photo: Lafotogràfica | Lee Miller. Picasso in Private (2007)

· The Museu Picasso welcomes current art

Rodney Graham. Possible Abstractions (2010) | Series of performances

· New installation of the series Las Meninas, presented in chronological order

· Donation of a sketch of Las Meninas to the Museum by Catherine Hutin, daughter of Jacqueline Picasso

Pablo Picasso, Sketch for Las Meninas, Cannes, 16 August 1957 Coloured pencil on paper 24 x 30.5 cm Donated by Catherine Hutin MPB 113.292

· Increase in international loans of artworks to Picasso-related exhibition projects of outstanding importance around the world:

Preparations for the journey. Placing the artwork in the shipping crate

- Harlequin travelled to Rome for the exhibition Picasso 1917-1937: l’Arlecchino dell’Arte (2008-2009) and to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010-2011).

- Seven canvases from the series Las Meninas, La Nana, a self-portrait and the portraits of Sabartés and Casagemas were loaned to the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais in Paris for the exhibition Picasso et les Maîtres. Las Meninas also went on show in the National Gallery in London (2008-2009).

- Waiting (Margot) was loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (2006-2007)

· Relaunch of the website and development of strategy and activities for 2.0 communication and the social networks, which won the Best of the Web award at the M & W conference in Denver, CO, 2010

· Preparation of the online collection and upload on the Internet.

· Improvements in visitor services with the introduction of online ticket sales, the arranging of time slots for group visits and the launch of the Museu Picasso Pass.

· Launch of a new multimedia audio guide in eight languages

· Restoration of the Palau Aguilar with the discovery of medieval polychrome ceilings and the carrying out of an X-ray study of the collection

Restoration of the ceiling of the Palau Aguilar | Analysis of Woman’s Head (Fernande Olivier) with an X-ray fluorescence gun

· Setting up of the new Centre for Knowledge and Research in a new building on the Plaça de Jaume Sabartés

A study day in the Centre for Knowledge and Research. Photo: Conxa Rodà

· Setting up of the Education Service and the Museu Picasso’s work to become a learning resource for all educational levels

Neighbourhood Projects | A dynamic visit to Las Meninas by a primary class

· Expansion of the programme of activities relating to the collection and the temporary exhibitions. Development of projects in collaboration with other organizations and building closer links with the neighbourhood

‘Let’s Talk about Painting’ with Frederic Amat. Photo: Jordi Mota | Japanese Woodcut and Print Workshop. Photo: Jordi Mota | Big Draw. The Festival of Drawing. Photo: Bárbara Piffre

· Setting up and running of the Postgraduate Course in Museum Management ‘How a Museum Works’ in conjunction with the IDEC in-service training institute at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

· Launch of a new publishing venture with the Abstract and Focus collections

The booklets in the Abstract collection are designed to accompany some of the Museu Picasso’s temporary exhibitions. Each one includes a summary of the show’s thematic areas, a selection of the most important works and key passages from the catalogue. The booklets in the Focus collection accompanying the small- and medium-format exhibitions set out to analyse in greater depth particular works in the museum’s collections

· Setting up of a Picasso Network in conjunction with other institutions that manage facilities dedicated to the artist and his work, including Gósol Town Council, the Picasso centre in Horta de Sant Joan, the Museum in Cadaques and the Fundació Palau in Caldes d’Estrac.

We also have a number of projects in progress at an advanced stage!

· Process of creating a Museu Picasso Barcelona Foundation

· New articulation and presentation of the permanent collection

· Publication of a new print guide to the Museu Picasso

· Production of a of 50 min. video, Picasso and Barcelona.

Maybe we hyave accomplished ten years’ work in just five. What do you think?

Museu Picasso newsroom

Interview with Silvia Domenech, curator of the exhibition

Starting from this premise it was decided to use the archive as a primary articulating element, with a view to explaining more fully and accurately both the actual 1936 exhibition and the network of individuals and interests that was formed in order to make it happen. We felt that visitors would be interested in having this chance to interact directly with the contents of the period documents, to get inside the archive, and that the best way to achieve this was to use technological tools.

The whole process was a work in progress involving the museum’s in-house team and the team of designers and programmers, an experimental undertaking based on an expository discourse rather different from the usual, these singular features meant that the ‘making of’ the exhibition was similarly unconventional. The word that perfectly describes the work done during the eight days of the montage is ‘artisanal’, because the whole show was put together on the basis of objects and programming specifically in the service of the curator’s thesis.

Touch screen of the exhibition

In order to explain the discourse of the archive we laid out a special mapping room, based on the correspondence of ADLAN (Amics de l’Art Nou, or Friends of New Art, the group that organized the show), to show the genesis of the documents and their relation to one another.

The designers of the exhibition suggested to the curator that the information be structured in terms of ten key concepts that would be materialized on ten cards: when these cards were introduced into a table specially designed for the show they would project onto the mapping wall specific items of content (consisting of copies of letters, newspaper clippings, photographs and graphic material from the time),setting out key facts about the 1936 exhibition and bearing witness to the importance of the network of intellectuals involved in organizing it and at the same time allowing the visitors to interact with the information.

This was a complicated but also a very interesting process. One of the most debated issues had to do with the length of the projections. The curator’s knowledge of the subject was evidently very extensive and an effort would have to be made to summarize this mass of information. At first we considered the possibility of 15 concepts, but in the end the two teams decided that the best option was to reduce the number of cards so as to make the experience more fluid. In fact, this is a very representative instance of the ongoing collaboration between the two teams.

Another element that was constructed out of the joint work of the two teams was the ontology: the explicit formalization of a shared conceptual scheme. The purpose of this ontology was to provide a detailed understanding of the relationship between Picasso and the individuals and agencies involved in putting on the exhibition, and their relations with one another.

The first part of this two-part process was based on the work of some of the programmers with the curator. Having established the identity of the individuals and agencies, the categories and the types of relationship, as the basis of the ontology, the museum team began to enter all of this information into a database to which we had online access. We then thought about how this database was to be visualized and a specific software application was created to visualize the ontology dynamically. We had two metal tables made, with built-in touch screens to allow the user to navigate directly through the different themes of the ontology. In order to structure and refine the information in the ontology, it was decided to set up different conceptual groups that would make navigation easier. The creation of these groups was a gradual process: the curator proposed a type of group and relationship and the programmer set it up, but we couldn’t be sure that this relationship would be permanent until we had seen the result. The fact is that all of the changes were decided one by one by all of the members of the exhibition team.

Curator and visitors to the exhibition

As you can see, this very untypical ‘making of’ was based on a joint effort in which an interdisciplinary team worked together to enter inside an archive with the aid of technology.

Mariona Tió

Coordination “Picasso 1936. Traces of an Exhibition”
Related links

We’ll be talking about the archive at the round-table ‘Documents, archives and artistic processes’ on Thursday, 26 January at 7.30 p.m. If you’d like to find out more about how the archive tells stories, come along!

Provisional and final versions of a page of the second number of the Focus collection”Picasso 1936. Traces of an exhibition”

Even now I love turning the pages of any book that has photographs in it and trying to find a storyline. Perhaps that’s why I’m still committed to the belief that each new Museu Picasso publication should be able to be seen as a kind of narrative.

Achieving this goal is not always easy. When we do the catalogue for a large-format exhibition we know we are producing a one-off, and the successes and shortcomings of each publication help us to make the next one better. But when we do a collection of books, the challenge is greater, because the basic parameters of the model cannot be changed. And this is the case with the Focus collection, which was launched to provide lasting testimony to the small-format exhibitions that the museum was planning to base on pieces from its holdings.

Cover of the second number of the Focus collection

We entrusted the design work to Edicions de l’Eixample, and they came up with a wonderful model that answers perfectly to the characteristics of the project. The dimensions, the paper, the layout, the typefaces, the internal structure of two clearly differentiated parts (text and images) and the illustrated cover are all just right.

Draft of a page of the second number of the publication

The first title, “Science and Charity Revealed”, allowed us to establish many of the graphic parameters of the collection, because although the structure was well defined, every new idea that we came up with as we were constructing the dummy raised questions and challenges.

The second title, “Picasso 1936. Traces of an Exhibition”, proved especially tricky. In addition to working with a very different kind of graphic material, we had to fit into a static support a story involving a lot of dynamic elements. The technology used in the exhibition, pure interconnectivity, presented the series of pieces to the public in a much more exhaustive fashion, but ‘trapped’ on paper as we were, we had to think hard about the content of each double page in order to achieve a comparable result.

Provisional and final versions of pages of the second number of the Focus collection

If putting together a model or dummy is always like doing a jigsaw puzzle without knowing how it’s supposed to look when it’s completed, in this case it proved to be more complicated than ever. The designers had to find the visual appeal in material that didn’t seem inherently attractive (press clippings, pages from newspapers, fragments of documents…) and construct an intelligible sequence. They tried out different orders of images, they laid out the blank space, they fitted the captions to the photos and tried to create an attractive rhythm. We wanted the patient reader to be able to turn each page and feel a real desire to read the documents we have presented and gradually come to see how the exhibition came together in 1936.

Would it have been easier to produce a multimedia enriched digital book? Have we really succeeded in explaining to the reader the links between the different individuals, entities and conceptual elements that configured the Picasso exhibition of 1936? These are questions that I for one am still asking myself.

Provisional and final versions of pages of the second number of the Focus collection

Immersed as we now are in preparing the next title in the collection, we are facing a different set of difficulties, but we will keep on working to solve this new puzzle, which you will soon have the opportunity to discover.

Marta Jové
Publications

Roofs of Barcelona. Pablo Picasso, 1903

‘[…]Catalan architecture, dispensing with the pitched roof and retaining what we call the solera, because the sun beats down on it, produced the roof terrace, which in all honesty is the pride of Barcelona, ​​where it rests on the brow of the house like a crown of gold and silver with the stars for diamonds, and makes the city as flat as your hand, and locals and visitors to Barcelona alike can go up onto the roof and stroll to and fro contemplating and admiring the succession of rooftops one after another, like a plain extending from the sea to the hills, hung with washing drying in the sun, flapping like the flags of the ships in the port, as if they were the hair on the houses’ heads, and this plain links together and like a ring fits a finger the sky, the hills and the sea that surround and protect us. […]

‘A day came when, influenced and blown by the wind from the North of Europe, which drives everything before it, nothing would do but to put pitched roofs on the houses again, aggravated by the fact, which we can never forgive, that instead of putting back the old roofs of red terracotta tiles […] they put on slate tiles, black as soot or as grey as a rainy day […]

Urban Landscape (1896), Rooftop Parapet and Water Tank (1895-96), Urban Landscape (1896). Pablo Picasso

‘And in the presence of this calamity that ruins our houses, and which we trust will not long endure, since it is to be hoped that the young architects now coming up will open their eyes one of these days, the wretches that do it should understand that to steal the flat roofs is to rob the houses of Barcelona of their greatest treasure, ​​which they love more than anything, because they seem to touch the sky […]

‘The architects of today, who have let themselves be tricked by Northern Europe, conceal and disguise the flat roofs, placing them on top of all the black tiled roofs they make, so that the residents can hang out their washing and go up there whenever they want, to touch the sky with their teeth and see the sea and the hills around Barcelona. […]

Roofs of Barcelona. Pablo Picasso, 1902

‘And so we may say that if the fashion of hiding the roof behind the parapet passed away and was succeeded by the jewel we have today, we ask that there pass away as soon as possible the fashion of hiding the flat roof, dissembling it on top of the pitched roof, as if it were something not fit to be seen, and in this way Barcelona will not lose one of the few charms ithas, and which everyone envies us, because if it did not rain as much as it does in the countries of the North, we are sure that they would copy it from us.’

Francesc Pujols, The Rooftops of Barcelona, “La Publicidad”, 18 June 1920 [from Francesc Pujols, Articles, selected and edited by Enric Cassany, Quaderns Crema, Barcelona, 1983]

Pere Vila primary school. Photo: Kisa

At a session at the same school last year the teachers made us aware of the need to give a boost to art education in school, and it was clear that the best way to do this was through joint training, giving us a fuller understanding of the resources available for visual expression as a basis for designing activities with the pupils.

In conjunction with the Department of Innovation of the Consorci, we felt it would be interesting to ask the Museu Picasso’s Education Service, which is committed to working closely with the schools in our area, to give a presentation of the key ideas, the aims, the processes and the capacities involved in the educational proposals available to school groups visiting the museum, in order to help us move forward in this reflection that we realized we needed to engage in.

Working sessions

Every December, as a New Year’s greeting, the girls and boys at the school make a calendar for their parents, with self-portraits of all everyone in the class. We asked the Education Service to help us look with ‘artist’s eyes’ at Picasso’s portraits and self-portraits as a way of encouraging the children to give expression to their self-portraits, which are, in essence, a way to learning to know themselves.

Working sessions

We had four sessions at the school, starting by situating the portrait in its artistic and social context through history and going on to run three workshops with members of the museum’s Education Service, educators from Àgora and teachers from the Illa art school. The sessions provided a framework and facilitated the experimental work of making portraits using different techniques while, most importantly, bringing out the importance of looking at ourselves and our feelings and recognizing one another: all of us, including the Pere Vila teachers, ‘looked at each other’.

Workshops with members of the museum’s Education Service

Workshops

Workshops

Late December, we collected as usual the self-portraits the children had made for the calendar. What first struck us was that the noses, mouths and eyes were richer and more diverse and — most interesting! — a lot of the children had drawn themselves wearing glasses. We can say, then, that we have started to do portraits ‘with a nose, a mouth and two eyes’ — and glasses!

-2012 Calendar. Pere Vila primary school (P3a)

-2012 Calendar. Pere Vila primary school

Isabel Nadal
Head teacher, Pere Vila primary school

The inauguration of the Centre for Knowledge and Research on the Plaça de Jaume Sabartés. The new building has been designed and built with the idea of constituting a local and international point of reference for the study and research of Picasso and his artistic and social context. Photo: Josep M. Llobet

The second annual Big Draw. Festival of Drawing was a huge success thanks to everyone who took part: workshop organizers, artists, docents and teams from the various participating centres. Big thanks! Photo: Nuria Fradera

Visitors to the exhibition of “Feasting on Paris. Picasso 1900-1907”, which showed how the artist evolved from his arrival in Paris in 1900 until 1907 or 1908, when he was acknowledged to be the principal figure in the artistic avant-garde in the French capital. Photo: Jordi Mota

“Cartoons on the Front Line” explained by the show’s curators. The exhibition was structured around two etchings from the sequence Dream and Lie of Franco. Photo: Jordi Mota

Participants at the Europeana Hackathon held at the Museu Picasso: multicultural hackers with plenty of ideas and projects to programme.

The first get-together of representatives of the Catalan museums and Amical Viquipèdia to share quality information and best practices for collaboration.

The catalogue of the museum’s library is now searchable online! And the bibliographic information you find there is easy to download.

The development of content for mobile devices with highlights from the collection and a virtual tour of the museum’s courtyards, plus an audioguide in eight languages.

People taking part in the pilot project REFLEXIONART: Art Tutorials, the main aim of which is to bring together Barcelona’s cultural institutions and schools to reflect on a common theme. Presentation of the students’ work in the Museu Picasso’s exhibition rooms.

The second Postgraduate Course in Museum Management: how to make a museum work, run in collaboration with IDEC at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

The acquisition of the fonds of the Sala Esteva made it possible to create the recently opened exhibition “Picasso 1936. Traces of an Exhibition”.

Presentation of the restoration of the 16^th-century polychrome printed wallpaper discovered in the Palau Aguilar. A great professional get-together.

All of us at the museum wish you a Happy New Year 2012!

Related links

Museu Picasso in images 2010

Museu Picasso in images 2009

Yerba Buena Family Day:  Children’s Creativity Museum, MOAD

Of particular interest in this field is the work being carried out by the MAH: Museum of Art&History in Santa Cruz, California. The recently appointed Director, Nina Simon, is putting into practice the theories of participation set out in her book The Participatory Museum.Those of us who took part in the last Postgraduate course in Museum Managementhad the opportunity to get to know her ideas at first handin the workshop on participatory activities she ran at IDEC, and at the lecture she gave at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona in November 2010.

When I learned from the Postgraduate course that the MAH was offering internships I applied at once, and when I was accepted for a two-month placement in November and December I decided to go to Californiaa few weeks early in order to visit the museums of San Francisco. A brief note on this: check out the action out on 15 October in the Yerba Buena Arts District, with such great museums as the Children’s Creativity Museum, MOAD and SFMOMA.

Yerba Buena Family Day:  MOAD, SFMOMA

A little further out from this nucleus is The Exploratorium museum of science, art and human perception, a giant warehouse, full of interactive apparatus, and an absolute must-see, especially in 2013 when it will open a new space.

The Exploratorium

I eventually got to MAH in late October and set to work, finding out all about the museum’s programme of activities and what I could do there.

The museum has a small number of staff, plus interns — seven counting me — and around 130 volunteers (a lot, taking into account the size of the city and the museum) who help out in all kinds of ways and really do a remarkable job. (The subject of volunteer work in the U.S. deserves a post all to itself!).

Santa Cruz MAH

As this is a small museum with not many staff, everyone lends a hand at everything. There are two Curators, one for Art and one for History, and together with the Director, Nina Simon, and another staffer they plan all of the museum’s activities. The meetings are really interesting: everything that is talked about is centred on the visitors’ interests, how they can be involved, what they want to see and what they can do in the museum. Here the concept of the participatory museum is taken very much to heart, and absolutely nothing is planned anything without considering its participation potential.

I started out working on the design of activities related to forthcoming exhibitions (planning participatory activities, doing renders of proposals, looking for materials, and so on) and on other projects ranging from the redesign of areas that were ‘not participatory enough’ to graphic design for displays and running craft workshops for the visitors.

The experience is very rewarding and undoubtedly very valuable on a professional level. The underlying discourse is enthusiastically embraced by everyone who works here, and this is reflected in a very coherent way of doing things that is shared by all of the museum’s departments.

Nina Simon has only been in charge at MAH for seven months, but in this short time she has made great changes, starting out by fixing the financial situation and continuing by significantly increasing the number of visitors.

3rd Friday at MAH: Radical Craft Night on 18 November

There can be no doubt that MAH Santa Cruz is a museum of and for the community and not just a place where old and/or beautiful things are put on show. An excellent example of this is its programme, especially with the Free First Friday and 3rd Friday of each month. One of the most interesting initiatives I’ve seen in any museum is the Radical Craft Nighton November 18. A real experience, without a doubt.

If you’d like more information, visit the MAH website, the MAH facebook or the facebook of The MAH Collective. You can also find more photos on my Flickr.

Greetings from California, land of great wines and great museums.

Esther Giberga
Former student of the Postgraduate course in Museum Management
Currently on practical placement at MAH Santa Cruz, California

The director of the Museu Picasso, Pepe Serra, opened the conference with a reminder of the important contribution made by technical expertise (materials, creative processes, etc) in the documentation not only of the museum’s collections and also of its buildings.

Restoring the Palau Aguilar’s ceiling

After a brief introduction to the medieval palaces and the principal historical alterations made to them, the restorers Jesus Zornoza, Mònica Guitart and Beatriu Montoliu from the team coordinated by the museum’s Conservation and Restoration Department gave a detailed description of the restoration process and the presentation criteria adopted.

This prompted general discussion by the participants of a variety of subjects such as the permitted limits of an intervention, the stability of old wood as a support and the excellent quality of the rag paper made in the Mediterranean during the 15^thand 16^th centuries, as a reason for the good state of conservation of the wall coverings.

The scientific contribution was supplied by Sarah Boularand, of the Universitat de Barcelona, ​​who detailed the methodology used to identify the materials found on the ceiling of the Palau Aguilar.

In the round-table, the interrelationship among the so-called minor or applied arts was the common strand connecting different disciplines. Blanca López de Arriba, a specialist in polychrome restoration, gave an exposition of the systems used to decorate musical instruments in16^th-century Flanders and the similarities with the manufacture of printed papers in the same period.

Speakers during the conference. Photo: Reyes Jimenez

Elvira Gaspar, an expert on the conservation of paper, outlined the differences between the keeping of objects made of paper (screens, fans, etc) in private collections and in museums, and the very different approaches to interventions in the cultural heritage in the East and the West.

Àngels Bello and Carme Borrell from the B2 studio concluded the round-table with a discussion of the always controversial subject of temporary exhibitions and the uses and abuses of paper objects, which opened up a debate on the possibility of displaying facsimiles or digitized replicas instead of original documents.

Attendees and speakers during the break

Finally, Raquel Lacuesta of the Diputació de Barcelona presented some very interesting historical documentation and offered access to the archives of the Local Architectural Heritage Service as an in valuable first step prior to any intervention in the built heritage.

This interdisciplinary conference was attended by representatives of the Arxiu Històric, the library of the Universitat de Barcelona, the Escola Superior de Conservació i Restauració, the MNAC, the Print Museum and specialists in the conservation and restoration of graphic documents.

Reyes Jiménez
Head of the Preventive Conservation and Restoration Department

Although great advances have been made, much remains to be done and our cultural institutions have a crucial role to play in facilitating access to culture for everyone. In this article we will focus on the issue of accessibility in relation to the web.

In their daily lives, people with disabilities face a world full of barriers, and the information and communication technologies (ICT) are no exception. The ICTs are vital for their potential to enable millions of people with disabilities to develop full social and cultural lives every day, and this is why it is so important work to make them accessible to all.

The ever-greater integration of ICT into daily life, work and culture means that the digital divide is especially prejudicial to those who do not have access to products and services. One way to overcome this divide is to implement policies on web accessibility, so that everyone can use the Internet in a satisfactory manner, irrespective of their limitations, whether physical or environment-related.

‘The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone, regardless of disability, is an essential aspect.’ Tim Berners-Lee, W3C director and inventor of the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a body known as the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) that works to improve Internet accessibility around the world.

To appreciate the importance of web accessibility, let’s ask ourselves the following question:

How do people with disabilities surf the Internet?
We should bear in mind that people with disabilities enter the web with the aid of support products. Examples of support technologies are screen readers that read aloud what is on the computer screen for people who are unable to see or read it, and voice input software and push buttons for people who cannot use a keyboard or a mouse. It is essential to understand that people access the web in many different ways if we are to apply the principles of accessible design properly and guarantee universal access to the greatest possible number of users.

The Museu Picasso home page viewed with a web browser in text mode

Here are some of the principles for ensuring that websites are accessible:

Provide adequate alternative text
Alternative text provides a textual equivalent to non-textual content such as images, animations or videos. It is especially useful for people with visual impairment who rely on a screen reader to access the contents of a website.

Subtitle and/or provide transcripts
It is important to provide subtitles and a transcript of the video and audio content. With archived audio, a transcript may be sufficient.

Ensure that links make sense out of context
Every link must make sense if the link text is read on its own. Given that users of screen readers may choose to read only the links on a website, terms such as ‘click here’ and ‘more’ should be avoided.

Ensure the accessibility of content that is not HTML
PDF files, Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Adobe Flash content and so on.

Organization of the web page
Use headings, lists and a consistent structure and, if possible, use the CSS language for the layout.

Las Meninas (group) viewed with a web browser in text mode

In this image we can see how content is interpreted by a support product, whether it be a screen reader or a text-mode web browser for blind people and those with severely impaired sight. The web content is linear and text-based, and detects the headers and the links on the page — hence the importance of a proper logical structure.

The content of the pages should be structured with header labels — <h1>, <h2>, etc — because the majority of screen readers and some browsers allow the user to navigate within a site by ‘jumping’ from one header to the next, allowing them to get to the information they are looking for more quickly.

Among other things, we must also describe in detail all of the actions that can be carried out to make navigation easier for the user.

In relation to the difficulties that people with visual disabilities encounter in navigating a website, Santiago Moese (ONCE) gave us a number of guidelines by which museums can improve access to information. For example:

• When we enter a website it should be easy to find the information links on the homepage (times, prices, how to get there, virtual tour, etc).
• It is very important to have RSS feeds for the exhibitions, given that museums today are so active.
• It must be possible to download the information.
• We should be able to access and download the audio guide in MP3 format. In this way, when we visit the museum we can have it loaded on our own player, making the whole process much easier.
• Audio-visual materials should be readily accessible, with subtitles for people with hearing disabilities.

The conference speakers positively rated the extent to which the accessibility of web pages has improved in recent years. However, it is essential to keep up the good work and be aware of the barriers that confront people with disabilities.

Mireia Llorella
Internet team

A few months ago twoteachersfrom the Escola Nadís SCS school, Llum Tormo and Maria Traid, contacted us to ask about the possibility of adapting the content of the activities we offer to schools to cater to the specific needs and abilities of their students, and in particular of two groups, one aged between 10 and 19 and the other of children aged from 4 to 10.

Workshop at the room Las Meninas

This innovative experience, developed in very close collaboration with Llum and Maria, has been tremendously enriching experience for us, aswe first engaged in a process of reflecting on the contents of our visits andunpacking their contents elementary and then went on to adapt the way we do things in the workshops. We have also learned new working methodologies and, as in any process of trial and error, rated some things very positively and come to see that we need to rethink others. We’re very glad that the Escola Nadís thought of us, and really appreciate the feedbackfrom the school, not to mention the good humour and willingness of all those involved: teachers, volunteers and students.

The students took part in the workshop visits ‘Las Meninas, a series’ and ‘Feeling Picasso’, on two consecutive Mondays. We offered to run the workshops on that particular day of the week because Mondays are when the museumis closed to the public, allowing us more time and space to work with groups with specific needs.

Workshop at the museum’s rooms and in front of Las Meninas

We asked the teachers involved for their evaluation of the experience, and here are their comments:

‘First of all, thanks for the warm welcome and the readiness of the museum’s education team to make this a very valuable workshop for our students. The fact of proposing to run it on a day without visitors also made it easier for the students to concentrate.

‘In relation to the first visit, providing a guide dossierwith which to prepare the material on the basis of the Velázquez painting was very positive in terms of understanding what is happening in the picture and who the main characters are.

Workshop at the museum’s rooms comparing pictures

‘The proposed activity, with each participant recognizing his or her character was a really good idea, because all of the students had their own space to feel an active part of the picture, and it provided a starting point from which to take in different dimensions of the plane. Prior to that we had identified the characters in the classroom on a small scale (puppets), on the computer screen and on anA4 page, but some of the students were surprised at the actual size of the picture.

‘Perhaps we could have done with more information about the details of the Picasso painting (the reason for the use of colour for some characters, and the disproportionate sizes of the different characters, and the layout of the image). Some of this information was provided at the start, perhaps too quickly. But we are aware that the augmentative communication systems we use with our students make communication a slow process.

Students, teachers and volunteers participating in the workshops

‘The other point to be made is that — as you too you have pointed out — the second part of the workshop was a little disconnected from the itinerary through the exhibition rooms of the museum. There was too little time to understand and give examples of consecutive situations or from different ways of looking at reality. Even so, the end result was very positive for all of us.

‘In relation to the ‘Feeling Picasso’ workshop, we would stressthe importance of having had tools to work in the classroom before the visiton some of the elements that we would engage with in the workshop. In view of the specific abilities of our students, the idea of sharing what the painter feels when he iscreating in such a sensitive way is more understandable for them. We really liked the fact that some part of Picasso’s life was explained as a story related to each painting that we looked at. The second part of the workshop was very appropriate, both in the preparation of the material and in the presentation.

‘We rate very positively the adaptation of the explainers’interaction so as to get the pupils involved, interpreting their responses and making available the right material for eachpicture.’

Maria Alcover
Education Service