Art is an important part of young people’s lives nowadays
An exhibition created by teenagers at the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius
The exhibition ‘Where are the People?’, currently on view at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, is a unique art and educational project in the Baltic States. The show has been created by twenty-three teenagers, and they have done everything by themselves: they devised the exhibition's theme and idea, selected artworks and communicated with the artists, created the architecture and design of the exhibition, conducted audience research, and explored the possibilities of social marketing.
The project was initiated by Eglė Nedzinskaitė, the curator of educational programmes at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius.
One of the participants’ aims was to create an exhibition that would be interesting and relevant to other teenagers, as there is an assumption that art is hard to understand or simply not interesting enough for young people. The marketing team created by the young people looked at the process of creating the exhibition as if it were the process of creating a product, carrying out marketing research on the target audience and forming a unique selling proposition. They sought to answer the question – Why should young people visit the exhibition? This is how singer-songwriter Gabrielė Vilkickytė and her music came to be in the project. Her songs have been paired with artworks as well as certain areas of the exhibition. The participants believed that this would help visitors to understand the art in their own way and discover new meanings. Audience research showed that there is a lack of sensory experience in most exhibitions, which is why it has been implemented into this one. Here there are different surfaces you can touch, there are things to look at and listen to, and most importantly, once a month there will be special events at which the creators will work with visitors on new ways of viewing and re-reading the works of art.
The participants themselves believe that this experience is truly valuable and differs from the educational experiences found at school and after-school activities.
Arterritory.com presents the following interview with these members of the exhibition team: Meda Baltramonaitytė, (member of the marketing team), Salvinija Cibulskienė (mentor of the marketing team), Enrieta Cicėnaitė (member of the architecture team), Eglė Nedzinskaitė (curator of educational programmes at NGA and project manager), Justė Samuolytė (member of the design team), Aurelija Slapšytė (mentor of the design team), and Marijonas Verbel (member of the curatorial team).
Teenagers have created this exhibition from start to finish. How did the idea come about? How significant is the role of art in the lives of the younger generation?
Meda Baltramonaitytė (MB): Art always connects with the expression of feelings, both in one’s inside and outside worlds. Young people also do art for the same reason, but somehow there appeared these widely accepted “rules” that they need to follow when doing or watching art. But art surrounds us everywhere and every teenager creates some kind of art.
Enrieta Cicėnaitė (EC): I think art plays a vital role in the lives of young people – especially, if not most of all, in the form of music. But not everybody realizes that what they are enjoying and consuming is actually art. Computer and console games, videos on social media – all of these are new mediums for all generations to explore along with traditional forms of art. I think that the understanding of what art is – or should be, traditionally – scares a lot of young people away.
Eglė Nedzinskaitė (EN): The idea to invite children to create an exhibition was in the back of my mind for several years. I see my task as an art museum educator to not only encourage visitors to find connections with particular works of art, but to open up the process of creating the exhibition – the backstage of incredible teamwork which is needed for an art museum to operate and for the curator’s idea to become a visual and spatial experience.
The initial idea was to invite primary school children to create an exhibition. But after several meetings with other mentors of the project, we decided to invite teenagers. Partly because they are the group that rarely comes to the museum by themselves, and partly because all the mentors – Salvinija Cibulskienė, Margarita Kaučikaitė, Aurelija Slapšytė, Evelina Vasiliauskaitė – are professionals in their fields and can give the participants both an involving experience and professional skills.
Photos: Gintarė Grigėnaitė
Justė Samuolytė (JS): I believe it depends on the person, but overall I would say art is an important part of young people’s lives nowadays. I suppose that the majority of young people look very creatively at how they present themselves to the world. For example, teenagers might look to fashion, tattoos, etc. as a form of art and self-expression. Moreover, it is now more widely considered a form of self-care and a tool for self-reflection among teens.
Aurelija Slapšytė (AS): In my opinion, art can give you freedom. And that is one of the most significant things. The main purpose of this project was to set almost no boundaries and give participants the possibility to do whatever they want. In this way, art gave them a place to be themselves, to have fun and not be preoccupied with the pressures of everyday life. It was a getaway to meet new people and do like-minded stuff, to invite the world to see from their perspective.
Marijonas Verbel (MV): I feel that art is not that significant to the younger generation. Since the current educational system treats art as the least important subject, young people internalize that art is not that important. Art is significant only to those who want to discover it no matter what others say.
The exhibition was created in a way to make it interesting for young people. Have you come to understand what is important to today’s youth, what their interests are? What are they searching for in art?
MB: Yes! Before starting on creating the exhibition, we did a survey of young people to find out what they would want from it. We learned that they would like the exhibition to be interactive, that they could listen to music, find their own interpretations, and even meet someone new – and we gave them all of that!
Salvinija Cibulskienė (SC): We performed qualitative and quantitative marketing research. For the qualitative marketing research, we used personalized, in-depth interviews – we had about 30 respondents from the target audience. For the quantitative marketing research, we used a standardized questionnaire and questioned more than 1000 respondents from a targeted audience. 600 of them left their contact information with a request to be informed when the exhibition opens.
As a result, we had the following insights:
IT'S WEARISOME to look at art and feel or think something because it's not relevant to the problems or reality of today’s youth.
IT'S TIRESOME to read loads of texts and try and understand contexts when, in the end, you still can’t grasp any meaning from it.
IT'S BOTHERSOME because the exhibition space is so obvious and common, and you can't touch anything, you can't listen to music, can't talk, can’t move faster, you can't even sit or lay down comfortably because it's “art”, it's “culture”, and such behaviour does not fit into that cultural space. So the young people feel that the rules for “high art” have been carved into stone, and they already have tons of those kinds of rules. They are always struggling between the need to adapt to the adult world and its rules, and fighting for their own will and space.
THERE IS BIG COMPETITION for young people’s attention, and if the topic is not relevant, painful, or full of excitement, they won’t pay any attention to a leisure-time activity such as an art exhibition.
AND IF THEY DO GO TO AN EXHIBITION, they would like to feel free, feel themselves get lost in the space, feel comfortable, have it be sensory, and experience a journey: sometimes to a terrific, sometimes to a beautiful inner-self-space. Art can be meaningful to the young people if that art resonates with the inner-self, asks questions, or leads to better self-reflection.
EC: While you can never know enough about your audience, I think we managed to get more insight about them. Young people search for something they can relate to and want to have the freedom to explore art and interpret it as they wish.
EN: I actually recognized that today’s teenagers feel quite similar to how I felt when I was a teenager. I found similar struggles with inner and outer world, doubts, and future dreams. But sometimes – when it was needed the most – they acted as real grown-up people: making decisions, taking responsibilities.
Art is more like a reflecting mirror for them. Usually they start with an interpretation that echoes their feelings, and these interpretations can sometimes be very far away from those that the art field professionals had imagined. That’s where I see the value of this project: teenagers don’t mind constructing and assigning new and unexpected meanings to artworks. But sometimes they do refer to stereotypes learned at school.
JS: In order to understand what the younger generation is searching for and what their needs are, we did quite a few exercises. We found out that with the help of art, they want to explore the depths of their emotions and feelings – the conscious, the subconscious, and more.
AS: We used many different approaches to find out what they are into and in which group they would want to be involved. Through many group workshops online, we talked about the world and our place in it – how do they feel about it, what are the topics they want to talk about.
These young people were brave. They wanted to talk about their feelings and were open about it. Once we began talking more and more, I realized how many topics were interesting to them and how many different things were going on in their lives every day. The pressure is real. And that’s the thing. They are pressured to focus on everything around them. And it shows in our exhibition. At first, when you walk into the show, it might seem a little crowded or chaotic, even. But once you start to pay attention, you can see that, through art, these young people are talking about their inner worlds and the topics that surround them.
MV: The main thing young people focus on is seeing and learning about things that they haven’t been told about. Since every step leads to discovering more things, the collision between their inner and outer worlds becomes increasingly tense.
These teenagers will be the next primary audience for the museum. Could you say that this is a way in which the National Gallery Vilnius is preparing for the future? What will be the role of the museum of the future?
MB: Museums always feel like a place of culture. We wanted people to feel like they’re at home there – to feel safe, feel understood, and feel that you're not alone. Teenagers associate museums with school and boredom; we want to show them that it's a place you can easily hang out in.
SC: The teenagers have been working together with their mentors for almost a year. This was an educational journey, with hands-on experience and daily interaction with art. As a side effect of this project, we could see how interactions between the young people and art in general were changing – they started to follow along with what is happening in the field of culture, they started to analyze other exhibitions, and they are now paying attention to the small things that create the semantic Universum of art. Isn't that great?
They are inviting classmates, friends, family members. The exhibition has been open for just one week, and we already have requests coming in from all over Lithuania. News about the exhibition has spread well among the youth (our team has been building social networks on Instagram, and this is the very first exhibition at NGA with a dedicated social media channel), and other teenagers are saying that they would like to see this exhibition specifically.
And this brings us to the core function of the museum of the future: it will be a space for creative interdisciplinary learning activities with hands-on experience. And we need to start as early as possible so that the target audience can interact and develop critical soft skills such as reading, understanding images, and questioning the world around us. And not only questioning, but supporting and creating – because art expands our ways of seeing.
EC: In my opinion, museums should be catering to people of any age. I think that is the future of the museum. While I hope that our project encourages young people to participate in art themselves, there still remains work to be done.
EN: Throughout this process, I wasn’t actually thinking about future visitors to the gallery. What I was mostly interested in was today’s visitor, particularly teenagers. What could be the reasons for him or her to walk into an art museum and feel that it is a place for them. But definitely all educational activities taking place in the museum are also a preparation for the future. Our highest goal is to make the art museum a point of interest in their “mind-maps”. And to make it multifunctional. I hope projects like this one become a way to make museums a place for thinking, creating, reflecting and entertainment. And that it can help make art a tool for learning, communicating and problem solving.
JS: It is not an easy question to answer, as most things in terms of culture have kind of gone online and there is no real need for people to go to a physical museum anymore. It is more than easy to look up music, plays, famous paintings, sculptures and more on the internet. Anyways, I truly believe the younger generation will not stop visiting museums in the future, because it can really be a character-forming experience.
MV: The role of museums of the future will be to orient themselves towards the younger generation because nowadays, museums do kind of leave out the 14–18-year-old audience. There should be more art-education projects like this one because it broadens one’s understanding of art and allows for hands-on experiences that are crucial in a young adult's development.
This cooperation project between different cultural disciplines involved musicians, architects, artists, and curators. This appears to demonstrate that cooperation and synergy are a driving force behind art. And not only in art...
MB: It was shocking how only using teamwork, you can achieve something so big and great. I think it works best when different people work on one thing. They learn to express their opinion, but also how listen to others, come to a conclusion, and find the best option. One person couldn't attain this. People need other people to make everything complete.
EC: While every artist has their own muse that breathes inspiration into their minds, I do believe that cooperation is the glue that keeps everything together. Exchanging different points of views and ideas paves a way to incredible works of art.
EN: Exactly; this cooperation is hidden from the usual museum visitor. Teamwork is essential for any good exhibition to happen. This was one of the core ideas of the project – to bring a group of teenagers and unique individuals together and help them work together, help them recognize how one idea can benefit from others. But it is also about professional skills. Good cooperation won’t happen if all those cooperating have similar skills and competencies. It was important to highlight that you have to go deep into your profession if you want to be a valuable part of a system of cooperation. I still believe that synergy can happen in one person’s mind. I actually think it is more a matter of open-mindedness and critical thinking than gathering a lot of people into one place.
JS: I think so! Although people usually create in solitude, they get inspired by their surroundings, other people, other artworks, etc. I believe everything is connected and we can view the world and everything in it as a mutual creation.
AS: Yes, it shows that once you share your ideas with the team, you can achieve much more than by just doing it alone. What was beautiful about this process was that we could see and feel how differently, and at the same time, how similarly, we see the world. There were so many different approaches we used to solve the same problems.
MV: I think it shows that two (or more) heads are better than one. When people from different disciplines and cultural backgrounds start to cooperate, the outcome will always be unique in some kind of way.
How skilled was the team creating the exhibition? How did you manage the educational process for them?
MB: Every member of our team was very unique and important because they brought different things to our project, but we put them all together and made one exhibition. We are regular students who are still searching for who we really are, what we like, and what we are good at, and this process helped us improve ourselves. We aren't professionals, but five talented moderators guided us throughout the project. I personally really enjoyed being on this team; we supported each other and arrived at good decisions quickly.
SC: The team consisted of teenagers who had no clue about how to create an exhibition. What is meant by an exhibition's architecture, its design, and how it is marketed? All those concepts were empty boxes for these young people who didn’t have any theoretical or practical knowledge. The whole process was led by five professionals. In the beginning, we had some joint online work sessions (due to the quarantine) in order to give some sneak-peeks into each profession. Then each young person chose a group with which they would like to work with during the upcoming half year. And this is it. Each team worked with a professional who gave them some theoretical knowledge and practical assignments. The most important thing here is that the moderators left free space for the kids to make their own decisions. Hopefully this process has taught this group of young people how to take on responsibility, how to work in a team, and to appreciate the importance of communication and collaboration. It was a team process, not one by solo performers.
EC: Both the participants and the creators of the project were incredibly skilled. I learned a lot of new things and worked on my communication and cooperation skills without ever feeling like I actually had to sit down and learn. What I really enjoyed was the fact that there was no dry theory – everything was a hands-on experience. Instead of just getting to read or watch the process happen, I got to be part of it.
JS: All of us had an interest or some experience in art, so it was actually very fun to work together. We also had wonderfully friendly and highly skilled mentors. We had a safe environment to create in as well as in which to make mistakes and learn from them.
AS: All of them were creative. Most of them participate in many after-school projects. This project was one of many things they were doing. So it was easy to see that they were eager to work in a creative field. Of course everyone has a different set of skills, so in the design group we had design theory lectures and talked about what they love about design. Some were passionate about illustration; others were into typography or wanted to learn how to work with design programs. We distributed our work process based on that, and in that way, everyone in the group was able to work on something that interested them. I would say that the educational process was very personalized, as it is almost impossible to share all there is to know about graphic design in such a short time period.
MV: The participants did not have any skills in exhibition creation. The only skilled professionals were the mentors and the invited art professionals from various fields who taught us about the processes of creating an exhibition. For me, the educational process was an amazing experience as the learning process was purely based on hands-on experiences. There was only a fraction of time given to the “theory” part, and that led us to experiment more, learn more, and discover unique ways of curating.
What are the main things that you, as a curator, have learned from the young people by working together on this project? In particular – about art/creativity/thinking as a process/approach to work/life/the world?
EN: The project started in February 2021, so it’s no wonder there were ups and downs during the process. The young people seemed more involved at some periods than others, and I believe this was related to getting results that they could see and touch. The school system has taught them to be oriented towards results rather than towards the process itself. I learned to put my trust in the teenagers’ decisions, at least at those moments when they really took responsibility for their actions. What surprised me were all the artists and art field professionals who supported the idea, spent their time in online and live meetings, and invited the teenagers to their studios and lent out works for the exhibition. The young people were really inspired by their warmness and openness.
What is the role of art in Lithuania’s educational system? Aside from this particular project, how can you involve young people in the everyday life of the museum?
MB: I don't think art is that important in our educational system because a lot of young people think that art is confusing. That was one of the objectives of our team – to show our peers that art is not hard to understand. We also wanted to give our visitors complete freedom in finding meanings for themselves as they went through our exhibition. That’s because, for example, in school, teachers present a certain way that you need to think about art and what you need to see, and we wanted to break these rules.
EC: I think art is often, sadly, downplayed and placed below the sciences in the hierarchy of the educational system – and not only in Lithuania. While that view has shifted, it is still in the process of changing.
JS: As far as I know, it greatly depends on the teacher. Art can be a dreadful and boring subject which many will hate, but if a teacher is able to engage the students and motivate them, I believe the subject can really help them find their path.
MV: In Lithuania, art is considered to be the least important subject. Every time something happens connected with money, the first thing schools do is cut off funding for art lessons. A lot of people don’t even know what art education is. I, myself, found out about art education thanks to this project.
Does art have an age?
MB: Art does not have an age. Nowadays, when we’re living in the period of postmodernism, we can create whatever art we like – artists don't have any rules they need to follow because creativity has been elevated. Artists can now work in various genres and mediums – they can paint, draw, do sculpture, photography, video art, or search for other ways to express themselves. But people still appreciate different kinds of art; it doesn't matter if it was created in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or in the modern day. It all depends on what different people like, but no one judges others for creating whatever kind of art they want to.
EC: Definitely not.
EN: That is a complicated question. I would say that art doesn’t have an age, but we do see it differently depending on whether we are kids, teenagers or grown-ups. To recognize some aspects in the artwork, one needs to have had some life experience; on the other hand, some aspects are visible only to a younger observer. Our connection to artwork is constantly changing.
MV: Art does not have an age – only the materials can indicate when the art was made.
I do think that art has a way to remind us of age, for example, if you were to create an art piece and then view it after a few years, it will remind you of the past, the making of it, how you were feeling at the time.
JS: I don’t think so. It’s never too late to become an artist – to start experimenting with various techniques and art forms. That’s what’s so wonderful about art – being able to free yourself from societal norms and expectations and just explore the world as well as yourself from yet another point of view – from a child-like, curious, creative and fearless person’s eyes.
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Participating artists: Žygimantas Augustinas, Irma Balakauskaitė, Alvīne Bautra, Violeta Bubelytė, Vitalijus Butyrinas, Ramūnas Danisevičius, Alfonsas Dargis, Kristina Inčiūraitė, Vytautas Jurkūnas, Linas Jusionis, Gudrun Krebitz, Andrius Kviliūnas, Vitas Luckus, Aurelija Maknytė, Antanas Martinaitis, Rūtė Merk, Henrikas Natalevičius, Tymonas Niesiolovskis, Damir Očko, Vygantas Paukštė, Audronė Petrašiūnaitė, Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Edmundas Saladžius, Dominykas Sidorovas, Eglė Vertelkaitė, Ugnė Žilytė.
Where are the People?, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, 13/11/2021 – 06/02/2022
