Seeing Time: Strategies for Thinking with Art

A group of people seated on stools in a gallery. One person stands and gestures toward a large, abstract painting that hangs on the wall in front of the group.

Sydney Skelton Simon, the Bradley Associate Curator of Academic Affairs, leads a discussion of Erika Giovanna Klien’s Abstraction (1926) with students in Chitra Ramalingam’s first-year seminar “Science and the Senses,” fall 2022. 

In this Gallery Talk, Sydney Skelton Simon, the Bradley Associate Curator of Academic Affairs, demonstrates some of the strategies used by museum educators to facilitate deep thinking with and about works of art. Simon discusses how she guides university classes from a wide range of disciplines to engage with works of art in ways that stretch students’ thinking about course topics in new and creative ways. Inspired by courses from physics, the history of science, and English, Simon invites participants to explore temporality—how time is represented, measured, felt, and even defied—in two works of art.  

Meet by the central column in the Gallery lobby. Space is limited.