Docents by the dozens

LITTLE ROCK — The trio is clustered in front of a Ben Shahn illustration of a castle in the Arkansas Arts Center.

Jeanne-Marie Meyer knows her stuff. The artist is an American, born in Lithuania. He’s better known for his photography, she says and begins to discuss the shading and other nuances of the 1963 “ink and wash on paper.”

And then she asks this: “Is this from memory or something he saw every day?”

Jordan Bennett responds: “I’d say from memory. There aren’t any castles in America.”

Meyer turns back: “Help me out here, I’m kind of floundering.”

She needn’t worry. The others in her group, all docents in training undergoing intense study at the museum, are a bit nervous, too.

On this Saturday morning, the group of seven splits into teams and conducts practice tours like the one Meyer was leading.

In a few months, they’ll give real tours including one of the museum’s “The Impressionists and Their Influence” exhibit, set to open April 1.

The role involves more than an encyclopedic knowledge of art. Docents are expected to engage, entertain, enrich and educate their audience.

“A mind is not a vessel to fill, it’s a fire to ignite,” explains Louise Palermo, the museum’s curator of education.

The museum and other institutions, such as the Clinton Presidential Center, often use highly trained volunteer docents to help lead tours. Others rely on part timers or a small staff.

Whether they are art students, such as Meyer, a graduate student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, or paid professionals, those leading the tours all have something in common. They must continually hone their skills and increase their knowledge.

The docents at the Arts Center train for 16 weeks; the latest group wrapped up Feb. 5. They spend their Saturday mornings in the galleries squinting at brushstrokes and lines. In the darkened boardroom upstairs they scrutinize slides of masterpieces. They discuss artists’ techniques and how to ask the right questions of the tour group.

“That’s just the initial training,” Palermo says. “The predominance of our collection is works on paper. That means our exhibits rotate in and out every three months or so.” The museum limits how long it displays delicate works.

Once the initial training is complete, the docents will work with mentors until the end of May to fine-tune their skills. The class of docents will be the first to offer weekend tours at the museum in more than five years. Plans call for family tours and storytelling ones in the future.

“Learning how to give a tour, it is challenging,” Palermo says. “It’s not natural. We grew up being lectured to; no one asked us to participate.”

But at the Arts Center, a successful tour hinges on participation. “We really try hard to make them active,” she says. “In a tour, we definitely try to set up a dialogue.”

Visitors ask docents “Everything from ‘Where’s the bathroom’ to ‘Do you know Monet?’” Palermo says. At end of one tour, a second-grader once asked a docent: “Do your wrinkles hurt?”

“‘Only from the inside,’” she replied.

During the 2009-10 “World of the Pharaohs” exhibit, docents gave 1,370 tours to 21,292schoolchildren and many other types of groups, Palermo says. From July 2008 to June 2009, docents gave tours to 4,060 people. She expects this year’s total to be somewhere in between.

The 30 or so docents - there were a few more for the “Pharaohs” exhibit - run the gamut from students to retirees.

That’s also true of the 300 volunteers who greet and guide visitors at the Clinton Presidential Center, seven days a week, 362 days a year. The Clinton center closes only for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s.

“It’s definitely a mix; we have people from all walks of life,” says Lena Moore, deputy executive director of the William J. Clinton Foundation in Little Rock. Stay-at-home mothers, executives, those who wouldn’t consider themselves history buffs, all volunteer. The volunteers range in age from 16 to 94, she says.

And yes, “We do have some Republicans,” confirms Moore, who oversees the volunteer program. Volunteering is bipartisan, she says. “It’s not on the application, there’s no box to check.”

Docents train quarterly and annually, giving tours on permanent and rotating exhibits and on the museum’s “green” features aimed at shrinking its environmental footprint. They also help out at the Clinton Museum Store and the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service.

Joy Broach, who has volunteered since the center opened in 2004, leads tours on Sundays and the occasional weekday. She’s retired from“several different careers.”

Broach, who was the 2010 volunteer of the year at the center, says she’ll spend as much time with a given group as it wants. Most tours are about 90 minutes. But if someone only has 30 minutes,she’ll accommodate them. If another group wants her all afternoon, she’s game.

Broach loves showing off the features that are “unique” to the library: the Oval Office and Cabinet room.

She also tries to tailor her tours to her audience. When a group from China visits, she’ll point out the portraits of their leaders. The library sees around 300,000 visitors a year.

When children visit, Moore says that volunteers will sometimes ask for their birthdays and then pull out memos or schedules that show what was happening on the day they were born.

When Broach is thrown a curveball, “I never hesitate to say I can’t answer that.” But she’ll find the answer or the person who has it. She’ll jot down visitors’ email addresses and follow up to make sure the employees she sent the question to were able to send an answer back.

How does she stay on top of eight years of history? She reads constantly and in her spare time she roams the exhibits herself. Even after all this time she’s still unearthing interesting little nuggets.

“I learn something new every day,” she says. “It pays to keep your eyes open and read.”

Jordan Johnson, a spokesman for the Clinton foundation, says that as of mid-January volunteers had contributed 260,000 hours to the center since its opening in November 2004.

Not all museums need an army of volunteers.

The Southern Tenant Farmers Museum in an old dry cleaners and gas station in downtown Tyronza gets by with a part timer, a graduate student and one full-time employee, assistant director Linda Hinton.

Many tours are self-guided. “If they want a tour they get it,” Hinton says. “We do at least 10 a week.”

She started as the secretary at the museum, which opened four years ago. Before then, Hinton says: “I didn’t know anything, I didn’t have a clue and I’d lived in Tyronza for like 34 years. If you go the Arkansas history books we have like a paragraph.”

A retired teacher, Hinton says she was never a history buff. “I’m still learning. The older people come in and teach you more than you’ll ever teach them.”

She learns a lot from the graduate students who spend time at the museum and from the museum’s director. And she reads as much as she can.

Museums are the perfect place for volunteers to “be social and give back to community,” she says.

She likes the chance to discuss everything from the New Madrid earthquakes and timber to the Great Depression and the tenant farmers union.

At the Arts Center, Palermo says they want docents whose enthusiasm is contagious. “Working or retired, we want you,” she says.

When it’s Jordan Bennett’s turn to lead a practice tour, she starts with an Impressionist painting of a military school in Paris by Luigi Loir. She describes how artists in Paris started impressionism and asks Meyer and Ann West, an attorney mediator, “What do you see here?”

The three discuss the busy street scene, the blurry faces, the imposing building.

“What do you notice about the people in the painting?” she asks.

Meyer looks closer and says, “They’re not detailed. You get the idea people are in movement.”

West says: “It’s kind of like a moment in time.”

Bennett nods: “Like an impression of a moment.”

The groups critique each other’s delivery, and Palermo interrupts from time to time when a docent in training asks a yes-or-no question. Leading ones engage the audience more, she says.

Meyer hopes being a docent will put her more at ease speaking in front of people. It will just take time and practice, she says.

As the class moves upstairs, Palermo goes over what went well and what could have gone better. Everyone in the room is excited about art. When they talk about what stimulates them, their audience should be inspired, too.

“The best compliment you’ll ever get is when a student says, ‘I thought this would be really boring, but it was fun,’” Palermo says.

Class adjourned.