A Brooks Perspective from a Memphis College of Art Intern

Blog written by Ashley Lulo, Fall 2015 Marketing Intern

The Brooks Museum is a really neat museum, especially forstudents and teachers at Memphis College of Art. Due to the Brooks proximity toMemphis College of Art, it is a great asset to our studies. For many of our arthistory courses, especially our freshman year art history courses, we arerequired to visit a museum and write about works in the time period we areworking. The Brooks has many works from a large range of time periods that MCAstudents can utilize for our art history courses. 

Memphis College of Artutilizes the Brooks for more than just art history courses, it is also a greatresource for artist research because students can come and see many works of anartist and learn much about the artist from the information of pieces and theaudio tours.

Professors at MCA also utilize the Brooks for classes. Because theBrooks is so close to MCA many of the painting and drawing professors bringtheir classes to the Brooks to show them works and lecture about them right inthe galleries. A nice perk gifted to MCA students and staff from the Brooks isfree entry any day, which helps many students. 

The rotating galleries are a bighelp as well to the students and professor because, depending on what is beingshowed in the gallery, the professor can show students works that really canonly be best appreciated in person and comment on details that can only be seenin person. Even the Art of Video Games exhibition was helpful and appreciated by MCAstudents, for majors such as, Animation, illustration, and Comics. The Art ofVideo Games exhibition went through a history of games and showed the level of detailof concept art, which both inspires and assists the students at MCA. 

Otherrotating exhibitions help students in other majors, such as the Wood Engravings by Thomas Bewick, showingprintmaking majors skills and techniques through examples.

Another example wasthe Dalí: Illustrating the Surreal exhibition,which helped many drawing, painting, and illustration majors with concepts andideas as well as 3D artist, who could be inspired to make works from the2-dimensional works.

The Brooks even housed MCA’s own Maritza Davila’s work in Ancestry and Identity: Prints by Maritza Davila, whichshe then used to help teach her printmaking classes what concept is and typesof printmaking processes there are. The Brooks is an amazing asset that MemphisCollege of Art has and many student and professors at MCA take advantage of allthe great things it has to offer.