Easy participation + content rich guides = MFAH book club

There's been a lot of activity on our museum book club pages. Along with 10 guides we've commissioned, created or otherwise collected to share with you (with more on the way), we have a listing of more than 30 museum book clubs around the county, and nearly 100 books on art that those clubs have read and discussed. Occasionally, we also like to feature great clubs here on the blog and I'm excited to share the terrific recent work of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston book club.

The MFAH started their club two years ago and have read a dozen books so far. This fall however, public programs coordinator Jay Heuman has dramatically upped the museum's commitment to the club, and is pushing the bounds on what a club can be. Like for most other museum book clubs, the MFAH's book selections—vetted by Heuman and his colleague, Sara Wheeler, public programs assistant—are connected to special exhibitions and the permanent collection. For this fall, the museum has "Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts" and "Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs" on view, and so has selected My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk and Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff, for their book club. MFAH's innovation, however, lay in their book club tours and their customized reading/looking guides.

Rather than having a limited sign-up of a couple small groups of people to come in, sit down and discuss the books together in the museum—which is typical to many museum clubs, and can be quite effective with smaller communities in particular—the MFAH is suggesting you simply read the book on your own or with your existing book group and then come into the museum for a special, free book club tour of the galleries. The tours last one or two hours and are geared to connecting themes in the books directly with objects in the galleries. As Heuman relates:

"Each of our book club docents, extremely knowledgeable about the MFAH’s permanent collections and learning more on a daily basis, attend the MFAH Book Club docent education sessions and then develop their own tour in their own style. The common characteristics though include reading excerpts from the books while sitting before works of art, and active discussion/participation. We encourage the docents not to 'talk at' those who tour, but engage them in discussion, sharing their impressions of the books (style, themes, characters, plot, etc.), but also related personal experiences."

The museum has seventeen drop-in book club tours scheduled between October 20 and January 28, both on weekdays and weekends, and in the morning, afternoon and evenings to accommodate a wide variety of schedules. Or, if readers have their own book group of six or more people, they can schedule a private book club tour of their own—also for free. This is phenomenal, and makes participating about as easy as can be. Anyone who chooses to read either of the two books at any time during the next few months can come into the museum almost anytime, with little notice and no additional cost, to discuss that book and its relationship to the art with trained docents and other readers!

Second, Heuman has created custom reading/discussion guide for each book, that can be downloaded from the museum's website. Of course, reading guides are nothing new, but the MFAH's guides go far beyond the usual ten-question format. Between five and six pages long each, MFAH's new guides pull out larger themes from each book, suggest discussion questions, and, most critically, include information, images and additional questions about artworks in the museum (and elsewhere) that connect directly to the reading. Each guide is a rich, standalone resource that deepens readers' connections to the books and to the museum, even if they never discuss the books in a book club, or go on one of the museum's tours. Though the way MFAH has set up the tours, they're an opportunity I doubt many will miss!