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Language: en

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The National Medal for Museum and Library
services is the nation’s highest honor for

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libraries and museums that are serving their
communities in exciting ways.

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Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman and
community member Virginia Ines Vergara traveled

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to Washington to receive the national medal
and spoke to IMLS about how the museum impacts

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the community.

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Arnold Lehman: The museum is one of the oldest
fine arts museum that is in the United States

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and certainly one of the largest and we like
to think of it as a world class institution

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that is really based within a community and
that community is Brooklyn.

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The apprentice program has now been in effect
for 11 years and that was a way to bring younger

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people into contact with the professional
staff into contact with the collection and

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into a really intense interaction amongst
one another.

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So I think it’s an enormous win-win both
for those people engaged in the apprentice

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program and for the museum because we learn
from one another and we learn a lot.

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Virginia Ines Vergara: I was drawn to the
museum apprentice program because I think

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at that time it was really the one program
where you could work with a group of other

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teens in the museum.

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And so it gave, and it continues to give teenagers
responsibility that you don’t have really

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anywhere else when you are in high school.

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And your duties include leading these tours
and a huge question arises how are you going

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to get these people, the visitors to return?

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Also we got to write our own tours that we
led, so that we were able to use our own input

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and what we thought and so this was a place
where opinions were valued and that you don’t

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often have in a high school setting where
people really care about what you are thinking.

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Being there in the museum setting and really
looking at art and the way art was behind

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the scenes really influenced my way of pursuing
visual art, because in the studio you are

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your primary audience when you are making
art, but I am always making that for a larger

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audience.

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So trying to think about what a viewer’s
going to see and almost detaching myself from

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that studio practice and trying to look at,
which is very difficult when you are very

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connected to your work of what someone else
is going to see when they look at that piece

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and I think that’s all the Brooklyn museum
has really helped me to achieve.

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Arnold Lehman: Our sense for education is
first and foremost to get people in the building.

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The word outreach for many of us is not a
word that we use very often, because that

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means we are going out and sort of scouring
the community for those people who could benefit

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from the museum.

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Our belief is that we can benefit from the
community, it’s more in reach.

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We want people in the building, we don’t
want people to feel that they’re anything

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but the core of what we do and every program
circles around that.
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