.bodytext {float: left; } .floatimg-left-hort { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right: 10px; width:300px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-caption-hort { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:300px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-vert { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right:15px; width:200px;} .floatimg-left-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size: 10px; width:200px;} .floatimg-right-hort { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px;} .floatimg-right-caption-hort { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimg-right-vert { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px;} .floatimg-right-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; border-top-style: double; border-top-color: black; border-bottom-style: double; border-bottom-color: black;} .floatimgright-sidebar p { line-height: 115%; text-indent: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar h4 { font-variant:small-caps; } .pullquote { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 150px; background: url(http://www.dmbusinessdaily.com/DAILY/editorial/extras/closequote.gif) no-repeat bottom right !important ; line-height: 150%; font-size: 125%; border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} .floatvidleft { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatvidright { float:right; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} Soon after Mireille Djenno moved to Des Moines from Madison, Wis., two years ago, she knew she wanted to volunteer at the Des Moines Art Center.

“I’m one of those people who wish they had majored in art history,” said Djenno, a 32-year-old librarian at Drake University. This week, she will embark with 19 other candidates on a nine-month instructional journey to become a docent at the Art Center.

More professionals such as Djenno are carving time out of their schedules to become trained as docents, museum-trained guides who provide interpretive tours of the Art Center’s works.

“In the past when we were doing docent recruiting, by and large we were getting people who were retired from their careers and had always had an interest in art or teaching and now had time to attend these training courses,” said Jill Featherstone, the Art Center’s museum education director. “But in the past two times I’ve done this training, I have seen a trend that we’re getting people who are juggling a career and time to volunteer. … I think employers are responding to the demands of their workers, and it’s been wonderful.”

Out of the class of 20 that will meet for three hours each Thursday morning for the next nine months, about one-third are working professionals, Featherstone said. The class, which is full, is typically offered every other year to fill vacancies as people retire from the program. The classes are taught by the Art Center’s assistant curator and docent lecturer, Laura Burkhalter.

Once the candidates complete the training, they will be asked to provide at least one hour-long museum tour a month, though many of the current 35 veteran docents do much more than that, Featherstone said.

“The docent program is one of the backbones of the Art Center’s education department,” she said. “And really, they are a huge presence in the community because they are the public faces of the museum. When people come in, they don’t necessarily see me, but they see the docent, and the thinking and the learning that we’re teaching them.”

There are facts about the piece and what the artist intended to say, but you can bring your life experience to the piece. They encourage you and the patrons to say new and interesting things about a piece.
– Angela Lampe docent, Des Moines Art Center

On average, the Art Center’s docents provide between 12,000 and 14,000 visitors with hour-long tours each year.

“That really is a pretty high number, considering we’re closed every Monday, and we don’t take tours on Thursday mornings or on Fridays,” Featherstone said. “So we’re squeezing all of those people into basically three and a half days. So the docents get worked pretty hard. Our busiest season is winter/spring.”

Though the Art Center doesn’t require its docents to have a background in teaching or art history, many do have art degrees and are seeking to reconnect with their academic roots. Counseling-oriented careers are common among many of the docent volunteers, Featherstone observed.

Djenno, who was born in France and has visited art museums throughout Europe, the Caribbean and Africa, said she’s looking forward to the coursework as a way to expand her background in art history. Art museums “tend to be my favorite site anywhere I visit,” she said. Fitting the docent classes and later, tours, into her work schedule at Drake won’t be too difficult, she said.

“We work fairly odd hours to begin with, so we have a fair amount of flex time. So it wasn’t a problem to make up those hours in another part of my schedule,” she said.

For Paul Kasal, a lead business analyst with Grinnell Mutual Reinsurance Co., becoming a docent provides a means for him to use his degree in art history from the University of Iowa and network within the art community, he said. Having majored in medieval art, learning about specific modern and contemporary works will be a new experience for him. However, “art history to me is just like second nature; I just pick it up naturally,” he said.

In addition to moving to Newton from Grinnell recently to be about equal distance from the Art Center and his job, Kasal had to devise a workable schedule for his employer’s approval. “As long as I’m willing to make up the hours, (my boss) is more than happy to do it,” he said.

Kasal, who is 35, said he’s particularly interested in providing tours for teenage students. “If I can get them more interested in (art) and bring it down to their terminology, that’s what I’m gunning for,” he said. “Getting more people interested in art before they retire, to knock it down to where it’s not so pretentious.”

The majority of the people receiving docent tours are elementary school students. As many families with kids know, each fourth-grade class from the Des Moines, Waukee, West Des Moines and Indianola schools visits the Art Center at no cost to the districts, using transportation funding provided through private donations.

Though probably 95 percent of the tour groups simply ask to see general highlights of the collection, “we really do love to get very specific requests,” Featherstone said. For instance, Grand View College has often arranged tours that focus on art centered on a theme of nurturing or caring for its nursing students.

“We’ve had requests for docents to focus on French works, and we actually have a couple of docents who are bilingual, so they can offer the tour in another language,” she added. “I know this year we are adding a few people who are fluent in other languages.

“Pop art is also very popular, so we are often asked to focus on or pay attention to pop art in our collection. Or we may be asked to focus on portraiture or some of the other major traditional themes. It’s fun when the teacher has something very specific in mind.”

Angela Lampe, a 42-year-old costume designer for the Des Moines Playhouse who completed her initial training as a docent three years ago, said elementary school students’ tours are her favorite.

“I really do like taking those kids and sharing art with them,” she said. “Adults can be a little bit more intimidating. Kids get more engaged and talkative, and I’m amazed at what they come up with sometimes.”

Lampe said she has always had an interest in art, and thought that becoming a docent would be a good way to learn more.

“It’s proved to be an incredible experience. And the Art Center’s collection has been a tremendous draw,” she said.

One thing that surprised her about the program was the degree of latitude each docent is given.

“They don’t spoon-feed what you’re going to say about each piece,” Lampe said. “There are facts about the piece and what the artist intended to say, but you can bring your life experience to the piece. They encourage you and the patrons to say new and interesting things about a piece.”

That approach is part of an effort to empower the visitor, Featherstone said.

“We try to teach the docent how to facilitate a conversation about the object they’re looking at,” she said. “That docent is asking questions to the group about what they see, and then asking them to defend their answers; it’s really the Socratic method of learning. … So when they go on a trip to Chicago two years later and they don’t have a docent, hopefully they’ll think about some of those strategies they learned at the Des Moines Art Center.”