Do’s and Don’ts For Docent

Docent Pat Gabaldon, left, often leads tours for Alzheimer patients and their caregivers. With her is Martha Phelps, the docent's vice-chairman.

I am walking through the Vero Beach Museum of Art’s Schumann Gallery with docent and advisor Pat Gabaldon, who frequently leads tours for mid- to late-Alzheimer patients and their caregivers – one of many community outreach programs offered by the museum. We are viewing the watercolor show “Ecstasy: The Mystical Landscapes of Walter Anderson,” a Southern artist who died in 1965. Anderson not only did watercolors, pencils and pen-and-ink drawings, but also was a master potter, sculptor and writer.

I confide to Pat that Anderson’s rendition of pink and blue trees reminds me of Fauvism, a style of painting popular in France in the early 1900s that used brilliant colors often incongruous with the subject matter. Pat, ex-chairman of the docents, remarks that Anderson’s symmetrical patterns remind her of the Dutch graphic artist, M.C. Escher (1898-1972), a lithographer, woodcutter and engraver. Pat has just proved one of her salient points from our initial meeting: “There is no right or wrong approach, no script for the docents to follow for the exhibits.”

The docents bring their own perspectives to their work. “If a docent is an artist, she might be more concerned with color and composition, whereas an art history major might emphasize the period in which the work was done,” says docent Suzanne Albani, whose job as statistician is to record all the hours logged into the museum’s “Green Bible” and put them on spread sheets contained in the docents’ office in the library.

Read the entire article in the Summer 2009 issue