Tours of duty

Dec. 8—There was little that Holly Henry could do but stand by and watch as Julio Caban cried at the sight of the artwork.

Caban wept as he listened to Henry talk about the Luis Jiménez sculpture Border Crossing, which depicts a man carrying a woman on his shoulders as he crosses a barrier — the river, perhaps? — to a new country in hopes of finding a better life.

Henry — a docent at the New Mexico Museum of Art, where the work is exhibited — told about 10 people taking a recent tour that Jiménez was trying to put a human face to the story of the many migrants who seek refuge and comfort in a land that is not their own.

That was enough to move Caban, a New Jersey resident who was on a Henry-led docent tour of the downtown Santa Fe museum. Following the end of the roughly 45-minute tour of the museum, he says taking a docent-led tour of a museum is "like therapy. You go in not knowing what to expect, then you're crying, then you're laughing. You're emoting.

"It's a nice ride," he says, a smile coming to his tear-streaked face as he stands next to companion Deana Moore.

Henry likes taking people on that kind of a ride. After working more than 35 years in human resources for a variety of private businesses, the Washington, D.C.-born resident of Tesuque decided upon retirement she wanted to do two things: Learn. And teach.

And what better way to do both, she says in an interview at the museum on a recent cold and cloudy day, than to volunteer as a docent?

She says she was captivated by the numerous tours she took of museums as a child with her mother, who wanted her to learn about art and culture and history though the museum system in D.C. and elsewhere.

"I was captured, curious, mesmerized, fascinated," Henry recalls. "The artwork came alive for me in museums."

She still recalls, some 10 years or so later, visiting the exhibition Becoming Van Gogh at the Denver Art Museum and becoming captivated with the way the paintings in the exhibit were displayed to show the evolution of his talent. "The labels and interpretive panels described his motivation, experimentation, detours, and inspiration," she says.

Henry is one of about 45 volunteer docents in an arts museum program (that includes the relatively new Vladem Contemporary) that has been running about 30 years.

Many — but not all — of the state's other museums also have docents. The New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum in Las Cruces has 10, for example, while the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture has nine, according to Greg Gurule, spokesperson for the Department of Cultural Affairs.

Sarah Zurick, museum educator and volunteer coordinator for the New Mexico Museum of Art, says the docents act as "ambassadors to the community." They provide a link between the works on the wall, she says, and the people who are there to see them. The art museum's commitment to recruiting, training, and retaining docents is particularly important as other museum and cultural institutions around the country scale back, seriously cut, or outright cancel docent programs, she says.

In October, the Portland Art Museum announced it was doing away with its current docent program in favor of hiring "learning guides" from local colleges instead. Last year around this time, the Oakland Museum of California did the same thing, while other museums around the country have moved to paid college-guide programs.

But New Mexico's state museum docents program continues to draw volunteers who are, like Henry, looking to educate and learn at the same time. Zurick says she already has a line-up of "interested people" wanting to train as docents next year. (Trainees need not have any artistic or art history background, she notes.)

The docents go through an eight-month training period during which, according to a syllabus Zurick provided, trainees meet with and hear from everyone, from museum division directors to curators to cashiers.

They receive courses in public speaking, the architecture of the museum, and its influence on other architectural elements in the city (Henry made a point of talking about this on the tour), and the artistic movements of modernism, impressionism, and realism, among other styles.

Among the questions the training staff asks trainees is what exhibitions they remember as museum visitors and whether they thought of the role of the curator in those presentations. Henry says museum staff, from curators to librarians (there's a kind of secret art library in the basement of the museum that insiders can access), continue to "urge us to do research," including through visits to local art galleries and other museums.

At the top of her tour, Henry — who exudes a confident sense of welcoming that suggests she's leading her friends around the site — connects with each visitor, asking where he or she is from and whether they've been to the museum before. She then lays out — in an easy, informal, and assured tone — the post-railroad history of Santa Fe and the events leading to the formation of the museum way back in 1917, when artists were eager to come west to carve out their own frontier of creation expression.

She is clearly not afraid of learning as she teaches: When a museum security guard spontaneously offers insight into some work created by New Mexico artistic icon Georgia O'Keeffe, Henry listens, incorporates the information into her talk, and thanks the gentleman for the additional data. (He later says he worked at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum for years before moving over to the art museum.)

Aware a local photographer is on her tour, Henry asks the woman to comment on what she likes about the focus of a Manuel Carrillo (a Mexican modernist photographer) image in the museum. Henry continually asks visitors about their thoughts on the work in the museum, drawing them in as partners for a room-by-room tour of the works.

She talks about artistic themes such as tribal rights, border crossings, and racial inequity as she leads her guests through an artistic expedition of a jungle of creative wonders.

For Caban, the tour offers the chance to have someone more intimately connected with the works on the wall "shed light on the state's art and history."

His partner, Moore (they've been dating for about 18 months, and it seems to be working out pretty well, they both note), says the tour gave her a chance to rethink the way she teaches art to elementary-level children in the public school system where she works.

"It's inspiring to me as an arts teacher to pass on the history of art to my children," she says.

Henry thinks the fact she and the other docents are volunteers works to the advantage of the program.

"We have an emotional connection to what we are doing," she says. "People volunteer with their hearts."

Each New Mexico state museum oversees its own docent and volunteer programs. Visit newmexicoculture.org/about/contact for a list and contact info for state-run museums, including the New Mexico Museum of Art, Vladem Contemporary, and other museums.