Bringing Art to Life: Zoe Goldman from the Getty Museum and If Objects Could Talk (Ep. 493)

How do you make ancient art exciting for kids? In this episode of Art Ed Radio, Zoe Goldman, podcast producer at the Getty Museum, joins Tim to share the behind-the-scenes story of If Objects Could Talk—a delightful, sound-rich podcast where ancient artifacts speak for themselves.

Zoe explains how her team transforms visual art into immersive audio stories, working with curators, writers, and sound designers to help young listeners connect with history in meaningful ways. From creative collaboration to museum accessibility, she offers practical ideas for art teachers on how to bring art history to life in the classroom.

Full episode transcript below.

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Transcript

Tim:

Welcome to Art Ed Radio, the podcast for our teachers. This show is produced by the Art of Education, and I’m your host, Tim Bogatz.

Today I am excited to bring on Zoe Goldman from the Getty Museum, and we’re going to talk about the new podcast that they produce called If Objects Could Talk. It’s a wonderful series that gives voice to ancient artifacts and other things in the museum through storytelling, sound, and imagination.

It’s educational. It’s engaging and it’s perfect for kids, families, maybe in your classroom. But honestly, like I’m having fun listening to it as an adult as well. So I want to talk to Zoe about everything it takes to put together this podcast and how they make these artworks come to life. They have them literally speak, you know, sharing stories about how they were made, how they were used, and the people who lived with them thousands of years ago.

Because as art teachers, we’re always looking for ways to help students connect with art, to connect with art history, and make all of those things feel relevant. And If Objects Can Talk does exactly that, you know, they have short, engaging episodes. They’re a lot of fun, and I think they can be inspiring for some discussions, some projects, and so I want to talk a little bit about the podcast, but more about bigger ideas of how we get kids engaged with art, how we get them loving art and art history and museums, and all the things that go into that for us as art teachers. So there’s a lot to talk about. Let me bring Zoe on and we will get into the discussion.

Okay, Zoe Goldman is joining me now. Zoe, how are you?

Zoe:

I’m good, I’m adjusting to the time change.

Is that too temporal? Are you going to run this in like six months?

Tim:

No, we’re good. No, I was just gonna say I have some very strong feelings about daylight savings time and I could I could put together a pretty good rant on that but that’s probably not what people want to listen to today. So I’m just saying I am also adjusting but but doing all right with it. But very excited that you have agreed to come join me. So welcome to the show. And I guess to begin, I think an introduction is probably the best thing. So

Can you tell us about the work you do at the Getty Museum and tell us a little bit about your newest project that you’ve been doing?

Zoe:

Sure. So I am a podcast producer at the Getty in Los Angeles. And so what that means is I get to think about how all the work we do might translate into audio. Not always an easy feat because we really focus mostly on visual art. so transforming visual art stories to audio can be tricky, but also really just so lucky and so fun that I get to work with art every day.

I’ve worked on a couple series, but the newest one, I think the one that we’re going to focus on today is called If Objects Could Talk, and that is our first series that is really targeted to kids and their families. Also for everyone, you know, not going to gatekeep, but we had elementary age kids in mind when we were designing it. And so the premise is basically museum objects, they come alive and they get to talk about themselves, how they were made.

how they were used, and especially how kids might have interacted with them. And the first season focuses on ancient art objects. These episodes are voice acted, they’re sound designed, and we really thought a lot about how to structure them to engage kids in relating very personally to art and the ancient world, so art and the history of these objects.

Tim:

Yeah, and I really love listening to the episodes. I know they’re for kids, but I’ve been listening and I’m really enjoying them. But I love how, you know, the objects do come alive. And like you said, they tell about themselves. They tell about the personality. The voice actors are great, like really giving personality to those objects. And it makes it a lot of fun. like you said, it’s excellent for kids, obviously designed for kids in mind. The short episodes are perfect for kids, like it would be great in the art classroom. So as you know, our teachers listening here, I think it’d be a great thing to play in the classroom and not only engage kids, but definitely, you know, start some different conversations and a different way to kind of engage with art history. So I like that idea. I wanted to ask you though, just about how you decide on, you know, what objects you’re going to feature in the show. And just, can you talk a little bit about the, whole creative process? Like, can you walk us through that? Just the initial idea from the episode and like how, how those stories are told, how you bring in the actors? Like, can you tell us about the process of recording all of that?

Zoe:

Yeah, absolutely. This was a very collaborative process with our curators here who are the sort of, you know, experts on this material. They research it, they work on it, they make sure that it’s healthy and safe. And we also worked with outside writers who are sort of the creative brain behind this project and who are known experts in their field, but who also have a connection to art and art history, which is really fun. The process is super collaborative, as I said, and our writers were given a lot of leeway in picking the objects that would speak to them, you know, giving them a voice or that they’ll speak for, I guess. And so we met regularly with our curators to brainstorm about what objects?

They love the collection that might not get as much attention as some of the big sculptures. If you look over the course of our first season, a lot of the objects are more everyday objects. So it’s coins, it’s pottery, it’s jewelry. It is not the grand works in our collection. And it was just great to be able to showcase some things that don’t normally get the spotlight.

After we sort of brainstormed, we selected the objects with the curators. Our writers got to work researching, know, reading JSTOR articles and art history textbooks and checking in with our curators if they had very specific questions like, what was the role of pets in ancient Rome or who delivered the mail in Etruria? You know, questions that are like not so easy to just Google. And then…

You know, my role is editing the scripts. I got to cast the voice actors, which was a new skill for me or new, new experience, new role for me. And that was really exciting. And we also worked with a composer and sound designer, Alexander Kalinowski, who did so much to just turn the acting in the script into something that like moved and really felt alive and created a world in the episode.

And we have two writers, are Claire Hupy and Takara Elise, and they did a phenomenal job bringing these objects to life and giving them personality, giving them history, giving them a voice.

Tim:

Yeah, I love all of that. You you mentioned how these objects kind of come alive and that’s kind of the theme I keep going back to when I’m listening is like you said, it’s so immersive. You feel like you’re in the world with whatever object it is. And I love, you know, the sound design. I love the voice acting and how that’s all put together. So I guess my compliments to you as a producer. But I think it’s great for kids to kind of be able to, as I said earlier, engage with that and thinking in terms of art teaching, I want to ask you from your perspective, how might the show, like if we’re talking about if objects could talk, how could those episodes fit into an art teacher’s curriculum either in the classroom as part of discussions or as inspiration for art projects or other ideas? Like how would you see it being used in an art teacher’s classroom?

Zoe:

Well, first, I just want to take one step back to build off something you said, is that art is alive in a lot of ways. It’s not necessarily designed to be seen only in a museum. It’s designed to be lived with. That is really something, especially when we’re talking about these ancient art and these ancient objects, many of these were for everyday use. It’s almost closer to designed objects, so keys with beautiful handles.

And we have that, you know, around us all the time. I think that’s something that people can relate to maybe a little more easily than when they go to a museum and they see contemporary art and they’re just like, I don’t get this. But they do love beautiful things around them. you know, they like their cute, Labubu key chain or whatever is like the next trend. And so, some of these, hopefully, it’s building the ability to relate to ancient people, recognizing that they are people, just like us. They like pretty things. And just making art something that feels like comfortable and something you can live with and that can live with you was one of the goals. And then back to this idea of how this might fit in an art teacher’s curriculum, a little outside my wheelhouse. admit that is definitely your area of expertise, but I have ideas. I’m happy to give opinions on things.

One of the things that works for me personally, may not work in a classroom, may not work for everyone is I love listening to podcasts when I’m doing other things. Yeah. And so instead of music, I like listening to talking. so putting on some fun episode, maybe you catch a little snippet about history while you’re doing, you’re probably not deep listening during that, but you might pick up a little bit of something.

And so that’s one way, especially I think to make or incentivize getting supplies out, getting supplies cleaned up, making those times a little more fun, depending on the length of your art period, you know, a 10 minute episode might fit really nicely with your cleanup period. So we’ve also developed listening guides, which can work sort of like lesson plans.

And many of these have additional ideas for art projects or activities that are inspired by the episodes. Like we have an episode on a lamp and the activity would be to, and they talk about shadow puppets in the episode. And so you could make shadow puppets from, you know, very simple with your hands to more elaborate cutouts, articulated. And we suggest instructions for a very basic art teacher would definitely want to go in there and build up the project and make it their own. But it’s sort of suggestions if you’re feeling really brain dead and you just need someone to tell you, you know, what project might work for this. Or we have one on building a family shrine because there’s a Roman demigod. We have one on using recycled materials because we talk about glass. And what’s so cool about glass is that glass can be almost infinitely remelted and reused.

And while we don’t suggest that small children break and melt glass and blow glass themselves, you know, they can take that sort of ethos maybe and work with tin cans or toilet paper rolls. The other piece of this that I would love to do that I find really inspiring is we talk in each episode a little bit about how objects are made in the ancient world.

A lot of those processes are not only quite similar to things we’re doing now, like the way coins are stamped now, we’re not literally out there making them by hand with a hammer. There’s a machine that does that, but the way that they use the die to cast the coin, it’s the same stamping process on soft metal. Digging into some of these processes in a more hands-on way, I think would be so fun. Lost wax casting, you’re probably not gonna put bronze casts together in your art classroom. But going through that process of the clay mold and just exploring different ways to understand these processes in history can really help you understand how things are made now.

Tim:

Yeah, I love that, and that actually kind of leads me into my next question. You may have already answered this, but I’m just thinking about, you know how how we make art history a little bit more exciting. How can we, as art teachers, get our kids more engaged with that? And you know there’s a lot of ideas there of you know, just talking about how objects were made, how people interacted with them. But do you have other ideas? Other things beyond that?

Maybe in your work, you’ve come across just some concepts or ideas on how to better tell those stories or how to bring those objects alive for kids and make them more meaningful for our students. What are your suggestions on how we can do that?

Zoe:

Yeah, it’s a little hard to ask the art teacher and the art history student how to make art more exciting because to me, that’s always been the best part. And so I don’t think it needs to be more exciting. I think it’s wonderful. But no, mean, we were thinking, in looking at the landscape in developing this podcast, there are so many science podcasts for kids. There are some history podcasts for kids, and there are really very few that we could find that are almost nothing art-related for children. And I think that’s because it’s tough. And at the same time, kids love art. They love it. From the youngest age, they’re trying to draw, they’re trying to do chalk, make marks, play with Play-Doh. so it’s just how do we build on that kind of enthusiasm without it feeling like a lecture?

And so one thing we did was we tried to make it really fun, kind of silly. And art doesn’t have to be like stuffy. It can be fun and experimental. Like I said, one of the big takeaways for me was that ancient people liked pretty things, which again, maybe not that big of a revelation, but also draws out that connection, I think, to what was maybe going on in the head of people when they were creating this.

There is something really powerful, I think, about being connected to objects that were touched by people. We don’t need to get into the art theory part of the age of mechanical reproduction or whatever. We can leave that to the side and just say it’s really powerful to connect across history with people.

One of the lessons that I took away from talking to our educators, which was another piece of this, they provided some feedback on early episodes to help us learn from what they know, their best practices about getting kids excited in our galleries. And one of the things our educators are really interested in is sort of embodied learning, using your body to make sense of art. And I know older kids probably are gonna get like a little shy about this, but there are ways that we can bring movement and activity into talking about art. doesn’t all have to be a slideshow of, you know, in the dark after lunch where people maybe fall asleep.

But if they can ct out what the figures in a piece are doing or if you, you know, we have a water vase, like what does it feel like to carry this vase full of water? How are you doing it? Move your body. Move around to really understand, you know, or sculptures that were done of live models. Like how did the model have to stand? How long can you hold that pose? How does that help you understand the art differently?

Tim:

No, I think those are great suggestions. Those are some great ideas. And I think as people are listening to this, those wheels are going to be turning about how, this is what my kids might want to do. These are the stories we can tell. And I think that’s incredibly helpful for people. So I also wanted to ask you, just from your perspective working in a museum, I read an interview. I don’t remember where it was. I’m sorry. But you had mentioned that

Museums can feel kind of intimidating for some families. And so I’m curious about what you do from a museum perspective to make things more welcoming. And, you know, what can we do as art teachers to kind of do the same thing? How can we talk about museums? How do we show that museums are welcoming and fun and interesting to our students?

Zoe:

I think art teachers are in such a special position here in trying to figure out how to make art accessible because you get to have the kids make art. Like there’s nothing more accessible than actually getting to make things yourselves and figuring out how to relate that to going to a museum is definitely a piece of this. think part of what makes museums really intimidating for

people, maybe not young kids, but they’ll soon learn this is that, you know, they, they feel like it’s a very like, no, no, no space. You can’t touch, you can’t really talk, you can’t run, you know, don’t do this, don’t eat food, don’t wear your backpack on your back. and that’s not fun. and don’t think it has to be that way. Right? Like probably, yeah. Don’t touch the art. Like good rule. Don’t touch the art, but like you, you can talk, you should talk, you should have fun when you’re there. There’s lots of things you can do.

Many galleries allow you to take pencils into them so that you can draw in the gallery. Our educators, right, they get people moving. So figuring out how to move around the gallery in a safe way. Bringing play, I think, into that space is something we strive as an institution to do.

It doesn’t necessarily get people in the door, but once they’re here, hopefully we’re working on building that experience so that they’re going to want to come back again and have it be a space that they are comfortable in. I think another thing that can feel intimidating about museums and art in general is this feeling like, well, I don’t know what I’m looking at. So like, don’t want to have to stand there and like read this thing. It’s not always easy to read the text that’s on the wall. It’s not always comfortable. It’s like crowded. And maybe the language is not great, especially for students and younger students, the language isn’t always understandable, or they don’t have the context that they need. And this is another place where I think art teachers can be so valuable because they can really instill this idea that like, you’re allowed to have an opinion. And I don’t know that that is said enough in museums where we have all of this information to help shape your opinion.

It’s not there to shape your opinion, it’s there to give you context and help you shape your own opinion, but it doesn’t always feel that way. Right. And I think art teachers can really encourage kids to build this personal relationship to works of art. And you’re allowed to look and take time to think about it. You don’t have to react right away either. Taking time is something that I think is so valuable about museums and is not necessarily the way that people approach a museum sometimes you go and you’re like I have to see these ten things, you know Like you can sit for an hour in one room and see one thing and like that’s still a successful visit.

And I think along those lines, you know, that is sort of where I see our podcast fits in in helping people feel prepared and Like they’re going to the museum already with a little bit of familiarity a little bit of knowledge For the first season we are working with real works from our collection, but they are works that are sort of of a type. And you’re probably gonna find similar things at most encyclopedic art museums. You’re gonna find some ancient coins with an animal on them. You’re gonna find Greek pottery or fragments of Greek pottery. So if you listen to the podcast, you go in and you’re gonna recognize something. And like that feels so good, right? When you go in and you’re like, I know that, I’m smart.

It’s great. That feeling, you get to that kind of good feeling in a gallery, is going to bring you back hopefully again. And you’re not put on the spot. You feel like you sort of are familiar. You have this basis of an opinion and a relationship again, like building that personal relationship to art and works of art.

I have one more idea for how art teachers can really take this one step further. And it’s exploring the sort of physicality of art because that is a way of understanding art that is really hard to do on your own as an adult. But there’s something about being in the art classroom and like, you know, my go-to explanation of this is maybe not quite accurate, but there are adults who will, you know, see some Jackson Pollock and be like, well, drip, whatever. Anyone can like drip paint on a canvas, right? But like, okay, so like try it. What does yours look like?

It doesn’t look like Jackson Pollock. Understanding the movement and how things are made. With our podcast, would be understanding even if you can’t physically pound out some coins, you might be able to do some small metal embossing or watch videos of people who have pounded coins the ancient way. I think just trying your hand at the sort of artistic, technical, media, and physical media side of some of this stuff will give you a whole new level of appreciation for what people have made and give you a new way to connect in the museum space.

Tim:

Yeah, I love all of that. Those are so many different ideas, so many great ideas and appreciate all of them. And then one last question. You may be all out of ideas at this point, but I just wanted to . . .

Zoe:

Never, never.

Tim:

You know, any advice you have for our teachers just about getting more art, more art history in front of our students. You know, is it the storytelling we’ve talked about as a podcast, museum visits, these activities, or even just being excited about art, being excited about artists? Like, you you talked about how kids inherently love art from the youngest age. So how do we help grow that, like how do we help kids find or just nourish that love of art as they’re going through our classes?

Zoe:

One of the other series I work on is called Recording Artists, and we use archival material, largely archival audio from our Research Institute collection, which has these vast artist archives to tell the stories of artists. And we have an episode from our last season on Robert Rauschenberg and about failure and how important failure is to his process and how you even define success as an artist, which is like not.

It’s not easy. It’s not an easy question to answer what success is for a particular work or for a career even. And when we were doing that episode, we were talking to a neuroscience researcher about what high achieving people have in common. And it is being unafraid to fail. And I think that art, as it gets taught, there is some risk that people feel like they’re failing at art.

Or that if they can’t do it right away, if they can’t, you know, draw the thing that they have in their mind on the first try, they’re just not a good artist. And like, that’s not how anything works. That’s not how art works, you know? So building that resilience seems to be like a sort of buzzy education word, but it is like building up that understanding that like, yeah, artists experiment and fail all the time.

You’re not just experimenting in science class. Like you are experimenting in art class and it’s not always going to be a success. It’s not always going to come out how you want it. Sometimes it’s going to come out better and sometimes it’s going to come out worse and that’s totally fine. And like you’ve learned something, okay, go do it again. Do it better, do it differently. You’ve learned something about how to make it, and you can apply that. So I think just getting away from this idea that like there is failure in art or there’s like one, there’s one goal.

It’s really important and that’s sort of like a big, you know, lifelong lesson. It’s not easy for people. But then the other thing, you know, in thinking about this question, different kids learn in really different ways. And so I think you just have to try everything all the time. Easy. Teach kids to be okay failing and do everything all the time. But no, I, you know, I think for some kids, that idea of like the hands-on project is going to be really helpful. Like,

You know, they have to understand this bronze sculpture by trying to make their own clay model that could become a bronze sculpture. Other people absorb information by listening, and a silly story and storytelling are going to engage them. Some people do like a lecture, and there are, you know, more serious podcasts or lectures on YouTube for them. And then, you got your classic like slides with a lecture and a history textbook, and that works really well for some people too.

And so I think just offering options is giving kids the opportunity to figure out what it is that they connect with in art. Hopefully, at some point, they will figure it out for themselves what clicks, and it’ll be something that they can take with them, you know, out into the world, out into the rest of their life.

Tim:

That’s great. No, that’s a great answer. That’s great advice. So thank you for all of that. Is there anything else you want to share? Anything else you want to talk about before we go?

Zoe:

Well, we have this kids podcast, If Objects Could Talk, which is our newest series. First season just wrapped up. We’re going to have some bonus material coming out until the launch of our second season, which will be next fall. But we also have a lot of other series that are great for art teachers who I assume are art lovers and probably older students, not the elementary age. They’re not inappropriate, but they’re probably just a little advanced. Like I mentioned, our recording artist series uses artist archives.

We had a long running series called Art and Ideas, which were interviews with our former president of the trust. And he interviewed some great living artists, as well as art historians, architects, architecture historians, conservators. We do a lot of conservation work, which is another way you can explore the wide world of what an interest in art can lead you to career wise. And the new season of our podcast, Recurrent, just launched this week.

And that is more about sort cultural heritage and all the different places around us where cultural heritage is visible that we don’t think about.

Tim:

That’s all great and lots of options and hopefully we can find something that that intrigues them or speaks to them amongst all those. So Zoe, thank you so much for giving us some time sharing your experiences, sharing the podcast and all of your great ideas and great advice. We really appreciate it.

Zoe:

Well, thank you so much for having me. It was great to speak with you.

Tim:

Thank you to Zoe for coming on. Thank you for sharing all of those ideas that she had. I feel that was a great discussion, with so many different strategies and ideas we can implement as teachers to help engage our kids with art and art history. And if you are really wanting to do a deep dive into art history, I want to suggest AOE’s PRO Learning.

PRO Learning delivers PD that you need. is accessible anytime. Each ProPack is built by experienced art educators. We have a few great ones on art history, one by yours truly with using art history in the secondary classroom. Lindsay Moss has a great one on art history in the elementary classroom. We have multiple packs on contemporary art. And the really just takes the ideas that we discussed today and pushes them further because

In these packs and in all of the PRO Packs, you get practical strategies, classroom solutions that are ready to go immediately, and you have access to printable guides and templates and all sorts of resources that save you significant time. So you can join thousands of teachers using Pro Learning today at theartofeducation.edu/pro.

And aside from that, we have so many incredible resources between magazine articles, podcasts, other resources. We will link a lot of them in the show notes. We’ll share those with you. I will also link a lot of things that Zoe talked about with the Getty Museum, the podcasts that they are doing, some of the resources that they have.

There will be a plethora of things if you want to dive into any of these ideas, bring them into your classroom, explore things further. It’s all going to be there for you.

Until then, I want to say thank you again to Zoe for coming on. I think that was a really enjoyable, really informative discussion. I can’t recommend the podcast highly enough, and I think all of the things that we talked about today can be relevant in some way, so I hope you can find something that works for you.

Art Ed Radio is produced by the Art of Education with Audio Engineering from Michael Crocker. Thank you as always for listening. We would love for you to share this podcast with someone else who may enjoy it. You can also leave us a five-star rating and review. That is another great way to help other people find the show. Thank you so much for doing that and we will talk to you next week.