Innovators in Sculpture; Innovators in Painting Tours by Dianne L. Durante

Innovators in Sculpture

Innovators in Painting

In these two walking tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we look at innovations that gave the artists who created them – and all artists who followed – greater power to make viewers stop, look, and think. Either one is a great introduction to the Metropolitan Museum, and will give you a framework for looking at any work of Western sculpture in any museum. Even better, each tour will help you find more subjects, styles, and periods that intrigue and delight you. Each tour runs about 2 1/2 hours.

Praise for Innovators in Sculpture and Innovators in Painting

From an engineer:

It expanded my range of enjoyment and helped me think more carefully about my reactions.

From a musician:

You totally nailed being “down to earth” and yet extremely perceptive.

From a philosopher:

The way you compared and contrasted the detailed features was concise, clear, and illuminating.

From a sculptor:

This tour offers a clear and straightforward approach to understanding art. Love the theme of innovation in art! Exemplar images help make key concepts meaningful, and the leading questions are clear and compelling.

From a dentist:

Every bit of the content was absolutely wonderful. The lecture was interesting & informative, & the examples illustrated your points perfectly. … There’s so much there that I had never noticed before, and now I will in the future.

Inspiration and evolution

I’m a passionate amateur, not an academic. I write on art because I love looking at art, and thinking about art, and helping other people have a blast looking at it, too.

So back in 2003, I offered an eight-hour series of lectures whose working title was the “Crash Cruise Course.” It was a survey aimed at people who didn’t know much about art, but who were vacationing at places with fantastic sculptures and paintings, and wanted to be able to appreciate them.

In 2008, I gave an evolved version of part of that survey at the Quent Cordair Arts Cruise on Voyager of the Seas. Soon afterwards, I transformed the survey into a pair of walking tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that covered 5,000 years of painting and sculpture in two hours each. In 2015, I published a version of Innovators in Sculpture as a Kindle book. (Innovators in Painting is in the works.)

To arrange a tour

• Email: DuranteDianne@gmail.com
• Phone: 917-392-2695
• Tours start at $400 per group (maximum 8 guests per group).