This paper examines the findings of a project that brought art and math together in the context of an art museum for intergenerational families lead by custodial grandparents. The project brought together intergenerational families to explore the connections between math and art at art museum in the Southeastern U.S. The project consisted of six intergenerational sessions that promoted looking closely at the art through the integration of math into art museum experiences. Project activities integrated art and math content in ways that provided for a learning experience of greater complexity than art or math would alone. The project’s goals were to push families to think mathematically and to help them improve their
attitudes and self-confidence toward math. We conducted a final group activity with the grandparents that combined a self-guided gallery tour, a hands-on creative activity, and a photo elicitation focus group.
This paper examines how custodial grandparents’ spontaneous talk in the focus group explained how artworks brought together math concepts with art. We also examine the conversational strategies they used to contribute or to avoid math conversations. We found that participants spontaneously used a broad range of mathematical concepts without considering them to be math at the same time that they used strategies for math avoidance when math was explicitly mentioned. Based on these findings, we recommend supporting custodial grandparents’ development of broader understandings of what constitutes math.