Guest Post by Martin Djupdraet: Let the Decision Makers Do the Audience Research

This guest post is written by Martin Brandt Djupdræt, Head of research and presentation and a member of the management at the Danish open-air museum Den Gamle By (The Old Town). I met Martin last year at the MuseumNext conference. I was impressed by his commitment to putting visitors first - and his technique for inviting more of his colleagues to do so as well. In this post, Martin shares a simple yet effective way to involve staff at all levels in conducting visitor research to drive new perspectives and decisions. Note that Martin uses the word "survey" in a slightly more expansive way than is typical in the United States.

At Den Gamle By we have set ourselves a goal to broaden the perspective of those in responsibility and to ensure the management will take our audience seriously. Den Gamle By (“The Old Town” in Danish) is an open-air museum about urban life and the local museum of the city of Aarhus. It is the second most visited museum in Denmark. What we have done is quite simple, but it works: we require decision makers to do audience research themselves.

Learning experts have pointed out that when people are involved in a subject and actually experiencing it, they are likely to learn more. Interacting with visitors and engaging their emotions is a method used by many museums. But direct involvement with the audience is not necessarily a method used by museum management. Good museums listen to their audiences and the public before they make changes, but my guess is that most museum managers let others do the visitor research. Our experience now is that different lessons are learned when the management participate in collecting the data themselves.

Our new type of research was developed last year though workshops with museum researchers John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking. We wanted to understand the decisions visitors make while visiting and the impact of the visit. There are two elements of the research: tracking and interviewing.

Here’s how it works: a staff member from the museum meets a randomly selected person at the entrance. With the visitor’s consent, we follow and observe them during the entire, noting what parts of the museum they visit and when. The same staff member then interviews the visitor three weeks later.

Visitors are asked:

• why they chose this museum,
• what they noticed especially during the visit,
• whether they interacted with anyone, and
• whether they had talked to anyone about the museum after the visit, and what about

To make sure this knowledge is put to use in developing the museum, the management and curators are part of the team who carry out the survey. Managers have to leave their desks, and track and interview ordinary people they never would meet in their daily work or at the meetings they normally spend time on.

Before doing the survey, most of the management and curators felt they knew the museum and how visitors use it quite well, but it was an eye opener for us to spend an entire visit with one of the guests and interviewing them some weeks later.

What surprised us? The curators were surprised by how important other parts of the museum besides the historical content were for the visitor. The F&B manager and the head of HR were surprised by how many objects and stories the visitors were absorbed in. This has also given us insights into the work of our colleagues and made us appreciate their work to a larger extent. Now we all have useful and inspiring stories about visitors’ choices and the impact the museum had on them.

Another observation was the importance of food and drink. In our trackings we could see how much time the visitors spent on the museum’s eating places and the great social importance these breaks had. Something we learned about food through the interviews was that the guests consider the food at the museum as part of the museum's storytelling. This insight has encouraged us to focus on food and food history as a priority topic at the museum, and a colleague is going to work particularly with that subject.

This research has also given us confidence in choosing the core stories of the museum. For example, a woman in her 20s said that Aarhus Story, a new permanent exhibition about the city of Aarhus, had made her proud of being a citizen of Aarhus and that she developed a stronger sense of belonging to the city, because the exhibition showed her parts of the history that she could connect with. We were pleased and humbled that such an impact was possible. This observation along with other similar observations has already led to new decisions. They were part of the reason why we chose to skip the easy and light crowd-pleasers in our planning of new elements for 2019, and instead went for activities where the museum had a deeper knowledge, good exhibitions and good stories to tell. Through the research, we gained the courage to go for more difficult and ambitious activities and more profound stories.

Visitors have always been a focus for the management, but the research have personalized our audience and they are discussed differently now. As the head of finance described it: “I normally look at whether a task is well done, financially possible and efficient, but now I also consider more seriously how a visitor would feel and react to the changes we plan.”

Does it take time to do this research? Yes it does. Time which could be spent meeting with important people and dealing with important strategic considerations. But none of these worthy activities is more important that meeting the audience and taking their thoughts and actions seriously. Not one.

Is an individual observed in this way representative for all the guests? No, but the reflection shows that it gives new insight, and it certainly ignites the decision makers’ imaginations. Those who have tracked visitors up to now have spent maximum a whole working day altogether on tracking the visitor, the interview and gathering the information. That single day has been an eye-opener for the curators and other decision makers. In addition, we have made it easier for all of our staff to gain insight by meeting our visitors face-to-face by doing a half-hour shift as a welcoming host at the museum entrance. More than 20 staff member working at the offices tried this new practice last December. Most of them were thrilled about the talks they had with the visitors and back at the desk their experiences were discussed with colleagues. These efforts have taught us all through simple involvement that there are many different ways of understanding and using our museum. We have not just learned it, we have felt it.

Four other Nordic museums are now doing the same type of tracking and interviewing. In the year to come we will compare our observations, and will also be happy to share the result with you and others who might be interested. But we know already, before even looking at the collected data, that the project has been a success in Den Gamle By. It has broadened the decision makers’ perspective and made our audience even more important when new exhibitions and goals are planned.

Guest Post by Jasper Visser: Storytelling for Social Cohesion at Story House Belvédère

I first read about Story House Belvédère on Jasper Visser’s excellent blog, The Museum of the Future. This small, startup cultural project in Rotterdam works directly and intimately with community members to share their stories. It is a platform for social bridging and cultural exchange. Jasper enhanced his original post to share with you here. I hope you’ll be as charmed and inspired by Story House Belvédère as I am.

Story House Belvédère in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is a magical place. On a beautiful location in a former jazz-era night club, a committed team works on storytelling activities to bring different communities in the city together, and contribute to a happier, more engaged city. They do so by making the stories of individuals and communities visible, and encouraging new encounters. In its short existence (it opened in 2013), the place has made a name for itself as a successful community-driven, innovative cultural initiative.

I visited Story House Belvédère as part of the new Intangible Cultural Heritage and Museum Projects I am involved in. I had heard a lot about Belvédère before my visit, so my expectations were high. The place surpassed them. I spoke with some of the people working there, especially founder Linda Malherbe.

What makes Story House Belvédère so special?

It is rooted in its diverse neighborhood and the people who live there.

Story House Belvédère is in Katendrecht, in southern Rotterdam. Katendrecht is a part of town that for over 125 years has been a home for migrants and newcomers to the city. The neighborhood is a mix of people and communities by design and has a rich social history. Currently, the neighborhood is being gentrified and its development, which tells a wider story about the city, is ongoing. The team found the current home of Belvédère almost by chance when they were looking for a temporary working space. But the location proved perfect. According to Linda, the project could not have been imagined and developed anywhere else in the city. A diversity of people and stories is the reason it exists.

It started as a community project rooted in relationship-building.

Before there was a house, the team behind Belvédère organised a community-focused social photography exhibition outdoors on one of the quais in the south of Rotterdam. It was an exhibition of group portraits of the many communities in the area. City officials doubted the idea of an exhibition in the public space in a part of town they considered dangerous. They said, "you will get shot at, and in two weeks everything will be destroyed." But they were wrong. The exhibition was up for a year and a half. When it ended, the portrayed communities took their portraits home, starting relationships with Belvédère which in some cases still persist.

After the photography show, the team was encouraged to continue their work. They focused on one of the key events in Rotterdam history: the bombing of the city at the beginning of the Second World War. Inspired by Story Corps, they toured the neighborhood with a mobile recording studio and captured memories of the bombing. They created storytelling events and shows, which prompted other communities to start telling their own stories. As Linda says, “Every story inspires a new story.”

The success of the storytelling events encouraged the team to look for a permanent location. They found it in the old jazz club/boxing gym/neighborhood museum Belvédère, a building which dates back to 1894. Together with the communities they had worked with before, they are now renovating the building. In 2018 it will officially reopen. But currently you can visit when the door is unlocked - which is almost daily. After the formal reopening, they still expect to evolve. As Linda says, the process will never be finished, as people will always continue to add and make changes to the building to reflect new stories and ideas.

The community values of the team permeate the space and their projects.

Already you can feel Story House Belvédère is a special place. You feel it the moment you step into their warm and welcoming space. It feels like a living room, where everybody can be a friend. Even the coffee cups and the cookies are in style. The magic, of course, goes beyond aesthetics and is deeply embedded in the organization.

A small team is the driving force behind all projects. It is a committed, dynamic group of freelancers who care about the mission and magic of the place. The place they created is warm and welcoming, and yet it is their energy and enthusiasm that stuck with me most after my visit. I asked Linda to describe what defines the team, and received over a dozen characteristics:

• A shared love for people 
• They are good listeners 
• Positively curious, and always asking new questions 
• Actively looking for (a diversity of) people 
• Etc. etc.

The approach the team takes to connect with communities and then connecting communities is straightforward. In projects, they build a profound relationship with one specific community, such as the Chinese, Bulgarians, or football hooligans. This relationship is based on a genuine interest and includes a long-term commitment to stay involved with each other. When I visited, a community member had made our delicious Bulgarian lunch. Such profound ties make it possible that when a new project focuses on another community, the team can personally invite people from other communities to join. In that way, they build bridges between communities. Everything starts with listening and being curious about the other, and then inviting people, as guests, to take part.

This approach permeates all activities of Story House Belvédère. If you rent the place for a private event such as a wedding, some spots at the event are reserved for people from other communities. So, if you’re interested in joining a Syrian wedding or Jewish Bar Mitzvah, you can. The reason this works is because of the personal ties between the team and the communities. The aim of Linda and her team is to create relationships with people that are everlasting.

Guest Post by Seema Rao: How Museums Can Resist Racism and Oppression

This guest post was written by Seema Rao, a 2017 MuseumCamper and brilliant GLAM visitor advocate. Seema wrote it (original post here) in response to her experience last week at MuseumCamp... followed by the painful news about racism-fueled rallies and mob violence in Charlottesville, VA. 

Like Seema, I've been looking for ways to increase active resistance of racism, hate, and bigotry--both as an individual and as the leader of a museum. Seema and I have started an open google doc to assemble ideas for specific things museums and museum professionals can do to resist oppression. Please check it out, add to it, and join us in taking action.

I had the extreme pleasure of being part of this year’s MuseumCamp hosted by Nina Simon at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. For those who are unaware of this program, it’s sort of a hybrid museum conference, personal growth program, and summer camp smushed into three days. Intense would be a useful descriptor. Useful, impactful, and thought-provoking also work.

Monday morning, after such wonderful experiences with people from around the world in the cossetted kooky culture of Santa Cruz, I had hoped to create a blog post from my MuseumCamp notes. Instead, my heart feels exhausted. I wanted to share some of the hope a community of change-makers felt. Instead, my brain is misfiring. I wanted to pass on useful advice to colleagues who couldn’t be in Santa Cruz. Instead, my soul needs rest.

Why? Well, because for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, for all the changemakers aimed at an inclusive society, there are those who want exclusion. There are those who fear more people at the table will mean less space for them. There are those who only feel full when others are starving.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. You can choose your opposite reaction or not. If you don’t react to negativity, you are still acting. Your lack of action is still a reaction. So, when you see evil, when you see people actively fighting inclusion, and you decide it might be too political to act, you are being political in your inaction.

Today, everyone in America woke up in a country where people spouted hate publicly and proudly. Today in America, we saw the emblems of enemies past parading in the streets of one of the nation’s best college. Today in America, we remembered that our own worst enemies are our own neighbors.

What does this have to do with museums? Museums are the best of our nation, even literally, holding our national heritage for eternity. Museums are ideas. They are hope. When the best of our nation doesn’t do anything, they are choosing—and they are making the wrong choice. There is a simple binary: chosen action (1) or choosing inaction (0).

How can museums react? Here are a few ideas to get started... please add yours to our open google doc.

• Staff can be allowed time to share their feelings together 
• Staff can raise money for organizations that support inclusion 
• Staff can reach out to colleagues in Charlottesville with unencumbered, unquestioning support 
• Museums can host conversations for visitors 
• Museums can share their stories of colonialism and inclusion as a model for growth 
•  Museums can model inclusion in their programming 
• Museums can work together in regions to create safe spaces for inclusion

So what is your museums doing? Let’s grow this list until every museum has something they can check off. After all, action is so much more fun.

Thou Shall Not Paint the Concrete: Guest Revelations by Don Hughes

I started my museum career as an exhibit designer. There are many heroes I look up to in that field. But I reserve for Don Hughes that particular blend of admiration and fear that comes when encountering uncompromised brilliance. Don has been the head of exhibits at the Monterey Bay Aquarium for thirty years. He is a genius designer out of central casting: an artist, mercurial, funny, emphatic, honest, unflinching, with a disarming weakness for babies.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is a giant in our field, just as Don himself is a giant in the world of museum design. While I don't always agree with the Aquarium team's work, I always learn from them. Don is leaving the Aquarium, and he wrote this list of revelations on design to pass on to the next generation at that organization. He shared it with me, and he agreed that I could share it with you.


Thou Shall Not Paint the Concrete 
The Monterey Gray Revelations, as revealed to Don Hughes over three decades

One: Thou shall protect the original architectural design. 
The building and the exhibitions have a unique and historically successful relationship. Maintain this success by replacing worn or failing elements with materials as similar to the original as possible. Uphold the Aquarium’s overall industrial vernacular aesthetic.

Two: Thou shall provide negative space to rest the eye. 
Well-meaning staff want to fill empty walls with important and meaningful messages. Prevent this. Our enduring design is simple and clean. It embraces the modernist philosophies of Less Is More and Form Follows Function.

Three: Thou shall not restrict views of the bay. 
The building’s exterior is understated Cannery Row. The interior is polished industrial with rich appointments and allows for many views of Monterey Bay. Our building does not compete with the bay; it complements its natural beauty and power.

Four: Thou shall keep the regional focus. 
The greatest stories ever told are always about place. The Aquarium is the most recent tenant of a location that humankind has used for thousands of years. Visitors flock to us to see live plants and animals from this place. Departing from this holy vision leads to damnation.

Five: Thou shall have no greater god than visitors. 
Thou shall treat visitors like royalty, but thou shall not overestimate their interest or attention span. Visitors are not as interested as we like to think they are. Like life, communications with visitors is short, but staff’s list of meaningful, critically important topics to share is long—too long. Edit them. 

Six: Thou shall look like a museum and behave like an attraction. 
The Aquarium is confident. It doesn’t need to shout or brag. Our visitor experience is subtle, elegant and understated, not bold and in-your-face. We look more museum-like than Disney-like, and that makes us unique in a world of attractions. Like Disney in the world of theme parks, we set the standard for the world of public aquariums. Here, every visitor deserves a perfect visit, without out-of-order signs or beta-test experiences in the public space. We learn from our visitors, but not at the expense of their onsite experience.

Seven: Thou shall beware of tacky idolatry. 
No penny crushers, flashy sales signs in the bookstores or cafe, no anthropomorphism or theme park-like costumed characters, no photo booths or other fads posing as content. Cast out those who want to squeeze more and more money from visitors. Dwell in the straightforward and honest presentation of nature. But don’t take thyself too seriously—use humor, and do not preach.

Eight: Thou shall heed the words of the prophets. 
The Aquarium is on a peninsula not an island. Embrace the wisdom of Mickey’s Ten Commandments and Judy’s Visitors’ Bill of Rights.

Nine: Thou shall remember the words of our father. 
“The objective is not to maximize attendance and revenue, but to do the best possible exhibits. Have the highest quality program you can have; spend the money it takes to do that; everything else will follow.” —David Packard, September 25, 1989

Ten: Thou shall know all rules and revelations are created to be broken. 
The garden will change; it must. But resist the temptation of self-esteem. You are but a caretaker. Amen.


p.s. from Nina: Do check out Judy Rand's Visitors' Bill of Rights and the accompanying speech that goes with it. Judy is a tremendous exhibit developer, writer, comedian, teacher, and champion for museum visitors everywhere.

Meditations on Relevance, Part 4: Guest Comic and Open Thread

For the past few weeks, I've been writing about relevance and museums. The conversation in the comments on each post has been fascinating and educational. Today, I wanted to share a provocative comic made by a talented museum-er/illustrator, Crista Alejandre. I hope this piece encourages more dialogue among us in this penultimate post in the relevance series.

 ***  

This post is part of a series of meditations on relevance. This week is YOUR WEEK to weigh in on anything related to relevance that you want to explore. At the end of the series, I'll re-edit the whole thread into a long format essay. I look forward to your examples, amplifications, and disagreements shaping the story ahead.

Here's my question for you today: What responses, questions, and stories does Crista's comic spark for you?

If you are reading this via email and wish to respond, you can join the conversation here.

Familiarity Breeds Love…and a Desire for Things to Stay the Same: Guest Post by Karen Wise

Visitors in front of the African Elephant Diorama at the Natural

History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC photo)

This guest post was written by Karen Wise, Vice President, Education and Exhibits at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. 

 “I love it! You’ve made it better without changing it.”

Those words haunt me. The person who said them is a member of our Board of Trustees. He’s one of our biggest supporters. He is committed to our aspiration of creating a new model of what museums can be in the 21st Century. Yet he was thrilled that we had not changed what he loved – any of it – when we installed our new signage system.

This isn’t an isolated issue. Loyal museum visitors – members, patrons, volunteer docents, people who grew up coming to the museum -- love the old exhibits they are used to. Familiarity may breed contempt in some contexts, but apparently not in museums. Familiarity with our museum seems to breed loyalty, love and a desire to have things preserved rather than changed. Dioramas. History exhibits with hundreds of objects and no coherent story. Schizophrenic bird halls with 5 different design and content presentation styles. How do we grapple with this difficult fact - that what staff may see as old-fashioned exhibits, those with no stories, just lots of coded content – can be visitor favorites???

The specifics of what visitors love is often hard to tease out. A couple of months ago, my middle school age daughter and her friends were in the back seat of the car talking about the museum where I work. One of them broke the unwritten rule against talking to the parent driver and asked me what was coming next. They got excited when I told them we were bringing in an exhibit on mummies. Then one of them asked me where we were going to put it. When I told him - into a hall that held what remains of our old California History Hall - the kids protested loudly that the old Hall is one of their favorites. When I asked them what they love about it, they named a few objects, but then one said “the whole thing” and my daughter said “the smell.”

Their loyalty, that fondness for the familiar, the smell--these precious memories do not drive attendance or keep us relevant. Even at a museum like ours, where more than 70% of our visitors are bringing others to facilitate a social (often family) experience, only new things can reliably motivate a visit.

In museum circles, there is also a widely recognized need for us to be relevant, to tell big stories that matter, to create experiences for the widest possible range of audiences, and - in the case of science museums - to help solve the STEM crisis by making science fun, accessible and interesting. As museums work to fulfill visitor-focused missions – in our case to inspire wonder, discovery and responsibility for our natural and cultural worlds - we face some ironic paradoxes.

Each month, during our visitor intercept surveys, we ask a sample of 200 visitors whether they came to see anything in particular, and if so what. The most popular answer among those that say yes is Dinosaurs. When asked what they want more of they say Dinosaurs - and more hands on experiences for kids.

No visitor has ever told us that s/he came to the museum to learn a big story or to see science in action. And yet, as museum professionals, we are constantly talking about our responsibilities to tell those big stories, to display a wider range of our spectacular stuff, to help visitors make sense of change through time, put current anthropogenic climate change by putting into the context of climate change throughout the history of the earth, and to display our collections as evidence for the history and evolution of the earth and life on it.

So how do we balance that perceived obligation to tell big stories – of the history of our planet and life on it, of evolution, extinction and survival, of how science works, visitor motivations for social experiences -- with great objects and specimens and memorable stories?

Most museums, including us, might answer this question by changing our approach as we create new experiences. But as we look at creating new layers for iconic, historic exhibits this can get dicey. In our case in LA, we’re addressing this now as we consider our diorama halls. We have some of the best diorama halls in the world. They are incredibly detailed depictions of scientifically and visually accurate moments in time and place with backdrop murals made accomplished artists – including some famous Plein Air artists who created them as part of W.P.A. projects during the Great Depression. How do we make them relevant, engaging, must-see experiences without changing them? Can we? There are plenty of models out there – and the range of options keeps increasing with technological innovations. We will learn from them all, but none that we have seen yet quite fit the full range of inarticulate needs of our visitors.

No matter what we do, I know this: we will test and test and test before we install anything in the diorama halls, lest anyone complain that we changed them.

Thanks to Karen Wise for this thoughtful post. Please share your perspective below--Karen and I both look forward to the conversation. If you are reading this via email and would like to share a comment or question, you can join the conversation here.

Guest Post by Nora Grant: Lessons from A Year of Pop Up Museums

This post was written by my colleague Nora Grant, Community Programs Coordinator at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. 

“Pop Up” has become an international buzz term to describe ephemeral, experimental projects--from pop up restaurants to pop up boutiques--but a “Pop Up Museum” is still somewhat mystifying. How can you take something as substantial and precious as a museum and add a pop up twist?

There are many different models, including The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, The New York Met, SF Mobile Museum, and even a Pop Up Prison Museum.

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), we have been experimenting with a kind of pop up museum that is primarily created by the people who show up to participate. We’ve been popping up around Santa Cruz County for a little over a year and have had over 30 different pop up museums. Our primary goal for pop up museums is to bring people together in conversation through stories, art, history, and objects. Building off of Michelle DelCarlo’s pop up museum model, MAH pop up museums bring different people, perspectives, and projects to one central gathering place, enabling a democratic type of public curation.

What does this look like? Imagine a potluck in which instead of a dish, everyone brings an object and/or story to share with others. We choose themes and venues in collaboration with a community partner. People are invited to bring something on topic to share. When people show up, they write a label for their object and leave it on display. The museum lasts for a few hours on one day, with people coming and going as they please.

We favor this “potluck” approach because it:

• Empowers people to share meaningful stories and objects with one another 
• Enables the museum to step outside physical confines, and collaborate with community partners who wouldn’t ordinarily come to museum programs 
• Opens up conversation as to what it means to be a museum and who can participate in making one 
• Allows us to experiment with themes, content, and collaborations in an intimate yet short-lived, simple way 

In addition to pop up museums we facilitate locally in Santa Cruz, we also want to provide global support for anyone interested in having a pop up museum. We have created a free and downloadable pop up museum organizer’s kit. Check it out if you’re curious about choosing a strong theme, working with a collaborator, designing a portable structure, or tips for implementation.

Designing a pop up museum structure that is replicable by amateurs in diverse venues, appealing enough to attract a variety of participants, and portable is not easy. We continuously iterated our pop up museum format with different set up designs and language to realize a structure that satisfied these objectives. Having a lot of pop up museums and observing what did and didn’t work enabled us to learn more about our community while providing practical, real-life content for the organizer’s kit. 

While the kit offers a step-by-step guide for organizing pop ups, I want to share some of the more unexpected takeaways I’ve learned through this process.

Pop Up Outside the Museum 

It’s appealing to plan Pop Up Museums in conjunction with exhibits or museum events, but people are rightfully confused about a pop up museum taking place inside a museum. Like a café inside a restaurant, a museum inside a museum feels redundant rather than complementary. When framed by a larger museum, the pop up museum doesn’t embody as much individual vibrancy as it can’t be decontextualized from preexisting notions of said museum institution. When popping up in non-traditional exhibitory spaces, you cannot only prompt unexpected conversation, but also unite location and theme. For example, we had a pop up at an arboretum on Growth.

A Little Frame Goes A Long Way 

People like picture frames. They make the ordinary look special. They’re eye-catching. When we first started having pop up museums, we displayed objects on tables with black tablecloths, which had a simple yet flat aesthetic. So I bought vintage frames from a nearby thrift store, getting different shapes and sizes to accommodate various objects. The frames not only enhanced the aesthetic, but also visually communicated that the pop up museum serves as an open framework for the participant’s narratives. An empty frame is much more inviting than an empty table. Suddenly, people could pick and choose which frame they wanted, and design their own display within the communal show. Furthermore, open frames enable participants to physically touch exhibited content while demonstrating that the object still deserves special recognition.

Mix and Match Museum and Community Content 

One of the reasons we started the pop up museum was to challenge the idea that museums have an omnipresent authority over what is and what’s not “valuable.” We were surprised to learn that the pop up museum is actually most compelling when we exhibit objects from the museum’s collection alongside individuals’ objects. This bridges institutional and community-created content. By sharing the same space, you’re illustrating how a personal object can have just as much story value as a museum object. This mixing and matching ties into another conversation around what a “museum” means to people. People certainly have diverse views and relationships to museums, but I found that most of our collaborators were excited to partner with a museum because it validated their project or object. Something about the idea of a museum carries a lot of weight, and the Santa Cruz community has responded well to pop up museum collaborations. This is not to say that everyone loves the MAH or that everyone sees our pop up museum as museums for that matter. But we did notice that participants and collaborators were more attracted to having a pop up museum in partnership with the MAH rather than throwing one on their own.

Serial Pop Up Museums Sustain Interest 

Pop Up Museums are ephemeral, and because of their brevity, it can be difficult to maintain and sustain momentum for each one. We experimented with serial pop up museums and held six pop up museums thematically tied to an exhibition last fall. Held in collaboration with six different partners, taking place in six different locations, and occurring on consecutive Saturdays, each pop up expanded the overarching theme of the exhibit. Unlike other pop up museums which live for one day, serial pop up museums have the advantage of reaching a larger audience and encouraging repeat participation. 


What’s wonderful about the pop up museum is that it’s a flexible format for sharing. The changeability is part of its charm. We don’t know exactly how, or where, or with whom it will pop up. But like the blank labels or empty frames we leave out on the table, pop up museums will continue to invite and support public conversation, personal empowerment, and open-ended narratives.

Guest Post by Porchia Moore: Performing Blackness--Museums, Mammies, and Me

Kara Walker,
The Emancipation Approximation (Scene 18)

This guest post was written by Porchia Moore, a third year doctoral candidate in Library Science and Museum Management at the University of South Carolina. I was first exposed to Porchia’s work in the fall 2013 issue of Exhibitionist. Since then, I have avidly followed her smart thinking on the intersection of critical race theory and museums. In this powerful blog post, Porchia demonstrates both the need and the opportunity for cultural competency to transform who participates in museums and how. 

I was standing in an elegant room of a historic house museum with 25 museum professionals from across my southern state on a bus tour of local museums as a part of our annual museum conference. We crowded into a tiny room adorned with heavy drapery, high-backed chairs, and gilded frames of Civil war-era paintings above marble-topped fireplaces. And then things fell apart.

As the tour guide summed up his brief intro, he turned, pointed, looked at me, asked me my name, and told me not to worry. That “in the end, it all worked out” for me and my people. In fact, to dramatize how wonderful things worked out, he would give me the opportunity to wave a flag at the end of his tour signaling the end of the war and the end of slavery (and presumably all its ill effects). I folded my hands behind my back, smiled, and prepared to take the most meaningful museum tour of my life.

 The tour guide--let’s call him Henry--peppered every other sentence with slave references while pointing or deferring to me. Thus: “Porchia, you are going to like this” as he told me about the enslaved peoples who worked in the home, including many happy, well-adjusted “mammies” that lived and worked in the very room where we stood. I wondered with amusement if Henry really thought that I was going to wave a flag.  Should I grab it and with the thickest, most vile accent shout loudly, “thank you ‘Massa!”? Henry clearly wanted me to perform his notion of Blackness that day.

As he kept asking us to gather closer around him, I began to retreat so that soon I was almost in another room. Perhaps, if I moved out of his line of sight, we could turn this tour around. Too late.

“What do you think the slaves ate[…pause] What did the slaves eat, Porchia?” 

Shoulders shrugging….mumbling “I have no idea…” 

“Come on, Porchia,--hoecakes!” 

He slaps his leg and smiles as if to chastise me lightly; fingers almost wagging as if to surmise that of course, I knew the answer and was just being shy.

Yes, this is a true story. It happened last year.

After that last exchange, one of my fellow museum professionals abruptly ended our tour as everyone else looked on in horror and disbelief. I was extremely grateful for that interruption. Some people were angry. Others embarrassed. A few were not sure what to make of what just happened.

The Case for Cultural Competency 

I acknowledge that my experience is extreme. It took place in the Deep South. Henry is a man of a certain age. But these are not reasons to excuse what we all endured that day. I share my story because I hope that it makes you uncomfortable.

Henry is not the typical museum professional. Henry had been contracted for years by local government to give us a tour. He is regarded as both a noted historian and consummate professional capable of executing interpretive work at a historic site and museum.

 This story drives home my belief in the power and potential of cultural competency in museum settings. I believe cultural heritage institutions are the best suited to think critically about cultural competency and the language of cultural competence because that language inevitably fosters inclusion and participation.

 Henry was making a genuine attempt at building rapport. Part of me is happy that Henry wanted to connect with me, the lone person of color in a group of all white museum professionals. But there is another part of me that could not imagine being so disconnected from cultural competency that I would try to connect by being racially offensive and thereby speaking a language of exclusion even as I intended to be inviting and inclusive.

Instantly, I began to think about how cultural heritage institutions might be replicating Henry and his behaviors daily in much more subtle and inadvertent ways. When we “invite” the Other into the museum, we inadvertently send the message that inclusion is not inherent. Invited participants are given Welcomed Outsider status. The discourses of diversity are often wrought with language that sends mixed messages by placing the majority-minority outside of the museum. The sentiment is correct, but the language is flawed. I advocate co-creation as the language of inclusion because it promotes genuine active participation—the kind that cultivates a desire to become a vested stakeholder.

I had entered that tour excited about the complex narrative surrounding the objects and the people who owned the home. I had a kind of macabre enthusiasm about performing Blackness as a “diverse” new participant in that space. In my mind, what cultural competence would have looked like for me that day is partly about language: the proper use of terms such as “enslaved person” instead of “slave,” knowing that the use of the term “mammy” is inappropriate. Furthermore, I wish Henry had felt comfortable enough to speak about slavery in a way that anchored it in statistics, facts, and complex narratives that made the tour fun, memorable, and powerful without being overly-conscious of my presence as a black woman in the room.

Two of the many barriers to participation for people of color in cultural heritage institutions are assumptions of identity and the burden of expectations of the performance of race. While visitors of color want to be assured that there is equity in the exhibition, marketing, and programming, we do not want to perform race either--especially when we are fully aware that the very act of our participation might have originated in response to a call for diversity. When executed poorly, this kind of invitation does not illicit co-creation but rather feelings of exploitation.

There is no single Black experience. Henry had no idea if I were born and raised in the US, the UK, or even if I was a native English speaker. He was too busy asking me to perform his version of me to allow me to participate fully as the black woman that I am.

The Truth about Bilingual Interpretation: Guest Post by Steve Yalowitz

You know those research studies that make you want to immediately change your practice in some way? I recently read The BERI report on bilingual labels in museums and was blown away by its findings. BERI was an NSF-funded three-year collaborative project co-led by Cecilia Garibay (Garibay Group), Steve Yalowitz (Audience Viewpoints Consulting), Nan Renner (Balboa Park Cultural Partnership, Art of Science Learning) and Carlos Plaza (Babel No More). This guest post was written by Steve Yalowitz, a Principal at Audience Viewpoints Consulting, who has a Ph.D. in Applied Social Psychology and has evaluated and researched informal learning experiences in museums and other visitor institutions for over 20 years.

Bilingualism in the U.S. is a controversial topic, and the same is true in museums. If someone asked you whether museums should or need to have text in more than one language, what would you say? You probably have an opinion, or you could probably come up with an opinion without too much effort. Maybe you are in a country that mandates multiple languages, or at an institution already committed to bi- or multi-lingual interpretation. However, based on my conversations and experiences with many museum professionals, my guess is that many of you are aware of the issue, may think it’s worth discussing, but have limited knowledge about the core issues surrounding bilingual interpretation.

I was co-author of a recently completed research study [PDF] funded by the National Science Foundation, the Bilingual Exhibit Research Initiative (BERI), which strove to better understand bilingual labels from the visitor perspective. This qualitative, exploratory study involved tracking and interviewing 32 Spanish-speaking intergenerational groups in fully bilingual exhibits at four different science centers/museums. We observed and audio recorded the groups, and conducted in-depth interviews in Spanish after they went through the exhibit, with a focus on what the bilingual experience was like for the group.

The BERI study really expanded our thinking about bilingual interpretation, even though we’d been studying the topic for years. One of the main affordances of bilingual interpretation, of course, is that it provides access to content. The BERI study shows that access to content—the most obvious benefit of bilingual labels—is just the tip of the iceberg. Bilingual interpretation expands the way visitors experience and perceive museums, shifting their emotional connection to the institutions.

Here are three affordances that may not be as top-of-mind when we think about bilingual interpretation:

1. Code-switching – We found lots of evidence of effortless switching back-and-forth between English and Spanish. We saw kids and adults switch from English to Spanish not only mid-conversation but mid-sentence, both in the exhibition and in the interviews afterwards. Museum professionals often incorrectly assume that if we provide Spanish text for Spanish speakers, they stay in “Spanish mode.” The power of bilingual text is that it’s bilingual – it provides access in two languages, and code switching lets you understand and express yourself from two different perspectives, with two sets of vocabulary. It was a huge affordance for bilingual groups, especially when some members were not able to understand English, or even if they were Spanish dominant or fully bilingual. 
2. Facilitation – We researched intergenerational groups, so it’s not surprising that many of the adults saw their role as facilitator as essential to their own and the group’s success in the exhibition. We confirmed what other label studies have previously found: that adults were more likely to read labels than kids. However, this study found that in bilingual groups adults were more likely to read in Spanish, while the kids were more likely to read in English. With Spanish labels available, adults were able to facilitate, guiding the conversations and interactions, showing their children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews where to focus and how to interact. Adults who were previously dependent on their children could now take the lead as confident facilitators. An added benefit of bilingual labels, even for those who could read in English, was that they didn’t feel slower or that they were holding up the group.
3. Emotional reaction – This study found that the presence of bilingual interpretation had a profound emotional effect on the groups. Groups said they enjoyed the visit more, felt more valued by the institution, and many said having bilingual interpretation changed how they felt about the institution. In our field, if we focus on the emotional aspect of the experience, it’s typically around the content and what we’re hoping people feel when engaging with our exhibits. While some of the reactions were around engagement with content (as would be expected), many of them were really about feeling confident and comfortable–key factors for a satisfying and worthwhile visit. 

When asking whether bilingual interpretation is worth it, we’re often looking at it through the wrong lens. It shouldn’t be about whether it’s worth it for us as an institutional investment, but whether it’s worth it from the visitor perspective. Does it improve the visitor experience in a way that adds value to the visit, providing affordances that don’t exist in monolingual experiences? The answer, from the BERI study findings, is a resounding yes.

BERI was a three-year collaborative effort I worked on with Cecilia Garibay, Nan Renner and Carlos Plaza. When we received the award, we felt a great sense of opportunity and responsibility, since this was the first NSF-funded research study about bilingual families and their experiences in fully bilingual exhibitions. You can download the research report and find out about the research model, methods, analysis and implications for the field.

 We saw this study not as the answer to the field’s questions about bilingual interpretation, but as the start of a conversation around better understanding how it works. In doing so, we found out that it is a much more complicated and rich experience than even we thought. After a recent presentation about the findings, a museum professional told us that the study’s findings helped change how they think about bilingual interpretation. My hope is that some of you out there will continue this important work, and help change how I think about bilingual interpretation.

Guest Post: A Shared Ethics for Museum Internships

Is your museum running on interns? In this guest post, CUNY lecturer and former manager of the Guggenheim Internship program Michelle Millar Fisher makes a passionate argument for the end of unpaid internships. It is a strong, museum-focused complement to an excellent three-parter on Fractured Atlas about the ethics and future of unpaid arts internships. 

One of the most poignant signs I saw waved during the Occupy Movement was held by a young woman who politely advised The System to "F**k your free internships." Free intern labor wasn't ever right, but it has become glaringly unethical in the current post-Lehman-crash era. That protest placard highlighted the unpaid internship as a simultaneous symptom and result of badly broken political and social systems.

If you're reading this at work, you're probably reading it within ten feet of an unpaid intern. It's probably a path you had to navigate too. There's a sense of "it worked for me...." And it does - it did work for me. I got my first real job in a museum (at the Guggenheim) after a life-changing internship. My supervisor was amazing, caring, and supportive. I worked so hard in those three unpaid months that I made myself indispensable and jumped ship from my home country (Scotland) and came to New York. My whole career path has been positively changed by that one internship experience.

However, my experience was an exception to the rule that internships increasingly prove: free labor contributes to the growing inequities of the non-profit labor system. Issues of class and economic status haunt the museum internship. You have to be able to afford to work for free in order to take an internship that will help you onto the career ladder. There are certainly excellent programs that try to circumvent this stereotype, and there are stipends to be had in some museums, but they are far from the norm.

My experience was exceptional for one simple reason: my internship at the Guggenheim was the only unpaid internship I ever did. It was the only one I could afford to do. It was made possible by a small, unexpected windfall. If I hadn't had the windfall, it's highly unlikely that as a first-gen college attendee I would have been exposed to the other opportunities it afforded me. (I have somewhat of a "control" in this social experiment in that my talented sister has plied a similar path to me, but was unable to afford the opportunity of one unpaid internship at a museum. Even though she worked just as hard as I did, it took her five years longer to get her foot on the arts employment ladder than it did for me.)

I have done my very fair share of perpetuating the cycle of unpaid internships. As an Associate Manager of Education, I coordinated internships at the Guggenheim museum for four years before I headed back to academia. I expanded the program from around seventy-five interns per year to over one hundred and thirty in almost every department of the museum. I loved my job, and I think many of the interns had amazing experiences at the museum because we tried to take care of them, introduce them to arts networks through a rich weekly seminar program, and encouraged supervisors to be the best mentors they could. But now, as I counsel my university students, I feel it unethical to recommend the same path I took. I have taken a firm stand. I will not forward unpaid internship postings that come my way and actively respond to the senders, even when I know them well as colleagues: “This is not ethical!”

Is unpaid participation in the life and operations of a museum always a bad thing? No. Are the worst offenders larger museums who know they can get away with asking people to work for free? Yes. Is it unethical to ask college juniors and seniors, graduate students, and recently qualified degree holders to undertake multiple free internships? Absolutely. Making small changes and offering some kind of basic compensation for interns in the arts would benefit us all. If the lowest wage on the ladder is zero, entry-level wages don't have to be much higher, and this affects the whole pay scale for the majority of those who work in non-director positions.

Would some form of universal museum internship standard mitigate this? How about a national Museum Internship Ethics Charter that would make three core promises to any museum intern:

1. a stipend 
2. a clear written statement of expectations given at the beginning of their internship 
3. a final face-to-face evaluation with the internship mentor at the end of the internship 

I'm constantly surprised at how many students I speak with, even those who are working for college credit where this is meant to be regulated, do not receive any of these three components. A shared ethics on the subject of internships means a shared ethics for human resources in museum more generally. This type of shared ethics can only be a positive thing for both individuals at all levels, and the institution - and thus its visitors. Happy employees (yes, even interns!) mean greater productivity, creativity, and accountability.

 The students I teach in undergrad classrooms in New York are about a decade younger than me. They're the Internship Generation. The more I am faced with their predicament when they ask me about how to balance work experience that won't pay them with study and (especially at the city college where I teach) the jobs that are paying their tuition, or to write them letters of recommendation for unpaid labor, the more uncomfortable I have become.

How could we all better address this issue? Could museum managers agree to hire interns who need the work experience rather than those with a resume already the length of the Nile? Could they agree to put aside a small part of their yearly budget to compensate interns in some way? Could university instructors (especially those with tenure and a voice) steer their interns in the direction of paid opportunities, and campaign within their own departments to end the cycle of internships for credit? Could we all agree to a universal standard under the auspices of a body like the AAM? Are there already internship models out there that do this that we could learn from and offer as examples?

I'm truly interested in any discussion and feedback on this topic, and taking sustained action. I want to do better for my students, and to participate in the rethinking of a broken model I have helped to perpetuate.

What's your vision for the future of internships? Share your thoughts with Michelle and the Museum 2.0 community in the comments.

Guest Post: Restoration Artwork

This is the last of the guest posts offered during this fall season, and it dovetails with last week's post about opening up collections access nicely. George Scheer is the director and co-founder of Elsewhere Collective, a fascinating "living museum" in a former thrift store in Greensboro, NC. Elsewhere is at the top of my list of places I would most like to visit. In this post, George grapples with the challenges of balancing the care for a museum collection with that of contemporary artists-in-residence who are constantly reinterpreting it.

Every Saturday, the curatorial team at Elsewhere, a living museum in downtown Greensboro, NC, reviews the project proposals of its artists-in-residence. Proposals involve sculpture, performance, participatory-projects, videos, and installation that use and respond to the museum’s collection.  This past July, artist Guillermo Gómez proposed to restore a piece of art.  

Restoration is a formal gesture for most museums. In this post, I hope to bring out some of the complexities of the idea of restoration as it occurs within an experimental museum supporting both a collection and the practices of emerging artists.

Elsewhere is a living museum, set in a former thrift store once run by my grandmother, Sylvia Gray, from 1939-1997.  During this period, she amassed a vast collection of inventories, filling the three-floor store, including a former 14 room boarding house, and third floor workshop.  In 2003, collaborator Stephanie Sherman and I “re-discovered,” the former store, declared nothing for sale, and began inviting artists to create works using the set, or collection of objects.  From the outset, we imagined an infinitely re-arrangeable puzzle, a three floor installation composed and recomposed from only what was at hand.  Both objects and art-objects would be part of this continuing transformation and evolution.  The objects, artworks, and the traces of past experience are all part of an unfolding continuum of the living museum.  

The artwork to be restored is a piece called the Glass Forest, (2009) created by Agustina Woodgate, composed of glass and brass cabinets and mirror-etched bark patterns.  The Glass Forest was itself an act of restoration. It re-set the room’s contents of glass mirrors and significantly restored the tired tongue-and-groove floor. Curiously, Guillermo is the current studio assistant of Ms. Woodgate, and is intimately familiar with Woodgate’s work, process, and thinking.  

The proposal was as much to restore an artwork as it was to “take back” the artwork, because after 4 years of slight interventions, film shoots, and an “unsuccessful” effort to create a new work that changed the tone, composition, and material content of the piece, it was determined a restoration-reset of the Glass Forest was in order. During the proposal it was discussed that certain elements of previous works and interventions should remain in the restored Glass Forest and it was further noted that Ms. Woodgate’s work undid a previous work, Mr. Stag’s Hosiery Museum, by Lucy Steggals, a period piece of an imagined hosiery salesman. At every moment the question of restoration was countered with the preservation of traces.

The restoration, which was championed by the curatorial team, has sparked an interesting debate about the intersecting challenges of making work in and from a museum collection, and the occasional incongruity with artists’ creative needs and formal structures of residency program itself.  

Elsewhere’s residency invites artists to use the museum as site, resource, and concept to create new artworks. Artists are explicitly asked not to have proposals before they arrive, but rather immerse themselves in the museum, its community, and collection. The artists’ challenge after a short three days on the ground is to design a response to the museum, press their experimentation with materials, and transform both object and artwork. To this effect the curatorial team works closely with each artist to support the process, guide the careful use of collection, push a continual reflection on site specificity, identify past histories, and ensure a relation to the various publics that the museum serves.  

Sometimes a work just doesn’t work, or the challenges of the residency don’t connect with the artist’s practice, or the timeframe for response is too short to fully engage the complexity of the museum’s context. While there is a strong resistance toward “fixing” a work, Elsewhere’s curators are all artists and view their role as collaborators in the overall creative development of the museum-as-artwork. They maintain a creative autonomy and intimate relation with the museum and its collection that empowers them to play with and transform the visual environment. Most importantly, the conversation about restoration brought to light the contingent values that support a site-specific, museum-based, experimental practice with a collection.  

As a guardian of a collection, Elsewhere breaks a marker of tradition by allowing art and object to be transformed. However, extreme purposefulness and resourcefulness are applied to the tiniest plastic bead, antique cloth, and wood scrap left from a cut made to century old lathe. “Successful” artworks draw out qualities in the collection, reflect material histories, and show the artists’ process and conceptualization. Each moment of material use is collection use, and represents an ethical and aesthetic decision for resource potential and the way we advance and perpetuate Elsewhere’s meaning to its artists and publics.  

Like other museums, Elsewhere is an interpretive space, constructed to secure and invest in cultural meaning, cultural objects, and creative expression. We willingly transfer this interpretive responsibility from the institution and its curators to the artist at the artist’s most precious, fragile, and critical moment of creative process. This demands that awareness and responsiveness be deeply embedded in the artist’s practice and thought. For curators, it means they must act as guides for the artists, supportive and challenging, but willing to continually reflect on the museum’s own institutional reflexes, aesthetic tendencies, and precious instincts.  

As I write this post Guillermo’s restoration remains in mid-process. Strangely, I am the only one on the team who saw the Glass Forest in its original inception, and I’ve remained quiet about small details that are different between Guillermo’s actions and what I remember to be Agustina’s original intent. Nevertheless, in those gaps of document, memory and intervention, Elsewhere evolves. Each artist brings a restorative and disruptive process. We welcome that. They often place pieces into the puzzle that unhinge whole sections of the picture, but they also restore and evolve the visual environment and the museum’s meaning. It is a living process, a deeply artistic process, and an exciting part of the museums’ imaginary--that a restoration is always already a new work of art.

Guest Post: Collections Access - Open the Door Wider

North Carolina Museum of History 1988.39.4

I’m always amazed when my colleagues tell me that the biggest barrier they face to “opening up” the content at their museums is from registrars—the people who care for collection objects. In this courageous guest post, Adrienne Berney, a Collections Care Trainer who works primarily with history museums, gives us an insider’s guide to these issues. 

Followers of Museum 2.0 are well versed in new ideas for audience engagement and committed to opening up their institutions to increase public access. But this is not always the first priority for professionals in the museum field. Some collections stewards, steeped as they are in professional artifact-protection standards, are reluctant to shift toward the more open version of institutional access that engagement advocates promote. Do these two directives and perspectives have to be at odds? Can collections access be a way to entice new audiences?

Recently, several subscribers to the RCAAM (Registrar’sCommittee of AAM) listserv posted concerns about professional photographers and museum visitors taking photographs of objects on exhibition. One announced her intention to seek legal recourse against a photographer, and another warned that in the past her institution’s legal council had dissuaded that museum from seeking action. “Unfortunately,” that subscriber advised, there are no legal avenues to stop visitors from photographing objects or images in the public domain in public spaces where photography is allowed.

To me, this seems both discouraging and ungenerous to visitors. I stirred up a debate by raising the question “why not allow access?” I believe the museum field as a whole should do more to encourage reproductions of collection objects and images, regardless of whether reproducers hope for profits. I encountered strong push-back on the listserv, with one subscriber calling my fitness for my job title, “collections care trainer,” into question. Respondents flexed their protective muscles to limit access to the artifacts they have pledged their professional lives to preserving. I’m listing most of the concerns voiced in that debate so that readers can assess the severity of each obstacle and can help generate ideas for surmounting them, toward a goal of more open collections access.

• Increased risks for deterioration: most of us are familiar with the agents of deterioration and understand the varying risks to collections materials that access poses, especially as a result of increased handling and light exposure. Digitization can help offer safe access to collections.
• Staff time: allowing access can be labor intensive for those in charge of collections. Institutions may not want to invest work hours into providing access for visitors who may then turn around and sell reproductions for their own profit. But if collection reproductions are a potential cash cow, then why aren’t more institutions pursuing product creation? Some history museums, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Sandy Spring Museum, have implemented innovative programs inviting artists into storage and galleries to create new works with collection items. But what about the potential creator who happens into an exhibit, gets an idea, and takes a picture? What if objects are already on exhibit and their reproduction involves no additional staff time? Should the museum impose a fee on reproducers or limit their pursuits in other ways? Keep in mind that enforcing limited-access policies requires significant staff time too, along with possible legal fees.
• Copyright infringements: A large portion of historical collections are in the public domain. The Library of Congress advises collection users to go through a risk assessment process for each image they seek to reproduce. The LOC provides open access as a public service and the user assumes whatever risks may be involved in reproduction. Why can’t all collecting institutions take this position?
• Misrepresentation of the artifact: I’m not sure what this means, perhaps reproducing only a portion of an artifact or splicing its image with another. If the reproducer includes a reference to the original source, does that offset the concern or increase it? In the case of documents, historians regularly argue about the meanings of various passages. If a scholar misrepresents a document, it’s his/her reputation on the line, not the repository’s. Why should museums arbitrate or otherwise limit creative vision?
• Relatedly, poor quality images of artifacts in collections may harm the reputation of the museum and do a disservice to the original donor. In a footnote in her Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections, Malaro mentions that a museum might not want to be listed as the source of an image in certain reproduction applications for fear of appearing to endorse the product or its creator. A risk assessment may help clarify the danger: Is it riskier (in terms of failing to fulfill a museum’s mission) to allow access, with the potential for audiences to generate poor quality products, or riskier to keep tight control over collection materials? Can you think of any cases where a reproduction harmed an institution housing the original?
• Contractual issues or donor restrictions: These are red flags for placing an artifact on exhibit or an online database. Experts advise museums against accepting restricted donations, and they are rare in history museums. The most likely donor restrictions prescribe access and call for “permanent exhibition.” In addition, some museums have worked with native tribes or other descendant groups to establish access guidelines for sensitive anthropological materials. Do you know of other donor contracts or restrictions (besides copyright) that would allow the display of an artifact and disallow its reproduction?

Given that public and non-profit private institutions hold collections in the public trust, a large portion of collections (at least in history museums) are public domain materials, and most donors give with the expectation of preservation and access for perpetuity, museum professionals should have a wide range to engage the public with collections. Allowing for exceptional cases where limited access would be necessary, can’t most of the above concerns be managed within an overarching open-access approach to collections?

This image, created by artist Courtney Bellairs
by photographing an artifact in the Sandy Spring
Museum collection,  was for sale as a limited edition
giclee print in the museum’s gift shop for the duration
of the related exhibition and remains for sale via the artist.    

Without broad access, why should any community or institution go to the trouble and expense of preserving artifacts? Visitation has decreased significantly at historic sites and institutions since the 1980s and yet artifact-featured forms of entertainment like collector reality television shows and auctions have proliferated. Potential audiences feel connections with artifacts, so why don’t they participate in or support collecting institutions more often? The Rijksmuseum of the Netherlands sets an exciting example by providing high quality collection images online and encouraging product creation.

By allowing open access for creative reproduction, I suspect institutions could become more welcoming, and collections can function more fully as relevant and engaging resources.

How has your institution balanced collection concerns with its efforts to engage audiences? Do you view collections as a problematic juggernaut to avoid, or an indispensable resource base, or both? How can we safely steer the reflexive “no” toward a “probably” and open the door to more collections access?

Thanks to Allison Weiss, Executive Director of the Sandy Spring Museum, John Campbell, Collections Section Chief of the NC Museum of History, and RCAAM listserv respondents, for their contributions to this post.

Guest Post: Creativity – Why do some places have it and others don’t?

This week's guest post is written by Julie Bowen, VP of Experience and Engagement at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. Julie is one of my true heroes--a creative systems thinker who has the intelligence, patience, and guts to make big shifts possible at large informal science organizations. I met Julie almost ten years ago, when she was leading the Agents of Change project at the Ontario Science Center, and I have admired her ever since. 

Years ago, I was running a workshop at a conference introducing a creativity technique to museum professionals. There was a lot of energy in the room, some very intense conversations and some great ideas were built. In the debrief to the experience I asked people what they thought they might take back to their institutions from the workshop. The comment that brought me up short was “This was great. I can see a lot of potential for how this could help us develop better stuff. But it would never work in my museum because my boss would never go for it.” 

This is a comment I’ve heard a lot over the years, and have wondered about what it takes to introduce or build more creativity into institutions. Having worked in and with a lot of different institutions, teams and departments, I’ve discovered that the secret sauce is different in each context – some places and people are distrustful of creativity, some get stuck in the planning, some need permission to be creative, others see creativity as the purview of a specific department, some are enthusiastically creative for a while and then fall back into more comfortable patterns and some embrace it as a part of their corporate culture. 

Based on a lot of experimentation (and a lot of failures), a whole lot of conversations and some amazing questions from people, here are some things that seem to contribute to getting creativity introduced and to having it stick. Not all of these are required in every instance, but having more of these seems to increase the likelihood of success (whatever that looks like). 

The leadership environment

Leaders (whether on a team, in a department or institution-wide) have to be open to taking risks, trying new things, evaluating and learning from failures. Discussions about what type and level of risk is acceptable and when risk is acceptable (early in the development process, contained to a defined time period or clearly articulated experiment) are useful here. The leadership environment is key. If your leadership can’t see value in creativity then try and work within your own sphere of influence to show how creativity can be valuable. You’ll have to be patient and persistent. If the leadership is actively disinterested in creativity, it will be hard to get whatever change you make to stick beyond what you can influence. To be a creative or innovative institution, with a lasting commitment to creativity, then creativity (and the inherent risk taking) needs to be supported at the top, valued for what it can bring to the institution, built into operating procedures, and reflected in the culture of the organization (through action, and aligned with values, mission and vision and reinforced through training and rewarding of staff and management).

Prototype lab at TELUS World of Science Calgary, 2011

The physical environment

The physical environment has to be conducive to creativity – and by extension to taking some kind of risk whether personal, professional or institutional. In fact, Sir Ken Robinson contends that “if you are not prepared to be wrong you’ll never do anything original”.  One way of doing this is to create a ‘skunkworks’ --a real place and time carved out of the day to experiment – where people can get comfortable being creative. This means a place that’s safe to try out stuff – where if something doesn’t go well, you’re not front and center in the museum’s lobby (once you get good at experimenting – then the lobby can be a fun place to try stuff with people), that is sturdy enough to invite experimentation (with robust floors, work surfaces, seating) easy to clean up, stocked with tools and random, cheap materials that can be used by staff to build and try stuff.

The idea environment

• Processes can get in the way of or can facilitate creativity. Sometimes changing the way you get to ideas, can change the kind of ideas that are generated. Think of a different way to brainstorm – for instance, build ideas out of things rather than words. 
• There needs to be a reason to be creative – usually in response to a problem or opportunity – that blank piece of paper in front of you can be more daunting than a well-defined set of restrictions. To get started, consider what your assumptions are about the problem at hand and then think about ways to question those assumptions (for instance, if you’re thinking about a new food service design, you’ll probably assume tables and chairs. What happens when you take away the chairs? Or the tables? Or the idea of ‘service’)

The individual

• There are a number of skills that can improve creative output – one study found the five skills that distinguished the most creative and innovative executives included association, observation, questioning, experimentation, and networking.
• If you’re trying to introduce creative ideas into your institution, something to consider is whether the ideas you’re introducing solve a particular problem that you are struggling with, or if they are aimed at your perception of someone else’s problem. Giving unsolicited ideas to the marketing department when you work in the exhibits department is unlikely to be successful (think of it as how you would feel receiving someone else’s idea on how to improve what you do before you throw the ‘you should try this’ at someone else). 
• Ask a lot of questions – to really get creative, asking questions of yourself and others, exploring different ways of looking at a problem or opportunity, observing behavior – all of these things can help you get more creative.
• Build something – take the idea out of the world of talking about it and build it (cheaply and quickly) – this can be a really powerful way to show yourself, your potential users and your boss what the idea could be. It also provides a really great test of whether something has any merit in being pursued.
• Recognize that ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas are a quarter a dozen and great ideas are rare. If you’re grumpy because “no one likes my ideas or ever implements them” then think about folks like Thomas Edison who is reputed to have tried and failed 10,000 times to invent the light bulb. Ideas that have merit are those that are subjected to rigor – observation of the problem and an understanding of its nuances, testing of possible solutions, iterating, re-testing, experimentation, seeking out critical feedback. Some ideas eventually make it out of that crucible to become something really amazing, and others die on the vine. Not to worry, there are dozens of other ones that will come up in the course of the exploration…that’s the fun part about creativity.

What have you found works or doesn’t to introduce or increase creativity in your organization, department, team? 

Guest Post: Weaving Community Collaborations into Permanent Installations at the Denver Art Museum

Earlier in 2013, I was amazed to visit one of the new “Studio” spaces at the Denver Art Museum. The DAM is one of several large art museums that is embracing making in a big way—first, through their event-based programming and open art studios tied to temporary exhibitions, and now, through a 1,200 square foot studio in which visitors can do art projects tied to the permanent collection. In this guest post, Stefania Van Dyke, Master Teacher for Textile Art and Special Projects, tells the story of how the co-creative development and visitor participation in the “Thread Studio” that accompanied their 2013 summer exhibition, Spun, changed her perspective on her own work.

The Denver Art Museum is no stranger to community collaborations, but we’ve been dipping in our toe a little more deeply when it comes to developing permanent participatory installations. This summer’s Museum-wide celebration of textiles, Spun, consists of fourteen exhibitions and “moments” (most temporary, some permanent). Part of our approach to community involvement in planning Spun had to do with necessity; we needed help to pull this off. More important to the Museum’s long-term goals, it was an opportunity to engage creative locals in conceptualizing, programming, and installing in a significant way. As an educator, I know that lessons learned and questions raised from this experience will substantively shift how I think about and act upon our relationship with our local creative community moving forward.

I came on staff in December as the Master Teacher for Textile Art and Special Projects with the immediate task of developing a permanent studio—DAM’s term for an exploratory and interactive space—in conjunction with the reinstallation of our textile art collection (the main impetus for Spun). Once we had the basic components and goals for “Thread Studio,” my first instinct was to call upon friends on staff at other museums for feedback and insights. But my DAM colleagues encouraged me also to talk with community members who are intimately involved in the world of fiber and textiles. I soon discovered the enormity of that group: there are dozens of guilds in Colorado dedicated to quilting alone. Who are all of these people? What inspires them? Once we started the conversation, the outpouring of excitement was remarkable.

My colleague Djamila Ricciardi and I shared our concepts for the various components of the studio. Community artists gave their honest feedback, and we crafted a display based on these discussions and their contributions. More than 160 contributors, ranging from nationally known artists to hobbyist crafters, sent us samples, tools, and heirlooms that almost completely populated the 80 cubbies in our dense curio-cabinet-style display. Prompted by our simple questions (“Have you ever made a quilt out of particularly meaningful materials?”), they created pieces imbued with stories—like Amy Gibson, the mother of four who designed and made a quilt block out of parachute material her grandfather brought home from France after serving in World War II. Some community artists even helped install the space.

Visitors Going Rogue

We collaborated formally with community artists to design Thread Studio; once it opened, the participation expanded to museum visitors. Thread Studio contains two embroidery tables with designs printed on burlap and instructions for stitching, as well as a variety of looms on the wall on which visitors can weave with unconventional materials like jump ropes, vines, and bungee cords. Since the studio opened in May, visitors have left their marks there in the most awesome of ways. They’re tagging with yarn.

Now that we’re a few months in, we’re seeing visitors’ confidence and creativity grow. They’re not only contributing in unique ways to the pieces we’ve offered them formally, but they’re also going rogue. Someone expressed her (his? More men are participating than I anticipated) appreciation of the space by leaving a small hand-made lace heart on a chair. Another visitor yarn-bombed the tether on our remote control. Others are coming in to do spontaneous demos in the space. They’re gathering in groups:  in June, visitors stumbled upon members of the Rocky Mountain Lace Guild making both small talk and lace. And I recently got word of a spinning flash mob in the works, with dozens of spinners planning to pull out their wheels and spindles to show their stuff at the Museum.

Sustaining Collaborative Momentum

Now comes perhaps the biggest challenge: How can I, with help from my colleagues, sustain this organic enthusiasm and burst of creativity, as well as these relationships? Looking back at my team’s original goals for the Thread Studio, none of them mention it becoming an ongoing hub of community activity. I didn’t realize it when I started on this project last fall, but that idea has truly permeated everything we’ve done. Our primary goal was to inspire visitors’ own creativity—which we’re seeing in these traces they’re leaving behind and overhearing in visitors’ discussions in and around the space.

But what role does the initial community participation play for general visitors who may or may not care about textiles? Does it matter? Why is community involvement in a permanent installation important to us as museum professionals? What exactly about this space is inspiring visitors and how can we apply these lessons to other collection areas beyond textiles?

I’m spending the summer reflecting and trying to get a handle on these questions and their answers, trying to harness the momentum that we’re experiencing and to learn from it. DAM staff has been talking a lot lately about being seen as—or actually being—a contributing part of the local “creative ecosystem.” I recognize that we’ve started heading in that direction with Thread Studio and don’t want to lose it. As someone who has only ever worked on more traditional exhibitions of capital-A-art, this has been a challenging and unpredictable project. I did not enter this project thinking about the importance of co-creating a permanent space with our community, but now that I’ve seen it through this way, my work will never be the same.

Stefania will respond to your comments and questions here.