A Radical, Simple Formula for Pop-Up Museums

Pop-Up Museum [n]:

1. a short-term institution existing in a temporary space. 
2. a way to catalyze conversations among diverse people, mediated by their objects.

Over the past few years, there have been several fabulous examples of pop-up museums focusing on visitor-generated content. There was Jaime Kopke's Denver Community Museum, which existed for nine months in a Denver storefront in 2008-9 to celebrate visitors' creations. Maria Mortati runs the wonderful SF Mobile Museum, which roams the Bay Area showing mini-exhibits on evocative themes. The never-quite-opened National History Museum of the Netherlands created an innovative vending machine for historic objects, which traveled to festivals and urban centers for people to add their memories.

And now, Michelle DelCarlo has created a shockingly simple template for pop-up history museums focusing on personal objects of meaning. I strongly recommend you read her whole blog back to the beginning (it's not too onerous) and check out the evolution of her experimental format, which she has deployed in museums, libraries, and classrooms in the US and Australia.

Here's how it works:

• Michelle partners with an organization, institution, or group. They come up with a theme, a date, and invite people to come.
• On the prescribed date and time, people show up with personal objects on the theme. There is paper and pens to write labels. The objects and labels are laid out on tables.
• People walk around, look at objects, and talk about them.

This project is beautiful in its simplicity. Any institution could do this with a few folding tables, pencils and paper, and a little bit of promotion.

There are a few things about this that I find incredibly interesting:

• The experience is event-based. Michelle noted after early experiments that short timeframes work best for participants. These are museums that last not for a day or weekend or month but for two hours. The experience is the museum, and the objects are exciting because the people are there to share them. There's no forced sense that the objects should remain or be relevant beyond the event.
• The goal is promoting conversations. Michelle has an explicit mission to "create conversations between people of all ages and walks of life." It's not fundamentally about the theme or the objects but the conversations that happen around them. (She also has an interesting take on the deliberate choice of "conversation" instead of "dialogue" as the goal.)
• The design is humble--and radical. Look at photos of Michelle's pop-up museums, and you'll see a bunch of plastic tables with objects lined up on them. Because the experience is the key focus (and because of the highly temporary nature of the experience), the design costs are nil. There's no focused lighting or casework or beautiful labels. This is the natural extension of what some innovative exhibit designers--especially Kathleen McLean--have been advocating for: simple, flexible formats that put primacy on ideas and visitor contribution. It tracks almost exactly with Kathleen's Manifesto for the (r)evolution of Museum Exhibitions, all the way down to the snacks. And it looks totally unlike a standard museum. 
• The format focuses on intimate experiences. Michelle's pop-ups reach twenty or so people each time, and that's ok. Particularly for small museums, which deal in magnitudes of tens instead of thousands, this format can provide the kind of unusual deep experience that can only happen at this scale. Smaller is not worse. It is different. This is a format that works for small.

Kudos to Michelle for her inspiring work. We can't wait to try out the format at our own small place, and in partnership with non-museums in our area.

What Hours Should Museums Be Open?

An exhibiting artist approached me recently at an evening event at the museum. "Hey!," he said, "I have some feedback for you. You know, the hours that you're open--they're not very accessible for people who work."

He's right. They aren't. We're open Tuesday-Sunday, 11am-5pm. And if you work and or have a family, that doesn't exactly make it easy to visit.

This isn't rocket science. But it's a question that many museums seem to address inadequately. We try so hard to make our visitors feel welcome and comfortable once they're inside, ignoring the glaring obstacle that may prevent them from even getting in the door.

It's interesting to me that so many museums debate admission fees but don't get comparably riled up about open hours. Some of the most innovative, community-focused museums I know of are trapped in the 11-5 game, and it's frankly a little bizarre--especially from visitors' perspective.

The obvious outcome of daytime hours is fewer visitors. But it also has a lot of other chicken-egg effects. Imagine if a theater or jazz club was only open during the day, and what conclusions one might draw about audience type and preferences based on that decision. For example, in museums:

• Retirees and vacationers--two groups with daytime availability--become primary audiences that receive significant attention and subtly influence programming choices. Who would be "core" audiences if our institutions were open from 3-9pm instead of closing at 5? How might programming shift to support them?
• Evening events provide rare opportunities to experience the museum after work. Are these events popular because of programming, or are they popular because of the hours? Would events be as significant in the experience of young adult audiences if there were more opportunities to experience the exhibitions after work without special programming?

In thinking about whether, why, and how we might rethink hours at my institution, I've come with the following list of pro's and con's for shifting the hours later.

PRO:

• more accessible to working people
• more symbiotic with times people are recreating downtown (dinner, happy hour, shopping)
• separates school tours from public visiting hours, which can be helpful in a small building

CON:

• requires changes to staffing and signage
• can't rent the museum for lucrative evening events as often. If we're open every evening, it cripples this business. If we're open only a few evenings, it may confuse visitors.

What do you think? What questions should I consider in examining this? What have you seen change--or not--when hours change? What institutions are worth looking at to learn more? I'm particularly curious about other cultural and community organizations--libraries, performing art spaces--and how hours impact their use and value.

Inside a Museum Website Redesign

When I started at The Museum of Art & History (MAH) in May, one of my priorities was redesigning our website. I didn't want to do anything fancy--just make the site more functional, lively, easy to update, and reflective of the new institutional vision of being a community hub. You can see the site circa February 2011 here, and the current site here. 

We got incredibly lucky with a fabulous volunteer web designer, Marty Spellerburg, who saw my request for help on this blog and enthusiastically jumped in. Marty is everything I could have wanted from a designer--he overdelivered on my vague directives and pushed me to think more rigorously about what we were trying to do. And he did it all from afar--I've never met Marty in person and have only corresponded with him by voice a couple of times. Thank you, Marty. I hope everyone who reads this hires you to redesign their websites.

OK, enough promotion. I want to use this post not to talk about the final result but the process--what we thought about as we did this and what we hope will come out of it.

We made two key decisions that I think are somewhat unusual in doing this work:

1. We tried to create a single message that clearly defines what the museum is about and put that front and center.  
2. We treated the whole redesign process, and the website work going forward, as wholly iterative and incremental.

Single Message Homepage

Marty and I looked at a lot of websites for inspiration as we started this process. We tried to focus on small organizations--nothing too fancy and unachievable for us given our budget of $0. We saw homepages of two main types: blocks (i.e. MCA Denver) or single rotating image (like JMKAC). 

While both types had strong examples, neither satisfied us. We wanted to be as focused as possible with the prime real estate on the homepage while offering navigation that would be consistent across the whole site. I wanted to be ruthless about homepage creep and avoid the "my program should be on the front!" battles that can lead to incoherence. We are rebranding our museum in the community--not with marketing dollars, but with a singular message about being a thriving gathering place around art and history. I wanted the website to be the front line for that message.

Marty pushed me to look at websites in a whole different sector--online services. Many of these websites, from MailChimp to Kaleidescope to Posterous, have a consistent format:

• The main ("above the fold") area is one big value proposition. A big image, big headline, large copy.
• This culminates in a strong call to action, usually with a button.
• Four or six features are highlighted, with no more than a couple of lines each and an image/icon.
• Optionally, other relevant information provided to strengthen the pitch (testimonials, blog).
• At the bottom -- last chance! Repeat the call to action.

While we weren't able to be as laser beam-focused as many of the online services sites are, we did pursue this strategy in the eventual homepage. If you look at the MAH homepage now, you will see:

• Clear, unchanging value proposition in the middle: "Your Place to Explore Art & History." This message is supported by a slideshow of images, all of which reinforce the message (we have rules like "all images must include people" that help us make sure we're doing this).
• Two calls to action (and yes, these could look better) to check out upcoming events and join the email list.
• Four supporting events or experiences in a series of unchanging categories: "Meet, chat, study, make, and dream," "Dive into the past with family and friends," "Be inspired and feed your curiosity," and "Support our community."
• At the bottom, below the fold, a restatement of the main message and a repeat of the call to action to join the e-newsletter.

We're still working on interpreting statistics on use. We've made so many changes--not just to the website, but to our whole institutional positioning--that it's hard to glean specific insights about the homepage. But there's no question that people are repeating our main messages back to us and commenting on how well the website reflects what they've read, heard, or experienced about how we're trying to shift the museum.

Iterative Redesign

People always talk about iterative redesign, but the truth is that it's really pretty scary. It means launching things that aren't done, shifting your website slowly over several weeks or months, and potentially confusing people along the way. But Marty encouraged us to commit to an iterative process for two reasons:

1. It allows us to incrementally experience the new changes and to openly discuss what  should shift based on the response to the intermediate steps. This was important both on the back end--i.e. we switch to Wordpress and notice a bunch of little issues that need to be cleaned up before going to the next design step--and the front--i.e. we learn that our users want a tab for exhibitions and are not satisfied by a "what's on" tab that includes all programmatic experiences. We learned that layman's terms like "events" were much more understandable for people than "programs." And so on. We could keep making these changes with our designer rather than Marty already being out the door.
2. It supports a culture of a constantly improving website. Every shift makes the website better. No shift makes it perfect. Most everyone on our staff and several interns are empowered to edit the website, and we add things as we can--even if they're not complete. We add events before we have an image to go with them. We incrementally improve the information about volunteering and donating. We don't need things to be finished to put them on the public site--we just need to have enough to know we're offering the base of something worthwhile. I think this is a healthy process for us moving forward--especially as a team with no single staff member who is "responsible" for the website. It's not a 0-1 game. It's an evolving site--just as the museum is evolving.

Someday, when we have a non-zero budget, I expect that we'll do a more serious redesign of the website. But for now, we're incredibly happy with what we have--and even more so, with how the redesign made us think about our communication with the outside world and our work processes to support it.

Getting in on the Act: New Report on Participatory Arts Engagement

Last month, the Irvine Foundation put out a new report, Getting In On the Act, about participatory arts practice and new frameworks for audience engagement. Authors Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak-Leonard pack a lot into 40 pages--an argument for the rise of active arts engagement, a framework for thinking about ways to actively involve audiences, and lots of case studies. It is framed as a kind of study guide; pop-outs provide questions that tease out opportunities and tensions in the narrative. This report is not an end-all; it is the opening for a conversation.

Here's what I think is really strong about the report:

• Coordinated, succinct research findings supporting the rise of active arts engagement. Pages 9 and 10 pull together data from the NEA, the Irvine Foundation, Dance/USA, RAND, and the Knight Foundation to tell a tight, compelling story about the demographic shift from consumptive to active participation and the extent to which traditional arts audiences are also participating in art-making outside of traditional arenas.
• Excellent case studies, especially from the performing arts sector. I've often been asked about examples of participatory practice in theater, dance, and classical music, and this report is a great starting point. I was particularly inspired by the case studies related to art and civic action (like Paint the Street) and intrigued by the "implications" pop-outs asking questions about how the case studies might impact your own organization's practice.
• Useful differentiation in their Audience Involvement Spectrum (see image at top) between programs that provide "enhanced engagement" and those that invite audience members to make contributions that impact and alter the end result. It can be easy to conflate engaging activities with participatory opportunities, and I'm glad they were explicit about the difference.
• Useful definitions of participatory activities as "curatorial, interpretative, and inventive"--this is a reframing of the Forrester research framework for online participation which is probably more appropriate to the arts context.
• Useful designations of four broad goals for active participation (page 14):

1. Participation in Service of a Community Need or Societal Goal
2. Participation in Support of, or as a Complement to, Artistic Vision
3. Participation in Service of an Artistic Process or Product
4. Participation as the Fundamental Goal

What's challenging about the report is how many different frameworks it presents. I counted at least five different schemes in the six-page section on "Participatory Arts in Practice," and none of these were explicitly referenced in the subsequent case studies. I found many of the frameworks useful, but the lack of context and detail was frustrating. How did the authors come up with the intriguing blend of curatorial, interpretative, and inventive opportunities shown in the Audience Involvement Spectrum's Venn diagrams? Why is a photography contest an example of "crowd sourcing" wheres a community drawing contest is an example of "audience-as-artist"? What's the relationship between the goals of participation and the techniques employed?

I admire and wholly appreciate the brevity of this report, but I fear it's too short to be genuinely useful for organizations that want to act on it. The authors present complex ideas about active arts participation, and it's clear that a lot of research and thought went into their work. I'd love an extended version with more explanation about how these frameworks might work in practice, how they map to the case studies provided, and how organizations with particular participatory goals might best achieve them. If the goal is for organizations to adopt these frameworks as their own, I think we need a lot more supporting material--and maybe fewer different taxonomies.

What do you get out of the report? What next steps do you think we need to make it as useful as possible--and how can we, as active participants--take the lead?

Spring Internship Opportunities - and Thoughts about Internships

It's November, and that means we start looking around nervously at our fabulous fall semester interns and worrying about all the light that will go out of the world when they head back to school, home countries, etc. If you're interested in interning with me and my crew at the MAH in the coming months, please check out our offerings. We're seeking great folks for public programs, participatory exhibit design, online marketing, 3D design, and whatever else you might have to offer.

And while we're advertising positions, we've also learned to advertise something else: the experience of what it's like to be an intern at the MAH. And that's what this post is about--how we advertise the culture at our organizations (or not) when we offer new positions.

I had a bit of a wakeup call about internships last month at an "emerging leaders" lunch event at the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums conference. The topic of the lunch was internships, and the tables paired students with established professionals to talk about opportunities, issues, and possibilities. I was dismayed to discover that by the standards of many of these grad students, I'm a lousy intern manager. At our museum, we don't provide a lot of structured mentorship for interns. We don't have job-like feedback systems or crystal clear criteria for success. What we have is a lot of opportunities to contribute substantively, and a community of energetic colleagues (mostly other interns) to support the work.

Talking with the students at MAAM, I realized I tend to run internships in accordance with my personal values and a recollection of what I wanted as a newbie in the field. I wanted freedom and responsibility. I wanted the ability to do projects that would end up on the floor. I wanted to be able to work out my own ideas with smart mentors and then produce them--despite my inexperience--for visitors.

I often feel like I spend every day relearning that people think differently from each other. Not everyone wants a super-unstructured internship. What looks like opportunity to me looks like chaos to others. And if I think honestly about the interns we've had over the past six months, their success or failure had a lot more to do with personality and expectation fit than their projects or work areas.

At this time, we're not ready to offer people highly structured internships. We might never get there. But we are ready to be much more upfront about what the internship experience is like at our museum. Our Jobs and Internships page now explicitly says that our internships are good for self-directed, energetic folks who revel in ambiguity. We need interns who work onsite so they can get into the swing of things. And we're best for people who crave unfettered opportunity to make and do.

When you advertise jobs or internships, do you focus on the activities to be performed or the culture of the institution? My lunch experience at MAAM is leading me to focus a heck of a lot more on the second and less on the first. I'm curious to learn more about how other institutions are handling this. I think it's especially necessary in a time when we're focusing more and more on 21st century skills in the workplace--skills like collaboration and innovation--that suggest work formats and approaches that are increasingly different from formal education settings.

Do You Have a Good Argument for Your Institution?

At my grocery store, if you bring your own shopping bag, they give you tokens that you can use to donate money to local nonprofits. As I drop 5 cent tokens into my slots of choice, I often wonder: could my museum be on this list? Would it be appropriate to ask for donations here alongside the food bank and the women's shelter? Would anyone put their token in our slot?

This boils down to a fairly basic question: what's the value of our institutions? We all have arguments we make to prove our worth--economic, educational, social--but many of those arguments are insider-focused. They are successful with audiences who already believe in the intrinsic power of art or the role art plays in civic engagement, but it's unclear how helpful they are to the people who aren't attending, participating, or supporting. I don't think many of them pass the the grocery store token test.

Last year, the Fine Arts Fund in Cincinnati (now called ArtsWave) released a terrific report that examined this question in detail. The Fund wanted to find the most effective ways to promote public action for the arts in their city--not among established arts supporters, but among diverse members of the public who may have only a glancing relationship with arts institutions.

Here's how the project worked: researchers worked with small focus groups to understand their associations with arts and culture organizations and developed several framing arguments for public support of the arts. Then, they interviewed 400 people by phone and online, presenting them with a short framing argument (80-120 words), followed by a series of open-ended questions intended to determine how memorable the argument was, how it influenced their perception of the public value of the arts, and how likely it was to inspire action. The goal was not to find out what people like about the arts but what might impel them to actively support arts organizations and projects.

The results are fascinating--not just for the arguments that did work, but even more so for the ones that didn't (jump to page 15 of the report). A few gems:

• To many people, "culture" is about ethnicity. If you talk about a "cultural institution" or an "arts and culture" project, people might think you are talking about something specific to a set of individuals who share common heritage, not something universally shared.
• People often think of art institutions as providers of individual entertainment opportunities. If you want to go to the museum and I want to go to the baseball game, we're each making our own choices with our recreational time and money. This perception makes it hard for people to get behind the idea of public support for the arts--why should I subsidize your personal interest?
• Arguments about broadening your horizons through art and the spiritual and health benefits of art work for established arts enthusiasts, but for others, these arguments may fall flat. A lot of things can broaden your horizons, reduce your stress, and connect you to transcendence. While these statements were interesting to some people in the study, they were perceived as highly specific to individual experiences and did not impel any sense of public responsibility.
• If you talk about arts and kids, people may quickly assume that you are talking strictly about the education system and the role of art in schools.
• While arguments about the role of art in engendering civic pride and local distinction were effective, arguments about the role of arts in city planning or civic improvements were not. Participants quickly got distracted in talking about the problems of their city and were not sufficiently convinced that art has a role in addressing those issues.
• Arguments appealing to the long history of arts support in the city made some people feel defensive about contemporary public issues and interests. "We should do it because we've always done it" is not compelling to people dealing with difficult tradeoffs and stresses.

What did work? The framing argument that was most successful in Cincinatti was:

A thriving arts sector creates “ripple effects” of benefits throughout our community... The arts ripple effect creates at least two kinds of benefits:

1. A vibrant, thriving economy: Neighborhoods are more lively, communities are revitalized, tourists and residents are attracted to the area, etc.
2. A more connected population: Diverse groups share common experiences, hear new perspectives, understand each other better, etc.

The authors noted that this "ripple effects" framing was effective because:

• it focuses on public benefit, not individual enrichment.
• it positions the arts as having a geographically diffuse effect, not tied to specific events, institutions, or districts with which individuals may or may not associate.
• it pairs a practical idea of community health (economic vitality) with something more emotional and aspirational (bringing together diverse voices).
• it doesn't focus strictly on the dollars and cents of economic impact (which invites potentially unhelpful comparisons), but more broadly on the idea of vibrancy and vitality.

Some of these findings may be specific to Cincinnati, but I find the overall report extremely helpful as I think about how to talk about arts in Santa Cruz--both as the director of an institution and as a member of the city arts commission. It can be hard to step outside our own rhetoric and circles of support to realistically judge what people do and don't understand about what we do and why our institutions exist. We don't have an unalienable right to public support. We have a responsibility to frame what we do in a way that inspires people to act. And maybe, hopefully, to drop a token in our proverbial slot.

What inspires you to support the arts? What arguments do you find effective or unsuccessful in your region or organization? When a friend asks you why he/she should support the arts, what do you say?

Balancing Engagement: Adventures in Participatory Exhibit Labels

We’ve been doing a little experiment at our museum with labels. The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum recently loaned us some fabulous surfboards that tell the co-mingled history of surfing and redwood trees in Santa Cruz. In our quest to make the public areas of the museum more reflective of Santa Cruz culture, we moved these boards from a comprehensive display in the history gallery into a main stairwell, prominently visible from the lobby and throughout the building.

The surfboards are beautifully hung in their new location, but they present a new challenge: we have to write very short labels. They’re no longer “an exhibit” per se—more of an evocative design element that hints at an important story told elsewhere in the museum.

We decided to approach the label-writing for these boards in a participatory way. We blatantly borrowed the brilliant technique the San Diego Museum of Natural History used to write labels based on visitors’ questions. We put up the following label along with a pedestal with post-its and pencils:

We're writing a description* for these surfboards and we need your help.

• What do the surfboards make you think about?
• What do you want to know?

Understanding what you think helps us think about how we display our collections.

*note: originally, this said "we're writing a label" but with that phrasing, lots of people wrote creative titles for the surfboards (like the title for a work of art) instead of talking about content of interest.

Visitors have gone to town, writing both basic questions (“who made them?” “who were the surfers who used them?” “how did they ride the plank?” "how old are they?") and sharing opinions (“better in their natural form," “my joyful youth circa 1963”). We’ve learned some things that should definitely be on the final label, such as the clarification that the plank on display is not an early surfboard but the raw material used to make one.

We can certainly write a decent label based on this activity. But one post-it threw me for a loop. It said:

“you should do something to spruce these up a bit. I wouldn’t have noticed the boards except for the post-its.”

Maybe this person was writing about his or her preference for neon paper products, but I doubt it. It was the activity that drew this person (and probably others) to the surfboards—not the objects themselves.

And that leads me to a basic question: Is it better to replace the post-its with a label that answers visitors’ questions, or to continue to support this participation? Instead of clearing the post-its and putting up a nice, discreet label (my original plan), we could keep the post-its and just write answers to the questions directly under them. Or, we could write a starter label based on the questions asked thus far, but then invite (and respond to) additional ones.

The fundamental question here is how we balance different modes of audience engagement. You could argue that visitors are more “engaged” by an activity that invites inquiry-based participation than one that invites them to read a label, even if they never get answers to their questions. Or, you could argue that this kind of active engagement should be secondary to sharing information, which can be more efficiently communicated by a label.

If museums are truly about inquiry-based models for learning, we need more tools—especially in history and art museums—to promote inquiry-based engagement. Science centers and children’s museums promote inquiry-based learning with multi-sensory experiences that are focused more on igniting curiosity than providing answers. Seeing how people responded to these simple post-its made me consider the relative paucity of tools we have to “ignite curiosity” in art and history institutions. If museums of all kinds are going to make serious claims about being places for 21st century, multi-modal, inquiry-based learning, we’ve got to have robust, diverse onsite experiences to back them up.

In this case, given the location on the stairs, we’re likely to replace the post-its with a label as planned. But the bigger question remains: How can we promote true inquiry in our institutions, and how can we give visitors the tools not just to ask but to debate, discuss, and address their questions with each other?

Equity in Arts Funding: We're Not There Yet. We're Not Even Close.

This week, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy released a new paper by Holly Sidford called Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change. The title may sound innocuous. The paper is anything but. Sidford makes a clear, well-researched, and persuasive argument that "current arts grantmaking disregards large segments of cultural practice, and by doing so, it disregards large segments of our society." You should read this report. This is one of those important problems we were talking about last week.

We may say that we want to support programming and cultural opportunities for low-income and non-white people, but that's not where the money is going. Only 10% of arts foundation funding goes to minority-led organizations, and worse, the higher a foundation's funding in the arts, the less likely their money goes to support organizations serving low-income or underrepresented audiences. The majority of foundation funding for the arts goes to large, established organizations that present work that is based in the European canon for a primarily white, upper-income audience. Even as demographics change and public participation in the arts shifts away from these Euro-traditional formats, the money still flows down the old pathways.

This has obvious negative implications when it comes to issues of social justice and representation in the arts. But it has a whole slew of other negative implications as well:

• it hinders innovation by narrowly focusing money on a small group of organizations
• it makes funders less relevant to the shifting trends in cultural practice and participation
• it makes philanthropy less philanthropic and more self-serving (wealthy people getting tax exemptions for donating to the symphonies, theaters, and museums that are most likely to serve them as audiences)
• it creates inequity not just in initial funding but sustainability of programs for underserved audiences
• it diminishes the potential for art and arts programming to have transformative civic impact on individuals and communities

It can be easy to throw up our hands and say, "we don't make the rules here--the funders do." But a lot of the questions and issues described in Sidford's paper are as applicable on the level of individual programs or institutional priorities as they are for funders and foundations.

Page 20 of the report describes six barriers to equity in arts funding, all of which apply on the institutional level. There's the barrier of artistic quality--funders, trustees, or staff members who argue that work by non-canonical artists is not up to the standards of the institution. There's the barrier of the concern that this work is "social work" and not art--and therefore doesn't belong in a museum or a theater. And then there's the concern that you might have to cut "core" programs to introduce something new for a specialized audience. These barriers are present on every level of our organizations, from who we choose to collaborate with to what programs we offer to what our board looks like to where we seek funding.

All of these questions and barriers are worth grappling with and debating among cultural practitioners. What are we doing to create new pathways for more diverse and equitable work, and what are we doing to shut those pathways down?

Reading the report, I kept thinking of Rick Lowe, the artist and community activist behind Project Row Houses in Houston. When I met him at AAM, Rick told the story of the beginnings of Project Row Houses in the following way. He had been hired on contract in the 1990s as a curator for an exhibition at the MFA Houston on African-American artists. He got to see the museum process from the inside. The exhibition project was grant-funded, and it was specifically targeted to support African-American artists and audiences. But Rick noticed that only a tiny portion of the grant was actually going to those folks--the majority fueled the MFA machine. And so he realized that he could start his own non-profit that would do a better job supporting underrepresented artists and audiences. Almost 20 years later, Project Row Houses is a powerhouse organization combining art, civic action, public housing, and social change.

Project Row Houses does receive foundation funding--but there are a lot of projects with comparably powerful community impact that do not. Rick's story makes me wonder: what could arts institutions be doing to incubate and foster innovative work by and for underrepresented audiences? Instead of Rick's experience with the MFA turning him off of traditional institutions, is there a way that experience could have been a positive launchpoint for his future work?

One of the institutions that really impresses me in supporting this kind of social change through the arts is, strangely enough, a children's museum. The Pittsburgh Children's Museum leads the Charm Bracelet effort to provide micro-granting throughout Pittsburgh's Northside neighborhood to enhance community vibrancy, health, and learning. The Children's Museum is functionally serving as a fiscal sponsor for small programs--peer mentoring for teen girls, public art, a farmer's market--that promote social justice and cultural engagement for low-income people. I find it incredible that in the midst of an economic recession, the Children's Museum (and other institutions in Pittsburgh) have stayed committed to regranting for social change in this way.

What can you do in your own organization to ensure that your programs, budgets, and priorities match your goals for demographic participation, civic engagement, and social justice? What do you think funders should be doing--and are you willing to hold yourself to the same standard?

What Are the Most Important Problems in Our Field?

I'm working on a keynote address for next week's Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums conference in Baltimore. The speech is in memory of Stephen Weil, one of the giants of contemporary American museum thinking--a radical in a bowtie who strove to "make museums matter."

As I think about what can and might make museums matter today, I keep rereading a speech by Richard Hamming, a mathematician who made major research contributions to the fields of computer science and information technology. In 1986, Hamming made an incredible speech, "You and Your Research," about the question of what makes some scientists achieve great things and others, not so much. The crux of his argument is this: make sure you are working on the most important problems in your field. He explains:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem' must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems.

This last sentence, I fear, describes the average worker, not just the average scientist. Most of us spend most of our time working on problems that are not important. That's somewhat reasonable--we all have to make payroll and run our programs and keep things going. My bigger concern is that when we DO make time for the bigger picture, the problems we choose to tackle are not the most important ones.

What are the most important problems in the cultural sector? The two hot problems seem to be:

1. finding new business models to sustain funding and support operations
2. making offerings relevant and appealing to shifting audiences

These topics may flood the blogosphere and conference circuit, but I don't think they're ultimately the most important. These problems are fundamentally self-serving; they come from the root question "how can we survive?" These questions could just as easily apply to any struggling industry (postal service, cigarettes) as to cultural institutions.

I suspect there are other problems we can work on that are more about culture and learning and less about institutional survival. When we think about "making museums matter," the important parts are the "making" and the "mattering"--not the museums. The goal is not to justify museums' existence but to make them as useful as possible.

So what are the important problems we need to tackle to become more meaningful institutions? I'm trying to mull a few for this talk next week, and I'd love your thoughts on what you see as the most important problems in our field. Here's what I've come up with:

1. How can we make cultural knowledge--content, context, and experience--as widely, freely, and equitably accessible as possible?
2. How can our institutions and programs improve quality of life for individuals and communities?
3. How should we structure our institutions and funding programs to do 1 and 2?

What would you add to this list?

On Saying Yes

It's a Saturday night when I get the email. "Sharon D. Payne," member of the incredibly popular Santa Cruz roller derby team, wants to pitch a partnership with our museum. She doesn't have a specific idea for a partner event or exhibit, but she feels like we have a lot to offer each other in terms of publicity and a shared focus on enhancing cultural experiences in the community. And she wants to do it now--in the next two weeks.

I want to say yes. In fact, I do say yes. But then, it turns out we've already said yes to three other groups for the event in question. I end up having to call and say we're going to wait until the spring to make something happen. And then I feel like a jerk.

I love saying yes. Yes to the heirloom seed library that now graces our lobby. Yes to partnerships with the Second Harvest Food Bank and the Homeless Service Center. Yes to tie-ins with the Symphony and the Boys and Girls Club. Yes to the Big Read with the library, yes to the Burningman artists who want to show their giant kinetic sculpture in the lobby, yes to projections on the side of the building.

Saying yes is one of the few things I can offer sympatico community organizations and individuals. We have a "no money, no bullshit" motto here right now; there's no money for partner projects, but we can say yes with a minimum of bureaucracy and red tape. We've actually gotten some of our best partnerships (like the seed library) because another organization said no. Being nimble and open to a bit of chaos is a luxury that comes with being a small institution on a mission to be a community hub. It's exciting to have someone approach us on a Tuesday with a great idea for Saturday, and as much as possible, we try to say yes.

But it's getting harder to do so as time goes on. Each time we say yes, the schedule gets a bit more full, the space is a bit more complete, the insanity a little higher. I'm learning to say "yes, but not now" or "yes, but let's figure it out a little more," and sometimes, painfully, "no."

I can see how it gets easy for an organization to get in the habit of starting from "no" instead of "yes." Chaos can be stressful. When we have more money and programs, maybe we won't want to deal with the headaches of installing a giant multi-person hammock in the lobby--even if it is free.

I don't want to get there. I believe that we're doing our best work when we are able to say yes to people who walk in the door with good ideas and real community needs to be met. And I feel like we're most fresh and dynamic when we can keep being responsive to the next idea.

The challenge, then, is to figure out how to say yes consistently, smartly, over the long term. Just as any project has its messy, open-ended phase before it hardens into completion, we're in a messy phase as an institution. What will we harden into? Is it better to try to stay in the messy phase as long as possible, or to create a structure that supports the messiness within a more formal setting?

This brings me back to Paul Light's recommendation in Sustaining Innovation that organizations need to learn "how to say no and why to say yes." My presumption is that as time goes on, our answer to the question of "why to say yes" will change. Right now, we're saying yes because it's a way to build trust in the community, to build on the enthusiasm of others, and to enliven our space with the passion and diversity of our partners. It would probably be a worthwhile exercise in the future to make sure we sit down as a staff and ask ourselves: "why should we say yes to this or that?" and track the change. But I don't want to codify anything to death. I'm still not sure whether informality and flexibility can be a permanent state of being... but I'd like to try. And in the meantime, I'm dreaming of what will make the most sense in the spring with the Derby girls.

Do you feel like you work in a place where "yes" is the default? What do you see making that possible (or impossible)?