The Art of the Steal: Access & Controversy at the Barnes Foundation

Last week, I finally watched The Art of the Steal, an arresting documentary on the controversy around the evolution of the Barnes Foundation from a suburban educational art facility to a major urban art museum (to open in May 2012). The documentary raises basic questions about donor intent, legal execution of eccentric peoples' wills, and, most interesting to me, the definition of access to a collection.

A quick background on the Barnes Foundation. It was founded in 1922 by Albert Barnes, a wealthy scientist who collected what is now considered an incomparable collection of Impressionist and Modernist art. Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso--Barnes collected it before it was popular in the U.S., and he collected the best of the best. With the help of educational philosopher John Dewey, Barnes founded the Barnes Foundation as an educational facility in Merion, PA, near Philadelphia. Unlike most art collections, Barnes' art was neither exclusively private nor a public museum. It was primarily used as a teaching collection for youth and adult students. The Barnes Foundation allowed a limited number of public visitors two days a week, but visitors were second-class citizens compared to the students.

Barnes protected his vision for the collection in his will. The art could not be sold, reproduced, loaned, or traveled. The school was to continue. There were slight concessions to public visitation, leading to capped attendance of about 60,000 per year. However, over the past thirty years, Philadelphia leaders clamored for the art to move to the city and be made more accessible to visitors (projections suggest the new facility will welcome 250,000 per year). The film documents the incremental subversion of Barnes' will and the eventual development of a new, highly public home for the collection in Philadelphia--exactly what Barnes despised and sought to avoid.

The documentary is shrill at times, with several Barnes Foundation stalwarts ominously repeating the word "conspiracy." There are cringe-worthy art critics who decry Barnes' rivals as "people who know nothing about art." But the fundamental story is fascinating and really challenged some of my basic ideas about museums. Despite my focus on populism and access, I am sympathetic to Barnes and his followers, who feel strongly that a serious injustice has been done.

The civic and cultural leaders who successfully challenged the original intent of Barnes' will had two basic arguments for the transformation of the collection:

1. The Barnes Foundation was struggling financially. A move to a more accessible venue in the center of Philadelphia would increase attendance dramatically, thus bolstering finances.
2. The Barnes collection is an incredible cultural artifact that more people should be able to access. Demand exceeded availability for public hours in the Merion location, and that demand constituted a valid public concern, one that foundations and politicians felt necessary to address.

I think both these arguments are bullshit. Let's look at each one closely.

First, let's talk money. The strangest thing about the documentary was the insistence by all parties--those who supported the move to Philadelphia and those who wanted to preserve the Barnes in Merion--that increased attendance would solve institutional financial crises. I kept scratching my head and thinking, what kind of art museum makes big money on attendance? Most art museums get a maximum of 10% of their income from admissions.

Consider two examples in the Philadelphia area. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, which welcomes about 800,000 visitors per year, had income of $80.4M in their 2010 fiscal year (based on their public 990 tax form). Of that, $3.9M (5%) came from museum attendance, and an additional $1.7M came from special exhibitions (2%).

Now, another institution--the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which welcomes 54,000 visitors annually and manages a school for community members as well as BFA and MFA students. Their total revenue in 2010 was $16.2M (their 990). Of that, $1M came from attendance (6%), and $9.3M (57%) came from the educational program.

What's healthier for the financial viability of the Barnes Foundation--focusing on being a school, or focusing on being a museum? I don't see how a four-fold increase in public attendance--saddled with the significant costs of operating a large urban museum--will ensure stability.


Second, let's talk about access. If a donor designates a particular use of his or her property, how closely does that have to be followed? If a large body of civic and cultural leaders feel that the designation is no longer culturally relevant, does that matter? If someone owns something unique (and bars its reproduction or transfer), how much "public good" does that collection have to confer before the owner's wishes are challenged? And on a more practical museum management level, are there multiple ways to validly define access to a collection?

I don't feel qualified to answer the first three questions. But I do feel confident in my answer to the last one: yes. There are many ways a collection can be accessible or inaccessible (check out the UCL report Collections for People for a rigorous review of this). There are some collections that are entirely private. Others are accessible seasonally to a handful of visitors. There are publicly-owned collections that are only accessible by appointment or through digitization efforts. There are objects you can see, and objects you can't.

The Barnes Foundation was inaccessible to visitors who wanted to come to the facility, pay an admission fee, and view the art in the galleries. At the same time, it was deeply accessible to a cadre of teachers, students, and artists who spent prolonged periods with the work.

The controversial reconfiguration of the Barnes Foundation suggests that the first kind of access is more important than the second. That attendance trumps depth of experience. That center city trumps suburb. That granting access to 60,000 people per year is not sufficient to appropriately meet the demand to view the collection. That that demand has a moral public value.

In museum circles, we often say, "numbers aren't everything." But when we say that, what other things do we offer up as alternatives? Can we make a compelling quantitative argument for the benefits conferred to students at the Barnes Foundation, many of whom engaged in multi-year art and horticulture programs? How many one-time 1-hour visits does a three-year course of study equal? Is it really "better" to have 250,000 visitors shuffle through a museum than to give a deep experience to a few hundred? Who gets to decide?

The Barnes Foundation was not founded as a museum. It was founded as a school that used a privately-held art collection as its curriculum. I don't see why museum standards of access should be applied to such an institution just because it would be politically convenient to do so.

And that, I think, leads to the real reason governors, mayors, and heads of Philadelphia-based charities pushed to move the Barnes Foundation to the city. The Barnes collection is an extraordinary cultural jewel, and Philadelphia wants that jewel in its crown. It doesn't really matter if the collection is accessed by 60,000 people or 250,000 people, whether those people have a deep experience or not, and whether their admissions tickets will improve the institution's financial health. What matters is that Philadelphia can tout the Barnes collection and its wonders in its tourism and marketing materials for the city.

In some ways, this is a good thing. It implies that civic leaders do understand the incredible value of cultural institutions as identity-builders and tourism-attractors. But I don't think that justifies such a blatant disregard for donor intent, trumpeted with a one-note, "more attendance = better" horn. What do you think?

Fifteen Random Things I've Learned about Design for Participation This Year

We've been offering a host of participatory and interactive experiences at The Museum of Art & History this season. All of them are cheap, mostly simple, and occasionally, dangerous. I loved Jasper Visser's list of 30 "do's" for designing participatory projects earlier this month. I thought I'd add a few of the little things we've learned about visitors (and ourselves) through our monkeying. Please share yours in the comments.

SETUP

1. Cut your instructions down to as little text as possible. This is true for any kind of exhibit. If you don't need them, dump 'em. 
2. In contrast, people will read signs that explain how their work will be/was used, or that the giant sculpture of metal fish they are looking at was made by visitors. They will be impressed. They will want to participate. Accolades are more inspiring than instructions.
3. If you want people to write and/or draw, encourage them to draw. The timid ones will write anyway, and if you give them the option to write, no one will draw.
4. Different activities need different levels of materials to appear "open for business." For crafting activities, putting out a small number of materials encourages people to use sparingly and respectfully. But for voting activities with objects in receptacles (in our case, coffee beans), the receptacle has to be pretty full for visitors to comfortably understand that they can use some.
5. Put out seating for two or more with every activity, unless it's something incredibly personal. People will talk about what they are writing or making.
6. Artists work incredibly hard to produce their work. Design paired activities to reflect or at least respect the sensibility of their work, and where possible, involve them in the design.

MAINTENANCE

1. If you put out pencils and paper for an activity on a table that reads like a table, you're fine. If it's a couple of pedestals that you painted and attached to make a table (no wax, matte paint), kids will scribble all over the table. The same is true for paper instructions mounted on the table. Laminated = safe, mounted on foam core = not. Get a good eraser.
2. Have a game plan for what you'll do with past visitors' contributions as you prune to make room for more. We do different things with different products. I keep visitor comments in my office. For an activity in which visitors write stories on butterflies and pin them to a board, we group older stories into "clumps" of butterflies at the edges of the board to look pretty and make room for new contributions. And the crayon drawings on the fridge door in an exhibition of award-winning local artists? We throw those away.
3. Prune for diversity and clarity, not quality. The contributions that are the "best" may be a narrow reflection of your own personal preferences.
4. Don't go overboard in affixing things to the wall or table or surface. Visitor behavior will tell you how much glue or lamination you need. We guessed wrong.
5. You can put out full cans of coffee beans on a third floor hallway overlooking a stairwell and people will not throw fistfuls of coffee beans down the stairs. They will very conscientiously pick up any beans that drop on the floor. Small kids love this task.
6. Have extra coffee beans, index cards or whatever you're using on hand at all times. Make sure staff/volunteers know where they are. Schedule volunteers to prep more butterflies.

OTHER

1. "Make and share" is more powerful for many people than "make and take." Most people--including kids--want to display their creations, not keep them. 
2. People of all ages can use sledgehammers with minimal oversight. We had over 400 successful bangers with no injuries. The risk of liability was worth it.
3. People love pleasant surprises. Our most commented-on change by far is the brightly painted chairs in the elevator. This isn't even participatory. It's just fun. 

AND A FEW THINGS WE'LL KEEP WORKING ON FOR THE FUTURE...

1. Find a way to get back in touch with people to let them know that their fish/butterfly/story/object is on display. We haven't figured out a seamless way to capture emails so we can do this yet.
2. Encourage gifting. We are trying some activities that invite people to make things for others, or to take something made by a previous visitor. Most people do not take the bait. We need to find a more appealing way to do this.
3. Figure out what to do with the giant collaboratively-created objects when an exhibition run is over. Right now, we have a lots of vacant space, so visitors are helping us paint murals and make massive mobiles. But we won't want those things forever, or we'll want to create new things for those sites. I'm not sure whether this is the ordinary churn of the museum or if we need a more thoughtful "deaccessioning" plan for collaborative work.

Here's to a 2012 filled with more experiments, dialogue, and surprises.

Open Thread: How Does Your Institution Say Happy New Year?

It's that time of year when inboxes fill up with digital thank you's, happy holidays, and end-of-year solicitations. At the MAH, we had an intern who worked this summer and fall to create a video (her first!) to reflect some of the new activities at the museum. We didn't really have a plan for what we would do with it, but when it was done, I suddenly realized we had a great way to showcase 2011 to our members, donors and friends. (Warning: the song can get stuck in your head, and yes, that is my dad singing.)

And that made me wonder: how do other organizations showcase their work at the end of the year? What do you do to ask, tell, share, and celebrate what's been happening at your institution? This year, I've seen everything from heartfelt solicitations (Young Playwrights Theater) to surreal pop culture singalongs (MCA Denver) to impressively-produced, collaborative, yet poignant pop culture singalongs (Detroit Science Center, which closed one month after this video was released).

Enjoy our video and share your own via the comments. I don't really have any brilliant ideas on what makes a good end-of-year video (except that it should be short). I'd love to hear your thoughts on what works and doesn't. If lots of people share their videos in the comments, I'll write a follow-up post next week based on some of the apparent trends.

Yes, Visitors Can Help You. But You Have to Let Them.

Two weeks ago, two of my staff members came to me with a problem. They were planning a wall mural for our classroom. They planned to paint the outline of Santa Cruz County, print out photos of a series of important landmarks or icons throughout the county, and then paint those items onto the map. As part of our monthly First Friday community event, they would invite visitors to draw some of the icons, and then the drawings would be the basis for what would be painted on the mural.

The problem? It was Friday, a few hours before the drawing activity, and my colleagues were worried that it would be too challenging for people to draw the icons and landmarks selected. They were afraid that visitors would get frustrated or that the quality of their work would not be good enough to translate to the mural. We often avoid drawing as a community art activity because visitors can get really judgmental of their own abilities, and our staff just felt that this might be too hard.  They wanted to drop the activity.

I asked what plan B was if visitors didn't draw the items. They said that they would draw them or translate them from photographs in some way. These are both busy people, and while they are very artistic, neither is a crack drawer.

I encouraged them to go ahead with the community activity as planned. It seemed to me like we had little to lose and a lot to gain if visitors could in fact make some good representations of the icons. I figured this was a classic crowd-sourcing activity; while not everyone can draw well, it seemed a heck of a lot more likely that we'd get some good drawings from a few of the 800+ people at the event than we'd get if we never asked.

Visitors rose to the challenge and made some incredible drawings. It turned into a pretty wild evening in the classroom, filled with, "Whoa! You drew that?!"s, visitors pouring over each other's work, and impossible decisions about which drawings would be used for the final mural. We were all surprised by the quality of the visitors' work. We selected final drawings for the mural based on drawings by young kids, teenagers, and adults. This Friday, a new set of visitors will paint the drawn icons onto the actual mural.

This experience reminded me of how much confidence it takes to say yes to any new activities (this isn't limited to participatory projects) because of unfamiliarity with the process. My colleagues are smart, generous people who love involving visitors in our work. But when the work gets complicated or difficult, it's easy to get nervous about visitors' ability to perform.

A participatory project is one in which visitors/users can actively contribute to make the institution better. That's only possible if we let them try. We're probably all self-censoring opportunities for community members to make significant contributions to our work. How could visitors improve your institution, and what do you need to let go of to help them do it?

Digital Museums Reconsidered: Exploring the Walker Art Center Website Redesign

I have a confession to make: I've never cared much about museums on the Web. I'm focused on the onsite, in-person experience. When smart people talk about digital museums and virtual experiences, I nod and compartmentalize it as someone else's bailiwick. I understand the value of having a web presence that is reflective of institutional brand, makes content available for people to use in a variety of ways, and enables new connections with community members. But I've never really understood what it could mean for a museum to create a website that has a complementary function to the physical institution--an entity in its own right that expands beyond the scope of the physical institution, programs, and collection.

Now, I think I'm starting to get it. Last week, the Walker Art Center launched a major website redesign, which museum geeks are hailing as "a potential paradigm shift for institutional websites," (Seb Chan) and an "earth-shaking game changer" (Museumnerd). Here's what I see: a website as a unique core offering--alongside, but not subservient to, the physical institution. Walkerart.org is not about the Walker Art Center. It is the Walker Art Center, in digital form.

The new site resembles an online newspaper, featuring articles written by Walker staff alongside stories from the greater world of art reporting on the web. While there is a tight menu of Walker Art Center offerings at the top (Visit, Exhibitions & Events, Media, Collections, Join), the rest of the website is a digitally-based panoply of content broadly related to the Walker's mission. It is an online experience about contemporary art that goes beyond the Walker's walls.

And it breaks a lot of conventional rules about museum homepages. Such as:

• It organizes the content primarily by "stories"--a news lexicon that I've never seen used in a museum context.
• There's lots of content everywhere, including little things you wouldn't usually see on a museum website--like the current weather in Minneapolis, where the Walker resides. 
• It features many stories ("Art from Elsewhere") that were not produced by the museum and are not about the museum. 
• The "Art from Elsewhere" stories all link to sites that are not associated with the Walker. No more lock 'em in and keep 'em here--the theory is that the value of the site is in the curation of links across the web.
• The name "Walker Art Center" is abbreviated to "WALKER" at the top of the homepage. It's not 100% clear that this thing called walkerart.org represents a museum or facility, though there are ample opportunities to discover that.

Is this the future of all museum websites? Probably not. The care and feeding required for a site like this is tremendous. The Walker employs a four-person editorial team (one of whom is completely dedicated to the website), along with a five-person new media initiative group. That's more people than work in my museum total--and a lot more who are dedicated to digital experiences and content than at even the largest museums around the world.

But the biggest reason that the Walker site is so unusual is its clarity of purpose. Not only did the Walker have the resources to create a major online project, they had the institutional coherence and focus to make it their primary website. Many, many museums have created superlative online experiences--from the IMA's ArtBabble to the Exploratorium's educational resources to the V&A's collections site any number of exhibition microsites--but these are all offshoots in the museum website universe. 

What the Walker has done is commit to a unique online approach--not just for one program or microsite, but for their homepage. They took their vision of the institution as an idea hub, looked at comparable sites online that achieve that vision, and adopted and adapted the journalistic approach to their goals. 

An institution of any size with enough mission-coherence and courage could create a website that is comparably unique. It comes down to articulating your mission in a digital space. Not every museum would choose a journalistic approach. Maybe the metaphor for your institution is a restaurant with a simple set of consistent offerings or a music venue with a constantly rotating program of events. Maybe some museum websites would look like online schools, or community bulletin boards, or shopping sites. But I suspect that most of them would continue being a little of this, a little of that, with a brochure for visiting slapped on top. And I think that's ok too if your goal is to have a physical museum with a website that supports it.

But if you want to create a digital museum as a partner to the physical, take note. Thank you, Walker Art Center, for showing me one version of what this can look like.

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.