Why Does It Matter?

Doing some random browsing on the web in an effort to keep up-to-date, I came across the Art Gallery of Ontario's collectionx website. I'd visited the AGO late last December, and was very intrigued by some of their work in connecting with audiences. On one blog entry, they posit some questions that they as a staff have been pondering as they undertake major re-installation in their new building:

What is art?
Why does it matter?
How do we connect with each other creatively?
How can we discover new relationships together?
How can we create meaning?
How can we raise issues?

The connect part of the website talks about their exhibitions--and explores the answers to a whole range of questions about art, elitism and community. But for community based museums, the site also, perhaps unintentionally, provides a raft of ideas for exhibitions that might help them connect better to their own communities. I saw In Your Face, their exhibit of community (including nationally and internationally) portraits and self-portraits last year--and watched visitors of all ages, classes, and ethnicities spend substantial amounts of time looking at the work done by thousands of people who mailed their postcard size portraits to the museum. But then there's community and personal mapping, Carbon Copy, where students created a forest out of paper waste, numbers of outdoor art installations exploring a community's past (and in several cases, using boarded up or empty storefronts...no lack of those in upstate New York)....

And I very much like the part of the website that encourages people to share either their own artwork or artwork that interests them. You can find Misfortune Cookies, a series of vapour trail images shot in the skies around Toronto, and The Shooting Gallery, a project of the Thunder Bay Arts Gallery in Northern Canada, that features work by First Nations' young people.

Above: Portraits from the In Your Face project at the Art Gallery of Ontario

The Same and Different

In the past couple months, I've visited three museums that reflect their ambitions, tastes, and desires of their early 20th century collectors: the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia, the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY and the new Arkell Museum in Canajoharie, NY. Taken together, they're a fascinating look at collectors and the museums they found--and how those museums move forward into the 21st century. The Barnes is the most familiar, I suppose, and certainly the subject of the most controversy because of its planned move to downtown Philadelphia. I'd read about it for years, of course, and the subject of the move was a part of my museum controversies class at Hartwick. I understand the need to move, but at the same time, the experience will be greatly changed. Like the other two places, it's a tremendous place to see art...no crowds, small intimate spaces, and the chance to connect directly with work--and much of the work was art I hadn't seen before. I had read about Barnes' interest in juxtaposing American decorative arts--ironwork, Pennsylvania painted chests and the like--but it was really stunning to see. After a room or two, it really begins to make sense...Barnes was about color and shape, and the works play beautifully off each other. I'm glad I had a chance to see the collection in its original location...but if I worked there, I would probably be lobbying for the move.

A friend and I took a little field trip to the new Arkell Museum in Canajoharie. Most people have probably never been to Canajoharie, but if you drive the New York State Thruway, the Beech Nut sign marks the spot--and is the source of the Arkell money. It's a fine collection of American art--and then that large reproduction of Rembrandt's Night Watch. It really is a community place, connected directly to the community library. I was surprised, a bit, at how conservative the installation and interpretation were. I enjoy places like the Brooklyn Museum, who experiment with how to engage visitors with art and was disappointed that the presentation was so staid. That said, beautiful work and a chance to look carefully and closely. Most intriguing--the Rufus Grider paintings (but I wanted to know much more!) and the exhibit that explores the ways in which Arkell used his art collection in promotional materials for Beechnut--creating this idea of a bucolic, romantic American part.

Not so far from the Arkell, the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls. I was there for work, rather than for pleasure, so in some ways, a very different experience. The Hyde has just undergone a major restoration of the house itself, where a highly eclectic collection of art is installed. Here's the place where you can imagine living with the art--along with the candlewick bedspreads and ball fringe curtains of the 1950s!

All three places were wonderful places to see art...small and intimate, not crowded, and allowing you to look closely at works.

Why I do what I do

Today's New York Times has an article by Edward Rothstein about the opening of the new Uris Center for Education at the Metropolitan Museum. In the museum field, there's been a great deal of thought--and some very interesting writing--devoted to meaning making. In his article, he says,

"But art education is a strange and surprising enterprise. It makes memories as important as celebration, traditions as crucial as innovation." He goes on to describe his family's participation in programs in the old education center, which began with the "scruffy informality" of the center and then, "a train of adults and children would follow an instructor up the stairs into the American Wing or the African galleries or the 19th-century European-painting rooms, and press close to two or three works as the instructor teased the underage aesthetes into learning how to see a painting, or into thinking about what can be learned from looking and even sketching."

And then, Rothstein recounts, "And then the train would return to the Uris, where some aspect of the gallery experience would inspire a craft project using cups of pencils and crayons, sketchbook paper or scraps of construction paper for pasting.

There were programs about portraits, about families, about countries, about particular artists. And they were so refreshing because, given the nature of the audience, there was no way even the most accomplished adult could veer into intellectual abstractions or indulge in the lingo of the art theory industry."

For Rothstein and his family (including a daughter, now an art history major, who started her love of art at the Met), these experiences created indelible memories, and a chance to make their own meaning of the museum's incredible collection. In addition to talk about meaning making, there's also a great deal of talk about outcome-based evaluation. So a post workshop evaluation might have shown that the Rothstein family learned about a particular artist--but it wouldn't show us how those workshops shaped a family.

Why did I title this post this way? Because the chance to create those lasting memories--about things that matter--whether it's at a community history museum or the Met--are worth doing and worth doing in the very best way we can.

(and by the way, 20,000 educational events a year at the Met! I'm tired even thinking about it but wish they could offer even more--and most family programs are free with admission)

Storytelling--Teachable?

A comment below noted my fairly regular thoughts and comments about museums as places that tell stories and wondered if storytelling, as such, should be taught in museum studies programs. Hmm...I don't know if storytelling needs to be taught, but perhaps courses in screenwriting or playwriting would generate new thinking. In both those disciplines, writers use all the tools at hand, not just words, but other elements to create a visual experience. They tell the story through stage or film sets and locations, costumes, props, and of course, their actors and the words they speak. But of course, the best writers do that just with words. I'm reminded of a session my colleague Christopher Clarke facilitated several years ago at the Museum Institute at Sagamore, a program of the Upstate History Alliance. In advance, Christopher asked half the group to read one non-fiction book, and half another. The books he choose were The Sudden Sea, about the great hurricane of 1938 by R.A. Scotti and Close to Shore, about the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks. The group, with his skillful help, examined how these authors chose to tell a story and how their storytelling as non-fiction authors, relates to our own work as exhibit developers or other museum people. The books (both great, entertaining reads, whether you're interested in sharks or hurricanes or not) use detail--but selectively; they have characters that you care about; and each book has a careful, compelling story arc.

Museums have both more and fewer tools at our disposal. To me, books are a type of experience that's fully immersive, and I'm not distracted by other people, by whether or not my feet hurt, by whether my parking is too expensive, or any of the other million things that occupy museum goers' minds. But, we have the ability, within our resources, to create immersive enviroments that stimulate the imagination, and, of course, we have the real deal. We have (just to name a few things I've seen that stick with me) Darwin's notebook in which he first posits the theory of evolution, Vermeer paintings, or even the well-worn overalls of a worker in the Lehigh Valley Railroad shops in Sayre, PA. Each one of those items connects me to a story--and for me, as a visitor at least, I care about the people embedded in those stories.

So should museum programs teach storytelling? Couldn't hurt (and might even help make those historic house tours better!)

Above: Can't figure out how to get people into your museum? Consider the methods of this sideshow barker in Donaldsville, LA, in 1939. Photo by Russell Lee, FSA/OWI Collection Library of Congress.

Matchmaking

I'm often struck, when I'm at a local history museum, how many fascinating stories, of all types, linger there, unknown and unappreciated, because no one has the time to consider them fully. Recently, at the Walter Elwood Museum in Amsterdam, I came across two boxes related to glovemaking (although not as important as in nearby Gloversville, it was an important city despite Amsterdam being known as Rug City, for all its carpet manufacturing).

In the boxes were beautiful drawings of possible gloves, detailing stitching and cutting, several little journals accounting various ways to make gloves, dozens of patterns for cutting, time sheets, order forms and other materials.

Those two boxes represented a life to me...and what does that have to do with matchmaking? I just wish there was a way to match all those budding historians in graduate school with the great materials in local history collections, so that more of these stories can be fleshed out, and their creators given space in our collective memories (or at least in history journals or other publications.)

Above: glove pattern from gloves.org

History Museums--Big and Little

Today's New York Times has an article about what it calls "shiny new history museums," that are attracting hordes of visitors. Mentioned among them are the National Museum of the Marine Corps, Mount Vernon, the Lincoln Museum and the International Spy Museum. Several parts of the story raise some interesting thoughts. Gone, says author Kathryn Shattuck, "are shelves of crusty artifacts, yellowed text panels stuffed with dates and names and the 'excitement' of a stale soda cracker behind glass that some historical figure may have sampled."

Okay, so I'm happy to have those shelves of dusty artifacts and those jam-packed text panels making an exit, but I'm perhaps a little less happy to see that those equivalents of stale soda crackers disappear. We are, as museums, about the real...so the chance to see real objects, connected to real people--and all kinds of real people, not just Washington and Lincoln, are what make us unique as a place.

I do agree though, with the emphasis on storytelling as one of our most important functions, particularly as it helps us as visitors make those direct connections to our own lives. (as an aside, I'm intrigued that a number of these new museums are about war and the military--what does that mean for us today?)
Equally important though is to consider what this trend means for the small history museum in your community, wherever you may be. If you go on vacation and try out the spy phones at the Spy Museum, or test your marksmanship at the Marine Corps Museum, what does it mean when you come home? Does it make you less likely to visit, volunteer at, or support your community museum because it doesn't offer a big bang experience? Small museums can't offer that big bang, but what they can offer is that direct connection to your own life. You can learn about where you live--what happened down the street--both good and bad. Community museums may not be able to compete in the big media department, but we can, with some intelligence, care and imagination, compete very well in the storytelling department.

What Makes a Good Story?

In today's (8/21/07) New York Times, Regional Editor Jodi Rudoren answers readers' questions. In addition to the several question about why and how she and her husband (also a writer) combined their two names into one (take that, you genealogists!) she also answered a question about what makes a good story, something she had spoken about in a writing class. I thought her answer was fascinating in how it related to the work of developing museum exhibitions. She said,

"I think I probably pointed out that stories, even the truest of them, even the hard-news boring-but-important ones, need to have: plot (an arc of stuff happening), characters (people you care about and can relate to), conflict/tension, scenes (that you witness and describe in vivid detail) and a beginning, middle and end (though not necessarily presented in that order).

I probably also posed the question, "What is a story?" and offered the ridiculously simple formula:

1. Something people care about.
2. Something people fight about.
3. Something people wonder about.

And I might have said something about making people laugh or cry -- or both.

"Tenets of Good Newspaper Writing" is an intimidating title; I'm afraid that whatever I would say, I'd be leaving much more out. I'd start any such list with something about good, deep, vivid, person-center reporting being at the heart of good writing. The lead paragraph, and as much of the story as possible, should be stuff you couldn't have written before you went to the place or made your phone calls, something you couldn't have written when getting the assignment. The quotes should be carefully chosen and sharply edited so that each quoted sentence is a fresh, original thought expressed as only the quoted person can, not something that could be more simply stated in paraphrase. Oh, but now I haven't said anything about organization and big-thought nut paragraphs....anyhow, it's a start."

So think about it--when was the last time you used the frame of what people care about, fight about or wonder about in developing an exhibit? Her observations on newspaper writing are people-centered in a way we often forget. Caring, fighting, wondering--those are things we all do. And "good, deep, vivid, person-center reporting"--that's what our research should be as well, leading us away from this 'this is a this and that is a that" approach so often seen at community museums.

It's funny that I came across this just as I randomly watched "All the Presidents Men" on television last night. Although I am glad to see that Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman have aged, just like me, and that it was a great period piece for the 1970s. It was most importantly an empassioned reminder of two writers' commitment to the story. Although community history may not have the stories that bring down a president, every place has stories that make people care, fight or wonder about.