Year End Review

So it's almost the end of this year, and the end of a year's worth of sporadic blogging and time for some random museum thoughts, based on experiences during the past year:

Best combination of place and art: visiting Arles and then the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Amazing both individually and even more so collectively.

Most entertaining and challenging teamwork: working with a talented team of staff and consultants at the Berkshire Museum on a new exhibition about innovation in the Berkshires. Very thoughtful work and a team that all respected the work of others. Biggest luxury in a work setting: getting to be a team member with opinions on this project, not a project manager.

Best volunteer organization: The Sayre Historical Society, who after long years of work, opened a part of their new museum to the public on December 16. As a board, their commitment to professionalism in building restoration, collections care and exhibit development was exemplary, and as well, they represent one of the friendliest, most enthusiastic communities where Riverhill has worked.

Blogs I'm currently reading on a regular basis and always find interesting: Museum 2.0 is written by Nina Simon and is about the ways in which "the philosophies of Web 2.0 can be applied in museums to make them more engaging, community-based vital elements of society." Thoughtful, funny reading and a great sweep of posts on influences from other places.

and CultureGrrl by arts journalist Lee Rosenbaum, who's passionate and outspoken about many issues relating to the arts and museums. She writes about art museums, somewhat out of my sphere, but it's always enlightening, and her continued push about deaccessioning in museums should be reading for all of us.

Museum I'll remember a long time--the Jewish Historical Museum of the Netherlands. Museum that was sort of forgettable: the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, despite a topic that is one that we all should be considering these days.

Topics I want to think more about in 2008: how to take interactives to a next step in terms of development and how to meet the challenge of interpretive difficult community issues in both historic houses and museums.

Exhibits or museums I wish I'd seen this year:
The Eldredge Street Synagogue, Mythic Creatures at the American Museum of Natural History, the Kara Walker retrospective at the Whitney Museum (highly recommended by a colleague), and far too many more to list!














Above from top:
Set design by Peggy Clark for a production of Philip Barry's holiday. The main character, Linda Seton, is in a playroom, awaiting the start of a New Year's Eve Party
Music Division, Library of Congress
The Sayre Historical Society's board of directors
A young museum goer and her mother at the Sayre Historical Society Museum
(last two photographs courtesy Ken Bracken)

Prototyping

Prototyping--it sounds very serious like we might work at General Motors and we're prototyping some big gas-guzzling, laden with fins, new car. But...this year I've worked on three projects where I've prototyped interactive stations for exhibitions. And in every one, I've been stunned at how revealing and helpful the process has been.

Why prototype?

It helps identify those great ideas that are perhaps only great to exhibit developers. I loved the idea of boondoggle for an interactive on summer camp (that's the upstate New York term for making lanyards out of that plastic stuff). In testing, we discovered that directions are amazingly to hard to write for this. Without a sample, all were lost. The solution: one set of strands attached to a hook to try and take-home packets with instructions. The unexpected consequence: despite its difficulty, it brought forth wonderful memories from parents.

It helps refine language to make it accessible for many. In testing an I Spy sort of interactive about the AC transformer we found that few people knew or understood what an AC transformer was (me too, really), but even more surprising, that the idea of unintended outcomes was a little fuzzy as well. A rewritten and re-tested label (below)meant that it became more understandable--and more fun--for visitors.















It saves museums from expensive design and fabrication costs for things that don't quite work. For instance, in a prototype activity about matching dolls from around the world with a map, the name of the country with the doll was in upper and lower case; the name of the country on the map was in all upper case letters. In prototyping, we discovered that early readers were having a really tough time puzzling out the country names because of the type itself--a very easy fix.

You learn how to extend the experience from the visitors themselves. For a pretend picnic interactive, we noticed that, in the prototyping, young visitors not only packed their picnic basket, but then took it over to a corner in the room and sat and had a picnic--our revised label copy encouraged others to do the same.













And, I think, most importantly, it strengthens the connection between a museum and its visitors. Participants inevitably are pleased to be asked to participate, and as one parent wrote, "Thanks for the opportunity. We can't wait to try the real thing!"

Photos: Top and center, from prototyping at the Berkshire Museum for the new Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation, December, 2007. Bottom: Interactive label for Summer in the Finger Lakes exhibitions, June, 2007.

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