11 Questions to a Museum Blogger on the Day After

Jamie Glavic, one of the co-organizers of Museum Blogs Day yesterday tagged me with 11 Questions for a Museum Blogger (you can see her responses here on her blog Museum Minute) that originally came from Blogstockchen).  I didn't quite make my answers in time for the day, but here they are.  I loved learning about blogs to keep an eye on, and thanks to Jamie and Jenni Fuchs at Museums140 for a great day.

1.  Who are you and what do you like about blogging?

I’m Linda Norris, and despite a pretty considerable amount of time in the field, still think of myself as an emerging museum professional.  I live in a tiny village in upstate New York and have done everything in museums, from working at a children's museum, giving tours at a wine museum, running a small historical society, developing exhibits and interpretation, heading up a museum service agency, and now working independently. I blog as a way of keeping conversations going.  Sometimes those conversations are just with myself, sometimes with museums I’ve visited, with ideas, and most of all, with you, my colleagues.  It’s been incredible when those conversations (like with Jasper Visser last month) have turned into in-person ones.  I love it when blog readers come up at conferences and introduce themselves to talk. In our book, Rainey Tisdale and I talk about creative people being open, generous and connected--the blog lets me be all that.  I also like that I can do it in my pajamas.

2.  What is the most popular post on your blog?

The most popular posts often seem to be those where I’m just an observant museum visitor, reporting on what I see and learn from big places. Recently a post about the Rijksmuseum’s great labels and handouts got great traffic, as have posts on the Minnesota Historical Society’s inventive labels and a wonderful docent at the Getty Museum.

3. And which post on your blog is your personal favorite?

I’ve been blogging a long time (since 2007) so picking one favorite is hard as so much of my blogging is so tied up with my own memories and experiences.  But as I look back, my favorite ones are from my first months in Ukraine as a Fulbright Scholar, where now, I can really see myself trying to puzzle my way through an entirely different culture and way of thinking about museums.  You can find those in January-May, 2009 if you’re interested.

  

4.  If you had a whole week just to blog: which subject would you like to thoroughly research and write about?

I am just a ditherer, with so many things I’d like to spend more time on. Currently these questions on my short list:

• Are museum studies programs producing the next generation of great, creative museum professionals?  And if not, why not?
• How can service organizations inspire their member museums in addition to serving as a place for information and resources?
• And the really big one—how can museums be more meaningful in their communities, particularly in communities undergoing rapid change or disruption?

5. If you could ask anyone at all to write a guest post for your blog (you can be as utopian as you like), who would you chose and what would you ask them to write about?

Hmmm…I think I’d ask some great storytellers to write about narrative.  I’d love Hilary Mantel or Adam Johnson, both of whose books enthralled me;  or alternatively, Wes Anderson, about how he creates entire visual worlds in his films and how that might relate to what we do.

6. What has been your most memorable museum experience? 

Definitely impossible to choose. 

7. What was the last museum you visited and how was it?

Fascinating, unexpected, slightly impenetrable—my last museum visit was to the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul.  I’m still pondering on how to write a blog post about it.

8. Share your favorite photo with us that you took at a museum.
A couple different ones (do you get the sense I have a hard time making choices?)  At the top of the post, boys on a school trip at the Louvre filling out worksheets on nudes;  and center, someone role-playing at the DDR Museum in Berlin.  I still remember Katrin whispering to me upon seeing him, "Look, he makes himself physically like a bureaucrat on the phone!"  Totally immersed, solitary, in the moment.  

9.  If time and money were not an issue, which museum in the world would you most like to visit?

I’ve been really lucky that my work life over the last couple years has led me to so many amazing places around the world—but the museum I would most like to visit is one that surprises me—so I won’t know until I stumble across it.

10. There are many big and famous museums, but which is your personal favourite ‘hidden gem’?

At the moment, Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles and Teyler's Museum, in Haarlem, the Netherlands.

11. Do you have any insider tips on any of the museums you have visited or blogged about?

Here’s a tip I learned from my colleagues at Context Travel who provide in-depth walks of many of the world’s great museums.  Go the opposite direction from everyone else.  Sounds silly, but it’s amazing how often you can find galleries with a bit of space for solitary reflection when you reverse against the crowd.  And the second:  if you travel at all, an ICOM membership is a fabulous thing—admits you free almost everywhere. (and it’s also great to be a part of that world-wide community).

And passing it forward, I'm tagging three more bloggers I admire:  Gretchen Jennings, Anne Ackerson and Nicole Deufel in the hopes they'll respond as well.  Here's your task: 

• Answer the eleven questions – you can adapt them a little to fit your blog, if you like.
• Include the BEST BLOG image in your post, and link back to the person who nominated you (that would be me, by the way, or more specifically, this blog post).
• Devise eleven new questions – or feel free to keep any of these ones here if you like them – and pass them on to how ever many bloggers you would like to.

Here's my questions for you. 

1. Who are you and what do you like about blogging?
2. What search terms lead people to your blog?
3. Which post on your blog is your personal favorite?
4. If you had a whole week just to blog: which subject would you like to thoroughly research and write about?
5. If you could ask anyone at all to write a guest post for your blog (you can be as utopian as you like), who would you chose and what would you ask them to write about?
6. What was your first museum job?
7. What was the last museum you visited and how was it?
8. Share your favorite photo with us that you took at a museum or historic site.
9. If time and money were not an issue, which museum in the world would you most like to visit?
10. What's the biggest lesson you learned from a failure?
11. If you could work anywhere, what museum would you like to work in?
    
     

Surrender the Chronology!

“Surrender the Chronology!”  doesn’t quite have the same stirring nature as other well-known battle cries beloved by military historians,  but in the re-interpretation of historic houses, it might be even more important.  I’ve been thinking about it ever since a meeting at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center a couple weeks ago, as we continue our work in rethinking the interpretation of Stowe’s house.   This meeting brought together historians, staff, and me.  And a very distinguished group of historians they were, with two Pulitzer-prize winners among them.  

As we thought about Stowe’s story, about the mix of her own personal story and that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her story that helped change our view of the world we found ourselves struggling with so many ideas about how to tell those connected stories, in a house where she lived at the end of her life, not when she was writing the book.  So there’s no shrine of room with pens and paper (I well remember the room in the Berkshires where Melville penned much of Moby Dick), there’s no great battlefield outside the door; and in fact, there’s a next-door-neighbor with a grand house and a pretty big story of his own (Hi Mark Twain!)

At one point in the process, historian  Lois Brown said, “Surrender the chronology!  What would happen if every room were not a planned sequence, but each room was its own tempest in a teapot?”   We started thinking. 

• What if we surrender the chronology of Stowe’s life, but what if we also surrendered the chronology (perhaps the tyranny) of a sequenced tour? 
• Could you start a tour anywhere? 
• End anywhere?   
• Could we create small tempests in each room? 
• What’s the balance between comfort and disruption on a tour?
• What would our visitors think?
• What will make people return?  The chance of a new disruption?How could we best create these situations?  Are the skills needed for guides not those of historians, but those of actors, facilitators, disruptors?
• Do we need not a single best answer, but a whole palette of choices and how can we build that into the re-interpreted experience both physically and conceptually?

In this and following conversations, we talked about drawing our inspiration from other models—not just historic houses.  Movies and novels both have flashbacks.  What if the house were a series of short stories, rather than a single narrative? Is it like a version of a Choose Your Own Adventure game?  What role can imagination—our own and our visitors—play in the experience? 

We've identified our key idea (thanks to earlier visitor conversations)--it's the idea of courage, about how Stowe found the courage within herself to write this book--and how all of us might find the courage to seek change and social justice as well.  We'll continue to talk to visitors and non-visitors about exciting ways to present this idea--but it's very clear that we've now been challenged by historians and by audiences to think deeper about how we present ideas to visitors.  We want to have the courage to shape a historic house experience unlike any other, helping to meet these important parts of the  Stowe Center's mission, "promote vibrant discussion of her life and work, and inspire commitment to social justice and positive change."  We expect that we'll experiment, we'll fail, and we'll keep trying, failing, and experimenting, learning along the way.   In our professional lives, we hope that we inspire other historic houses to take risks as well.  Surrender the chronology!
 

Center Image: 

Participants included Joan Hedrick, Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Harriet Beecher Stowe; Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Henry Ward Beecher; Susan Campbell, author of the forthcoming biography of Isabella Beecher Hooker; Lois Brown, Wesleyan professor of African American Studies and English along with museum consultant Linda Norris and Stowe staff. Courtesy of Stowe Center.

Creatively Speaking: Out and About in April

It's hard to think about April, when winter still seems in full force outside my window.  But Uncataloged readers and creative museum folks will have a few opportunities in April, to sit down for a cup of coffee with me and creative colleagues, in real or virtual spaces.

Leading into the month, on April 1 the Take 5 gang will be exhibitors at the annual Museum Association of New York conference in Albany.  I'll have books for sale (at a special discount) and of course, stop by for your free creativity tattoo.

On Friday, April 4, 10 AM,  I'll be discussing Creativity in Museum Practice on Carol Bossert's online radio show, The Museum Life streamed live.  I hope you'll tune in (or listen afterwards).  If you've got a particular issue you'd like to explore, just share in the comments below.

And then, on Wednesday, April 30,  from noon-1:00 PM, Rainey Tisdale and I will be presenting a Lunch with NEMA webinar.  We'll explore how you can enhance your own creative practice,  how you can make your organization more creative (no matter where you are on the organizational chart), and share some ideas about how the museum field as a whole can be more creative--and what that might mean for our communities and ourselves.   This is a great, free opportunity to connect with us and your colleagues from your desk, over your sandwich and tea.  You can register here.

Rainey and I have been hearing from some of our colleagues about how they're using Creativity in Museum Practice.  One colleague is taking time at lunch each day to read a bit of this and Anne Ackerson and Joan Baldwin's book,  Leadership Matters.  Another has set aside some staff meeting time to talk about some of the ideas; and yet a consulting colleague gifted it to a client.  Have you begin reading and sharing?  Do tell us about it!

Thinking about Historic Site Interpretation? The Onion Did

I spent several great days this week at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center thinking about re-interpretation and we found this video along the way. Absolutely worth a watch as a small reminder to not take ourselves too seriously.  Happy Friday!

Mid-Revolution: Ukrainian Museum Updates

As most of the world now knows, the situation in Ukraine has been rapidly changing.  Last week's shocking death toll has led to the disappearance of the President and other ministers, warrants for their arrest, and a new government in the making, but the situation still appears unstable.  As I’ve written and shared posts by others about museums’ reaction to the revolution there, I wanted to share a few updates on museum-related issues.  

In honor of the fallen heroes of Maidan,  Ukrainian museums announced the cancellation of all activities until the end of February, but continued to open their exhibition halls.

Although the collections of the Museum of the City of Kyiv were secure when Ukrainian House was occupied by protestors, evidently after protestors vacated the building the riot police broke into collections storage.  Some objects are missing and damaged, full details are not known.  It's also suspected that the inspection of former government officials houses will reveal objects, from icons to rare books, that have been stolen from museum collections.

The Minister of Culture has been dismissed by Parliament; and a group of artists, activists, and museum professionals have already gathered to propose the qualifications for new candidates and develop of strategies of arts and cultural expression and development, hopefully leading to the  and transformation of the existing system of management of culture. Also this group, the Assembly of Art Professionals is working over legal mechanism and practical  tools to control and influence the ministry of culture activities in the future.

A homemade catapult used by the protestors now bears a sign telling passersby that it is under the protection of the National Museum of Art and will become a part of the collection.  As mentioned in an earlier post, the Ivan Honchar Museum has  started collecting objects, memories and stories.  They  have succeeded in obtaining many important artifacts including an icon painting from the center of Maidan, and  helmets, shields, paintings, posters,  painted bits, gas masks and more.  This initiative was supported by a few other institutions including NGOs, and now the museum staff are working systematically over the project “Museum of Maidan."   

Various other museum and exhibit proposals are being announced, including the idea of an exhibit of Maidan’s doctors and medics at the National Museum of Medicine in Kyiv.  The museum has issued a call for object, images and stories.  

Blue Shield Ukraine was founded last week to ensure the preservation of museums and cultural objects in times of emergency.  This has included a plea for the care of some of the dozens of Lenin statues toppled over the last weeks, as some are listed as monuments of national significance.

One of many proposals for the use of former President Yanukovych’s lavish mansion, private zoo, and golf course, is for a Museum of Corruption. (from the photographs, it could also be the Museum of Bad Taste).   Evidently this museum’s archives could also be extensive as the paper documentation on corrupt purchases and payoffs was also found there.  Journalists, in a unique effort, have banded together to save these papers and eventually, provide a full reporting of how unbelievable sums of money were looted and spent.

Ukraine's story of this revolution is far from finished, but it's been inspiring to see my friends and colleagues move from the barricades to directly to saving important materials and considering big, structural changes in the way museums and culture work.  I'll keep you posted.

Note:  I've not been successful in finding a credit for the photo in this post, but would be happy to add it if informed.

No Bells and Whistles Needed: The Rijksmuseum

Last week I had the chance to visit the Rijksmuseum in its newly restored  and re-opened, glory.  I’d been aware of their great website,  Rijkstudio,making hi-res images available for free, and encouraging people to make imaginative, creative re-use of images from their collection.  So in my head, perhaps, I assumed that technology would be a key part of the visitor experience at the museum itself.

And to my surprise, I discovered exactly the opposite.   There was an audio tour, which I did not take, but what really shined through was the idea that museums are places of discovery, but many of us need a bit of help in our discovery.  We might not need a fully immersive, high tech experience, just a bit of knowledge to start our journey.

The Rijksmuseum provides a low-tech experience, but it's clear that there was a substantial investment in creating the most thoughtful experience possible.  From a visitor perspective, it seems the investment was in thinking, in people time, rather than hardware.  In conversation with another Dutch colleague,  he thought that the museum considers its website as a way to reach people outside of the museum;  but that the experience at the museum needed to be entirely different--a great lesson as we plan new experiences and exhibits.

I saw this attention to detail--to the visitor experience-- in a number of different ways.  First, the introductory room labels are so well written, in both Dutch and English.  They are clear, in the active voice, brief, and informative, giving a “so what?” clarity to each group of objects.  They provide, in effect, the 101 explanation of the topic at hand.

And then, particularly in the Gallery of Honour,  I was amazed at how many people were using the laminated handouts available.  These kinds of handouts exist in many museums—but I have never seen so many people using them.  What made them work?  They were not just repetition of label text, but they were really about looking at the work of art.  At the top of the post and below, are all kinds of people using the handouts.  I saw one family, Italian speakers, using the handouts so they worked even without understanding the written words.  I really liked that they encouraged you to look closely and even to compare paintings next to each other.   They weren't jargon-filled in any way.

I also trailed around several school groups and I also discovered that they took an approach that really encouraged curiousity, without lots of bells and whistles and with a kind of informality that made students feel at home.  Almost every student in every school group had a phone and was taking pictures, and as a group of students moved to a new location, there was a small bit of time permitted for that picture taking (even selfies in front of The Night Watch) and then, down to conversation.   Rather than forbidding photos, this meant that students created memories, but also found time to listen.  Each school docent had a big shoulder box of objects that they also carried--I didn't come across any of them in use, but as you can tell from the image below, they were simple things.

I found the Rijksmuseum a refreshing reminder that I need to bring this same kind of clear-eyed passion and focus on the visitor to all my work with the kind of confidence I saw embodied here. And of course, amidst the 375 million euro renovation, a clear demonstration of, as my colleague Anne Ackerson taught me, "Ideas don't cost money." Plus, as a bonus, what other museum can you ride your bike through!

Upcoming: Broken Relationships and Creativity in Amsterdam

Just in time for Valentine's Day! Uncataloged readers are invited to join Annemarie de Wildt, curator of  the current Amsterdam version of the Museum of Broken Relationships at the Oude Kirk,  and I for a walk-through of the exhibition followed by drinks and conversation about museums and creative practice on Monday,  February 17.

I'm really looking forward to seeing this exhibit and will be fascinated to see what the public call resulted in, and how Annemarie put it together.   And I hope, so will you!  Meet us at the entrance of Oude Kirk at 4:00, and I'll soon post where you can meet us for a drink later.

It's a great chance to dive into the creative work of developing an exhibition, engaging communities in storytelling, and of course, a chance to meet and share with colleagues.  Hope to see you there!