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A few years and a few hundred open mics into that experience, it became obvious that some venues fostered amazing poetry communities, others, not so much. One of my favorite open mics was at the Cantab in Cambridge, MA. Compare that with any number of lousy open mics. The process is incredibly open and equal.
The theme of TEDxSantaCruz was "Open." It gave me a chance to really think about how we have been opening up our museum and what it means for our community. Museums can be incredible catalysts for social change. The first way we open up is by inviting active participation. But they're not there yet.
Last week, I visited the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle. I've long admired this museum for its all-encompassing commitment to community co-creation , and the visit was a kind of pilgrimage to their new site (opened in 2008). I'm always a bit nervous when I visit a museum I love from afar. I avoid them.
I'm working on a section of my book about sharing social objects and am writing about the most common way that visitors share their object experiences in museums: through photographs. Revenue Streams: Museums want to maintain control of sales of "officially sanctioned" images of objects via catalogues and postcards.
--Helene Moglen, professor of literature, UCSC After a year of tinkering, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History is now showing an exhibition, All You Need is Love , that embodies our new direction as an institution. This post focuses on one aspect of the exhibition: its participatory and interactive elements.
The outcome is open-ended and visitor-driven. It invites visitors to make the museum better. When visitors share their brilliance, it brings the museum to life. I believe that every person who walks into our museum has something valuable to share. This is the participatorymuseum, played out loud.
But not enough people care about it anymore, and the museum is fading into disrepair. The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. Many people would look at the world''s oldest mechanized silk mill and say that the core content of the museum is silk. What do you do?
Submitted by Nina Simon, publisher of Museum 2.0. I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. This is a problem for two reasons.
The best participatory projects are useful. Rather than just doing an activity, visitors should be able to contribute in a way that provides a valuable outcome for the institution and the wider museum audience. This week, I saw a great example at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum that blew me away with its power and simplicity.
A new company in New York, Museum Hack , is reinventing the museum tour from the outside in. They give high-energy, interactive tours of the Metropolitan Museum and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The tours are pricey, personalized, NOT affiliated with the museums involved… and very, very popular.
Beck''s project is unusual because he deliberately resurrected a mostly-defunct participatory platform: sheet music for popular songs. In his thoughtful preface to this project, I reconnected with five lessons I''ve learned from participatory projects in museums and cultural sites. Constrain the input, free the output.
In 2009 , students built a participatory exhibit from scratch. Thirteen students produced three projects that layered participatory activities onto an exhibition of artwork from the permanent collection of the Henry Art Gallery. As one participant said, "the museum feels friendly in a way it usually doesn't."
I spent last week working with staff at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) on ways to make this encyclopedic art museum more open to visitor participation across programs, exhibitions, and events. While there, I was lucky to get to experience a highly participatory exhibition that the MIA mounts once a decade: Foot in the Door.
I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences.
Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. A year ago, I put my consultant hat on the shelf and decided to jump into museum management (a sentence I NEVER would have imagined writing five years ago). I'm open to any questions you want to raise in the comments.
I just got home from the Museums and the Web conference in Indianapolis. I’d never attended before and was impressed by many very smart, international people doing radical projects to make museum collections and experiences accessible and participatory online. Instead, I found a standard art museum. Impersonal guards.
A man walks into a museum. Two years ago, we mounted one of our most successful participatory exhibits ever at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History: Memory Jars. Two years later, this project is still one of the most fondly remembered participatory experiences at the museum--by visitors and staff.
This person is writing about a participatory element (the "pastport") that we included in the exhibition Crossing Cultures. People could take the pastports home or hang them, open to a preferred page, on a clothesline. We created a simple wheel with open-ended questions about identity and place, setting it in a lounge area.
As many of you know, I've been working for the past year+ on a book about visitor participation in museums, libraries, science centers, and art galleries. The ParticipatoryMuseum is a practical guide to visitor participation. The ParticipatoryMuseum is an attempt at providing such a resource. Want to buy a book
This is the final segment in a four-part series about writing The ParticipatoryMuseum. This posts explains why and how I self-published The ParticipatoryMuseum. Few publishers was open to Creative Commons licensing and to giving away the content for free online. Why Make it Open? Why Self-Publish?
In the spirit of a popular post written earlier this year , I want to share the behind the scenes on our current almost-museumwide exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Santa Cruz Collects. This exhibition represents a few big shifts for us: We used a more participatory design process. We had some money.
Every day for the past two months, a man has entered the largest gallery in my museum. It also complicates the question of what is acceptable in a museum. If an artist can come into a museum and smash stuff, what does that tell visitors? It is not acceptable to walk into a museum and destroy another artist''s work of art.
This is the second in a four-part series about writing The ParticipatoryMuseum. Several hundred people contributed their opinions, stories, suggestions, and edits to The ParticipatoryMuseum as it was written. Other contributors were collegial and a valuable network of museum wonks has developed."
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. This report is not an end-all; it is the opening for a conversation. Excellent case studies, especially from the performing arts sector.
Visitor-contributed photos surround a collection piece in Carnegie Museum of Art's Oh Snap! It can be incredibly difficult to design a participatory project that involves online and onsite visitor engagement. The museum selected and is featuring 13 works recently added to our photography collection.
Pop-Up Museum [n]: a short-term institution existing in a temporary space. Over the past few years, there have been several fabulous examples of pop-up museums focusing on visitor-generated content. Maria Mortati runs the wonderful SF Mobile Museum , which roams the Bay Area showing mini-exhibits on evocative themes.
"The words we use in attempting to change museum directions matter. Our museum in Santa Cruz has been slammed by those who believe participatory experiences have gone too far. I am glad this conversation is happening and that both museum professionals and local Santa Cruzans are engaged. But we do have ''and.''
This is the third in a four-part series about writing The ParticipatoryMuseum. This post covers my personal process of encouraging--and harnessing--participation in the creation of The ParticipatoryMuseum. As the participatory content review progressed well, I started looking for other ways for people to help.
I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. I''m open to any questions you want to share in the comments. We talk a lot at our museum about empowering our visitors, collaborators, interns, and staff by making space for them to shine. In the meantime, here are some.
Open Community by Lindy Dreyer and Maddie Grant. 9 The ParticipatoryMuseum by Nina Simon. Her book, futuristic look at how social media will change the world, launched the same week as the Networked Nonprofit and we kept passing each other on the book talk circuit. I read the manuscript this summer and provided blurb.
This August/September, I am "rerunning" popular Museum 2.0 Originally posted in April of 2011, just before I hung up my consulting hat for my current job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. I''ve spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums.
I like to ask myself this question periodically, challenging myself to find substantive ways for visitors to contribute to our museum. To that end, our exhibitions are full of participatory elements. And when I think back on the past year, some of the most magical things that have happened at the museum have NOT been designed by us.
Courageous speakers from dozens of countries described bold, participatory projects. El Museo Reimaginado is a collaborative effort of museum professionals in North and South America to explore museums' potential as community catalysts. I find North American museums to be risk-averse. Pioneers of communitario museums.
The runner up winner was Maureen Dowd from OpenMuseum What I propose to do with the library you are offering is read it, try it, share it, and let you know how it works for me, my colleagues and the people we influence. As you know, it takes more than access to create a successful social media network.
During a workshop on museum visitor participation, someone spoke up and objected: "this might work in California, but it will never work in Texas." I saw how participatory techniques were working in diverse museums around the world. I''ve never seen that kind of openness with strangers and cameras in the US or Europe.
This question is a byproduct of the reality that most participatory projects have poorly articulated value. When a participatory activity is designed without a goal in mind, you end up with a bunch of undervalued stuff and nowhere to put it. The project never gets "full" and is always open to new contributors.
As a designer, I'm always trying to ensure that participatory activities, however casual, impact both the participant and the organization. If fundraisers are so keen on relationships, why weren't they the first into social media and participatory projects on behalf of their organizations? What's going on here?
What happens when a formal art museum invites a group of collaborative, participatory artists to be in residence for a year? Will the artists ruin the museum with their plant vacations and coatroom concerts? But for museum and art wonks, it could be. Will the bureaucracy of the institution drown the artists in red tape?
For years, I'd give talks about community participation in museums and cultural institutions, and I'd always get the inevitable question: "but what value does this really have when it comes to dollars and cents?" We're hearing on a daily basis that the museum has a new role in peoples' lives and in the identity of the county.
Recently, I was giving a presentation about participatory techniques at an art museum, when a staff member raised her hand and asked, "Did you have to look really hard to find examples from art museums? Aren't art museums less open to participation than other kinds of museums?" In Your Face ).
I've spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums. The Museum 2.0 In 2008 and 2009, there were many conference sessions and and documents presenting participatory case studies, most notably Wendy Pollock and Kathy McLean's book Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions.
Which of these descriptions exemplifies participatorymuseum practice? Museum invites community members to participate in the development and creation of an exhibit. The exhibit opens. In the first case, you are making the design process participatory. In the second, you make the product participatory.
I'm thrilled to share this brilliant guest post by Marilyn Russell, Curator of Education at the Carnegie Museum of Art. In a straightforward way, Marilyn explains how her team developed a participatory project to improve engagement in a gallery with an awkward entry. It is great to feel more of a part of the museum!" "All
It's my second week as the Executive Director at The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz, CA, and boy is my everything tired. Film festival openings. There's just too much involved in the first few months of taking over a struggling museum to realistically imagine that I can also make enough fun stuff happen to keep me satisfied.
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