Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

George is a stranger I met last week at SFMOMA’s new show, The Art of Participation:1950 to Now. The Art of Participation provides a retrospective on participatory art as well as presenting opportunities for visitors to engage in contemporary (“now”) works. Here are two pictures. The first one is me. DO message clearly.

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Participatory Arts Design Museum 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 10, 2015

Last week, the international press lit up with a story from Paris : the city is removing the "love locks" from the Pont des Arts bridge. And so, one of the most successful, accidental, and fraught participatory projects of the past decade comes to an end. The "love locks" are not a project with an institutional or artistic director.

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Participatory Project Artist Instruction 20

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

We have witnessed and experienced incredible moments of transformation: homeless people and history buffs working together on historic restoration, graffiti artists and knitters collaborating on new artistic projects, visitors from different backgrounds making collages, or sculptures, or dance performances together.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

APRIL 26, 2018

One that has found remarkable success is California’s Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Audiences of all backgrounds found ways to connect with museums as it presented exhibitions with the help of foster youth, migrant farmers, roller-derby girls, mushroom hunters, surfers and incarcerated artists, among others.

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Audience Washington Museum Intergenerational 49

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 1, 2014

It made me dig up this 2011 interview with Tina Olsen (then at the Portland Art Museum) about their extraordinary Object Stories project. They designed a participatory project that delivers a compelling end product for onsite and online visitors… and they learned some unexpected lessons along the way. So what did you do next?

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Museum Story Project Design 43

Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2012

Art, however, does not come to museums pre-hardened. At the museum of art and history where I work, we are grappling with the question of how to help people enjoy themselves while keeping the art and artifacts safe. The level of touching, especially of art, has increased. Engagement with local artists.

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Museum Denver Artist Milwaukee 49

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 24, 2012

To that end, our exhibitions are full of participatory elements. Riding the art couch through downtown Santa Cruz with two visitors and a dog while blasting the Jackson 5 was one of the highlights of my year. Visitors can comment on how we can improve or what they would like to see. Happening Couch. Here's a picture of it in action.

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Platform Open Museum Participatory 41

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. Lumin at Detroit Institute of Art Now on to the interactives…I’ve been thinking a great deal about the function of interactives in museums. This activity went with an artist’s work where she told of immigration stories.

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Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

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. 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.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 9, 2010

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?" I was surprised by her question.

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Museum Difference Participatory History 29

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 18, 2012

There are many participatory experiences that appeal primarily to adults, and they are designed distinctly for adults. There's a huge difference between the edgy, DIY beauty of Candy Chang 's participatory urban artworks and the dayglow colors, exclamatory language , and preschool fonts of most museum interactives.

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Interaction Design Museum Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

I've seen this line of questioning almost completely disappear in the past two years due to many research studies and reports on the value and rise of participation, but in 2006-7, social media and participatory culture was still seen as nascent (and possibly a passing fad). In 2008, the conversation started shifting to "how" and "what."

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

MARCH 28, 2012

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), we've started experimenting with a "community first" approach to program development. There are many amazing community representatives from business, arts, education, and social services who connect us to powerful ideas and partners. It was an evening meeting with beer and chips.

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Program Community Design Museum 49

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 20, 2013

The majority of our public programs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History are created and produced through community collaborations. It’s not unusual for us to meet with an environmental activist, a balloon artist, a farmer, and the Mayor of Santa Cruz all in one day. Large and small (or no) followings.

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Collaboration Community Tools Museum 55

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

We ran with it and have since generated data about decision-making, cooperation, competition and negotiation for scientists (and also some artists) to play with. For example: We worked with a local psychologist to create an implicit associations-based game called "Smart, Hot, Honest or Not?" as a part of Experimonth: Race.

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51

Museum 2.0

APRIL 16, 2008

I've written before about the inspiring work that the Brooklyn Museum of Art is doing with their community-focused efforts. Click is an exhibition process in three parts: The Museum solicited photographs from artists via an open call on their website, Facebook group, Flickr groups, and outreach to Brooklyn-based arts organizations.

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Museum Participatory Artist Arts 24

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

The chairs were cast-off art, reclaimed as art, available for people to take off the hooks and use. They were there for artist talks. What kind of an art institution is this? It encourages process-driven performances and art projects. It takes the kind of risks that a university art gallery should take.

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Process Share Philadelphia Arts 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 29, 2015

These are the slides and notes for the talk I gave at the American Alliance of Museums conference on Monday, April 27 about the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. When I became the director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History four years ago, I took this work with me. We exist for people who live in Santa Cruz County.

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Build Community Museum Artist 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 3, 2011

Last week, I talked with Tina Olsen, Director of Education and Public Programs at the Portland Art Museum, about their extraordinary Object Stories project. They designed a participatory project that delivers a compelling end product for onsite and online visitors… and they made some unexpected decisions along the way. Who was there?”

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Story Interview Museum Audio 53

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 20, 2010

On September 10, the Whitney Museum of American Art started offering a new membership called "Curate Your Own," in which members select one of five specialized "buckets" of benefits in addition to core admission and discount benefits. People want to experience art in quite individual ways. The "insiders" are another example.

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Interview Director Museum Arts 46

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 22, 2012

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? Will the bureaucracy of the institution drown the artists in red tape? No, this is not a reality TV show.

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Artist Museum Project Public 39

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

What happens when you combine reality TV tactics with a traditional art collection? This guest post, written by Philippa Tinsley, Collections Manager for the Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum (UK), describes the innovative Top 40 exhibition they mounted in the summer of 2009.

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Museum Chart Picture Arts 23

Museum 2.0

MAY 5, 2009

Visitor Co-Created Museum Experiences This session was a dream for me, one that brought together instigators of three participatory exhibit projects: MN150 (Kate Roberts), Click! which followed a very strict formula that frustrated some participants who wanted to be treated like artists, not contributors to a data experiment.

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Slides Participatory Museum Children 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 7, 2010

I had a healthy second life as a slam poet, and I loved the world of artists and performance. I also learned that the best money in museums for someone who's starting out is in art modeling. I survived the first half of 2003 financially on art modeling and poetry gigs.

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Museum Boston Participatory Job 52

Museum 2.0

JUNE 10, 2010

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.

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Participatory Museum Arts Artist 46

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 29, 2010

Want to experience art in a populist, energized, industrial/urban setting? Artprize , now in its second year, is a city-wide art festival with a $250,000 top prize to be awarded to the work that receives the most public votes. The artists come from all over (though many are based in the Midwest), and anyone can enter.

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Arts Experiment Artist Social 52

Museum 2.0

JULY 1, 2008

We rarely offer alcoholic beverages, comfortable seating, background music, or free admission to go with the art, lectures, and interactive experiences now available in many hybrid retail spaces. One of the most interesting examples of this is the recent evangelical megachurch trend. From the Web 2.0

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Museum Library Participatory Wikipedia 20

Have Fun - Do Good

JULY 31, 2009

We're taking the art of freelancing for writers, and making it much more transparent and much more public. The other two things that happened was that I started working a lot in participatory journalism. I'm a big believer in participatory journalism, or citizen journalism, whatever you want to call it.

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Interview Fund Report Community 40

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 6, 2012

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. Reassert the "forum"?

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Museum Arts Problem Design 45

Museum 2.0

JUNE 24, 2015

The pilots showed us visitors were looking for a personal connection with our staff, wanted to talk about the art on view, and wanted that dialogue to be dynamic and speak to their needs directly. Our visitors were telling us they wanted personal connection and they wanted to talk about art. Goal 2: Looking closer at works of art.

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Museum Arts Interview Test 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 18, 2012

At the adjacent table, my colleague Stacey Garcia was meeting with a local artist, Kyle Lane-McKinley, to talk about an upcoming project. This is a tiny example of social bridging--people making connections to others who are not like them, who have different backgrounds, ages, races, professions, etc. Next time, everyone was talking.

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Community Teen Build Social 42

Museum 2.0

JUNE 15, 2009

In Praise of the Post-It There's lots of post-it-powered art on the web these days (like this and this ). The previous exhibit in this space was a very provocative art exhibit about sexual violence, and yet in our brief site survey in April we saw almost no one stop to look at the art. Not so for the post-its.

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Advice Museum Facilitation Student 31