Museum 2.0

MARCH 29, 2011

Last month, I learned about a fabulous, simple participatory experiment called “Case by Case” at the San Diego Museum of Natural History that uses visitor feedback to develop more effective object labels. I hope you are as inspired as I am by this project! Our problem is this. Where to now?

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San Diego History Museum Participatory 55

Museum 2.0

APRIL 2, 2014

There are many artistic projects that offer a template for participation, whether a printed play, an orchestral score, or a visual artwork that involves an instructional set (from community murals to Sol LeWitt). One of the things I always focus on in participatory exhibit design is ensuring that everyone has the same tools to work with.

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Participatory Arts Music Learning 52

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 3, 2019

I love alternative history novels. I was thinking I’d do a few alternative histories of museums for the first post of the last month of the decade. As I imagined a world without the many museum tech projects of the decade, I felt inherently sad about the imagining away the successes that friends and colleagues have enjoying.

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Museum Work Social Media History 21

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 13, 2011

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.

Participatory 44

Participatory Museum Action Experiment 44

Museum 2.0

JULY 11, 2012

I get excited about a lot of things in my work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. That's how I felt when artist Ze Frank got in touch to talk about a potential museum exhibition to explore a physical site/substantiation for his current online video project, A Show (s ee minute 2:20, above).

Museum 45

Museum Participatory Artist History 45

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

Every day for the past two months, a man has entered the largest gallery in my museum. His project, Is It Necessary? 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? But art museums are coming back from the dead.

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Museum Arts Artist Participatory 50

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Visitors bond and bridge through participatory experiences at MAH. I chose to focus my thesis on Community and Civic Engagement in Museum Programs. The purpose of my thesis was two-fold: To research and analyze community and civic engagement practices, methods, theories and examples in other museum programs.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

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.

Participatory 44

Participatory Museum History International 44

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

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.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

This morning, I checked in on the Pocket Museums on our museum's ground floor. This simple participatory project invites visitors to contribute their own small objects in little alcoves in our bathrooms. The Pocket Museum activity could be more appropriate for women, many of whom carry bags or purses.

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Museum Difference Examples Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 15, 2014

Gretchen Jennings convened a group of bloggers and colleagues online to develop a statement about museums'' responsibilities and opportunities in response to the events in Ferguson, Cleveland and Staten Island. Museums are a part of this educational and cultural network. Where do museums fit in? Here is our statement.

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Museum Blogger Cleveland Missouri 52

Museum 2.0

MAY 2, 2012

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.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. When I look back at some recent projects that I''m most excited about (like this teen program ), I realize that I had very little to do with their conception or execution. Participatory work can be very labor-intensive.

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Museum Director History Teen 49

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 8, 2014

It''s not a great photo of people enjoying the museum. At any given time, we are on a hunter/gatherer mission for an upcoming project at our museum. Last summer it was beach chairs for a history exhibit. But on another level, the wishlist is the most participatory part of the newsletter. It''s not what you think.

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Newsletter Museum Participatory History 35

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

One of the greatest gifts of my babymoon is the opportunity to share the Museum 2.0 First up is Beck Tench, a "simplifier, illustrator, story teller, and technologist" working at the Museum of Life & Science in Durham, NC. As a person who works for a science museum, I work in an environment that supports play.

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51

Museum 2.0

APRIL 11, 2012

Once there was a project to design a national history museum in the Netherlands. The team developed some highly innovative digital projects and approaches to history. Three years later, at the end of 2011, the project was canceled. I chose this book for our next Museum 2.0 What happened?

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Museum North America Netherlands History 34

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

NOVEMBER 30, 2011

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.

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Museum Denver Netherlands Classroom 55

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 25, 2018

For the past five years, each summer, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has hosted MuseumCamp. Come share your projects, challenges, questions, wild successes and epic failures with creative changemakers from around the world. Develop compelling, powerful participatory offers and promises for your prospective partners.

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Community Participatory Museum Registration 31

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 7, 2010

Nina has written a fantastic book engagement called The Participatory Museum. Imagine sitting around a conference table planning an upcoming project that involves user-generated content. A third argues that the project won’t be truly participatory unless users get to define what content is sought in the first place.

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

George Scheer is the director and co-founder of Elsewhere Collective, a fascinating "living museum" in a former thrift store in Greensboro, NC. In this post, George grapples with the challenges of balancing the care for a museum collection with that of contemporary artists-in-residence who are constantly reinterpreting it.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

Me with a friend As I keep saying, I’ve been to a few museums of late. In reflecting on the sample, I’ve made some broad reflections on museum workers and visitors. Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. People go to museums for leisure.)

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Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 16, 2013

It's not every day that a visitor buys pizza for everyone in the museum. Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. It was an opportunity for people who participate with Ze Frank's projects online to come together in real space and connect with him and with each other.

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Reflection Community Museum Participatory 43

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 13, 2010

On October 20, a young woman named Kate will move into Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry and live there for a month. This post is not about the Month at the Museum concept or implementation. Instead, this post focuses on a fascinating aspect of Month at the Museum: the video applications. That will come later.

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Museum Contest Video Chicago 34

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 11, 2012

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.

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Audience Museum Participatory History 47

Museum 2.0

MAY 10, 2011

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. I'm also making the 2011-2012 budget, getting to know our terrific staff and volunteers, and starting up a few small participatory projects to launch us into being a more community-driven institution.

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Museum History Participatory Arts 53

Museum 2.0

APRIL 4, 2012

Museums have been grappling with this question for years ( here's a 2007 roundup of such projects ), most aggressively in zoos and natural history museums where staff hope to inspire conservation and in history/concept museums that focus on civic engagement and activism.

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Story Participatory Museum History 47

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 24, 2012

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.

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Platform Open Museum Participatory 41

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

The book of the same title that he edited is rocking my world, both as a museum professional who cares about inclusion and as a new mother. Reducing intergroup bias isn''t a primary goal in all of our work, but in some projects, it''s of particular interest. But how will we know if we are actually achieving our goals?

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

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.

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Last month, MAH curator Susan Hillhouse and I sat down and wrote an exhibition philosophy for our museum. It's a working document, and we mean to put it to work planning new projects with our partners. This philosophy steers our work, and it means that we do things a little differently than some other museums and galleries.

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Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

Our county board of supervisors had brought their official meeting to the museum. The Lost Childhoods exhibition is a platform for 100+ partners to share their stories, artwork, ideas, projects, volunteer opportunities, and events. Museums could make the platforms for those experiences. This is the participatory platform model.

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Platform Impact Childhood Museum 31

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 11, 2015

This summer, we''re offering some amazing museum internships, as well as MuseumCamp : a weekend-long professional development experience that is part retreat, part conference, part summer camp. INTERNSHIPS If you want to join us in Santa Cruz for more professional learning, consider an internship at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.

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Participatory Community Museum History 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 14, 2017

This is the second installation in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square , a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz. The MAH fundamentally has two jobs: we bring art and history out into our community, and we invite our community in.

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Public Museum Arts History 27

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 15, 2012

We've gotten a little more organized at The Museum of Art & History , and we've now released opportunities for summer internships. These are unpaid part-time and full-time opportunities to help design public programs, develop new uses for the museum, perform visitor research, and pursue unusual projects.

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Museum Participatory Arts Attitude 34

Museum 2.0

APRIL 10, 2013

The weather is hopefully the least of the reasons you should want to come work with us here at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Participatory Performing Artist-in-Residence program. So start dreaming about the sun and exciting museum experiences. Museum of Art and History Quick Hits'

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San Francisco Participatory Artist Museum 23

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 7, 2017

I first read about Story House Belvédère on Jasper Visser’s excellent blog, The Museum of the Future. This small, startup cultural project in Rotterdam works directly and intimately with community members to share their stories. The neighborhood is a mix of people and communities by design and has a rich social history.

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Storytelling Story Photography Museum 39