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. These are unpaid, part-time internships in which you will make a significant contribution to our work, and at the same time, learn a heck of a lot about participatory design and community engagement.

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San Francisco Participatory Artist Museum 23

Museum 2.0

MARCH 20, 2013

This week, the Santa Cruz Weekly's cover story is about my museum (the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History ) and the work we have done to make it a more participatory, community-centered place over the past two years. Perry describes me as the "conductor" of a community-programmed orchestra.

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Story Georgia Participatory Museum 31

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 25, 2015

For the past two years, I''ve been working on a project to activate the concrete space adjacent to our museum as a vibrant, community plaza. We are hiring a temporary contract curator to activate the plaza this summer with 25+ cultural events. creative placemaking design Museum of Art and History programs public space'

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Public Activities Active Activism 20

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

DECEMBER 28, 2011

We've been offering a host of participatory and interactive experiences at the Museum of Art & History this season. I loved Jasper Visser's list of 30 "do's" for designing participatory projects earlier this month. Different activities need different levels of materials to appear "open for business." It's just fun.

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Design Participatory Learning Instruction 45

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

In particular, we want exhibition collaborators--artists, researchers, historians, collectors--to understand our goals and how we intend to steer the exhibition development process. We see our visitors as partners in actively interpreting and exploring exhibition content. But we weren't explicitly making those goals public.

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Museum Artist Participatory History 38

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

OCTOBER 30, 2013

Earlier this fall, I read this headline: "Stanford study: Participation in a cultural activity may reduce prejudice." I eagerly read about a new social psychology research study in which whites, Asians, and Latinos engaged in a simple collaborative activity--making a music video together. I wanted to know more.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 18, 2012

When talking about active audience engagement with friends in the museum field, I often hear one frustrated question: how can we get adults to participate? The common museum knowledge on this issue is that adults are timid, that we have lost some of the wonder, impulsiveness, and active creativity of childhood days.

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Interaction Design Museum Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 24, 2012

To that end, our exhibitions are full of participatory elements. We actively seek participation and develop structured opportunities for visitors to collaborate with us. the most powerful evidence of it happening is when our active role as designers/facilitators becomes invisible.

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Platform Open Museum Participatory 41

Museum 2.0

JULY 17, 2012

But we've just compiled all our attendance data for the past year at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (our fiscal year ends on June 30), and several people have written to me asking for the numbers behind our turnaround. actively sought out community needs to respond to. design new programs with a focus on history.

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Museum History Arts Artist 47

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? History Museums OPPORTUNITIES - History museums are in many ways the best-suited for visitor participation.

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Museum Difference Participatory History 29

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. With this in mind, when we produce participatory experiences, while our impetus is to serve our power users with extra content or “check for understanding” interactives, there are so many other ways to use interactives.

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Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 14, 2011

It was Friday, a few hours before the drawing activity, and my colleagues were worried that it would be too challenging for people to draw the icons and landmarks selected. We often avoid drawing as a community art activity because visitors can get really judgmental of their own abilities, and our staff just felt that this might be too hard.

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Participatory Classroom Help Artist 43

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

MARCH 21, 2012

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. In the history gallery, we have some blended props and artifacts, and it's rarely clear what is and is not ok to touch. Engagement with local artists.

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Museum Denver Artist Milwaukee 49

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 9, 2011

She is a fabulous and thoughtful artist. It's a little living room in a lobby area that invites people to lounge on comfortable chairs, leaf through magazines and books related to art and Santa Cruz history, and generally hang out. You can learn more about her work here. The area that houses the Creativity Lounge also shows art.

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Museum Arts History Columbus 51

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 15, 2014

Artists and arts organizations are contributing their spaces and their creative energies. Yet our posts contain similar phrases such as “21st century museums,” “changing museum paradigms,” “inclusiveness,” “co-curation,” “participatory” and “the museum as forum.” There is hardly a community in the U.S.

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Museum Blogger Cleveland Missouri 52

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

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 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. Over the past three years, we''ve tripled our attendance, doubled our budget, and, most importantly, established deep and diverse relationships with community members, artists, and organizations across Santa Cruz County.

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Museum Director History Teen 49

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. He''ll be able to watch how certain activities evolve into coordination and what kinds of histories the people who most easily coordinate have in common.

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2012

--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.

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Participatory Museum Blackboard Game 51

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

JULY 7, 2010

Most of my work contracts involve a conversation that goes something like this: "We want to find ways to make our institution more participatory and lively." It requires trading a certain history for an uncertain future--a nerve-wracking prospect no matter the situation. Fabulous!" "But This is incredibly scary.

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Audience Museum Oakland Participatory 40

Museum 2.0

MAY 3, 2011

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. We invited a cross-section of artists, filmmakers, and advertisers to join us for a think tank. How and why did Object Stories come to be? So what did you do next?

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Story Interview Museum Audio 53

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

MAY 8, 2013

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History , we''re approaching this challenge through a different lens: social bridging. Museum of Art and History programs social bridging' It can lead to parallel programming: bike night for hipsters, bee night for hippies, family night for kiddies. And rarely the twain shall meet.

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Museum Social Arts History 55

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 6, 2012

In a straightforward way, Marilyn explains how her team developed a participatory project to improve engagement in a gallery with an awkward entry. We also wanted to: Inspire visitors to engage in active looking: notice, reflect, react, and respond to the works of art and to the interdisciplinary quality of the exhibition.

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Museum Arts Problem Design 45

Museum 2.0

JULY 18, 2017

This exhibition is a big accomplishment for us because it incorporates multiple ways we push boundaries at the MAH: we co-designed it with 100+ community partners (C3) , including artists, foster youth, and youth advocates, with youth voices driving the project from big idea to install to programming.

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Action Childhood Artist Info 44

Museum 2.0

JULY 24, 2012

When we talk about making museums or performing arts organizations more participatory and dynamic, those changes are often seen as threatening to the traditional arts experience. What if historic arts experiences were actually a lot more participatory? But what if the "traditional" arts experiences is a myth?

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Greece Arts Industry Participatory 51