Museum 2.0

APRIL 14, 2011

As of May 2, I will be the executive director of the Museum of Art & History at McPherson Center in Santa Cruz, CA (here's the press release ). Because of the increased workload I expect in the months to come, as well as the likely possibility that we will start a Museum of Art & History blog, I'm lowering my Museum 2.0

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History Museum Arts Consultant 55

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. Yes, this activity is political. From a design perspective, this activity is scaffolded for success.

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Participatory Museum Action Experiment 44

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2014

The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. In the fall of 2013, they launched Re:Make , an ambitious project to redevelop the museum, live, on the floor, with a mix of staff, guest artists, and community members. Or factory life in the 1700s. It''s serious.

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Museum Product Participatory Community 53

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. Capital projects are sexy and exciting, but they are also finite and physical.

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Public Activities Active Activism 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Visitors bond and bridge through participatory experiences at MAH. To apply the results of my analysis to produce a community-driven program design specifically for implementation at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (the MAH). You can download and read the full version of my thesis here.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 16, 2013

Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. This past weekend, in conjunction with our exhibition about Ze Frank's current participatory project, A Show , we hosted " Ze Frank Weekend "--a quickie summer camp of workshops, activities, presentations, and lots of hugging.

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Reflection Community Museum Participatory 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

JANUARY 11, 2012

We just started to try to live up to that vision, partnership by partnership, activity by activity. It also feels amazing to see some of my theories validated in this way--that giving people the opportunity to actively participate does really transform the way they see the institution and themselves. It feels pretty amazing.

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Audience Museum Participatory History 47

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. They also had activities.

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Story Participatory Museum History 47

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

OCTOBER 25, 2011

Good Pitch is an effort that brings documentary filmmakers together with a wide range of partners in distribution, financing and outreach for activism. With a project like Granito, the film is only the beginning and serves as an invitation for everyone to share their story. But that is only the jumping off point for the inquiry.

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Guatemala Movie Artist Award 93

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

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

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

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."

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Design Participatory Learning Instruction 45

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

This simple participatory project invites visitors to contribute their own small objects in little alcoves in our bathrooms. We have seven participatory elements in our current exhibitions on three floors, ranging from voting to talkback walls to an in-depth "make a memory jar" craft activity.

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Museum Difference Examples 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

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

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

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

DECEMBER 7, 2017

This small, startup cultural project in Rotterdam works directly and intimately with community members to share their stories. On a beautiful location in a former jazz-era night club, a committed team works on storytelling activities to bring different communities in the city together, and contribute to a happier, more engaged city.

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Storytelling Story Photography Museum 39

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

It's a working document, and we mean to put it to work planning new projects with our partners. Here's the short version (read the whole thing here ): The Museum of Art & History is committed to creating exhibitions that inspire our diverse audiences to engage deeply with contemporary art and Santa Cruz County history.

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Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 14, 2009

For this reason, I spoke specifically about how to make dream projects possible at real institutions. Pick apart your mission statement, and look for the words and phrases you can connect your project to. What new projects might allow you to better reflect those aspirations? Or you can read this condensed version of the talk.

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Project Museum Teen North Carolina 22

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 23, 2014

They give high-energy, interactive tours of the Metropolitan Museum and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). We interacted with the art and with each other through dynamic photo challenges, kinesthetic activities, and conversations. A new company in New York, Museum Hack , is reinventing the museum tour from the outside in.

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Museum Interview New York Interaction 55

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

The Lost Childhoods exhibition is a platform for 100+ partners to share their stories, artwork, ideas, projects, volunteer opportunities, and events. This argument became one of the foundations of The Participatory Museum. This is the participatory platform model. Our staff could never produce all this activity on our own.

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Platform Impact Childhood Museum 31

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

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

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

Last week I was honored to be a counselor at Museum Camp , an annual professional development event hosted by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH). Each year they bring together diverse, passionate people for a sleep-away camp for adults where they learn together through active, creative workshops and activities.

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Causes Change Museum Social 50

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

There are many participatory kiosks that are functional black holes--visitors make videos or draw pictures or write stories, drop them in a slot, and. Such participatory activities would be seen as a waste of time. This sounds ridiculous, but it’s the way many museums approach participatory projects.

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Participatory Museum Rate YouTube 35

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

In this post, she writes about Experimonth, an intriguing set of crowd-sourced projects that connect scientists with research participants in surprising ways. The project blew away our expectations. game guestpost participatory museum Unusual Projects and Influences' Experimonth started out as play.

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51

Museum 2.0

MAY 2, 2012

Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. We went through a dramatic financial turnaround and redefined our relationship with our community through a series of experimental participatory projects and new programmatic approaches.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 15, 2014

National education organizations and individual teachers are developing relevant curriculum resources, including the #FergusonSyllabus project initiated by Dr. Marcia Chatelain. Colleges are addressing greater cultural and racial understanding in various courses. There is hardly a community in the U.S.

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Museum Blogger Cleveland Missouri 52

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

JULY 31, 2013

You''re in for a treat, with upcoming posts on creativity, collections management, elitism, science play, permanent participatory galleries, partnering with underserved teens, magic vests, and more. Sometimes, this has led to an unreasonable amount of stress for an entirely extra-curricular activity. As the readership for Museum 2.0

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Museum Participatory Reflection Conference 35

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

OCTOBER 29, 2009

Last week, Jim Richardson and I hosted MuseumNext , a 24-hour workshop for museum professionals focused on bringing new, wild museum projects into the world. Wild idea" sessions , featuring six dream projects, some already in motion, others firmly ensconsed in their creators' heads. Facilitator bits.

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Facilitation Reflection Museum Participatory 32

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

FEBRUARY 20, 2013

The majority of our public programs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History are created and produced through community collaborations. C3 topics have ranged from exhibition development, community needs, outreach programs, our Loyalty Lab project, and family programs. Can't wait to hear what you think. Make time for them.

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Collaboration Community Tools Museum 55