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

FEBRUARY 4, 2016

Photo by CLoé Zarifian, MAH Photo Intern We're working with a guest curator, Wes Modes , on an upcoming experimental project at our museum. Wes is an artist, and this is his first time running a museum exhibition development process. I said to him: I can't really answer that question. Developing new staff policies.

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Participatory Question Work Artist 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 13, 2013

So this week, I want to honor this conversation with links to a few of the great posts and a couple other sources that inform the way I think about diversity and engagement. Jada is passionate about supporting the future of African-American heritage institutions and working to diversify the museum field as a whole.

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Arts Question North Carolina Museum 48

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2016

They wanted to help museums and galleries across the UK make significant, sustained changes in the ways they engage community partners and visitors as participants in their work. The result, Our Museum , is an extraordinary funding program with a focus on community participation. didn't mince words. Here are my three top takeaways.

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Museum Participatory Resource Place 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 27, 2013

Detail on distribution of artworks in the Tate collection by birthdate of artists, visualized by Florian Krautli. What does "big data" look like for museums? The Tate is providing metadata about artworks and artists in its collection--over 70,000 artworks in all. These visualizations are fun. They are beautiful.

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Open Data Artist Museum 55

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 28, 2013

Earlier in 2013, I was amazed to visit one of the new “Studio” spaces at the Denver Art Museum. The Denver Art Museum is no stranger to community collaborations, but we’ve been dipping in our toe a little more deeply when it comes to developing permanent participatory installations. Who are all of these people? What inspires them?

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Denver Museum Arts Collaboration 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

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

AUGUST 1, 2012

That contemporary art museum is on the front of the LA Times again," she said. I can't believe that an art museum can be front page news in LA for days." He was mandated to turn the ship around financially and to expand the reach of the museum in the community. The discussion then shifted to the overall direction of the museum.

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Artist Museum Arts Director 52

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. This post shares some of the most interesting questions I've heard throughout these experiences. Feel free to add your own questions and answers in the comments! BROAD QUESTIONS ABOUT AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION 1.

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

MARCH 4, 2015

This week marks five years since the book The Participatory Museum was first released. Across the museum field, the questions about visitor participation have gone from "what?" Over the past four years, I''ve been running a small regional art and history museum in Santa Cruz, CA. and "why?" to "how?".

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Participatory Museum Empowerment Facilitation 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 30, 2008

Dear Museums on Twitter, Thanks for experimenting in a new and largely uncharted online environment. So here is a list of suggestions that hopefully will improve the way your museum thinks about using Twitter. Or it's rainy so you suggest I visit the museum? I am a museum of Native Cultures and Art!" You could do better.

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Museum Twitter Open San Francisco 46

Museum 2.0

MAY 22, 2013

Negotiation" implies a respectful relationship between institution (or artist) and user. Sometimes the negotiation can be exploited for artistic means. The theater is dark and the artist breaks the fourth wall and asks for conversation. The museum invites art-making in the elevator. How can we make it a win-win?

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Game Artist Museum Participatory 40

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JUNE 23, 2011

My colleague, Devon Smith, a self-described data nerd who loves benchmarking pointed out this glorious example from the museum world from Sean Redmond , a Web developer at the Guggenheim. I didn’t understand it until I read the conversation on Twitter. Certainly, some subtle peer pressure to do your homework.

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Benchmark Network Learning API 95

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. My biggest question for these social psychologists is this: how do we apply their lessons to our work? I realize that I may sound like a college freshman who just discovered Psych 101, but heck.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

MAY 27, 2015

I have an unusual education for the director of an art & history museum: a degree in electrical engineering. You'll burrow down rabbit holes of gorgeous videos, cerebral reading lists, and provocative artist talks. I've filled some gaps in my cultural education through a career in museums: reading, looking, exploring, listening.

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Course Artist Museum Learning 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 11, 2015

I''m not sure how well this is working for us in museum-land. As our culture explodes in embracing creativity across the professional/amateur spectrum, museums have two choices: we can sharpen the line. If done poorly (uncritically), it turns the museum into yet another place to watch cat videos. we can embrace the embrace. #1

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Professional Artist Museum Arts 20

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. 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. We don't have to convince them that it's their museum.

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Platform Open Museum Participatory 41

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 3, 2012

But Vi doesn't work in a science museum. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, who are well known in museums for their excellent Smarthistory website and podcasts. the way the best museums do. Does this mean Khan Academy is competitive with museums? She would be the best science center educator ever.

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Learning Free Museum Online 55

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 23, 2008

One of the best projects that illustrates the basic idea of Web2.0 - listening and conversation and stakeholders creating their own experience with your organization - comes from the Brooklyn Museum of Art. All evaluations are private; all artists are unnamed. They are sensitive to the artists who are being judged.

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Arts Social Media Examples Artist 74

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). Beck talks about this in the context of learning to play music as a young artist. There are twenty songs in Song Reader.

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Participatory Arts Music Learning 52

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 17, 2014

This is a tricky question in the nonprofit arts world--and probably in every field. If you don''t know the language, the players, the conversations in that subset of the field, you won''t even know where to look. Full disclosure: my museum is profiled in the latter.) There are some industry blogs and twitter feeds.

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Examples Artist Arts Profile 37

Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2007

But I’d been scribbling notes for an art museum label post for awhile, and then yesterday, the NY Times had a review of a new show at MOMA, Comic Abstraction. The collection is disaggregated, grouped by floor (Painting and Sculpture 1) rather than artist, movement, time period, or geography. MOMA has standard art museum labels.

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Arts Museum Artist Audio 30

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2009

Is it a conversation? In almost all cases, museums assure me that they want to be in conversation, that they want to be responsive, that they want to “really hear” what people think. In one case, the institution jumped into the conversation and converted an ugly situation into a positive community outcome.

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Conversation Museum Artist Minneapolis 21

Museum 2.0

MAY 13, 2015

Visitors in front of the African Elephant Diorama at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC photo) This guest post was written by Karen Wise, Vice President, Education and Exhibits at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “I Familiarity may breed contempt in some contexts, but apparently not in museums.

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Los Angeles Museum History Artist 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 15, 2015

But I couldn''t fully imagine how a museum or an arts center could embody it. Over three days, 52 artist teams erected experimental projects along San Francisco''s biggest thoroughfare. The result was a true experiment in designing the future--right here, right now--with artists and planners and civic leaders at the helm together.

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San Francisco Arts Design Marketing 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 3, 2017

This is the ninth 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. Working with creative people taught me to think like an artist: observe, explore, dive in, look out. The question is not, “what do I want to do?”

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Develop Artist Participatory Blended 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 25, 2008

I love carrying a social object with me that opens up casual conversation with strangers on the street. People ask questions. I'd love to see a museum offer temporary tattoos instead of stickers at entry. They are the kind of people we can't even get to the museum door, let alone through it. People tell stories.

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Museum Arts Artist Culture 23

Museum 2.0

JULY 12, 2011

A museum holds a free program in a semi-public space. This is the question I've been toying with this week. This is the question I've been toying with this week. Last weekend, my museum did a little pilot of a new program, Downward Draw. Ready for a math problem? Fifteen people engage in the prescribed activities.

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Participatory Museum Measure Activities 41

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 8, 2007

This week, with the gracious help of Eric Siegel of the New York Hall of Science , Museum 2.0 In the spirit of that question, Museum 2.0 We are solicitin g your feedback and thoughts on these concepts, using VoiceThread, a very cool application that allows you to literally add your voice to the conversation.

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Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2012

Last week, I was in Minneapolis for the American Association of Museums annual meeting. Kathleen McLean led a terrific session called "Dangerous Ridiculous" about risk-taking in museums. Interestingly, at my museum, our team is naturally better at ridiculous than we are at dangerous. I found this idea really powerful.

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Reflection Columbus Museum Participatory 43

Museum 2.0

JULY 20, 2007

I read recently about an awesome project at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2001, Collecting Our Thoughts, in which visitors were invited to write the labels for an art exhibition (more another time). But it's a lot of fun, and it could be a great way to construct a personalized takeaway from a museum experience. Pick a plural noun.

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Museum Game San Jose Artist 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

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. In my experience, museum professionals aren’t big reality TV viewers. Just like live reality TV, Top 40 felt like a risk at times.

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Museum Chart Picture Arts 23

Museum 2.0

MAY 3, 2011

Lots of museums these days have video comment booths to invite visitors to tell their stories, but how many of those booths really deliver high-impact content? Last week, I talked with Tina Olsen, Director of Education and Public Programs at the Portland Art Museum, about their extraordinary Object Stories project.

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Story Interview Museum Audio 53

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 4, 2010

He is Deputy Director for the Contemporary Jewish Museum , and an expert in using social media in a museum setting. We were lucky enough to have a fabulous space for the workshop in the Contemporary Jewish Museum. I ask certain questions to help identify these individuals. . I said yes.

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Social Media Reflection Learning Social 94

Museum 2.0

MAY 31, 2017

This is the eleventh 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. We had 2,000 t-shirts to give away, 850 balls to drop, and over a hundred artists, accordionists, salsa dancers, taiko drummers, and bubble ladies ready to go.

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Open Brain Press Museum 37

Museum 2.0

APRIL 19, 2016

Our museum has already had several requests to lend our support to bond measures that will be on the ballot in 2016. We reviewed a handful of existing policies from other institutions (local and national, museums and not), discussed their attributes, and started drafting/stealing/reworking with a Google doc. How did we create it?

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Policy Advocacy Create Museum 20