Connection Cafe

SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

After our complete closure on March 16, 2020 due to COVID-19 , our museum staff was busier than ever preparing to navigate these uncharted times. Download the free eBook from Blackbaud and Cuseum: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving & Thriving As A Cultural Organization. Co-Author: Carey Calhoon.

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Museum Arts New Hampshire Guidelines 31

Bloomerang

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

This guide is a great place to start to generate ideas for items and packages that will captivate your audience at your next auction event. Concert tickets Buying concert tickets has become like a competitive sport, as passionate fans flood ticket platforms to see their favorite artist live.

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Artist Classes Arts Local 72

Museum 2.0

MARCH 6, 2013

I write this piece in good faith about the organizations I know best: museums. The vast majority of American museums are institutions of white privilege. They present masterpieces by white male artists and innovations by white male scientists. I never saw comparable adjectives used in the European art labels at the museum.

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Museum St. Louis Arts Artist 55

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 15, 2014

When basketball players are offering more cogent commentary on racial issues than cultural institutions, you know we have a cultural relevance problem. Museums are a part of this educational and cultural network. Colleges are addressing greater cultural and racial understanding in various courses.

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Museum Blogger Cleveland Missouri 52

Museum 2.0

JUNE 27, 2012

A year ago, I wrote a post speculating about whether events (institutionally-produced programs) might be a primary driver for people to attend museums, with exhibitions being secondary. Many museums, big and small, thrive on events. At our museum, about 68% of casual visitors (non-school tours) attended through events this year.

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Museum Arts Dallas History 53

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 2.0

OCTOBER 17, 2012

When I started this blog in 2006, I made a multi-media introduction to the concept of "museum 2.0" Venue as content platform instead of content provider: the museum becomes a stage on which professionals and amateurs can curate, interpret, and remix artifacts and information. The museum gets better the more people use it.

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Museum 2.0

JUNE 8, 2010

This is the second installment of a book discussion about Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place. This guest post was written by Rebecca Lawrence, Museum Educator, Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center in Pennsylvania. You can join the conversation in the blog comments, or on the Museum 2.0

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Place Museum Discussion Pennsylvania 27

Museum 2.0

APRIL 14, 2011

Dear Museum 2.0 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 ). I am closing down my consulting business at the end of April, but the Museum 2.0 Here are a few things that make the MAH an exciting museum to me: It's small.

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History Museum Arts Consultant 55

Museum 2.0

APRIL 14, 2020

With many nations hit hard by the virus and events cancelled, the epidemic has already levied a major economic, cultural, and spiritual impact on Indian Country. Yet within days of the first shelter-in-place orders, I received Facebook invitations to groups such as Social Distance Powwow and Quarantine Dance Specials 2020.

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Digital Hunger Artist Museum 48

Museum 2.0

APRIL 26, 2018

The Washington Post covered the MAH's transformation as part of an article about museums engaging new audiences. The whole second half of the article was dedicated to our work: Smaller museums can be especially scrappy in finding ways to connect with the community. It’s something that any museum, of any size, can work toward.

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Audience Washington Museum Intergenerational 49

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. Elsewhere is at the top of my list of places I would most like to visit. This past July, artist Guillermo Gómez proposed to restore a piece of art.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

JULY 26, 2010

I've been spending time recently interviewing people who run unusual cultural and learning venues. I'm fascinated by these places because of their ability to attract diverse audiences to idiosyncratic experiences, and I'm curious how they stay afloat. One of my favorite places for a long time now. Skill-sharing free schools.

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Culture Alternative St. Louis Los Angeles 49

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 15, 2014

At the Inclusive Museum conference this summer, Dr. Rick West introduced this question through a tale of two museums. He described the National Museum of the American Indian--where he was founding director--as a multicultural institution, celebrating the diversity of Native peoples throughout the Americas.

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Museum Sweden Culture Celebrate 50

NTEN

JUNE 21, 2011

The speakers for this panel include: Tracy Fullerton - Electronics Arts Game Innovation Lab Ruth Cohen - American Museum of natural History Elaine Charnov - The NY Public Library Jason Eppink - Museum of the Moving Image Syed Salahuddin - Babycastles Elaine Cohen: The New York Public Library 100 Years of the flagship library in New York.

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Game Culture Change Museum 52

Museum 2.0

JULY 1, 2011

I've now been the Director of The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz for two months. But the point is that the MAH, like just about every other museum in the known universe, was content to define the museum experience as something removed from the outside world, a rarefied church-like space of refined artistic reflection.

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Museum History Arts Work 31

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

JANUARY 27, 2011

His foundation supports a private museum that is rarely open to the public. While there are many ways for museums to reach new audiences, when it comes to specialized knowledge, it's often a question of reaching the niche who care deeply about German watches from 1822 or the evolutionary shift in raccoon striping over time.

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Wikipedia Content Museum Artist 54

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 2, 2015

One of the most powerful books I read while doing research was We are Coming Home: Repatriation and the Restoration of Blackfoot Cultural Confidence ( read it free here , great appreciation to Bob Janes for sharing it with us). The Blackfoot mostly live in what is now the province of Alberta, where the Glenbow Museum resides.

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Museum National Story Difference 20

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

CauseVox

JUNE 9, 2021

With the majority of daily activities taking place over the web, it’s no surprise that we’ve also observed a rise in virtual fundraising. You can easily setup a place for them to do this using our online fundraising software. Reach out to a talented volunteer or local artist to lead the class, and purchases the necessary supplies.

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Ideas Online Fundraising Charity 98

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2013

TCG is the industry association for non-profit theaters, the way AAM is for museums. Given TCG''s multi-year Audience (R)evolution initiative, I took the opportunity to write a new talk about what revolution has looked like at our small museum in Santa Cruz. We heard again and again that the museum was cold and uncomfortable.

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Museum Learning History Arts 55

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. They talked about community building.

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Build Community Museum Artist 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

I had specifically asked about places that feel welcoming, and the responses were about exclusive experiences. Exclusive places reinforce our identities powerfully. You never say, "this place is so me" when talking about a generic public space. Secret places are a pleasure to discover and share. What's going on here?

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Museum Los Angeles San Francisco Model 34

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 9, 2011

She is a fabulous and thoughtful artist. Two weeks ago, we inaugurated a Creativity Lounge on the third floor of our museum. The same day we opened the Creativity Lounge, we opened new exhibitions throughout the building, including a paper collage show in the 3rd floor lobby by local artist Lisa Hochstein.

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Museum Arts History Columbus 51

Museum 2.0

MAY 18, 2011

Jason Beaubien was reporting on the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, the gleaming new art museum built as a "gift to Mexico" by the world's richest man, Carlos Slim. The news report , strangely, focused on the question of whether the Soumaya Museum is a rich man's indulgence or a truly "worthy" cultural institution.

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Classes Mexico Museum Columbus 55

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. An inspiration.

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Professional Artist Museum Arts 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 29, 2013

Any place with people working different schedules in different parts of the building suffers from it. At our museum, we''ve gotten better at communication up from the front desk to the office. People use it to share surprises in the archives, inspiring meetings with artists, dead birds in the lobby, and free food in the fridge.

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Facebook Museum Participatory Adopt 55

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

SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

Last Friday night, my museum hosted a fabulous (in my biased opinion) event called Race Through Time. When Friday night rolled around, we did see a crowd that skewed decidedly younger and hipper than our standard museum audience. Late night mixers at museums for young adults. Performances just for teens. There were families.

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Audience Develop Museum History 52

Museum 2.0

MARCH 25, 2008

Which is more inclusive: the place where staff curse constantly or the place where they ignore you? Which has more social impact: the place frequented by educated art lovers or the one populated by blue collar joes? I'd love to see a museum offer temporary tattoos instead of stickers at entry. but that's for another post.

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Museum Arts Artist Culture 23

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JUNE 14, 2010

The whole idea got started a year ago when James Leventhal who is Deputy Director for the Contemporary Jewish Museum asked me if I would design some trainings for the local arts community. Contemporary Jewish Museum. The Joe Goode Dance Company spoke about the challenges of getting an artistic director to Tweet.

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Social Media Media San Jose Social 99

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2010

When it comes to user participation in cultural institutions and the arts, it's popular to launch projects that pit visitors against experts. at the Brooklyn Museum, where you could track how people of various levels of art expertise rated crowd-contributed photographs. Tags: Museums Engaging in 2.0 There was Click!

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Audience Music Artist Museum 38

Museum 2.0

JUNE 19, 2013

Slots on the list were first-come first-served, though newbies were usually placed early in the set so they would have a gentle onramp (and so seasoned poets could skip the kiddie pool if they chose to). If there are implied rules or idiosyncrasies (and in the best cultures, there are), they are not completely shrouded in mystery.

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Participatory Process Open Proposal 51

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

The conventional wisdom on museum memberships is that they are "one size fits many" programs whose primary benefits are free entrance to the museum and insider access to exhibition openings. But what about all the other people who love your museum? Want to know how the Brooklyn Museum is answering this question?

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Museum Audience Program Artist 24

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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