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

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

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 Artist Remix Professional 47

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Writing my masters thesis for Gothenburg University’s International Museum Studies program while also working four days a week as the Director of Community Programs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History this spring was certainly a challenge but also an incredible opportunity.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 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

JULY 10, 2013

Here in Santa Cruz, we''re brushing off our tents and lining up the counselor whistles for Hack the Museum Camp , a 2.5 We have 75 campers here from around the world who will be working in teams to develop exhibits based on artifacts from our permanent collection that challenge museum conventions and traditional exhibit design practice.

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Museum Artist Project Team 48

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 26, 2010

I've been spending time recently interviewing people who run unusual cultural and learning venues. From a museum perspective, I think there's a lot to learn from these venues' business models, approach to collecting and exhibiting work, and connection with their audiences. Machine Project (Los Angeles, CA).

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Culture Alternative St. Louis Los Angeles 49

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

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

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

JULY 17, 2013

Last week, my museum hosted Hack the Museum Camp , a 2.5 day adventure in which teams of adults--75 people, of whom about half are museum professionals, half creative folks of various stripes--developed an experimental exhibition around our permanent collection in our largest gallery.

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Museum Arts History Professional 49

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Is that a Zen graffiti artist? She uses the word “curate&# which makes me imagine nonprofits as museum curators. Museum curators have expertise in a particular area of art, they know the ecosystem around the art – the artists, the patrons, other collectors, and other museum curators interested in that art form.

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Artist Structure Museum Nonprofit 96

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

Earlier this fall, I read this headline: "Stanford study: Participation in a cultural activity may reduce prejudice." When the music video was focused on Mexican culture, the researchers found that the white and Asian participants demonstrated a decrease in prejudice against Latinos, both immediately after the activity and six months later.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

AFP Blog

APRIL 18, 2013

Brooklyn Museum: Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum  Join us at #table17 : Starting Friday, Brooklyn-based artist Man Bartlett will take over these two feeds and create a project that speaks to how everyone can bring something to the table.

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Blogger Museum Community Artist 24

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

OCTOBER 12, 2011

This week, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy released a new paper by Holly Sidford called Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change. We may say that we want to support programming and cultural opportunities for low-income and non-white people, but that's not where the money is going. The title may sound innocuous.

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Arts Fund Artist Houston 52

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

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

Museum 2.0

APRIL 23, 2014

Museums, Politics, and Power is a new blog that lives up to its name. Elsewhere in podcast-land, Radiolab did a fascinating piece about cultural appropriation and gate-keeping in hip hop music. Some serious parallels to curating exhibitions and performances, especially with living artists. Petersburg. Sound familiar?

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Belarus Boston Ukraine Sweden 29

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. How can people--staff, volunteers, community members--help make this project better?

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Participatory Question Work Artist 20

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

FEBRUARY 1, 2012

Last week, Douglas McLellan of artsJournal ran a multi-vocal forum on the relationship between arts organizations and audiences, asking: In this age of self expression and information overload, do our artists and arts organizations need to lead more or learn to follow their communities more?

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Arts Museum Artist Tucson 45

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. Everything old is new again.

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Participatory Arts Music Learning 52

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 29, 2009

It's my "artistic rendering" of one of the most inspirational participatory projects I know of--the Bibliotheek Haarlem Oost book drops. Read the original post on this project for more info. Too often, cultural institutions design participatory projects that require visitors to learn new tools or make sacrifices to contribute.

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Participatory Project Library Netherlands 40

Tech Soup

DECEMBER 12, 2011

project will focus on apps for arts organizations, with a practical. artist's influences and the exhibit, in the artist's own words. For example, YBCA's audiences loved having access to artists' own unfiltered words. The Dallas Museum. museum, expanding access to the mobile tours even further.

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Arts Omaha Organization Artist 63

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

For years, I've been fascinated and a bit perplexed by the Elsewhere Collaborative , a thrift store turned artists' studio/living museum in Greensboro, North Carolina. Over the past seven years, this exploration has been undertaken by a staff of artists and more than 35 creators each year participating in our residency program.

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Collaboration North Carolina Museum Artist 36

Museum 2.0

MARCH 28, 2012

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), we've started experimenting with a "community first" approach to program development. We don't want to wear them out on standing meetings or ongoing projects that may not draw on their talents. Moving from community needs out to possible projects/collaborators.

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Program Community Design Museum 49

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. Projects interactives. There was Click!

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Audience Music Artist Museum 38

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

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

OCTOBER 31, 2012

Three of them are being hosted at my museum , and one at a mystery location. You Can't Do That in Museums Camp - July 10-12, 2013. In July of 2013, the MAH will host our first You Can't Do That in Museums Camp (or better name to be suggested by you), inviting 80 creative people to collaborate on an experimental exhibition.

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Professional Develop Museum Arts 35

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

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

When you find a bar with your favorite song on the jukebox, or a museum room that feels like your grandmother's living room, you suddenly feel a strong affinity and are able to see yourself reflected in the space. It may be great for a natural refuge to remain hidden, but that sounds like a disaster for a restaurant or museum.

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Museum Los Angeles San Francisco Model 34

Museum 2.0

JUNE 19, 2013

He casts the whole idea of a great jazz jam in the context of the tragedy of the commons--like a poetry open mic, the jazz club is a community whose experience is fabulous or awful depending on the extent to the culture cultivates and enforces a healthy participatory process. This is an issue we are actively grappling with at our museum.

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Participatory Process Open Proposal 51