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

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

Admittedly, many of these posts exist in a bubble of inter-referencing (which I am only exacerbating with this post): Clay Lord weighs in on the data about audience representation in Bay Area theater, and the ways that a majority culture can oppress its own value systems on others.

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Arts Question North Carolina Museum 48

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

OCTOBER 8, 2014

This question launches Howard Mansfield''s fascinating book about historic restoration, The Same Ax, Twice. How does this question play out in museums? At the 2013 American Alliance of Museums annual conference, a group of exhibition designers explored authenticity in a session called Is it Real? Does he have the same ax?

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Artist Museum Washington Arts 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

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Is that a Zen graffiti artist? Marnie asks a great question about the organizational structures needed to actualize abundance: So, if we are building organizations on the abundance of goodwill, energy and eager hands — and if we are thinking of ourselves, organizationally, as platforms for change rather than agents for change.

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Artist Structure Museum Nonprofit 96

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

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

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

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

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

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

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 27, 2011

At a recent talk in Chicago, an audience member asked a question. His foundation supports a private museum that is rarely open to the public. The people who want that content may not be in the same city as the museum nor even aware of the museum's holdings. This is museum digitization 101. but people aren't coming.

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Wikipedia Content Museum Artist 54

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

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!"

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Museum Twitter Open San Francisco 46

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

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

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 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

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

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

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. 1 is the weaker choice.

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Professional Artist Museum Arts 20

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. There was Click! What tools do we use?

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Audience Music Artist Museum 38

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JUNE 14, 2010

In his question to create the storage battery, he conducted 10,000 experiments before arriving at a method that worked. 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.

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Social Media Media San Jose Social 99

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. Now Friday nights at the museum have become something people can count on, and they keep growing.

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Museum History Arts Artist 47

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

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

CauseVox

JUNE 9, 2021

Let people ask questions, share their experiences, or get involved. Reach out to a talented volunteer or local artist to lead the class, and purchases the necessary supplies. Have your lead artist jump on and run the class on Zoom. The Brooklyn Museum let a local artist take over their Instagram for a day.

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Ideas Online Fundraising Charity 98

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

JUNE 22, 2011

I've often argued that art and history museums should adopt this approach and encourage visitors to explore their potential as artists or historians, not just audiences for content. But now I've started to question the value of this message. experiences in museums. What does it feel like to take care of dying people?

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Artist Museum Raise History 48

Museum 2.0

MARCH 25, 2008

People ask questions. I'd love to see a museum offer temporary tattoos instead of stickers at entry. I expected it to be both physically and culturally uncomfortable, something like going to a dentist in a Harley garage. They are the kind of people we can't even get to the museum door, let alone through it.

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Museum Arts Artist Culture 23

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