Museum 2.0

MARCH 4, 2015

This week marks five years since the book The Participatory Museum was first released. I thought the pinnacle of participatory practice was an exhibit that could inspire collective visitor action without facilitation. Over the past four years, I''ve been running a small regional art and history museum in Santa Cruz, CA.

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Participatory Museum Empowerment Facilitation 20

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

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 26, 2015

I also wanted to experiment with translating some facilitation techniques I use for face-to-face meetings (like sticky note facilitation ) to virtual meetings. Designing A Participatory Hook for a Virtual Meeting. How have you changed your organization’s meeting culture to be better? Design must comes first.

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Facilitation Virtual Arts Participatory 50

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? Here are three of my favorites.

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Arts Museum Artist Tucson 45

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 25, 2018

For the past five years, each summer, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has hosted MuseumCamp. MuseumCamp is a professional development experience that is part retreat, part unconference, part adult summer camp. Develop compelling, powerful participatory offers and promises for your prospective partners.

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Community Participatory Museum Registration 31

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

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Visitors bond and bridge through participatory experiences at MAH. There were times when coordinating a fire art festival while researching social capital theory made me want to burn my computer. Both emphasize museums reaching out into the community to support, understand and experience what the community is already doing.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 7, 2010

Nina has written a fantastic book engagement called The Participatory Museum. A third argues that the project won’t be truly participatory unless users get to define what content is sought in the first place. I’ve been using these participatory categories to talk about how we’d like users to participate in different projects.

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

Museum 2.0

JULY 10, 2018

Priya Parker's wonderful book The Art of Gathering shares the core principles of how to drive. Here are my three big takeaways from The Art of Gathering : Hosting is an exercise in courageous leadership. Creating event-specific rules can level the playing field, make the implicit explicit, and create a specific culture for the event.

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Hosting Arts Help Museum 31

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. 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! Yes and no.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

APRIL 15, 2015

"The arts are future-making." I wrote this down when Deborah Cullinan said it at a meeting of arts leaders about a year ago. We were discussing the potential for cultural organizations to have significant impact across communities: on planning, health, education, and quality of life. A fitness trail for urban life.

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San Francisco Arts Design Marketing 20

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

JANUARY 11, 2012

For years, I'd give talks about community participation in museums and cultural institutions, and I'd always get the inevitable question: "but what value does this really have when it comes to dollars and cents?" but I didn't have numbers to back it up. They all have in concert, and they build on each other.

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Audience Museum Participatory History 47

Have Fun - Do Good

NOVEMBER 2, 2006

It is an art form completely dependent upon the creative potential of each audience member in relation to the events on stage. Without a receiver, there is no experience. Over a month ago I told Emily from the Nonprofit Blog Exchange that I would participate in the most recent exchange and write about The Artful Manager.

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Arts Web Wisconsin Social 40

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 4, 2010

It's rare that a participatory museum project is more than a one-shot affair. Wikipedia Loves Art, Take One The first version of Wikipedia Loves Art first took place in February 2009. In contrast, the Wikimedians were focused on making cultural content digitally available online using as open a licensing structure as possible.

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Wikipedia Arts Museum Images 40

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JANUARY 18, 2011

Establish local networks of individuals and organizations using social media to help build stronger organizations and more participatory societies. Experience with Middle Eastern Culture and no experience. Trainer the Trainers: Beth Kanter, Mohamad Najem, Jessica Dherre, and Mary Joyce. Some Connection Points: Learning.

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Network Build Yemen Morocco 95

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

OCTOBER 25, 2011

Note From Beth: Yesterday, I attended a convening called “ Beyond Dynamic Adaptability ” for arts organizations about cultural participation in the arts. Every Memory Matters is expected to go live in January, 2012, when Granito is broadcast nationally on the PBS series POV.

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Guatemala Movie Artist Award 93

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

This post shares some of the most interesting questions I've heard throughout these experiences. 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. Yes and no.

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

Proposals involve sculpture, performance, participatory-projects, videos, and installation that use and respond to the museum’s collection. This past July, artist Guillermo Gómez proposed to restore a piece of art. Both objects and art-objects would be part of this continuing transformation and evolution.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

JUNE 1, 2010

Like many museum and library professionals, I am enamored of the idea of cultural institutions as “third places” – public venues for informal, peaceable, social engagement outside of home or work. I closed this book wondering: are cultural institutions really interested in being third places? Facebook discussion board here.

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Place Discussion Culture Museum 41

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 31, 2012

Ever wish for a low-cost, energizing professional development experience where you can work intensely with diverse colleagues in a risk-tolerant environment? day event at which participants work in teams with pre-selected permanent collection objects to create an exhibition full of intriguing, unusual, risky experiences.

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Professional Develop Museum Arts 35

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 9, 2011

It's a little living room in a lobby area that invites people to lounge on comfortable chairs, leaf through magazines and books related to art and Santa Cruz history, and generally hang out. The area that houses the Creativity Lounge also shows art. Lisa and I have fundamentally different ideas of what a "good" museum experience is.

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Museum Arts History Columbus 51

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 15, 2012

We've gotten a little more organized at The Museum of Art & History , and we've now released opportunities for summer internships. This could be a serious research opportunity for someone interested in impact assessment, community attitudes towards the arts, and the role museums can play in transforming communities.

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Museum Participatory Arts Attitude 34

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. It is incredibly rewarding work.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

They spoke powerfully and painfully about their experiences. In it, I argued that museums could give up control of the visitor experience while still maintaining (a new kind of) power. Museums could make the platforms for those experiences. This argument became one of the foundations of The Participatory Museum.

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Platform Impact Childhood Museum 31

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 3, 2009

On Friday, I offered a participatory design workshop for Seattle-area museum professionals ( slides here ). We concluded by sharing the tough questions each of us struggl es with in applying participatory design techniques to museum practice. questions that draw from personal experience, not abstraction. speculative (what if?

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Technique Question Design Develop 50

Museum 2.0

MARCH 14, 2017

This is the second installation 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. The MAH fundamentally has two jobs: we bring art and history out into our community, and we invite our community in.

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Public Museum Arts History 27

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. We work hard to name and build our culture in many ways. Institutional culture is something I never really understood before and I am now completely fascinated by how it can shape work. Naming our goals and our culture.

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Museum Director History Teen 49

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 18, 2012

Major research studies by the NEA and others demonstrate that adults well into their 60s are highly motivated to participate actively with cultural experiences. It's possible--likely even--that today's adults are more motivated by interactive experiences than generations past. They're going to trivia night.

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Interaction Design Museum Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2012

Our curator writes labels about licking the art. And I talked about some of the challenges of finding the right income and expense models for a museum that operates more like a community center than a traditional cultural institution. Merilee Mostov and the Columbus Museum of Art. Participatory art and co-creation on the rise.

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Reflection Columbus Museum Participatory 43

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 11, 2006

The above powerpoint is from 1999 and excerpted from day-long workshops I used to lead when I worked at NYFA and design and ran a program called "KIT: Knowledge in Technology - Technology Planning for Arts Organizations." What happens when you don't have the time to experiment or play so you feel comfortable?

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Social Network Network Guide Participatory 50

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

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. I promise--after this post, I'll stop writing about this. actively sought out community needs to respond to.

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Museum History Arts Artist 47

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

Do you consider yourself an "activist" for your organization, avocation, or art form? Sure, I admire cultural organizations that have a strong mission to change education or diversify access or transform the role of art in everyday life, but I'm an insider. It's a distraction from their experience at our venue.

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Product Build Museum Arts 51

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

Doing this talk was an incredible experience, both because of the warm and energized response I received at the event and because the format forced me to hone in on what's most important to me these days and share it in a succinct way. The theme of TEDxSantaCruz was "Open."

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Museum Open Charlotte Participatory 55

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

AUGUST 29, 2006

I met Janet Salmons many years ago while I working on various arts and technology projects in New York State for the New York Foundation for the Arts. I started in the Cornell University Center for Theatre Arts , where I founded and directed two programs: Cornell Theatre Outreach and the Community-Based Arts Project.

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Arts Community Online Intergenerational 50

Museum 2.0

APRIL 4, 2012

You have to care before you want to act, and caring--about the earth, about civil rights, about art--is not a given. I was reminded of this "care, then act" framework when I saw a recent story about a student's experience at a powerful issue-driven exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, Half the Sky.

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Story Participatory Museum History 47