Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 8, 2011

Last month, the Irvine Foundation put out a new report, Getting In On the Act , about participatory arts practice and new frameworks for audience engagement. It is framed as a kind of study guide; pop-outs provide questions that tease out opportunities and tensions in the narrative.

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Participatory Arts Report Case Study 50

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?" I thought the pinnacle of participatory practice was an exhibit that could inspire collective visitor action without facilitation.

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Participatory Museum Empowerment Facilitation 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 18, 2018

You can now read all the chapters in The Art of Relevance for free online. You can still buy The Art of Relevance as a paperback, ebook, or audiobook--but you can also read any chapter, any time, online. You can also post comments on any chapter, adding your reactions and questions to the published content. Or how Food What?!

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Arts Free Chapter Cleveland 40

Museum 2.0

JUNE 25, 2014

A man walks into a museum. Two years ago, we mounted one of our most successful participatory exhibits ever at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History: Memory Jars. Two years later, this project is still one of the most fondly remembered participatory experiences at the museum--by visitors and staff.

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Participatory Evaluation Project Museum 52

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.

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Denver Museum Arts Collaboration 35

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. I chose to focus my thesis on Community and Civic Engagement in Museum Programs.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2014

But not enough people care about it anymore, and the museum is fading into disrepair. The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. Many people would look at the world''s oldest mechanized silk mill and say that the core content of the museum is silk.

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Museum Product Participatory Community 53

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 18, 2011

We’ve been doing a little experiment at our museum with labels. The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum recently loaned us some fabulous surfboards that tell the co-mingled history of surfing and redwood trees in Santa Cruz. We decided to approach the label-writing for these boards in a participatory way. how did they ride the plank?” "how

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Participatory San Diego Museum History 48

Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2010

As many of you know, I've been working for the past year+ on a book about visitor participation in museums, libraries, science centers, and art galleries. The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to visitor participation. The Participatory Museum is an attempt at providing such a resource.

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Participatory Museum Vietnam Netherlands 30

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 1, 2014

Recently, we''ve been talking at our museum about techniques for capturing compelling audio/video content with visitors. It made me dig up this 2011 interview with Tina Olsen (then at the Portland Art Museum) about their extraordinary Object Stories project. We ended up with a gallery in the museum instead.

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Museum Story Project Design 43

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 15, 2014

Gretchen Jennings convened a group of bloggers and colleagues online to develop a statement about museums'' responsibilities and opportunities in response to the events in Ferguson, Cleveland and Staten Island. Museums are a part of this educational and cultural network. Schools and other arts organizations are rising to the challenge.

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Museum Blogger Cleveland Missouri 52

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 22, 2012

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, we take our interns seriously, give them real responsibility, creative challenges, and meaningful work opportunities. I'm particularly excited about two internships that relate to participatory exhibition design. First, there is the Participatory Exhibit Design Internship.

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Participatory Museum Photography Unconference 37

Museum 2.0

JULY 11, 2012

I get excited about a lot of things in my work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. That's how I felt when artist Ze Frank got in touch to talk about a potential museum exhibition to explore a physical site/substantiation for his current online video project, A Show (s ee minute 2:20, above).

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Museum Participatory Artist History 45

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

In the spirit of a popular post written earlier this year , I want to share the behind the scenes on our current almost-museumwide exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Santa Cruz Collects. The content focuses on the question of WHY we collect and how our collections reflect our individual and community identities.

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Participatory Museum History International 44

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. I''m open to any questions you want to share in the comments. We talk a lot at our museum about empowering our visitors, collaborators, interns, and staff by making space for them to shine. In the meantime, here are some.

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Museum Director History Teen 49

Connection Cafe

APRIL 21, 2014

Working with arts organizations there are often concern that your constituent stories aren’t as impactful. million likes surely someone touting the effect of music and art on their lives can get just as many. Participatory fundraising often starts with events that allow people to get involved causally with a small time commitment.

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Arts Story Org Personal 37

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 10, 2014

Scene: a regional workshop on arts engagement. A funder is speaking with conviction about the fact that her foundation is focusing their arts grantmaking strategy on engagement. Engaging people actively in the arts. Any questions? One, from a museum director. No arts experience hits them all. Core Museum 2.0

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Participatory Museum Arts Culture 55

Museum 2.0

MAY 2, 2012

Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. A year ago, I put my consultant hat on the shelf and decided to jump into museum management (a sentence I NEVER would have imagined writing five years ago). I'm open to any questions you want to raise in the comments.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

Museum 2.0

APRIL 20, 2009

I just got home from the Museums and the Web conference in Indianapolis. I’d never attended before and was impressed by many very smart, international people doing radical projects to make museum collections and experiences accessible and participatory online. Instead, I found a standard art museum. Lovely grounds.

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Participatory Museum Web Indianapolis 35

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

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

JANUARY 25, 2018

For the past five years, each summer, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has hosted MuseumCamp. Come share your projects, challenges, questions, wild successes and epic failures with creative changemakers from around the world. Develop compelling, powerful participatory offers and promises for your prospective partners.

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Community Participatory Museum Registration 31

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 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? Direct questioning. But how will we know if we are actually achieving our goals?

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 3, 2009

Submitted by Nina Simon, publisher of Museum 2.0 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. too teacherly).

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Technique Question Design Develop 50

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 23, 2008

I'm prepping for a workshop on Social Media and wanted do a round up of recent compelling examples of arts organizations using social media strategies and tools. I've covered arts organizations and social media here and there over the past three years and last winter co-wrote a cover story article with Rebecca Krause-Hardie for ArtsReach.

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Arts Social Media Examples Artist 74

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. Scientists design the test questions, steer the data collection, and analyze the results. Science has an answer.

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

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?" In Your Face ).

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Museum Difference Participatory History 29

Museum 2.0

JUNE 18, 2014

And it''s got me thinking about how we build energy and audience for the arts in this country. Barry Hessenius recently wrote a blog post questioning the theory that more art into the school day will increase and bolster future adult audiences for art experiences. If kids were checking out art supplies from the library.

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Arts Build United States Audience 47

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 16, 2010

I spent last week in the glorious country of Taiwan, hiking, eating, and working with museum professionals and graduate students at a conference hosted at the Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts. It's not topic-specific; I've done these exercises with art, history, science, and children's museums to useful effect.

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Museum Technique Taiwan Social 41

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?" We're hearing on a daily basis that the museum has a new role in peoples' lives and in the identity of the county.

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Audience Museum Participatory History 47

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

APRIL 7, 2009

Which of these descriptions exemplifies participatory museum practice? Museum invites community members to participate in the development and creation of an exhibit. But the difference between the two examples teases out a problem in differentiating "participatory design" from "design for participation."

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Participatory Design Difference Museum 27

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 4, 2010

It's rare that a participatory museum project is more than a one-shot affair. But next month, Britain Loves Wikipedia will commence--the third instance of a strange and fascinating collaborative project between museums and the Wikipedia community (Wikimedians). I hope you'll share your thoughts in the comments.

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Wikipedia Arts Museum Images 40

Museum 2.0

APRIL 28, 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 struggles with in applying participatory design techniques to museum practice. I love this question. First, what do the right questions look like?

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Technique Design Question Develop 52

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 22, 2010

And this leads to a basic question, one I haven't figured out: how do you encourage visitors to participate when they speak different languages? While there are some kinds of participation that are not language-based like making art or voting, most participation is lingual.

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Museum Work North America Language 38

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

George is a stranger I met last week at SFMOMA’s new show, The Art of Participation:1950 to Now. The Art of Participation provides a retrospective on participatory art as well as presenting opportunities for visitors to engage in contemporary (“now”) works. Here are two pictures. The first one is me. DO message clearly.

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Participatory Arts Design Museum 20