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. This exhibition represents a few big shifts for us: We used a more participatory design process. We had some money.

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Participatory Museum History International 44

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

Development works when you are responsive to the donor's needs, not just presenting your own." Anyone who has worked in fundraising has likely heard these missives again and again. As a designer, I'm always trying to ensure that participatory activities, however casual, impact both the participant and the organization.

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Participatory Practice Fundraising Relationship 39

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 10, 2012

What happens when you let visitors vote on art? Let's look at the statistics from three big participatory projects that wrapped up recently. Each of these invited members of the public to vote on art in a way that had substantive consequences--big cash prizes awarded, prestige granted, exhibitions offered.

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Arts Artist Museum Award 47

Museum 2.0

JUNE 18, 2014

People at work with the games running in the background on their computers. And it''s got me thinking about how we build energy and audience for the arts in this country. Like Barry, I feel that more art in schools is always better. I got into museum work because learning happens in many places and many ways.

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Arts Build United States Audience 47

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2016

They wanted to help museums and galleries across the UK make significant, sustained changes in the ways they engage community partners and visitors as participants in their work. While there was evidence of plenty of community engagement work across museums and galleries, most of it was funded project by project.

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Museum Participatory Resource Place 20

Deborah Elizabeth Finn

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

Deciding Together Shifting Power and Resources Through Participatory Grantmaking. Empowering Communities: Participatory Grantmakers Say We Must Go beyond Feedback. Solutions Privilege: How privilege shapes the expectations of solutions, and why it’s bad for our work addressing systemic injustice. Here are 6 ways it could go.

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Philanthropy Open Participatory Evaluation 98

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

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

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

OCTOBER 1, 2014

It made me dig up this 2011 interview with Tina Olsen (then at the Portland Art Museum) about their extraordinary Object Stories project. They designed a participatory project that delivers a compelling end product for onsite and online visitors… and they learned some unexpected lessons along the way.

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Museum Story Project Design 43

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. Want to buy a book ?

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Participatory Museum Vietnam Netherlands 30

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 7, 2010

I'm a huge fan of work and the way she thinks - especially after she road the Scare House ride on the Santa Cruz boardwalk with me and did a brilliant reflection on its design. Nina has written a fantastic book engagement called The Participatory Museum. One colleague suggests that users should be able to contribute original work.

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

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. No one wants to do crappy work. PARTICIPATORY: can people get involved or contribute to it?

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Participatory Museum Arts Culture 55

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 23, 2018

Two years ago, our team at the MAH embarked on our most challenging co-creation project ever. We partnered with foster youth, former foster youth, artists, and community advocates to create an exhibition that used art to spark action on issues facing foster youth. This project wove together many different participatory threads.

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Issue Childhood Community Create 45

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

I am just starting to dive into the science of intergroup relations (psychology-speak for social bridging), and I greatly appreciate these individuals who are working to popularize and open up what could otherwise be esoteric research. My biggest question for these social psychologists is this: how do we apply their lessons to our work?

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

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. 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

JULY 23, 2014

The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. In the fall of 2013, they launched Re:Make , an ambitious project to redevelop the museum, live, on the floor, with a mix of staff, guest artists, and community members. Or factory life in the 1700s. It''s serious.

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Museum Product Participatory Community 53

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

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. Furthermore, how can museums and communities work together to share strengths in the community?

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

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

DECEMBER 3, 2019

As I imagined a world without the many museum tech projects of the decade, I felt inherently sad about the imagining away the successes that friends and colleagues have enjoying. As I imagined a world without Nina Simon ’s Participatory Museum , I felt sad about all the visitors whose voices (and post-it note comments) weren’t honored.

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Museum Work Social Media History 21

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.

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Participatory Arts Design Museum 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 20, 2009

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. How does their work relate to their physical institutions? How does their work relate to their physical institutions? Lovely grounds.

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Participatory Museum Web Indianapolis 35

Museum 2.0

APRIL 7, 2009

Which of these descriptions exemplifies participatory museum practice? But the difference between the two examples teases out a problem in differentiating "participatory design" from "design for participation." In the first case, you are making the design process participatory. In the second, you make the product participatory.

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Participatory Design Difference Museum 27

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. Deborah''s vision for the arts leading the way to stronger future inspired me. But I couldn''t fully imagine how a museum or an arts center could embody it. A fitness trail for urban life.

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San Francisco Arts Design Marketing 20

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. 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.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 22, 2010

While there are some kinds of participation that are not language-based like making art or voting, most participation is lingual. Many fabulous participatory projects--like the Johnny Cash Project or the Art Gallery of Ontario's " In Your Face "--don't require language. What have you seen work?

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Museum Work North America Language 38

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

Every Saturday, the curatorial team at Elsewhere , a living museum in downtown Greensboro, NC, reviews the project proposals of its artists-in-residence. Proposals involve sculpture, performance, participatory-projects, videos, and installation that use and respond to the museum’s collection.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

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. With a project like Granito, the film is only the beginning and serves as an invitation for everyone to share their story.

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Guatemala Movie Artist Award 93

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JANUARY 18, 2011

Last week, I participated in three very intense days of project, curriculum, and online community planning for a new project, E-Mediat , a multi-stakeholder capacity building project for NGOS and Social Media in the Middle East. Multi-stakeholder projects with many organizations, people, and roles are complex.

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 13, 2013

Visitor-contributed photos surround a collection piece in Carnegie Museum of Art's Oh Snap! It can be incredibly difficult to design a participatory project that involves online and onsite visitor engagement. is a project that lets real-world and virtual visitors share their work in our gallery.

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Authoring Open Experiment Museum 53

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

Granted, I live in an increasingly narrow world of people who are exploring these topics and want me to work with them, but I still learn a lot from the questions and struggles I hear from colleagues and people who comment on the blog. Are there certain kinds of institutions that are more well-suited for participatory techniques than others?

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 16, 2013

Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. This past weekend, in conjunction with our exhibition about Ze Frank's current participatory project, A Show , we hosted " Ze Frank Weekend "--a quickie summer camp of workshops, activities, presentations, and lots of hugging.

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Reflection Community Museum Participatory 43

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. These are unpaid part-time and full-time opportunities to help design public programs, develop new uses for the museum, perform visitor research, and pursue unusual projects.

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Museum Participatory Arts Attitude 34

Museum 2.0

MAY 22, 2013

I''ve followed Wright''s work for years because of his unique perspective on the potential for game-players to be game-makers - in other words, to co-create the gaming experience. Negotiated agency" strikes me as a really useful framework in which to talk about visitor/audience participation in the arts.

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Game Artist Museum Participatory 40