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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Forum One

MAY 3, 2021

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. To provide tools and guidance to empower people’s journeys and inspire conversation about race, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) developed “Talking About Race.”

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The Modern Nonprofit

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

Their stories, brimming with passion, resilience, and a rich cultural legacy, are deserving of more than just passive acknowledgment. In an era where representation and inclusivity have become paramount, nonprofits stand at the forefront of this cultural celebration, uniquely positioned to amplify these voices.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 3, 2014

She would bring books especially for children and women, and conduct a couple of days of workshops on wide-ranging topics about enterprise, culture, history, poetry and books. We had a great conversation, and I learned much more about her dreams for doing more for the people of Morocco.

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Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 17, 2019

After the International Committee on Museums spent some time debating the definition of museums, many folks took up the charge on social media to give their own definitions. I know I’m missing early innovators of interaction in museums; feel free to tell me who in the comments.) We need new #MuseumVerbs.

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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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VQ Strategies

MARCH 22, 2022

Reading this immediately reminded me of my years working in museums, developing exhibitions and training and supporting volunteers who worked as interpreters in our blockbuster shows. Our museum was well known for exceptionally beautiful and well executed signage (labels) in the galleries.

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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 talk a lot at our museum about empowering our visitors, collaborators, interns, and staff by making space for them to shine. We work hard to name and build our culture in many ways. Naming our goals and our culture.

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Forum One

JULY 20, 2022

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) was planning the next installment of their already-successful and well-attended event, “A Seat at the Table.” It was a lovely evening that inspired rich conversation. Watch our discussion about creating a successful virtual event.

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Forum One

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

This Black History Month, we reflect on the strategy work that our team does through our partnership with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture —much of which centers around expanding access. It was a lovely evening that inspired a rich conversation.

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Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

It gave me a chance to really think about how we have been opening up our museum and what it means for our community. Museums can be incredible catalysts for social change. We can change that by embracing participatory culture and opening up to the active, social ways that people engage with art, history, science, and ideas today.

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Forum One

JUNE 8, 2022

Forum One received 11 awards in seven categories in this year’s awards for excellence and distinction in website design, development, and digital strategy across the categories of government, DEI, education, arts, health, cultural institutions, and annual reports for corporate communications. Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts. The Harry S.

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Award Communication Arkansas Drupal 71

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 16, 2017

Like Seema, I've been looking for ways to increase active resistance of racism, hate, and bigotry--both as an individual and as the leader of a museum. Seema and I have started an open google doc to assemble ideas for specific things museums and museum professionals can do to resist oppression. Museums are ideas.

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AFP Blog

APRIL 22, 2014

Center for the Future of Museums: Khan Academy & Cultural Understanding : Smarthistory at Khan Academy is used by museum visitors, independent learners, professors, teachers and their students.

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Museum 2.0

JULY 9, 2014

Earlier this spring, I decided to go on a mission to use social media to increase my cultural competency around Latino experiences, issues, and interests. At our museum, we''re making a big effort to increase our engagement with local Latino families. I consumed news, pop culture, and media through that lens.

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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 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). The possible determinism of cultural geography.

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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 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 2.0

MAY 6, 2016

Five years ago, I left the consulting world to take the helm at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) at a time of crisis and change. We have spent the past three years planning and raising money for a project to build a creative town square for our city on the front porch of the museum.

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Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

This person is writing about a participatory element (the "pastport") that we included in the exhibition Crossing Cultures. Crossing Cultures features paintings by Belle Yang that relate to her family''s immigration experiences. The idea was that people would spin the wheel and start a conversation. Some with a colored pencil.

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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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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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Museum 2.0

APRIL 17, 2013

When we talk about museums or cultural institutions as vehicles of social and civic change, what does that really mean? Last week I had a conversation that changed my perspective on this question. Museum work is mostly non-contact. We all work for nonprofits. This is the wrong analogy and the wrong question.

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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 2.0

APRIL 1, 2009

On Monday, I gave the keynote at the Museums in Conversation conference in Tarrytown, NY. I learned to cultivate creative greed while working on Operation Spy at the International Spy Museum, where I was lucky to be working on a project that was so new to us that we didn't have any pre-established models or structures for doing it.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

DECEMBER 6, 2010

Note from Beth: If you’ve been following my blog lately, you know I’ve been having this conversation with Marnie Webb about abundance. A month or two ago, museums and galleries around the world participated in a Twitter event called Ask a Curator. How did you get 340 museums to participate?

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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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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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Museum 2.0

JANUARY 17, 2017

Dear Museum 2.0 friends, I want to share two great opportunities to get involved at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in 2017. Each summer, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History hosts MuseumCamp , a professional development experience that is part retreat, part unconference, part adult summer camp.

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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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Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 29, 2016

We spend most of our days with people who look like us, who share our culture, background, and class. That's why our museum, the MAH in Santa Cruz, focuses on social bridging. Rather than operating in a bubble of “art people” or “history people,” we strive to connect ALL people in our county. Neighborhood. More of us.

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Museum 2.0

MAY 10, 2017

This is the tenth 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. How could we build a market that was as diverse as our museum? More people, and more diverse people, go to restaurants than go to museums.

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Museum 2.0

JANUARY 14, 2010

Recently I've been looking at ways cultural institutions invite people to self-identify relative to the visit experience. This external profile technique was also used at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum when it first opened to let visitors connect with the stories of particular people affected by the Holocaust.

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Museum 2.0

JULY 27, 2011

I'm trying to reposition our museum as a cultural hub supporting creative and intellectual community growth. Our conversation made me reflect on the museums that most inspire me from a public service perspective--institutions with missions that stretch far beyond their walls. These museums work differently.

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Museum 2.0

MAY 13, 2015

Visitors in front of the African Elephant Diorama at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC photo) This guest post was written by Karen Wise, Vice President, Education and Exhibits at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “I History exhibits with hundreds of objects and no coherent story.

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Tech Soup

DECEMBER 12, 2011

We thought, Oh, how cool that I can carry my phone around and I can have this conversation. The Dallas Museum. museum, expanding access to the mobile tours even further. Museum of African American History's mobile web app likewise runs on most mobile devices with a web browser. They also have some. The DuSable.

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