It is impossible not to be utterly fascinated and inexplicably drawn to a unique event that hits the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston this weekend … Cliff Diving! Yes, the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series has made the ICA its US leg of the tour for the second year in a row, bringing professional cliff divers from all over the world to jump off the cantilevered roof of the museum building and plunge into Boston Harbor 80 feet below. It’s almost enough for me to hop onto a plane right now, and see this for myself. I love the idea of 23,000 people gathering at an art museum to connect with an extreme event based entirely on risk, fear, and pushing the limits.
I have often figuratively compared the risk of experimenting in museums with that of “jumping off a cliff,” so the direct connection with the ICA’s event was irresistible for me. But I want to turn my attention now to a slightly-less-death-defying yet perhaps even riskier set of museum experiments with public engagement that were enacted a few weeks ago at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Why RISKIER? Well, that’s because these experiments were envisioned, designed, and enacted by a group of 18 part-time volunteer interns over the course of 10 weeks this summer at the Saint Louis Art Museum. These interns had never done anything like this before, so we were all faced with more fear and uncomfortability than any professional cliff diver likely experiences (except for maybe that first plunge off the cliff). And the best part about this intern-driven series of public engagement experiences is that the participating interns chose to call it Gallery Diving (yes, the connections with cliff diving keep on coming).
What is Gallery Diving?
It all started in June when the Summer Museum Teaching Internship Program began and a group of enthusiastic interns came together to begin our explorations. As I have previously written about, the entire project began with individual need statements (“What do you need most today?”) and some open thinking about how museums might connect with those needs. We had several weeks of exploring the museum in a variety of ways, including drawing, writing, personal response, theater exercises, movement, and conversation. We also learned about other experimental museum programs such as the Walker Art Center’s Open Fields, the Portland Art Museum’s Shine a Light, the Dallas Museum of Art’s Center for Creative Connections, and the UCLA Hammer Museum’s Machine Project — all great inspiration for designing museum experiences that engage a broader public in new, active, and less-information-centered ways.
A few weeks into the program, the interns were then asked to begin envisioning and building their own public engagement experiences that might explore the museum in a new way — perhaps even something that connected back to their personal need statements. This process took several weeks, and we used some elements of design thinking and ResponsiveDesign (from my work with the CoLab) to harness a mentality of risk-taking and failing forward. 
Project teams were formed, and everyone’s ideas were refined and supported by the entire group (in what turned out to be a truly collective process).
During one of the last meetings, we all came together to try and title this project — what would we call it? How could we encapsulate all the experimentation we had been involved in during the summer, as well as the experience we hoped to generate with the public audience? We threw 18 possible titles into a crowd-sourcing process, and the phrase “gallery diving” came out on top. What a fantastic metaphor for this type of elastic experimentation in which we would be asking public visitors to “dive” into the unknown within the galleries of an art museum.
On August 9 and 10, the interns enacted their Gallery Diving projects across the museum — 14 projects in total. Through creative writing, closer looking, collaborative drawing, blind contour drawing, dance & movement, retitling works of art, theatrical performance, music, poetry readings, use of social media, and a range of enticing conversations, this group of energetic and dedicated interns connected with more than 500 museum visitors during this 2-day period. Some of these participants came to the museum for the first time to be involved in one or more of these projects, and many museum visitors stumbled across these projects and stayed for hours. The experiences were powerful as hundreds of people learned to connect with their art museum in a whole new way … and as a group of undergraduate and graduate student interns learned to see the museum through a very different lens.
“I don’t think ideas are very valuable in themselves. It’s only in the doing of the idea that you learn anything, or anything interesting happens.”
– Mark Allen, Machine Project Hammer Report
You can find out more about this series of public engagement projects by visiting the Gallery Diving Tumblr site that the interns designed themselves as part of their projects: gallerydiving.tumblr.com
You can also download the unofficial program/schedule for the Gallery Diving projects here: Summer_Intern_Public_Engagement_Schedule.
So what did I learn from this experience?
As a constant learner myself, I always find that working with student interns can force me to reflect on my practice and its philosophical grounding in surprising, unexpected ways. First, I believe that there is an incredible value to bringing in a diverse group of voices to the museum, openly and freely exploring the galleries and collection in nontraditional ways, and then empowering the group to share their perspectives and to take action on the issues and questions that bubble up out of these conversations.
I also gained an ever greater understanding of the power of “yes, and” thinking over “yes, but” thinking. I did not want this summer to be a constant barrage of “no” every time an intern came up with an idea. We brainstormed and came up with lots of really interesting ideas, and then built from those ideas toward the projects that were implemented at the end. The idea of creating a more positive mentality in museum work is something that really interests me, especially because I have run into the “big bad no” so many times. I hope to explore this more fully in a future post. But for the purposes of our summer internship program, I made every attempt to establish the museum as a safe, creative space for ideas to be formed and to flourish.
What did the interns take away from this experience?
Well, I think it would be best to hear from them in their own words. So I invite this summer’s interns to add their reflections and thoughts in the “Comment” section below to help document the significance of this 10-week experience. While I know that many of them are returning to college right now, I hope some of their voices can be added to this conversation.
Special thanks to everyone at the Saint Louis Art Museum who supported this project (from Education, Marketing, Protection Services, Curatorial, and the Registrar’s Office) and especially the entire 2012 Summer Museum Teaching Intern group who, in ten short weeks, certainly gained the fearlessness and tenacity of professional cliff divers. Each and every one of them has now begun the much larger task of transforming museums one experience at a time. Please never stop ‘gallery diving.’
As an art history major, I have often been told to think about art in an academic and information-focused way. It was really exciting to learn from Mike about how various museums were subverting this traditional stance in favor of one that engages an audience in a meaningful way. I must confess that I had many doubts in the process of how successful this kind of learning would be. My change in attitude happened while putting our project into action. The excitement that our participants felt was the same that I have always felt when studying art. We were able to convey to others the joy of art in a way that reached them on a new level! The overall outcome of all our projects was to connect people to objects in a personal way, one with a truly human connection.
I really appreciate this internship. What I learn most out of it is how art can relate to and how IMPORTANT it is to relate art to the lives of the public. I have been viewing slides, listening to lectures about famous works and period styles, reading and writing a lot about art in art history classes all the time. But the experience at SLAM opened a new window for getting involved with art: through experiencing, imagining, even creation yourself! This means a more friendly and personal way to meet with the specific art work, and really starting to THINK about it/them. Through inviting museum visitors to participate and collecting their responses, we came to realize how important it is to know how people wish to connect to the works, and more importantly, how they wish to connect with each other! This internship also addresses the notion that museum is a public place and people are welcome to create their own unique, CREATIVE museum experience as long as it does not harm the safety and well-being of the museum, the people in it and the exhibits. The museum can and should be creative, and PEOPLE are the most important factor in reaching this target. (Sicong Zhu)
Currently I am a Graduate Student majoring in Photography and Educational Technology. I believe that the internship at the Saint Louis Art Museum opened my eyes to new and creative ways that I could engage my future students (especially with art that they didn’t like immediately).
It was extremely beneficial to work with so many people from different majors and experiences, and it was great to translate all of our backgrounds into such neat projects in community engagement. Although I wish the internship would have lasted a bit longer, it gave me energy to push my educational projects forward, and try things that are new and unexpected.
Yikes, sorry this is so late! I just started grad school for museum studies and I think this internship was the perfect prelude. Mike encouraged us to think about museum experiences creatively, and was very supportive of ideas that were surprising and fun. This was a great atmosphere to work in. Even though the process of putting our ideas into practice was sometimes frustrating and laborious, it was great that everybody involved was so positive and excited about making things work.
The project I worked on involved story-writing based on different works in one of the galleries. I was worried that it would be a little too involved and that visitors would not want to take the time to participate, but there were many who did so eagerly. Even if they didn’t stick around for the whole workshop, several people grabbed journals and wrote stories on their own. One family with several young school-age children seemed to really enjoy the activity; I saw the kids curled up on the floor in front of one painting, writing furiously, which I thought was really cool. My takeaway is similar to Sicong’s – that many museum visitors really want to engage with art in deeper ways than they have been, and they like to engage with each other in a museum setting. The people I observed responded positively to new and different experiences in a traditional art museum. I hope to continue to pursue this kind of engagement with visitors in my future museum work.
This internship was awesome! I learned so much from all of the interns’ projects and the activities we did in the galleries. One of my favorite parts of the experience was on the last day when we had three events– an open dance rehearsal, a public talk on museum education, and a poetry reading– one after another in the same gallery. It was amazing to see the way the space and the modern art in the gallery seemed to transform over the course of the afternoon. I also got to experience “failing forward” with the (somewhat disastrous) ballet workshop I led. From the beginning of our project design process, I really wanted organize a ballet class in the gallery but was scared this idea seemed silly. One of our final meetings was full of creative activities and inspirational quotes that convinced me to commit to doing the project at the last minute. After the ballet workshop, one of the other interns and museum staff members, Kay, commented that she had never laughed so much in the museum before. I learned that having fun in the museum is a good thing and that it’s important to take silly ideas seriously. Mike also danced with the visitors and asked a question during the discussion that helped me see Degas from a completely new perspective. Thanks so much! I hope to go to graduate school for education and someday work on programs that are as inspiring and supportive as this internship!
Thanks to each intern for adding their perspective here. I really miss the program, and just loved having the opportunity to take some risks and play in the museum. I hope that other museums develop similar internship programs that allow for creative exploration and reflective thinking about what museums are here for — what keeps them relevant in today’s society. We need as many emerging professionals as possible to provide museums with a fresh perspective.