Drinking about Museums

According to Wiktionary, the term “throw down” was popularized in 1990s street culture, derived from the idiom throw down the gauntlet or “to issue a challenge,” also used in the sense of “to make a stand” or “to stand up and contribute something.” The term has been further popularized by the drama-filled televised cook-off competitions of chef Bobby Flay in his Food Network show called Throwdown, which always ends with his open challenge to all viewers: “Are you ready for a Throwdown?”

There have been throw downs in poetry, music, football, breakdancing, cooking, glee clubs, boxing, politics, and street fighting, but there has never been a throw down in museum teaching … until now! This month, ArtMuseumTeaching.com brings together 4 challengers and 1 museum for the first-ever “Museum Teaching THROW DOWN,” aimed at bringing out the best in experience, creativity, risk-taking, and experimentation.

What: Museum Teaching THROW DOWN (Google+ Event Page)
Where: American Folk Art Museum, New York City, 2 Lincoln Square (Columbus Ave + West 66th Street)
When: Wed., February 26th, starting at 6:00pm

Four fierce educator/competitors will gather at the American Folk Art Museum on February 26th, prepared to “make a stand” and lead a gallery teaching experience of about 15-20 minutes each. Each educator will use the museum’s current special exhibition Folk Couture: Fashion and Folk Art to activate the audience in new and engaging ways. After each educator has completed their gallery experience, the audience then gets to decide who leaves as the winner of the first-ever Museum Teaching THROW DOWN.

Let’s meet the challengers…

As we start to get psyched-up about the upcoming THROW DOWN, I asked all the competitors to tell me why they are interested in this type of museum teaching challenge. So here is a little bit more about us, and why we’re doing this.

JEN OLENICZAK: Museum Hack-er and The Engaging Educator extraordinaire, working to rid the world of boring museum experiences for good. @TheEngagingEd

“So often we get caught up in what works — the gallery stops and activities that are tried and true in a given audience. Failure is a scary thing, and experimental implies a chance of failure. Through my work with the Engaging Educator and Museum Hack, I’m all about taking risks that have the capacity to either be massive failures or tremendous successes. If you are constantly trying not to fail, you’ll never succeed. The THROW DOWN for experimental museum teaching offers a platform to take a big risk with colleagues I respect — and to blow it up at the American Folk Art Museum.”

RACHEL ROPEIK: Real is a thing that happens to you when you mess with this titan of a museum educator who now hails from the Brooklyn Museum. @TheArtRopeik

“I’ve been a dancer for most of my life, but a lifetime of ballet and jazz classes do not a B-girl make. No, my forays (and yes, there have been several) into breakdancing haven’t scored me my own dance movie, but they’ve always been a blast. Why? Because they’ve always been about people getting together to throw down some moves and cheer each other on and have a good old-fashioned great time. So let’s do that in a museum. Let’s see some crazy cool art creations and some bad@$$ gallery teaching in action and make the museum the place for that collective sharing and cheering.”

“Breaking isn’t about meticulously planned choreography. It’s about feeling the music and trying things out and hearing the crowd roar when they love what you do. And OK, so maybe the crowd roar in the museum is going to have to be a little quieter, but I’m still ready to throw down some museum ed moves and shake it up and flow with some great colleagues and an eager audience. Bring it on!”

PJ POLICARPIO: Teaching his way across the Big Apple, this master-of-all-trades museum educator and community engager means business. @pjpolicarpio

“I do love a good challenge. I’m really interested in where this “throw down” is headed and would love to participate! An experimental museum teaching throw down is exciting because museum educators by nature are always on our toes. We are constantly challenged by a variety of factors and almost always rely on our myriad teaching tools/strategies combined with experience. This is a perfect challenge! Looking forward to collaborating on this project!”

MIKE MURAWSKI: Last but not least, the blogger who needs to put his money where his mouth is; the “Bobby Flay” of this Throw Down (FYI – Bobby Flay did lose many of his cooking throw downs; those were alway the best episodes, too). @murawski27

“I have been hankering for a first-ever Museum Teaching Throw Down, and am excited to launch this in the city that never sleeps. We all do teaching and touring in our ‘jobs,’ but we don’t get much time to truly play with our craft and experiment in fun and bold ways in a supportive environment outside our own institutions. I look forward to getting together with this terrifyingly fantastic group of New York City museum educators, and pushing ourselves in ways that are a bit outside the box. Let’s do this!”

It doesn’t end there. After the THROW DOWN concludes around 7:30pm (if there is anyone still standing), we plan to head to nearby P.J. Clarke’s (44 West 63rd Street) for a Drinking About Museums hangout, meet-up, and discussion. There, we can celebrate the winner of the first-ever THROW DOWN, and decide whether we ever want to do this again. Even if you can’t make it to the American Folk Art Museum, we’d love to see you for a few drinks and some great conversation.

We hope to see you there at the American Folk Art Museum on February 26th and for the Drinking About Museums that follows! To stay up to date on any further details or event changes, connect with the Google+ Event page (let us know if you’re coming) and the join the ArtMuseumTeaching Google Community.

And, to all you museum educators out there, keep doing what you do. But ask yourself this … Are you ready for a Throw Down?

Drinking about Museums — Portlandia Edition

When: January 9, 2013

Who: Sparked by my new love for OMSI and their staff, we gathered together interested people from their education and exhibit design departments along with people from our education and digital collections departments at the Portland Art Museum.

The evening began at the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry (OMSI) in their technology lab and maker space — an area of their museum in which they are playing with new forms of creative engagement and participatory design. David Perry, OMSI’s Director of Museum Education, and Kristin Bayans, Senior Educator, both hosted the group along with many other OMSI educators and staff. We all got to know each other through some fun (aka ’embarrassing’) activities, but mostly we played around in the learning lab space and got to chat with each other about what we do.

When you get so many creative, high-energy museum people together in one place, the ideas start flowing … and I feel that we came away from the night with tons of potential for meaningful collaboration. For me, one of the first experiments that will likely come out of this exchange is a couple MakerBot 3D printing workshops at the Portland Art Museum, allowing education staff from both institutions to play with this technology and its potential applications for an art museum.

MakerBots!

So this brings me to the next topic of my post … MakerBots! I have been eyeing the MakerBot station at OMSI for months now, chatting with their staff and volunteers about how it is being used, why it is being used, and what are the potential ways it could be used in an art museum context (or even with artists). Kristin Bayans, who manages this innovative lab space at OMSI, has been such an amazing person to brainstorm with, and she was able to download some objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection to print for us yesterday. Yes, earlier this year, the Met teamed up with MakerBot to make statues, sculptures, and other three dimensional artworks from the museum’s collection available for anyone in the world to access virtually on Thingiverse.com and physically recreate with The Replicator™– MakerBot’s third-generation 3D Printer. As Jackie Terrassa, the Met’s Manager of Gallery and Studio Programs, wrote about this Hackathon event:

“… by partnering with artists and programmers who are already using these accessible technologies as creative tools, we will advance a core component of the Museum’s mission to encourage the study and development of the arts, enhancing the Met’s role as a dynamic site for creativity, inspiration, and exploration by artists and visitors alike.”

I could not agree more, and this has made me so excited to experiment with some workshops here at the Portland Art Museum around these technologies, and ensure that the museum can be a place for open creative exploration. And, besides, now I have my very own 3D-printed replica of the Met’s sculpture of Marsyas by 17th-century German sculptor Balthasar Permoser … what could be cooler than that! Obviously, there will be more discussion coming up on this site around 3D printing and museums, especially the impact this type of work might have in the teaching and learning realm of the museum. But I would encourage everyone to learn more about what the Met has been doing, and check out the objects and the 123D Catch scene files you can download to make your own replicas.

OK, so that is a quick report from Portland’s first ever “Drinking About Museums.” I look forward to opening this up to more and more museums across Portland, and exploring the way we can learn from each other as professional, as creative thinkers, and as people. Cheers!