Category Archives: Experimenting in Museums

Towards a More Human-Centered Museum: Part 1, Rethinking Hierarchies

January 22, 2018 Mike Murawski 14 Comments

Written by Mike Murawski

As common sense and straightforward as it sounds to think about museums as people- and human-centered institutions—a concept you’ve heard me write about quite a bit—this idea has faced a legacy of rather fierce opposition grounded in outdated traditions and histories. How many museums have mission statements that prioritize the colonizing actions of “collecting” and “preserving” objects, rather than fore-fronting the people-centered work of building community, growing empathy and understanding, celebrating human creativity, and cultivating engaged citizenship? How often do museum leaders and boards make decisions that value objects and collections over staff, volunteers, and museum visitors? What if museum leaders and professionals considered human relationships and human impact, first and foremost, when making decisions about exhibitions, interpretation, programs, facilities, policies, and practices? Embracing a human-centered mindset in museums asks us to do just that, advancing empathy, human potential, and collective well-being as integral elements to our institution’s values and culture. And this is not just putting visitors at the center of our thinking, but all of the people that make up a museum’s community—visitors, staff, volunteers, members, donors, and community partners as well as neighbors and residents of our localities and regions. All of these individuals are part of a museum’s interconnected human ecosystem.

Embracing a mindset of openness, participation, and social connectivity allows museums the chance to extend the boundaries of what is possible, and serve as sites for profound human connection in the 21st century. In their 2011 book Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World, Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant discuss their ideas for developing a more human organization in a world affected by social media and the Internet.

“We need organizations that are more human. We need to re-create our organizations so that the power and energy of being human in our work life can be leveraged. This has the power not only to transform our individual experiences in the work world, but also to access untapped potential in our organizations” (p. 4).

Jasper Visser writes about museums and these aspects of a social business, quoting the Social Business Forum in defining a social business as “an organization that has put in place the strategies, technologies, and processes to systematically engage all the individuals in its ecosystem (employees, customers, partners, suppliers) to maximize the co-created value.” The model of a social business, therefore, focuses on building relationships and connections among its entire community, or ecosystem of people. For museums, this goes beyond just being visitor-centered and means thinking about staff and volunteers as well as neighbors and the broader public. As Visser states:

“museums and most other cultural institutions are inherently social organizations to begin with. They have always thrived on intimate relations with all individuals involved in the joint creation of value.”

Insert cliche image of people working together (couldn’t resist, sorry)…

This concept of a social museum relies on each and every stakeholder working together toward change, value, and impact (which is why using the stock image above actually makes sense to use in representing museums). The key elements of a social organization—embracing networks of people, considering social relationships inside and outside the organization, and enhancing collaboration in a way that crosses traditional boundaries—are all core to developing a human-centered mindset in museums.

Strategies for Change

So how can those of us working in museums begin to make this shift happen toward a more human-centered mindset? In order to become social organizations that achieve positive impact in their communities, museums need to be rethinking their internal organization structures. Most museums rely on deeply ingrained, top-down structures that rely on territorial thinking, defined protocols, and traditional reporting structures based on academic degrees, power, silos, division, and oppression. In these traditional hierarchies, communication flows from the top to the bottom which means that “innovation stagnates, engagement suffers, and collaboration is virtually non-existent” (Jacob Morgan, “The 5 Types of Organizational Structures: Part 1, The Hierarchy,” Forbes, July 6, 2015).

Furthermore, as stated in the nationwide report Ready to Lead: Next Generation of Leaders Speak Out (2008), organizations that maintain traditional hierarchies “risk perpetuating power structures that alienate emerging leadership talent in their organizations” (p. 25). The sluggish bureaucracy of this embedded management structure prevents a museum from being responsive to its staff and its broader community. In other words, traditional top-down museums are just not very human-centered. They tend to be leader-centered or focused on a few powerful individuals at the top. So how can this be changed? What steps can museum professionals take to think about and enact alternative structures?

To be more people-centered, museum leaders and staff can work toward more participatory, democratic, and flatter models for organizational structure. In their recent book Creating the Visitor-Centered Museum (2017), Peter Samis and Mimi Michaelson discuss this transformation taking place in museums taking a more visitor-centered approach: “new ways of working ultimately shift traditional structures and may end up equalizing roles or flattening hierarchies” (p. 6). Efforts to decentralize decision-making and promote broader collaboration lead to museums that are more innovative, more responsive to change, and more likely to have a shared central purpose across its staff, volunteers, visitors, and community stakeholders—its human ecosystem. When we rethink and replace the outdated hierarchies, there is clearly a greater potential for a broader base of individuals to feel personal ownership over the meaningful work of museums in their communities.

In 2011, the Oakland Museum of California (OCMA) made major changes to their structure that resulted in a new cross-disciplinary and cross-functional model focused on visitor experience and community engagement. Referred to within OCMA as “the flower,” this new organizational structure has attempted to rid the museum of some of the barriers formed by outdated ways of operating. In 2016, their updated organizational chart had “visitor experience & public participation” at its very center, and only text references to the CEO and executive team floating around the outside. What started as a “rake” of institutional silos, according to Executive Director Lori Fogarty, became a “flower” of cross-functional teams emphasizing transparency, input, and communication. The more decentralized flower structure has positioned this civic-minded institution to better serve and engage its community. Here is Fogarty speaking at an ArtsFwd event in 2014:

But What Can I Do?

Aside from reinventing your entire museum’s organizational structure (which is awesome, but quite challenging and rare), there are smaller action steps that anyone can take within their own institution.

One way to make these types of changes happen is to work toward flattening communication and expanding participation in decision-making. Seek ideas and input from staff and colleagues on a regular basis, and you don’t have to be a manager to do this. For example, instead of using meetings to passively report out information about upcoming projects or policies, use these times to also discuss critical issues and gather input. Even a large staff meeting can be a platform for two-way communication. In addition, empower staff at all levels to participate in setting goals for their departments and for the museum. This can happen at any level of an organization, and sometimes making changes at the smaller ‘grass roots’ level of an organization can eventually lead to significant changes at the top. And involving more staff input in goal setting may take a greater investment in time across an organization, it will lead to broader feelings of ownership once those goals are being implemented and achieved on the floor with visitors. Involving staff at all levels of an organization in goal-setting and decision-making can also work toward cultivating leadership at all levels. Human-centered museums are institutions that recognize leaders across all levels and departments, not just at the top.

Finally, one important strategy for embracing a human-centered mindset in museums involves replacing outdated “org charts” with new ways of visualizing connections. Everyone reading this is probably familiar with the org charts that have each position in a box, and lines connect everyone based on management and reporting. Who manages who? Who evaluates who? Who has power over who? These charts fan out from the Director or CEO box at the top, ending at the bottom with lots of little boxes filled with part-time staff, security guards, volunteer docents, etc. Not only are these charts confusing (and oftentimes quite ugly), but they emphasize oppressive power relationships and do not accurately represent the way a museum works and how staff interact with each other.

Your museum or organization might have something that looks a bit like this:

We need to replace these old org charts with new maps that emphasize human connection and collaboration. And you don’t need to be the human resources director or CEO to give this a try. Take a piece of paper, draw a circle to represent yourself, and then begin adding in other staff, volunteers, or partners based on your working relationships with them. Who do you collaborate with on a regular basis? What working group meetings or committee meetings do you attend? What are some of the social connections you have within your organization (yes, these count, too)? Soon, you begin creating an organic map of your organization based on human relationships and connection. Maybe something a bit more like this:

Not only is this a great way to visualize and map your existing connections with others, but you can also use this as a way to identify individuals or departments in your organization that you are currently not connected with. What are some ways you might begin to develop new connections to those people? What impact might building new connections have on your work, their work, and the museum’s work in the broader community?

Share Your Thoughts

These conversations and actions cannot take place solely behind museum walls or in the isolation of professional conferences. We need to work together to realize the full potential of museums and discover how a human-centered focus on social action can transform your practice, your museum, and your community.

Are you working toward rethinking hierarchies and outdated structures in your organization? Add your voice to the comments below or via social media (@murawski27), and share your experiences or questions as part of this effort to make change happen in museums.

Let’s be a part of making this change happen together!

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Check out additional posts in this series about how museums might become more human-centered institutions working toward positive impact in our communities, including reflecting on personal agency as well as embracing a culture of empathy.

About the Author

MIKE MURAWSKI: Founding author and editor of ArtMuseumTeaching.com, museum educator, and currently the Director of Education & Public Programs for the Portland Art Museum. Mike earned his MA and PhD in Education from American University in Washington, DC, focusing his research on educational theory and interdisciplinary learning in the arts. Prior to his position at the Portland Art Museum, he served as Director of School Services at the Saint Louis Art Museum as well as coordinator of education and public programs at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University. Mike has been invited to lead workshops, lectures, panels, and training sessions at various institutions, including the Aspen Art Museum, Crocker Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Phoenix Art Museum, among others. He is passionate about how we can come to see museums as agents of change in their communities as well as creative sites for transformative learning and social action. Mike’s postings on this site are his own and don’t represent the Portland Art Museum’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

Experimenting in Museums, Museum Tech

Rodin Remix: 3D Printing and Museum Engagement

June 8, 2017 Mike Murawski 2 Comments

Written by Jeanie Noto

In support of the most recent exhibition at the Portland Art Museum, Rodin: The Human Experience, Rodin Remix was a hands-on space where visitors could create figures based on Rodin’s process of reusing previously-made sculpted arms, legs, and heads, into new works. It put a modern spin on Rodin’s method of mass production by showcasing 3D printed versions of Rodin’s sculptures.

3D Printing and Rodin?

I came into the Portland Art Museum in October, relatively new to interpretation. My guidelines for the Rodin project were to create an in-gallery multi-sensory experience for all ages that would communicate 3D elements of Rodin’s process. After researching Rodin, his assemblages struck me – it was creative and clever to reuse cast offs, fragments of plaster casts that had already been made, by recombining them into new sculptures.

I wanted to visitors to experience for themselves Rodin’s reuse of plaster casts, but we needed a 3D reusable material that could go in the gallery, not plaster. At first I thought of paper dolls, since they were easily reusable, simple to produce, and people might know how to put paper dolls together. But then at a brainstorming meeting, 3D printing came up – we could produce 3D plastic parts of Rodin’s sculptures with connections for constructing and deconstructing.

We partnered with the Portland 3D Printing Lab, a local Meet-Up group of enthusiasts, to produce 3D prints of Rodins. They were so enthusiastic, and figured out that magnets were the key to make the pieces of 3D printed sculpture easily stick together and break apart. The prints were made from free online STL files under the Creative Commons license, and, later, from scans of the Rodins in the show. We decided to scan some of the Rodins in the show because not every Rodin can be found in STL-file form online. The scanning process was surprisingly simple, and to show the public how it worked, it was filmed in a Facebook Live, the Museum’s first. The files that were used to print can now be found on the exhibition page of the Portland Art Museum’s exhibition website.

LaDefenseCombo — from left to right: Auguste Rodin, La Defense, model made in 1879, cast ca. 1910; 3D scan of La Defense on Thingiverse; 3D Print of La Defense.

3D printing fit with other elements of Rodin’s process as well. Rodin would sculpt a model in clay, then pass it to his assistants. They rendered the work again in marble or bronze, sizing it up or down according to Rodin’s and his patron’s wishes. A 3D scan of an object can be similarly re-sized, to make a print of the desired height.

Rodin’s assistants made hundreds of casts of the same model, all official Rodins, in a sort of artistic mass-production. Smaller bronzes, produced in large quantities, were more affordable. These relatively inexpensive bronzes widened the range of people who could purchase a Rodin, earning the sculptor more money and popularity. Just as Rodin mass-produced bronze casts of the same sculpture in multiple sizes and media, the Portland 3D Printing Lab made many 3D prints of Rodin sculptures, experimenting with size and color.

Visitors were also encouraged to Instagram a photo of their creation in front of a backdrop of Rodin’s studio, which showed the plaster fragments he used. Each Monday during the run of the show I reposted a visitor’s photograph to the @portlandartmuseum Instagram, with the tag #rodinremix. Over 125 people Instagrammed their Rodin Remixes, and the comments we received on our reposts were reflective and positive.

How did it go?

My goal was to make a fun, exciting interpretive space that used 3D prints to communicate to visitors about two parts of Rodin’s process: his assemblages, and his mass-production and use of resizing sculptures. This is my first interpretive space, and my first evaluation, and I am not positive this project fully met all of my learning goals.

Visitors, especially those with children, clearly enjoyed their time in Rodin Remix, laughing, talking, and playing – making the sculptures interact with each other. Docents used the 3D prints for tours for people who are blind or have low vision, and for ArtNow, PAM’s program for people living with dementia and their partners. The ability to touch Rodin’s forms, to understand 3D printing, and to Instagram were all appreciated. And, multiple members of the Portland 3D Printing Lab who had not been to the museum in years, if ever, came, because their work was displayed in the galleries.

visitors1 — Visitors in the Rodin Remix gallery at the Portland Art Museum. Photo by Jon Richardson.

A little over half of the 250 people that I observed participated in the hands-on part of the interpretive space, and 145 people stayed in the space for more than 2 minutes. These numbers are skewed somewhat by two school tours I observed, since both of those had a lot of participation.

But my hope that the space would communicate Rodin’s process may not have always worked. When I asked a few visitors what they thought the purpose of the space was, on average, they felt it was to touch, play, and interact. That was part of it, but not the entirety. I did enjoy the couple who said, “He really churned them out” – they clearly understood the mass-production angle. I could have crafted more precise questions for my evaluation, and my evaluation should have been more survey-based than observatory. It is possible more people understood the learning goals than I thought, but I did not capture their responses well.

Attempting to cover two elements of Rodin’s process (mass-production and assemblage) in the same space, using 3D printing to illustrate both, confused people. Similarly, placing the space just outside the exhibition, in a throughway, meant Rodin Remix was not clearly a part of the exhibition. Rodin Remix evolved over time as well, which was both a boon and a complication. We planned for it to be a prototype space that would change, but it also evolved because even simple 3D prints took fifteen to twenty hours to print, and with over 20 prints in the space, the hours added up. The ability to change allowed me to experiment and improve. But Rodin Remix also did not look finished until the last month of the exhibition.

2017_04_07_3DPrinting_0080 — Shashi of the Portland 3D Printing Lab with his print of Rodin’s Head of Balzac along with the Rodin sculpture. Photo by Jon Richardson, Portland Art Museum.

The most exciting part of this project was working with the Portland 3D Printing Lab. They were generous throughout, coming to the museum and bringing others, advertising through their own channels, and on the second to last Friday of the show, bringing a 3D printer to the museum and printing live, in the gallery, which drew a crowd all evening. The success of this partnership may allow for future 3D printing projects at the Portland Art Museum, as well as other evolving interpretive projects, which the education department continues to develop.

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About the Author

JEANIE NOTO is the Kress Interpretive Fellow at the Portland Art Museum, where she produces interactives and descriptive information to support the permanent collection and visiting exhibitions. Before coming to Portland, she worked as the Academic Intern at the Norton Simon Museum, and got her M.A. in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Experimenting in Museums, Museum Tech

Revolution: MuseumNext Portland – Call for Speakers

April 5, 2017 Mike Murawski Leave a comment

Written by Mike Murawski

I am so proud and excited that my home institution, the Portland Art Museum, will be hosting this fall’s MuseumNext conference. I have been fortunate enough to attend MuseumNext both times that it has held conferences here in the United States thus far: first in Indianapolis, and mostly recently in New York. This conference, perhaps more than any other, brings together a diversity of thinkers and leaders in the field of museums, attracting speakers and attendees from all around the globe. And with this fall’s theme of REVOLUTION, there is no doubt in my mind that it will be a powerful, transformative event that brings together risk-takers and changemakers from museums as well as the arts & culture sector. I am thoroughly excited to showcase the great work happening right here at the Portland Art Museum, and welcome attendees to gain a richer understanding of the innovative, diverse, and creative things happening here in the incredible city of Portland (far beyond the stereotypes of Portlandia). Hope to see many of you here this fall!

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MuseumNext USA Call for Speakers
Portland, Oregon
2 – 4 October, 2017

Deadline: Friday 16 June (5pm PTZ)

MuseumNext is a global conference on the future of museums. Since 2009 it has acted as a platform for showcasing best practice today to shine a light on the museum of tomorrow. On October 2-4, 2017, we will be holding our third annual conference in the United States – with three days of presentations, discussion,s and debates at Portland Art Museum.

Every MuseumNext conference has a theme, around which the community comes together to discuss the future of museums. This year the theme for MuseumNext USA will be Revolution. Museums aren’t strangers to revolution, we are constantly responding to and transformed by our changing society, whether that’s due to politics, environment or technology. Our institutions don’t stand still. At the same time, having the mandate to conserve, revolutions are a risk and challenge to many museums.

We are now inviting proposals from our community on the theme of revolution, looking at what that means to individuals and institutions around the world.

Taking a stand – How are museums acting as agents of change within their communities and fighting for social good?

Managing change – How are museums responding to a rapidly changing society or change within their organizations?

Mini Revolutions – What trends are revolutionising the field of museums, from the maker movement to being safe places for refugees?

Collecting Revolutions – Museums collect and tell stories through their collections, but many of today’s most important stories center around civil movements, hashtags and other, uncollectable ideas. How do we document the revolutionary now?

Or – We welcome your own ideas about how revolution relates to museums.

MuseumNext follows a fast-paced format of twenty-minute presentations with the focus very much on practice rather than theory (please note that this is the only format we’ll use at this event and we aren’t seeking longer presentations or workshops at this time).

Proposals for presentations should contain a title, names of presenters, a summary of the themes to be addressed, relevant links as well as a description of the expected learning outcomes.

We offer those speaking at the conference one free ticket per session, and speakers are responsible for their own travel and accommodation.

All proposals should be submitted via this form.

Experimenting in Museums, Teaching Tools

It’s Okay to Turn Our Back on the Art

March 22, 2017 Mike Murawski 2 Comments

Written by Holly Gillette as part of the Gallery Teaching Lab series

As an art museum educator, it is imperative to always connect back to the art in our teaching. Or is it?

I follow a dialogical approach when I teach in museum galleries with adult visitors. I always invite participants to look slowly, to savor a long look at one work of art, a luxury we don’t often have in our busy lives. As the conversation among the group grows and might veer off in one direction or another, I try to redirect the conversation back to the art. We are in a museum with a physical work of art, something tangible that we could touch (theoretically, of course!), why would we not keep the conversation about the artwork in front of us? It is an aspect of object-based teaching that has been important to me as a museum educator, but recently I wondered: Is it okay to turn our back on the art to continue the group-led conversation elsewhere?

Photo by Robert Wedemeyer | Courtesy of Skirball Cultural Center

As part of the Gallery Teaching Lab developed by Theresa Sotto, assistant director of academic programs at the Hammer Museum, I had the opportunity to experiment with colleagues in the Skirball Cultural Center’s galleries in February 2017. I’ve been a participant of the program since its inception, and always looked forward to the vast range of experiences my colleagues brought to the Lab.

For my experiment, I wanted to explore how information plays into interpretation and how we, as educators, need to be mindful of what we bring into the conversation. I am also interested in ways we may discuss current events and hot button issues in respectful and considerate ways when they connect to objects in our galleries. Lichtenstein’s “Gun in America” series, part of The Skirball Cultural Center’s exhibition Pop for the People: Roy Lichtenstein in L.A., seemed a perfect fit to experiment with both of these concepts.

The Skirball Cultural Center juxtaposed two TIME Magazine covers, each published about three weeks apart. The TIME cover on the right portrayed an energetic politician, Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, issued on May 24, 1968, the year that he campaigned for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. The TIME cover on the left was printed on June 21, 1968, two weeks after he was assassinated.

Our focus for this discussion was the June 21st cover, an illustration TIME magazine commissioned Lichtenstein to create shortly after Bobby Kennedy’s death. The cover reads “The Gun in America” and featured an article titled “Nation: The Gun Under Fire.” After some digging, I was able to get my hands on the article which is both a reaction to Kennedy’s assassination as well as a response to the gun violence that plagued the 1960s. Bobby’s brother, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968, just a few months before Bobby’s death. America then, as now, was grappling with similar issues regarding gun control, which I believed to be an important aspect of my experiment. I was especially interested in how the text of the article affected the interpretation of the image on the magazine cover, not only in 1968, but today.

I set up my experiment into three parts that included a free write, small group discussion, and large group discussion. To give you an idea of what I was planning, here’s an abridged version of my teaching plan:

Introduction: Before entering the galleries, advise group that this is a safe space and we must respect everyone. Participation is optional, if it gets too much, it’s okay to step away.
Free Write – 5 minutes: Take a look at the artworks, get up close, take a few minutes to free write or draw. We will spend 5 minutes silently looking.
Discussion – 10 minutes: Group discussion of the artwork. What bubbled up for you? Would anyone like to share?
Pair Share – 20 minutes: Divide groups into pairs. Distribute an excerpt from the article to each group. Invite groups to move to another area of the gallery where they can get together to read the excerpt and discuss. Some questions to think about while discussing: How does this piece make you feel? Do you agree or disagree? Why? This was written in 1968, but, are there parallels today?
Discussion – 20 minutes: Bring the groups back together. Groups share their conversations, if they desire to do so. Briefly summarize your excerpt, what thoughts bubbled up for you? What debates did you have in your group, if any?
Conclusion – 5 minutes: Thank you to everyone for being vulnerable today.

Let’s face it, above was my teaching plan. When we entered the gallery, I soon realized that there was particularly loud jazz music playing in the exhibit. Apparently Lichtenstein loved jazz and the music is the soundtrack of Kamasi Washington’s break out jazz album, The Epic. A rookie mistake, because I didn’t have the opportunity to visit the exhibition before I was teaching in it! The music was welcome during silent looking but when we started discussing, it became difficult to hear even in our small group of ten participants. Our initial discussion drew from the physicality of the objects, seeing Lichtenstein’s hand and process. It then led to people sharing their feelings, one participant commented on how she was desensitized by the image of a gun. Another commented that they had recently been in the vicinity of an act of gun violence, and that their feelings now are different than if they had seen this image prior to the incident.

As the discussion grew beyond the formal qualities of the work itself, I used that moment to segue to the second part of the experiment. I divided the group into pairs and gave each pair an excerpt from the 1968 TIME magazine article. Pairs were encouraged to venture into other parts of the gallery or even outside on the courtyard to sit and discuss anything that developed for them when thinking about the artwork and reading the excerpt.

After 20 minutes, I wanted to bring everyone back into the gallery in front of the artworks, but instead, I made the decision to gather everyone outside the galleries where we could gather without the distraction of the music. We sat in a circle, I asked each group to share if they wanted to. Much of the excerpts from the 1968 article were arguments about gun control. Discussion from the group dug deep into this difficult and complex issue. Many participants discussed how they couldn’t fathom someone needing to own a gun, some shared stories about how family members own guns and either agree or disagree with them. Some stories were about growing up in rural communities where hunting was the norm. The person, who mentioned at the beginning of the talk that they were recently near an act of gun violence, felt safe enough to share her story. Parallels were made from 1968 to today, and it was argued that not much has changed.

What I had intended to be a 20 minute group-share turned into a 50 minute discussion. Instead of bringing it back to the work of art, I lost myself in the conversation. Instead of acting as facilitator, I became a participant. When I realized we had gone well beyond our hour together, cutting into our debrief time for the GTLab, I tried to reel the group back in and get feedback on the activity. To my surprise, the group just wanted to continue discussing the topic.

I was so humbled by my colleagues and the conversation we had that day. As we all walked back to our meeting room Rachel Stark, Assistant Director of Education at the Skirball Cultural Center, turned to me and thanked me for allowing us to “turn our back” on the art to have the real nitty gritty conversation. It was at that moment I realized that what I learned from this experiment wasn’t what I initially expected. Yes, I wanted to explore ways of using objects in our collection as entry points to discuss current events and complex issues, but I realized something more important. When it means continuing the conversation and focusing on the needs of the people present, it is okay to turn our back on the art and continue the conversation where the group needs to go, even if that means we aren’t focusing on the artwork anymore.

We all need an outlet in this political climate; if a work of art can jump-start important conversation, amazing! Let the conversation go where it needs to go.

What are your thoughts? I’d love to continue the conversation. Please comment here, or email me at hgillette@lacma.org.

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About the Author

HOLLY GILLETTE is an art museum educator with an interest in gallery teaching and community building. She is currently an Education Coordinator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) where she oversees the school and community partnership program Art Programs with the Community: LACMA On-Site. Prior to working at LACMA, she began her career in Museum Education at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA, focusing on school, early childhood, and family audiences. Holly holds a MS.Ed. in leadership in museum education from the Bank Street College Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in art history and studio art from University of California, Davis. Holly’s postings are her own and don’t necessarily represent LACMA’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

Experimenting in Museums, Inclusive Practices

Power Up: A story of how one artwork sparked love & connection

March 10, 2017 Mike Murawski 4 Comments

Written by Mike Murawski

This week, at the Portland Art Museum’s Members Night, I was asked to work with our Curator of Prints & Drawings and our Conservator to give a series of pecha kucha presentations telling the story about our museum collection coming to life. We all decided to dive into a recent exhibition on the work of Corita Kent entitled Spiritual Pop, which pulled from and enhanced the museum’s holdings of works by this inspiring artist and activist.

Kent, a nun widely known as Sister Corita, was a highly-influential artist, educator, theorist, and activist who gained international fame in the 1960s for her vibrant, revolutionary screenprints. She grew up in Los Angeles and, after high school, joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. She began screenprinting in the 1950s and by the 1960s had embraced L.A.’s chaotic cityscape as a source of inspiration, transforming the mundane into inspiring and often subversive messages of hope and social justice. One critic once wrote, “Her mission seems to be to surprise us into awakening to delight.”

Kent used the element of surprise to awaken her audience to issues of social justice, in particular, world hunger. The theme of food and nourishment run throughout much of her work, including her 1965 series “Power Up,” which appropriates the slogan of Richfield Oil gasoline in combination with smaller texts from a sermon on spiritual fulfillment by activist priest Dan Berrigan.

It was Kent’s “Power Up” that really stood out in this exhibition, and reached out to visitors and our community. And for my part of our pecha kucha presentation to Members, I chose to tell the simple yet inspirational story of “Power Up.”

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When we visit an art museum, deep down inside, we’re largely seeking out creativity, beauty, joy, energy, strength, connection, even love. When we stand in front of a work of art, perhaps we’re even looking to connect with something bigger than ourselves. Corita Kent brought all of that to the museum and our community in powerful ways. Having her work on view here at the museum and seeing its deep transformative effect, I am drawn to reflect on how the power of art does spread out to a community and beyond the walls of a museum.

During the Spiritual Pop exhibition, we had dozens of programs and projects that allowed visitors to connect with her printmaking and activism—from conversations in the gallery, guest lecturers, a POWER UP evening for LGBTQ teens, and regular printmaking workshops and demos. At our Miller Family Free Day program, we invited families and children to make a print that reflected something they love about Portland or their hopes for this city. These prints were compiled into an artist-made book, and a small team of us from the museum hand-delivered it to our newest mayor, Ted Wheeler, just weeks after his inauguration. That book immediately brought him joy, and it still sits in his office as a symbol of the creativity and love of this city.

Corita Kent’s print series “Power Up” itself has been a catalyst for community connections and outreach, providing an uplifting message of social justice for so many across Portland. During the confusing, challenging, and unstable times we have found ourselves in these past several months, this single artwork became (and continues to be) a source of energy, joy, and resiliency for many.

Also during the Corita Kent exhibition, we hosted a series here at the museum called Portland Prints, featuring this city’s energetic, thriving, and innovative printmaking scene. In partnership with the amazing Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC), the museum hosted a series of mini-residencies in which artists made new prints inspired by Corita Kent and Andy Warhol, and visitors could get directly engaged with printmaking. Illustrator and educator extraordinaire Kate Bingaman-Burt was one of those artists. She was immediately inspired by Corita Kent’s “Power Up,” and invited designers from around the world to submit their own “power up” drawings and illustrations.

And in they came. Power up! POWER UP! Power UP! power up! As our country neared the end of a contentious and emotional campaign season and then into the election itself, there was a tremendous thirst for “power up.”

Kate brought all these messages together into a single poster print, and here at the museum on the Friday and Saturday following the Election, she printed them.

And then printed more. And then some more. Over a day and a half, she had printed and distributed over 800 Power Up posters. These prints that now hang on office walls, cubicles, school classrooms, and people’s homes across the city (including mine). The ripple effect of Corita Kent’s activist message of love and humanity exists now in the daily lives of so many individuals.

Thanks to Kate, the Power Up message spread further through zine workshops, design events, and even awesome t-shirt designs by Michael Buchino. Just this month, our Education team decided to purchase these Power Up t-shirts as an expression of camaraderie and yet another way of keeping this uplifting energy alive.

Back in January, Kate brought her Power Up poster design to the Women’s March in Washington, DC, nearly 3000 miles away from this museum. The uplifting message of Corita Kent that had inspired our community here was now part of an even larger experience. Hundreds more of these prints were made and distributed there. The reverberations of “Power Up” were felt in our nation’s capital and as part of the millions of people who marched that day in solidarity, including over 100,000 here in Portland. Corita Kent, bless her soul, is undoubtedly looking down upon all of this with a strong sense of joy—seeing her civil rights message from 1965 resonating so strongly and proudly in 2017.

An incredible story sparked from one simple print that hung on the wall in the lower level of an art museum in Portland, Oregon.

Thank you Corita Kent.

Power Up!

* * *

About the Author

MIKE MURAWSKI: Independent consultant, change leader, author, and nature lover living in Portland, Oregon. I am passionate about transforming museums and non-profits to become more equitable and community-centered. After more than 20 years of work in education and museums, I bring my personal core values of deep listening, collective care, and healing practice into the work that I lead within organizations and communities.

I have served as Founding Editor of ArtMuseumTeaching.com since it launched in 2011. I am also currently co-producer, along with La Tanya S. Autry, of #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, a global advocacy campaign aimed at exposing the myth of museum neutrality and calling for equity-based transformation across museums. I am currently finishing my first book entitled Museums As Agents of Change. I’m grateful to have served as a contributor to the Museums as Sites of Social Action (MASS Action) initiative supporting equity and inclusion in museums; and as First Wave Project Advisor for the OF/BY/FOR ALL initiative helping civic and cultural organizations grow of, by, and for their communities.

Note: Thanks and recognition to Kate Bingaman-Burt for many of the images and photos in this post, which came from her social media postings. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Experimenting in Museums, Inclusive Practices

Be a CHANGEMAKER – Apply for MuseumCamp 2017 Now!

March 9, 2017 Mike Murawski Leave a comment

Written by Mike Murawski

Are you a passionately-creative thinker who wants to make a positive change in your community? Are you frustrated with the slow pace of change at your museum, non-profit organization, community group, or school? Are you tired of conferences filled with static presentations and “show and tell” sessions that don’t seem to connect with your goals and vision for change? Do you dream big about taking action, making new things possible, and thinking outside the box? Do you thrive in a diverse environment filled with others who share your passion, energy, and vision? Then you need to be seriously thinking about applying for this year’s MuseumCamp at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH).

MuseumCamp is an annual professional development event hosted by MAH and the inspiring Nina Simon. Each year, the camp brings together diverse, passionate people for a sleep-away experience for adults who learn together through active, creative workshops and activities. The 2017 MuseumCamp theme is CHANGEMAKERS, and I am so proud to be working with this summer’s group as a Counselor along with the phenomenal Ebony McKinney, Founding Director of Emerging Arts Professionals/SFBA — a network focused on empowerment, leadership, and growth of next generation arts and culture workers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In beautiful Santa Cruz, we will spend 2.5 days together exploring the ways we make change in our work, our communities, and the world. We will focus specifically on how we can use creative projects as catalysts for community action and change. Whether you are dreaming about change, making it happen, or have battle scars to share, we want you here this year.

This year’s MuseumCamp will be challenging — but not in a frenetic, obstacle course way. It will challenge us to confront our fears about change, empower others, and create the future we seek.

Learn more about the details of this year’s MuseumCamp here, and Apply Now — the deadline for applications is March 15th, so you need to get online now and make it happen.

I look forward to seeing many of you there this summer!!!!

* * * * *

Here are Nina Simon’s Five Reasons to Come to MuseumCamp 2017:

Dive into co-creative project design. A month before MuseumCamp, the MAH is opening a new exhibition, Lost Childhoods, co-developed with foster youth, youth advocates, and artists in our community. You’ll tour the exhibition with the team, discuss its impact, and explore the process behind it. This project is experimental, complicated work. Foster youth are central to every decision and direction. Artists are striving to follow their direction to beautiful ends. Dozens of youth advocates and partners co-own the process and are bringing their own dreams, talents, and connections to the work. At MuseumCamp, we’ll pull back the curtain on Lost Childhoods’ process and product. We’ll brainstorm how to partner with your community on projects that ignite social action.
Meet amazing colleagues and counselors. MuseumCamp attracts creative changemakers of all stripes and backgrounds. Last year Camp welcomed academics, museum folk, librarians, poets, artists, bike advocates, engineers, and one American Ninja Warrior. This year’s applicants include social scientists, activists, entrepreneurs, educators, and artists. We’ve got two incredible outside counselors–Ebony McKinney and Mike Murawski–and more partners coming onboard. You want to meet these people. You want to learn with them. MuseumCamp will help you build a diverse network of inspiring compatriots for your own personal journey to creative change.
Build – and share – a creative action plan for change. The central activity of MuseumCamp is a whole-camp project where we work in teams to make something. (Check out past projects here.) This year, we’re building a creative change toolkit. As a team, you will design it. After Camp, the MAH team will turn it into a beautiful product for you to keep. You’ll create it, use it, and share it with others around the world.
Find out what happens when a museum breaks out of its building. Later this spring, the MAH is opening a major expansion in Abbott Square, the plaza adjacent to the museum. Abbott Square will be a creative heart for the city, offering free events, workshops, performances, and playful programs in partnership with community groups. At MuseumCamp, you’ll be among the first to experience it. If you or your organization are considering doing more work in public space, this is a great opportunity to learn more firsthand.
Relax, recharge, and explore. Swim with sea lions. Ride a 100-year old wooden roller coaster. Sleep in a museum. All optional. All incredible. All at MuseumCamp.

You can apply for MuseumCamp until March 15. Now’s the time. Let’s do it.

MuseumCamp2014 — “One Minute Art Project” at the 2014 Museum Camp.

Experimenting in Museums, Teaching Tools

Gallery Teaching Lab: Where Rules Are Meant to Be Broken

February 28, 2017 Mike Murawski 1 Comment

Written by Theresa Sotto

What would happen in the galleries if we could only communicate through gestures? How might critics’ reviews about exhibitions be meaningfully incorporated in gallery teaching? How would museumgoers react if asked to draw a work of art as perfectly as possible–the opposite of conventional wisdom in museum education? These are just a few questions that educators from cultural institutions across Southern California have explored in a program developed by and for museum educators.

Museum educators from three different institutions–Zoe Silverman from the Hammer, Rachel Stark from the Skirball, and William Zaluski from the Getty Center–act out a short skit in a role-playing experiment led by Chelsea Hogan, who then worked at ESMoA. Photo courtesy of Chelsea Hogan.

I launched Gallery Teaching Lab (GTLab) at the Hammer Museum in October 2014 with educators from seven Los Angeles museums in an effort to foster innovation in gallery teaching. Now in its third year, the program has doubled in size to include fourteen participating institutions who each take turns hosting a GTLab approximately every six weeks. Twenty-five practitioners between Long Beach and Pasadena have the opportunity to try a new teaching strategy in an ever-changing space and receive constructive feedback from colleagues. Participants can use GTLab as a testing ground for nascent gallery teaching ideas without the pressure of building internal buy-in or fear of an unsuccessful experience with museum visitors. GTLab also offers educators an opportunity to eschew traditional or habitual teaching strategies and set aside their respective institutions’ existing programs or pedagogical philosophies.

Beginnings

The very first GTLab, which was led by Veronica Alvarez, Director of School and Teacher Programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was an experiment in facilitating silent conversations in order to create a safe space to explore potentially controversial topics. Veronica was inspired by Child Guidance Toys (1965) by Robert Heinecken, which was on view at the Hammer Museum in the exhibition Robert Heinecken: Object Matter. Created two years after president John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Child Guidance Toys poignantly juxtaposes two advertisements of two different products–a toy rifle and a miniature replica of JFK.

Prior to viewing Child Guidance Toys with GTLab participants, Veronica displayed three large sheets of butcher paper, each with a prompt that was relevant to Heinecken’s work: consumerism, gun culture, and the claim that artists make us more aware of social issues. We were asked to silently and anonymously address each of these prompts or someone else’s comments. In a post-GTLab reflection, Veronica wrote that “participants commented on the fact that they enjoyed sharing things that they might not have, had it been a verbal conversation. Others noted that they were able to discuss sensitive topics in a safe environment.”

A prompt used in a silent conversation led by Veronica Alvarez, Director of School and Teacher Programs at Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

After writing and reading comments in response to the prompts in a classroom space, Veronica led us in an inquiry-based discussion of Child Guidance Toys in the exhibition space. In front of the work of art, we wasted no time making connections between the imagery and the serious themes that had already been explored during the silent conversations. The resulting discussion about Heinecken’s work was thought-provoking and multi-layered. But equally thought-provoking–at least for a room full of museum educators–was the conversation about the experiment itself. Educators mused: Did the pre-selected prompts limit conversation about the work of art? Which audiences would this activity be appropriate for? How would the silent conversations differ if they took place in the galleries? Since everyone responding to the prompts were in the same room at the same time, the comments were not completely anonymous. How does semi-anonymity impact one’s ability to freely share one’s thoughts?

Following her GTLab experiment, Veronica incorporated the silent conversation activity in a teacher program–with great success. However, successfully implementing a GTLab experiment with museum visitors is more of a fortuitous outcome rather than a desired goal.

Experiments in Self-Guided Experiences

For my own first experiment, I was interested in exploring self-guided activities, and not just because I was interested in their format–one that typically doesn’t impart more than basic or cursory information about works of art. In the days leading up to my experiment, other work commitments took priority and I waited until the last minute to consider what I would do. My experiment became an opportunity for me to address two questions. The first: Can a self-guided experience be just as (or more) engaging and foster as much understanding about a work of art as a guided experience? The second question was one that I sometimes face more often than I’d like to admit: Is it possible to facilitate meaningful experiences with works of art when you don’t have time to properly research the works of art on view?

I decided to try a semi-self-guided experience with the exhibition Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now because of the wide variety of works, subjects, and artists represented in the galleries. I briefly introduced the exhibition and then distributed prompts in three categories—1) Select, 2) Question, and 3) Translate. Working with partners, participants picked one prompt from each of the categories, one at a time, at random. For the Select cards, participants were prompted to choose a work that they associated with adjectives like secretive, awkward, or friendly. Once a work was selected, partners picked a Question card and discussed answers to prompts such as: “Could this work change someone’s life? If so, how?”; “Why do you think this work was selected for inclusion in this exhibition?”; and “In what ways is this work relevant to people in Los Angeles?” I gave some pairs more than one Question card if they seemed to answer their first question quickly. By the time the pairs completed their Select and Question prompts, they had already discussed their selected work for approximately 20 minutes and were ready to “translate” the artwork. This is where the activity got more experimental. I challenged peers to reflect on what is essential about the work of art and to figure out how those qualities could be translated into another form or genre–such as a Craigslist ad, a restaurant menu, or thirty seconds of sound. Not only was this part of the activity a lot of fun, but it also helped the group come to a nuanced and deep understanding about their selected works while stretching them to think creatively.

A GTLab experiment informed the goals for this all-ages Discovery Guide.

After the experiment, GTLab participants remarked that they enjoyed completing the activities and they were able to make meaningful connections to their selected works of art. They also raised questions about appropriate audience applications and attendance limitations, and whether front-loading or modeling would be necessary with school groups. All good questions. But despite the overall positive and useful feedback, I never tried the same Select – Question – Translate prompts with actual visitors. For me, that wasn’t the point.

Taking Risks, Breaking Rules

I originally conceived of GTLab to foster innovation in gallery teaching–in my own practice as well as that of my colleagues. In fact, for the first couple of years of the program, I challenged all participants to follow one rule: your experiment should be an activity or strategy that you have not tried before. My experiment pushed me to re-evaluate what I want self-guided activities as a whole to accomplish: to foster personal and meaningful connections to art, to have fun learning with the people you came to the museum with, and to encourage creativity. These are by no means innovative goals. Rather they speak to the heart of what we do as museum educators.

The process of organizing and participating in gallery experiments has made me reflect on Gallery Teaching Lab itself. Innovation isn’t the main goal after all. Gallery Teaching Lab comprises a collective of peers who manage or support educator trainings at their respective institutions. For this professional learning community to be sustainable and useful for all participants, rules and goals should change based on the facilitator, the chosen experiment, and the galleries. What once took place at the Hammer Museum every six weeks on Wednesdays from 12-2PM now occurs at one of fourteen institutions on a day and time that works best for the host institution with goals that make the most sense for the facilitator. As is the case for all good labs, rules are meant to be broken.

* * * * *

About the Author

THERESA SOTTO is assistant director of academic programs at the Hammer Museum, where she oversees educational programming for college, family, and K-12 school groups. Theresa has been working at the crossroads of education and the arts since 2001. Prior to joining the Hammer, she worked at the Getty Museum, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and has served as a consultant for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Theresa received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona and is also a published poet.

Experimenting in Museums, Inclusive Practices

Getting Outside the Bubble: Museum Social Action Project at MuseumNext

October 25, 2016 Mike Murawski Leave a comment

Reposted and revised from MuseumNext, a global conference on the future of museums which has acted as a platform for showcasing best practice today to shine a light on the museum of tomorrow. Check out more details about the upcoming conference in New York by visiting their new website.

MuseumNext is very much a collaboration which brings together museum professionals to share what they feel is important and exciting, that is true of the presentations and workshops which our community propose through our call for papers and through the other activities which form our conference fringe.

Since 2009, we’ve had everything from brainstorming wild ideas with Nina Simon, to a symposium on heritage and retail to playing with the latest sensor technology, but for our conference in New York City we have a very exciting addition to the program.

Mike Murawski, Director of Education & Public Programs at Portland Art Museum, challenged us to build a Museum Social Action Project into the program and offered along with Monica Montgomery to make the project happen.

MuseumNext asked Mike to tell us more about this exciting project:

How did the Museum Social Action Project come about?

At a time when museum professionals are increasingly thinking about the social impact of museums as well as the role these institutions play within our local communities, it seemed urgent to get outside the ‘bubble’ of the conference and more directly engage with organizations responding to local realities.

I was invited to present at the MuseumNext conference in New York on the topic of enacting change in museums and converting talk into action, so it felt necessary to get outside the conference venue and ‘walk the walk.’ Not having a strong familiarity with the local communities across New York, I immediately reached out to Monica Montgomery (MuseumHue, Museum of Impact) to explore this idea of a Museum Social Action Project.

Monica and I brainstormed about some possible ideas, and she connected us with the team at The Laundromat Project, an amazing organization that works to bring socially engaged arts programming to laundromats and other everyday community spaces.

Why should a museum conference try and facilitate something like this?

As museum professionals, it is vital that we enact a mindset of giving back and supporting grassroots organizations like The Laundromat Project that strengthen our communities. Each and every professional conference should be focusing more on how it can be connected and relevant to the place of its convening, and not just think about locations as conference hotels and convention centers.

Conference sessions, panels, and topics can certainly be more grounded in the realities and issues of the conference’s city and neighborhoods, but I think it’s important to get outside the walls of the conference, explore direct ways to see our ideas in action, and be a responsible part of building stronger communities (beyond the spotlight of the conference).

What is The Laundromat Project?

Launched in 2006, The Laundromat Project brings socially relevant and socially engaged arts programming to laundromats and other everyday community spaces in order to reach as many of our neighbors as possible. The LP’s artists and staff work to amplify the creativity that already exists within communities by using arts and culture to build community networks, solve problems, and enhance the sense of ownership in the places where we live, work, and grow. The LP is particularly committed to long-term and sustained investment in communities of color as well as those living on modest incomes.

Their Kelly Street Initiative was launched in 2016 in partnership with Workforce Housing Group, Kelly Street Garden, and Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association, transforming a 2 bedroom-apartment on Kelly Street in Longwood, South Bronx, into a thriving creative community hub, with artist studios, arts programming, and community partnerships that allow The LP to engage the larger Kelly Street community. We are honored to be collaborating with Hatuey Ramos-Fermín, The LP’s Director of Programs & Community Engagement, to build this Museum Social Action Project together for MuseumNext.

What’s the project that you’re doing?

Participants attending this Museum Social Action Project will meet staff and artists at The Laundromat Project, learn about their various projects and programs, and tour the Kelly Street Initiative location as well as learn more about that neighborhood. LP staff and artists will then lead a short workshop and discussion on how organizations can learn more about a neighborhood’s capacities, creativity, and skills through community asset mapping.

Participants will also discuss ways to build a sustained investment in community partnerships, rather than one-sided outreach efforts or one-time program offerings. As a vital part of this project, we also ask that participants find a way to give back to The Laundromat Project and help them create more joyful spaces of creativity and community. Participants can do this by bringing an art supply Gift Card from Dick Blick or by donating directly to the Laundromat Project online (which I strongly encourage people to do, even if you are not involved in this project or the MuseumNext conference).

23501550362_ce672bf47b_z — The Laundromat Project’s Kelly Street Housewarming Party. Photo by Osjua A. Newton, Copyright © 2015

What do you think the delegates will get out of it?

The aim is for delegates attending the Museum Social Action Project to be able to gain a more concrete understanding of community-based practices, of how cultural organizations can serve as sites of social action and relevance, of how museums and arts non-profits can bring people together a work to build stronger, more resilient communities. They will gain skills from The LP staff and from each other around community asset mapping, and really listening to local community voices.

What impact can the project have?

For me, personally, there are a few big “what if’s” at the heart of this type of Museum Social Action Project. I know that museums and cultural organizations across the world are striving to be an essential part of their communities; but what if our communities could become an essential part of our institutions? What if we could effectively re-center this movement for change around our local communities and the power, knowledge, creativity, and capacities that they can bring to our institutions? What if conferences and professional gatherings spent more time doing and less time talking?

I don’t think we’ll achieve this all at our half-day Museum Social Action Project this November in New York, but I hope others are inspired to do similar types of projects and experiences, getting outside the walls of our conferences and harnessing the power of museum professionals to learn from and give back to our communities.

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The Museum Social Action Project is one of the fringe activities for MuseumNext New York City. The conference takes place 14 – 16 November 2016 at the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center. Find out more about the conference here.

Experimenting in Museums, featured, Field Notes

Art museums as creative laboratories for children’s play, experimentation, and the co-creation of culture

June 17, 2016 Jessica Fuentes 3 Comments

Louisa Penfold is a children’s curator currently undertaking a PhD in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham in partnership with Tate (United Kingdom).

Art museums have not traditionally been sites for children’s creative experimentation and play but rather understood as places of collection and display. However, the past two decades have seen young audiences become an increasingly important audience for art museums around the world with many institutions developing new spaces and practices towards children. The philosopher and founder of the Reggio Emilia philosophy Loris Malaguzzi once stated ‘children learn most readily and easily in a laboratory-type environment where they can experiment, enjoy and find out things for themselves.’ If this notion is true, how does the idea of the art museum as a creative laboratory reaffirm or challenge previous curatorial, artistic and pedagogical notions?

The art museum as creative laboratory

An artist has their studio, a cook has their kitchen, a scientist has their laboratory yet there are very few places in their communities where young children can go to creatively explore, experiment and freely play with ideas and materials. A creative laboratory could be anywhere in a neighborhood — a makerspace as part of a community centre, a tinkering studio in a science centre, a fab lab within a children’s museum, a woodwork area in a secondary school or a digital learning space in a library. Many of these ‘laboratory’ spaces and practices have been and are being developed by interdisciplinary teams within cultural institutions, often in partnership with community groups and university research centres. However, art museums can make a very distinctive contribution. Art museums can draw upon the processes of artists and their curatorial practices to establish a uniquely creative social and spatial environment for the co-construction of art and culture between artists, curators, children, and their parents.

tate-liverpool-family-activity — Family activity at Tate Liverpool. Copyright: Roger Sinek

The crucial quality of such environments is the presence of what Simon Nicholson once termed ‘loose parts’[1], these being open-ended materials such as blocks, clay, paint or design software that can be manipulated, adapted and transformed in a large variety of ways. This allows for deep, creative experimentation, questioning, explorative play and discovery-based learning. When such materials are presented in a curated creative environment where meticulous consideration has been given to their selection and presentation, combined with additional equipment and tools to assist experimentation of materials, vast and complex possibilities for exploring artistic phenomena are produced. These environments can also stimulate and support children to develop and express new creative processes and understandings of art and culture. But it is not just a matter of making materials available in a space, these need to be accompanied by artists, educators and curators who are experienced in facilitating young children’s creative play and experimentation. When they engage in careful and systematic observation and critical reflection, they can modify the spatial and social properties of the environment in response to children’s curiosities and discoveries.

The notion of art museums as creative laboratories within their community is built upon the premise that museums are not just for the transmission of culture but additionally a site for the construction of cultural knowledge and shared values. This requires a dialogic and collaborative process between artists, curators, children, their parents and the material environment. The understanding that art museums can also be places for cultural production offers an additional form of audience experience to object-centred and interpretation-based models in the gallery. Of course, transmission-based modes of cultural and artistic production should not be dismissed but rather this needs to be balanced with opportunities for individual and collaborative production of art. Child-centred practice in art museums fundamentally values children as co-creators of art and culture now, as opposed to seeing a value solely investing in the future development of children as adult museum visitors.

My interest in child-centred museum practice

I was first introduced to the interconnected ideas of child-centred practice, creative learning through play, and immersive environment design whilst working as a children’s curator at the Ipswich Art Gallery in Queensland, Australia. During this time I worked, as part of a team of highly passionate, intelligent, and creative artists, curators, industrial designers, researchers and creative practitioners, on the development of the children’s program. Collectively we were interested in exploring how the understanding of children as unique, complex, powerful, and creative beings [2] could intersect with new artistic and curatorial practices to construct immersive creative environments that deeply valued children’s artistry and creativity alongside artists.

Through my work in Australia, I continuously found myself asking: how can we construct a form of art museum practice that aligns with the notion of the ‘creative laboratory’ for children? What does it mean to children to experience these environments? In 2013, the children’s team at the Ipswich Art Gallery started to explore the complex concepts, theories and outcomes of these questions through a formal research project.

Atelier van Licht at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Image credit: Atelier van Licht.

I first met Dr. Emily Pringle, the Head of Learning Practice & Research at Tate at a conference in January 2014. We were both very interested in the concept, challenges and possibilities of child-centred practice and its possible intersections with artistic and curatorial practice in art museums. After a series of conversations I made the decision to relocate to England in September 2015 to undertake my PhD under Dr. Pat Thomson at the Centre for Research in Arts, Creativity and Literacies in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham. The research project is connected to the Tate Learning Research Centre where Dr. Pringle is my co-supervisor. The focus of my PhD is on the construction of child-centred practice in early years (2-4 years) environments in art museums. My research asks:

What are the key conceptual, spatial, and social qualities of these environments?
What does it mean to children to experience them?
How can children’s experiences be used to inform the future construction of environments within the unique practice context?

My goal is to develop a process-led, critical and reflective heuristic thinking tool that can be used to support conversations between artists, curators, children and parents engaged in developing children’s creative environments. The research will draw on early year’s intra-active pedagogical theory [3] and social constructivism [4] to generate deeper understandings of children’s experiences with human (peers, parents, artists and educators) and non-human aspects (materials, architectural space and curatorial discourse) of curated immersive environments.

Pedagogical documentation, where young children’s learning and theory building is collected using predominantly visual research collection methods such as photography, film and field notes, will be used to guide practitioner learning and reflection during and after the program is presented [5]. This documentation will seek to make young children’s learning more visible within institutional conversations. The reflection will be used to feed into future curatorial, artistic and pedagogic practice and have the ability to be adapted to the unique gallery contexts in which the practice is occurring. Critical reflection aims to give insights into ‘curation’ of early year’s immersive gallery environment design in regards to the intersection of curatorial, artistic and pedagogic practices. The project thus extends the notion of the art museum as a creative laboratory to the researching, questioning, experimentation and critical reflection of artists and curator’s shared practice.

My inquiry consists of four action research cycles. Each one develops, challenges and reflects on the construction of the reflective heuristic thinking tool. The second phase of the project begins in September this year and the first draft of the critically reflective framework will be presented to the education teams involved in the study late in 2017. After this, I hope to take what we have learnt to the wider art museum community.

By developing an approach that values experiential learning, discovery-based play and critical practitioner reflection, my research will support the construction of more dialogic and collaborative conversations between art museums, artists and the wider community. Through the PhD I will generate new findings on the practices that lead to meaningful experiences for young children in art museums, currently under-researched and under-theorised.

Reflection Questions…

Have you developed children’s creative environments around the ideas of child-centred practice, experimentation, and creative play? How does this reaffirm or challenge previous curatorial, artistic and pedagogical notions within an art museum context?
Please share your comments, experiences, challenges, and reflections.

References

Nicholson, S 1971. How NOT to cheat children – The theory of loose parts. Landscape Architecture, 62, p.30-34.
James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy, Oxon: Routledge.
Vygotsky, L 1930. Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Reggio Children & Harvard Project Zero. (2005). Making learning visible: Children as individual and group learners. Reggio Emilia, Italy: Reggio Children publications.

Experimenting in Museums

Museum Mashup: How We Did It + Triad Reflections

October 28, 2015 Jen Oleniczak Leave a comment

Written by Jen Oleniczak, Founder and Artistic Director, The Engaging Educator

On October 16th, Museum Mashup, Triad Style took place at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. Individuals from all over the state came to experiment and meet new friends, all with the idea of experimenting with cultural experiences. As this is at least the 7th experimental museum teaching event like this in the past year or so (they have happened in New York, Brooklyn, San Diego, New Orleans, Cleveland, Denver, and now Winston-Salem), I wanted to share more on how to plan your own Museum Mashup, as well as some reflections from our recent SECCA Mashup.

How We Plan a Museum Mashup

The impetus behind this is simple: empowerment and ownership. People on Twitter (encouragingly using #MuseumEdMashUp tag) reached out to me asking if they could do a Mashup and/or I or someone from my organization could come out and lead one at their museum. People here were asking if they could come since they weren’t an educator and others asked if they could invite non-art educators. My answer is and always will be yes. Yes, invite non-art educators. Yes, come even if you are scared. Yes, do one anywhere and everywhere. Yes.

When I did the first experimental teaching adventure with Mike Murawski and Rachel Ropeik over a year ago, it wasn’t this. It’s evolved into this, because of circumstance, need, new places, new people – and my guess and hope is it will keep evolving, beyond this ‘how-to’ and the Mashups that have happened. The Mashup doesn’t belong to any person or museum – and it doesn’t have to be about good teaching or developing programming or pedagogy. It focuses, in my opinion, on the creation of experiences with objects, people, stories, and surroundings. So folks asking “can we…?” the answer with me will always be “yes!”

Which leads to the thought that this isn’t so much of a ‘How-to’ as a ‘How-we’. And if we keep sharing this ‘How-we’ then we, as a community, can use this experimentation in the best possible way for ourselves.

So without further ado, the How-we:

Found a group of people.

As some of you may know, I just moved from NYC to Winston Salem, NC. I knew a handful of people, museum people mostly, through traveling and my partner. After chatting with Debbie Randolph of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, who was part of the NOLA NAEA Mashup at the Ogden, I emailed a group of people I knew in the Triad museum world and told them about the idea. I asked them to ask people they knew, and we had a group.

Found a place and date.

Lucky for us, Debbie had done the Mashup in NOLA and knew how successful it could be. She offered to host the first at SECCA. As a group, we did a Doodle poll and found a date and time frame that worked for the majority.

Promoted away!

Yep, promotions before logistics. Since the basic idea was experimentation, and because I had done a Mashup before, I wrote a quick blurb and put up a Facebook Event. The Engaging Educator wrote a press release and shared it with SECCA’s Marketing Director, who shared it with their press contacts.

Just did it.

Logistics were a big part, and the part that always stresses me out. I broke it down into a few key areas when planning for this Mashup:

The Schedule: Mashups are fast. There was 15 minutes alloted for greetings, groupings and a quick warm-up, about 35-45 minutes for the participants to create a 5-7 minute experience, and then the time for the experiences. That last time frame is flexible, based on the number of participants.

The Works: Since the exhibition at SECCA, Point & Counterpoint has 18 artists on display, it was natural to use them all, since we didn’t know exactly how many people would be attending. Alex Brown from SECCA printed out cards with the artist names, and the groups would randomly choose which artist they would be working with. Some artists had multiple works, but ultimately it was up to the group to decide what they wanted to create.

The Groups: As people walked in, they signed in. Taking the total number and dividing by three people per group, people were assigned into six groups in the good old fashioned method of ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…ok all the 1’s over here, the 2’s over there.’ I ended up doing this in a notebook and just calling out each group, but that elementary school grouping happened in a tiny moleskin.

Facilitation: The facilitator is crucial, but the lack of facilitator voice is even more important – it isn’t their show. Debbie introduced SECCA and the exhibition, and I explained the Mashup goals – random groups would randomly be assigned a work, they would have a finite amount of time to create an experience with the work. This experience would have to be experimental – that is, no VTS, inquiry, traditional teaching styles, and ideally something that could fail. Aside from instructions, the facilitator needs to push the event along, but not comment. While I did lead the group in an improv warmup (everyone felt scared! I feel energies too often in rooms, so I had to fix it!), I timed groups, cut them off when they went over time, and turned the attention over to the next group.

On a personal note, I leave things vague and don’t like to give the group ideas, suggestions, props – I want them to define experience themselves, the interpretation to come organically and the experience to be group driven, not agenda driven. Yes, I would love to see everyone do crazy out there experiences – but risk to me is very different than risk to others.

Lunch: Lunch was provided for the participants. This is optional, clearly, and our next one (YES, we have another planned!) will happen after lunch. I’m a fan of giving people some kind of treat after positive-risk taking.

Reflection: They came, they created, they presented, they ate, and they reflected. Below, you can read the reflections of several participants – I left it optional to submit a written reflection, but post-lunch we chatted about a few key things. I asked the group to think about how they felt before, during and after the Mashup, what successes and failures they saw and had, and what can they do today, tomorrow or eventually with what they saw today. Those questions were also posed to the group for the written response.

Wrapped it up, and said where next…

I’m a big believer of striking while the iron is hot – I immediately emailed the group post-weekend, and asked where the next Mashup would take place. Full disclosure, I asked AT the Mashup, post reflection, because I am still an abrasive New Yorker. Worked well, because the New Winston Museum and North Carolina Museum of Art offered to host the next two. I set a date for the participants and myself regarding reflections. It’s 4:30pm on October 26^th, and my self-imposed deadline was October 27^th at 5pm. I also started a Facebook group to keep everyone together, post photos, plan the next one – with the simple description of “To plan, execute and reflect on cultural experience experimentation in NC.”

Because that’s exactly what we are doing.

This wasn’t my first Mash Up, but this might have been my favorite one, only because of the domino effect that happened after. People are excited – we had educators, but we also had a curator, a chef, an owner of a new makerspace, artists, retired teachers, a poet – and that energy around connecting with objects and works is incredible. So YES, do these all over…AND share what happened!

Participant Reflections: Museum Mashup, Triad Style, October 16

Before the Mashup at SECCA, I was feeling slightly anxious. I had seen a mash-up in New Orleans, but wasn’t exactly excited about doing it myself. What if I didn’t have any ideas? What if I let my group down? What if I was assigned some artwork that I couldn’t find a connection with? I felt better knowing that I wasn’t going into it alone and that everyone would be encountering their assignment at the same time. Mostly before the mash-up I was feeling reluctant to go and trying to make an attitude adjustment so that even if I didn’t have fun, I wouldn’t bring an attitude that would encumber anyone else from having a great time.

Appropriately, Jen rounded up the group for a collective experience to get us started. This was crucial, as warm ups can be. I knew most of the people there, but there were some I didn’t and it was not a gathering that had existed before. We needed a shared experience before beginning the task. Simply gathering in a circle helped, Zip-Zap-Zop further supported a new dynamic and preparation for us to move forward.

I felt better when assigned my group; I’ve been on a committee with Katherine for the better part of this year and I had met Emily before at other museum educators events. When we received our artwork, I felt a little anxious again: it was a video work. How would we incorporate a piece of art that was so dependent on time? When we went to the video, however, I began to relax again. It was beautiful. My fear of connecting with the work was quickly assuaged and the next challenge was to figure out how to create a corporate experience. I felt blank. What on earth would we do? When Emily suggested sharing our thoughts in flashes while we watched, I again felt better and knew I could trust the process. We were sharing ideas; we had similar observations and some of the same ideas were resonating with us. The film was short and looped through several times as we formulated our own responses and began to brainstorm our approach. I kept finding myself thinking, what do I want people to notice and learn and had to remind myself I wasn’t teaching. Our goal was to create an experience. When watching the film that showed falcons and Arabian desert, I felt compelled to move. And movement became part of the experience.

We worked together to create an experience; while we didn’t require our visitors to look closely at the video or experience it in full, we did use the elements of the video to inform the experience. And, it served as a backdrop, visual and auditory, as we proceeded. I hope that people were able to see it and make connections while participating in the activity we led, even if the connection to the art was necessarily soft.

There was a moment, as we wrapped up our “experience,” when I realized that everyone in the gallery had jumped right in and trusted us all the way through the activity. They trusted us and each other (it might have helped that the room was darkened for video) such that at the end we were all standing as falcons and emitting a piercing cry of a bird of prey into the gallery. I was grateful for their trust in us and I think they were rewarded for it; the positive energy in the room was palpable.

I left the day feeling energized and like I had had a good mental/professional workout.

While in some ways, I feel like I am constantly experimenting in my own teaching in the process of figure out what works, I also experience limitations. Some of these are institutional, some are self-imposed. What I saw from my group’s gallery experience is how movement can be a really important thing to do in an art museum. It helped me respond to the video and it further shifted the energy of the collective group. I can thus push more to incorporate movement in the context of my museum teaching–trying to find ways to do it safely and structure experiences so that it is included.

In terms of structure, I think it was great to have the length of time (5-7 minutes) that we had and the number in each group (3). Also, as one of my colleagues said, it’s so fun to get to work with other people’s art!

Julia Hood, Coordinator of Education, Reynolda House Museum of American Art

* * * * *

The Museum Mashup is a really fun and fresh way to connect with one’s creative side and to collaborate with museum and art professionals. Mediation is the sacred key to what Curators and Educators do–it’s our shared ground. The Mashup brought us together and helped bring about a variety of responses, approaches to mediation, and conversation showing that good things happen when you play.

Cora Fisher, Curator of Contemporary Art, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art

* * * * *

When I first signed up for the Museum Mash-up I really had no idea what to expect, but I had met Jen a week or two before and I knew that it would be an exciting event. I met some interesting new people, which is rare for me. I know everyone in town! I was surprised by how some of the groups gave me a new and very interesting way to view some of the art installations. I think I made some new friends at the Mash-up, and I plan to take a closer look at the exhibits at SECCA and explore some new perspectives.

Alan Shelton, Co-Founder/CEO, Winston Salem Mixxer

* * * * *

It’s not always easy to break away from what “works”, but I believe it is always worthwhile to step back and look at things in new ways and through different perspectives. By encouraging collaboration between educators and non-educators from the Triad, the Museum Ed Mashup at SECCA gave me the opportunity to play with a group of individuals that value experimentation and play as much as I do.

In the field of museum education it is often all too easy to stop experimenting and become complacent when you find something that “works” well enough. This could be a tour program, an art activity, a scripted speech, or a way of looking at or experiencing artwork. While there is nothing inherently wrong with repeating programs or experiences, repetition in isolation and without experimentation can lead to complacency, and ultimately stagnation. This problem is exactly what the Museum Ed Mashup was created to combat. And that is exactly what it did.

By bringing together educators and non-educators together from varied backgrounds it gave everyone the ability to experiment freely and experience the world through different perspectives. This, I think, is the greatest gift the Mashup has to offer. It reminds us that not everyone thinks alike.

Alex Brown, Programs Coordinator, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art

* * * * *

The time spent at MuseumEd Mashup, far exceeded my expectations. In a world of meetings, planning, lectures and programming, it was refreshing to step away and look at exhibits in a more provocative way. I was inspired to explore the artist and medium in new and creative ways, with others! Thank you for stepping outside of the box and taking risks with your audience.

Amy Jordan Kincaid, Graphics and Special Projects Coordinator, Sawtooth School for Visual Art

Experimenting in Museums

A Salad Garden Grows at the Getty

October 14, 2015 Mike Murawski Leave a comment

What is the Getty Salad Garden?

Starting this October, the Getty Salad Garden, an installation of organic heirloom vegetables and salad greens growing in raised beds, pops up on the Getty Center grounds as the fascinating history of art and food come together in two special exhibitions: The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals, and Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Food in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Reposted from the Getty Museum’s website and The Getty Iris online magazine. Special thanks to Sarah Cooper and Annelisa Stephan at the Getty, as well as artist Julia Sherman, for allowing me to repost this content about such an inspiring, creative, and experimental project.

Presented by artist and writer Julia Sherman, creator of the popular blog Salad for President, the Getty Salad Garden is conceived as a dynamic platform for conversations, drawing together a wide variety of creative voices. Like the format of her blog, Sherman will invite a range of artists and creative guests to join her in harvesting and making salads, emphasizing that the simple act of cooking together can be the catalyst for fascinating conversations and a fruitful creative exchange. Through sharing their artistic and culinary interests and the surprising ways they intersect, the conversations reveal the potential for a simple salad to invigorate our creative lives. Throughout the fall, the Getty Salad Garden will serve as an unexpected, playful space for investigations into the historical material on display in the galleries, infusing it with contemporary perspectives.

For the project, Sherman collaborated with urban gardeners Farmscape Gardens, and art-historian-turned-landscape-architect David Godshall of Terremoto Landscape. Together they have designed a garden which thoughtfully responds to the Getty Center’s architecture and landscape, and utilizes rare seeds, including 19th-century varietals, that help preserve agricultural and culinary heritage. The garden will be drip-irrigated, using dramatically less water than a lawn requires.

The Getty Salad Garden will support a variety of projects documenting the salads and conversations Sherman has with exciting members of Los Angeles’s artistic community. Through student workshops, intermittent public hours, and small gatherings, the Getty Salad Garden explores the unique way gardens inherently foster community, and hopes to inspire new encounters between visitors, artists, gardeners, cooks, museum staff, and works of art.

The Getty Salad Garden in progress next to the Central Garden. Photo: Abby Han

An Interview with Julia Sherman of Salad for President (from The Getty Iris)

During Julia’s latest salad exploration adventure in Japan, where she sampled dishes with myoga wild ginger flower, ponzu dipped sea grapes, and fried lotus root, Sarah Cooper (Public Programs Specialist, Getty Center) spoke with her about how the Getty Salad Garden came to be and how the simple salad managed to get her vote.

What led you to create Salad for President?

In 2011, I had finished my MFA at Columbia University, and I was forging along, pursuing shows and residencies and paying a fortune for a studio on the fifth floor of a storage facility under the Manhattan Bridge. My space was sandwiched between a CrossFit gym and a 24-hour energy distributor, so you can imagine I was not feeling surrounded by “community.”

My husband started a Tumblr for me called Salad for President, urging me to catalogue my obsessive cooking, gardening, and hosting. These were the creative things I was doing without preoccupation, the equivalent of a sketchbook for most artists. There came a point where I finally admitted that I wasn’t inspired in the studio; I wanted to be in my kitchen or garden, making that which I knew exactly how to share. So I taught myself how to take photos of food, and I started inviting myself over to the homes and studios of all the salad-loving artists I knew. The energy I brought to the project was immediately contagious, and so it became a garden, a book, a cocktail syrup, and a soon a perfume. The open-endedness for me is the best part. Salad is a platform for me.

Julia Sherman. Photo courtesy of Julia Sherman

I read that you think making a salad is similar to making art in that it requires assembling various colors, textures, and sensory elements. Yet salads are not art. Why do you make this connection?

I think you could make an argument that a salad could be art if the maker wanted it to be, but for me, salad as an art object is not really the point. I am more interested in practice and dialogue, an artist’s approach to the entirety of their world, not just their finished works. If I were to call the salad itself a work of art, it would no longer feel like a casual gift, something I can so easily give to others. It’s not meant to be exhibited but consumed, and then reimagined the very next day.

What have been your favorite salad sessions?

Some of the best salad sessions have come from those who don’t identify as cooks. Sina Najafi—editor in chief of Cabinet Magazine—and Nina Katchadourian—one of my favorite artists—used the materials of their salad to make a tribute to Rafael Nadal, their favorite tennis player. They constructed a tiny tennis court out of pine nuts and chives, and we got so deep into the topic that it eventually turned into a potent lesson on role models and the importance of finding inspiration outside your given discipline.

If you had to choose a salad recipe that best reflects your own creative outlook, what would it be?

I always go back to the Greek salad, because I am fascinated by its staying power—I have never met a contemporary twist on a Greek salad that I preferred. In all creative pursuits, it is important to know when not to innovate but to instead appreciate things just the way they are. This is a trait I appreciate most in art—think of Bruce Nauman or the Fluxus artists. Things don’t have to complicated to be good.

What artists have been important for you throughout your career?

I have been very fortunate to have mentors whose work I admire. When I was in college, I identified with the work of Janine Antoni. I had the chance to work with her in grad school and assist her briefly, and she taught me about work-life balance, prioritizing, and taking risks. She has been making sculpture and installation successfully for over 20 years. Later she found her passion in dance and was not afraid to pursue that. That, to me, is what it means to be a great artist.

Installing the Getty Salad Garden. Photo: Abby Han

Same for Jon Kessler and Dike Blair, who have been painfully honest about the peaks and valleys of the art world and their own careers. We are all just trying to figure it out, over and over again, and it is so valuable to hear that from those who are succeeding. The art world is not a cult where you find your place and claim it; rather, we are just a roaming community of restless makers looking for a way to keep pushing ourselves.

Last year you created a salad garden on the roof of MoMA PS1 in New York. Why is it important to you to present Salad for President in the context of a museum?

The art world will always be my home, and I think it is crucial that I root my thinking there. A project like this, as innocuous as it might seem, asks some critical questions of both the visitors and the museum itself, the artists who show their work there, and the people who make the museum happen. How are you supposed to use the space and who does it belong to? How can a museum be an active place of engagement? How can it activate the imagination of the public?

For me, the garden is both familiar and strange—a place that allows for an ease of curiosity, discovery, and dialogue amongst the experienced gardener and the total novice alike. This mirrors the ideal engagement one should have at the museum.

For the Getty Salad Garden, you’ve brought in two collaborators: David Godshall of Terremoto Landscape and Farmscape Gardens. How did you meet these collaborators and bring them into the project?

David Godshall and I are old friends. He approaches everything he does with the utmost intention and respect. I knew that if we were to make a garden at the Getty, it would have to be beautifully designed and sensitive to its surroundings. So David created a really smart Tetris configuration, which was an elegant and cost effective solution to a functional garden. It’s also one that he sees as a midway point between the Getty Center’s architecture and Central Garden.

Overhead view of the Getty Salad Garden. Photo: Abby Han

When I was in Los Angeles about six months ago, Gillian Ferguson, the producer of the radio show Good Food, wrote an article about Salad for President for Los Angeles Magazine in which I alluded to my plans to make my next salad garden in Los Angeles. Lara Hermanson of Farmscape Gardens reached out to me, offering to plant and manage a garden if I were to make it happen.

I consider myself the ultimate amateur gardener, but for a project of this scale, I could never have done it without the expertise of Lara’s staff, Dan Allen and Ariel Chesnutt, who spend all day creating and maintaining public and private vegetable gardens in California.

Why did you want to realize the second iteration of your garden project in Los Angeles?

I moved to Los Angeles with my partner, Adam Katz, in 2007, and he and I started a project space in the front of my studio called Workspace. It really served a need of our community of artists, just finding their way after school, not yet showing their work in commercial galleries. It was there that I found my place as an organizer, a host, a facilitator of artists’ projects. I am grateful to Los Angeles and its artists for their energy at that time.

I later moved back to New York for grad school, but I’ve always maintained a life in L.A. I also learned to garden here, so it seemed only right to make the next salad garden in the place where so many of my fundamental ideas came together.

Bringing people together and sharing their stories seems to be the central impulse of Salad for President. What is it about salads and gardens that make them such great connectors?

I’ve discovered that the intimacy of salad and the garden unlocks a world of people I admire. We are all trying to figure out how we can live our lives better, more honestly, more fully. What better way to spark a conversation about those big ideas than to start with something small?

* * * * *

This season, Julia Sherman is in residence at the Getty Salad Garden, growing, harvesting, and cooking alongside members of Los Angeles’s artistic community. Through student workshops, intermittent public hours, and small gatherings, the Getty hopes the simple salad will inspire new encounters between visitors, artists, gardeners, cooks, museum staff, and works of art.

Experimenting in Museums

Museum Mash-Up: Triad Style!

October 13, 2015 Jen Oleniczak

We’re bringing the Mash-up to the Triad this Friday at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art!

Inspired by the 2014 NAEA Museum Mash-up (which you can read about here and here), we’re going to think outside of our comfort zones and create experiences on the spot with works of art from Point & Counterpoint: NC Arts Council Fellows 2014-2015.

Starting at 11:00am, we’ll create small teaching groups, get randomized object assignments and prototype short experiences with these objects. After sharing these adventures, we’ll meet for lunch and discuss the morning.

Please invite all experimenters: museum educators, art teachers, science buffs, general educators, as well as any community members interested in playing! The more the merrier, no experience in art necessary, just a can do attitude and willingness to play and experiment.

Not in North Carolina? Jen from The Engaging Educator will be live-tweeting the Mash-Up, and participants are invited to share at #museumedmashup

WHEN: Friday, October 16^th – 11am-2pm

11-11:15– Welcome, introduction, assign artworks + groups
11:15-12:00– Planning time
12:00-1:00– Museum Mash-Up
1:00-2:00– Reflection, light lunch provided

WHERE: Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art; 750 Marguerite Drive, Winston-Salem, NC 27106

For more information, contact Jen@theengagingeducator.com or RSVP here!

Art Museum Teaching

Category Archives: Experimenting in Museums

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Museum Mashup: How We Did It + Triad Reflections

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Found a group of people.

Found a place and date.

Promoted away!

Just did it.

Wrapped it up, and said where next…

Participant Reflections: Museum Mashup, Triad Style, October 16

Museum Mash-Up: Triad Style!

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Strategies for Change

But What Can I Do?

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3D Printing and Rodin?

How did it go?

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Beginnings

Experiments in Self-Guided Experiences

Taking Risks, Breaking Rules

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How did the Museum Social Action Project come about?

Why should a museum conference try and facilitate something like this?

What is The Laundromat Project?

What’s the project that you’re doing?

What do you think the delegates will get out of it?

What impact can the project have?

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How We Plan a Museum Mashup

Found a group of people.

Found a place and date.

Promoted away!

Just did it.

Wrapped it up, and said where next…

Participant Reflections: Museum Mashup, Triad Style, October 16

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What is the Getty Salad Garden?

An Interview with Julia Sherman of Salad for President (from The Getty Iris)

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A Forum for Reflecting on Practice