Category Archives: Experimenting in Museums

Experimenting in Museums, Field Notes, Gallery Teaching Marathon 2014, Spotlight on Practice, Teaching Tools

Long Live the Spirit of Play: Tracking a Theme through NAEA 2014

April 18, 2014 Mike Murawski 6 Comments

By Rachel Ropeik, Brooklyn Museum

Nothing signifies 'play' like this installation by Martin Creed. Photo by Nicolas Mirguet. — Nothing signifies ‘play’ like this installation by Martin Creed. Photo by Nicolas Mirguet.

What do maker spaces, bodily collisions with strangers, and sculptures made of Turkish delight have in common? They were all part of sessions at the recent 2014 National Art Education Association Convention in San Diego. To be more specific, they were all part of sessions that focused on a theme threading through the four days of sun and arts teaching: the spirit of play.

That’s how I’m referring to it, at least. The same idea was talked about as “being OK with failure”, “going in without predetermined outcomes”, and “iterative approaches”, but it was all shades of the same thing, and it was popping up everywhere. (Side note: The importance of play in our work lives has been a topic beyond the museum sphere for a while. Here’s a nice, clear Psychology Today article from 2008 that talks about what play means for our brains.) People are interested in testing new ideas without knowing how they’ll end up, and I love it. Like my theme tracking after the last AAM Annual Meeting, I want to follow this one through the NAEA Convention, highlighting some (though by no means all) of the conversations, actions, and tweets that made it one of my top conference takeaways.

Talking about play started out at the Museum Education Division Preconference, which was hosted at Balboa Park, home to some inspirational collaborations between cultural institutions. Collaboration was the theme of the Preconference, and the very first session of the day, a keynote panel of experienced museum collaboration facilitators, included advice like:

Heather Berry: sometimes #MuseumsConnect collabs btwn museums/community orgs don’t meet stated goals, but have great outcomes. #naeamused14

— Rachel Ropeik (@TheArtRopeik) March 28, 2014

and

Bless and release: a lovely way to phrase the need to collaborate on the big idea, then let each org make its own decisions. #naeamused14

— Rachel Ropeik (@TheArtRopeik) March 28, 2014

Conference attendees were excited about this theme, too, and talked/tweeted about it throughout the day.

Seema Rao of the Cleveland Museum of Art reminded us about taking chances.

Risk needs to be okay in general in the museum field #naeamused14

— seema rao (@artlust) March 28, 2014

David Bowles from the Metropolitan Museum of Art talked about what motivated him to take part in the Noguchi Museum’s Teacher Think Tank (a program that started with the open-ended goal of getting museum educators and K-12 teachers together to think about museums and schools working together).

.@iamdavidbowles shares thoughts on what drew him in. Part of it was the open-ended nature. No pre-determined outcome. #naeamused14

— Rachel Ropeik (@TheArtRopeik) March 28, 2014

On Saturday morning, a session called Museum Maker Spaces: Creating and Play for Adults (not to be confused with “adult play”) took up the playfulness banner. I’m sorry to have missed that session, but thanks to colleagues like Emily Holtrop (from the Cincinnati Art Museum) and Cate Bayles (from the John Michael Kohler Arts Center), I heard about some of its key themes on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/EmArtGirl/statuses/449944722451083266

https://twitter.com/FreshInTheField/statuses/449948897473875969

No pressure for an end product? What do we get out of play? As the larger debate continues about how to make museums relevant, I’m glad these are some of the issues being posed. I’m a firm believer that the museum can be a space for more than an in-depth, object-centered experience. As a museum educator, yes, that’s at the heart of what I do in many ways, but is it the only thing I do? No. The only—or, dare I say best—thing visitors can experience when they come to a museum? Heck, no!

Museums can be many things to many people. For those of us dedicated to making museums meaningful, setting up experiments and pushing the boundaries of what makes a “good museum visit” is a great way to find out what some of those many things might be.

That was exactly the spirit of the Gallery Teaching Marathon, organized by this site’s Mike Murawski and hosted at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego on Sunday of the NAEA Convention. As any regular reader of ArtMuseumTeaching.com knows, Mike is a voice for pushing our museum education practice, and he invited us to do just that through in-gallery sessions throughout the day. In his original email looking for educators interested in leading a session, here’s how he put it:

“I would encourage people to think of this as an opportunity to try something new, take risks, and know that you will be among supportive colleagues, peers, and educators.”

And for those who ventured into one or two or all of the Gallery Teaching Marathon sessions, risks and newness were there for them to find. Without speaking for my talented fellow educators who offered a wide range of experiences in the galleries that day, I will say the session I facilitated was exciting and invigorating to lead, and I hope fun to take part in.

We used Richard Serra’s site-specific work, Santa Fe Depot to inspire us to write found poems, to focus on the environment around the work (up to and including the tourists dancing on top of Serra’s forged steel blocks, the commuter trains arriving and departing immediately next to us, and the pile of “organic sculpture” a dog had left behind next to the artwork), and finally, to create our own interpretive movements based on the words we’d generated.

Throughout the day, the Marathon sessions were full of eager, interested attendees, gung-ho for all the weirdness that might come their way and then ready to reflect on it. For my part, I found it incredibly liberating to be trying something with no idea how it would go over. I liked explaining to the experimental adventurers at my session that I’d never done this before and talking about which elements of what we did made them uncomfortable and why. It felt like an exciting deviation from what I expect from my own teaching, which led directly to me thinking about how to make it less of a deviation.

How can I take that spirit of fun, unexpected experiences in the museum and layer it into my job? How can I give the teachers I work with—especially now, when so many are stressed over standards and evaluation—the same kind of joyful, playful invigoration that I felt from all these NAEA sessions and colleagues? How can I spread my own belief that sometimes the most fun you can have in a museum comes from doing something within its walls that you would never have expected to do?

That’s what I’ve come home thinking about, and I’d love to hear if this idea affected any of you, too. Any anecdotes to share about how the spirit of play has impacted your museum work? Any advice for spreading the enjoyably surprising? Any other NAEA sessions you attended that connected to this idea? Share your thoughts in the comments.

If you want to read more about some of the things I’ve mentioned, check the Twitter hashtags #naea14, #naeamused14 (for museum-related content), and #galleryteachingmarathon. There’s also my complete Storify account of the Convention, which has plenty more tweeting about the spirit of play, and Olga Hubard’s recent reflection on the Gallery Teaching Marathon itself (touching upon some of these same ideas).

Experimenting in Museums, Field Notes, Gallery Teaching Marathon 2014, Spotlight on Practice

In the Midst of Practice: Reflections on the Gallery Teaching Marathon

April 14, 2014 Mike Murawski 6 Comments

By Olga Hubard, Teachers College, Columbia University

Liz Diament leading part of a gallery teaching experience with Ai Weiwei's "Marble Chair." — Liz Diament leading part of a gallery teaching experience with Ai Weiwei’s “Marble Chair.”

We all know that one way we grow as museum education professionals is by sharing our practices and the thinking that surrounds them. In most cases we do this through traditional presentations: our ideas and experiences tidily packaged; challenges and difficulties presented as something that occurred (safely) in the past, and which we now frame as food for productive reflection. The experimentation and messiness that is so often part of our work — at least if we take the risks necessary to keep evolving — do not often occur in front of our colleagues. That is, unless we participate in a Gallery Teaching Marathon like the one that took place in the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego during the NAEA conference this spring.

I left the Gallery Teaching Marathon both inspired and hopeful. One important reason was the very nature of the marathon: a group of seasoned museum educators guiding each other in engagements with works of art. Some, by their own admission, did “something they had never tried before;” others shared approaches that had been tried and tested but with works that were new to them. The fact that these educators felt comfortable enough to make themselves vulnerable in front of their colleagues is indicative of extraordinary trust among this community. As well, it reflects the passion and indomitable spirit of a group of professionals who have helped shape our field from the ground up.

For those of us who have become accustomed to teaching in the galleries, it was a luxury to be on the audience end of things, with the primary responsibility of helping make meaning of a series of compelling artworks. It was also fascinating to witness a range of teaching approaches that overlapped as much as they were different. I know many of us left the marathon with new ideas — particular strategies that we plan to borrow from our peers, and which will likely be incorporated into our practice soon enough.

Participants engaging in movement and pantomime strategies led by Jen Oleniczak.

I am ready, for example, to invite viewers to think more explicitly of the layers of meaning that a work might yield (Niki Ciccotelli Stewart), or to encourage them to enact the movements they might make if they could go inside a picture (Jen Oleniczak). I am also keen to have visitors post written questions on the periphery of a work (Heidi Hinish and Liz Diament), or to ask them to do what a particular work “is asking them to do” (Elliott Kai-Kee). More than anything, I am curious to see what happens as other educators in the group borrow and adapt this or that approach, make it their own, and come up with yet other ideas. It is this sort of cross-fertilization that keeps things moving along.

Another gain for me was renewed empathy with audiences. Throughout the marathon, I was acutely aware of how I responded to the various conditions that shaped our gallery interactions. When did the pace of a conversation leave room for my comments and when did it seem too fast or too distant from my ideas? In the case of non-discursive activities, when did I feel too self-conscious to really be in the experience and when did I feel comfortable “going for it”? How did the educator’s demeanor influence my interaction with the work and with others in the group?

By taking the participant’s seat, I was also able to re-discover something I already knew — or thought I knew. Like all of you, I have known for years that partner talk is a valuable approach in the galleries (of course!). But at MCASD, when a group got too large, or when for whatever reason I did not feel prepared to share my thoughts in a group dialogue, how grateful I was to be able to share what had been in my mind all along with a partner! The next time I facilitate partner- or small-group work I will do so from a renewed level of empathy and awareness. Perhaps like me, some of you also left the marathon with your own “re-learnings,” which can only work to enhance visitors’ experiences in the museum.

Beyond specific strategies and empathy, the gallery teaching marathon animated some larger issues that underlie our work. Two that are particularly alive for me at this point:

If the experiences that took place in MCASD are in any way representative of the field, it would seem that we have come to accept that the meanings that viewers shape through words and rational thought are no more worthy than those they shape through poetic and non-discursive modalities. In an educational milieu that values rational thinking and word-based forms of meaning making above all, this places us at the vanguard–but also in tension with the status quo. Given this, how might we work to deepen and strengthen a commitment to poetic/artistic and multimodal ways of knowing so that museum visitors can continue to benefit from rich, multidimensional experiences with museum objects? How might we articulate the educational worth of diverse modes of meaning making? And how might we avoid dichotomizing rational, word-based approaches vis-à-vis more poetic ones, which might put us at risk of throwing out the baby with the bath water — or from recognizing when the two intersect?

A few times during the marathon, I heard participants note that certain activities had taken them away from, rather than closer to, the works that were the target of our exploration. In the same breadth, these people added something along the lines of, “I’m not sure that it matters, though; the activity was worthwhile anyway.” For us educators, this raises a question of intentionality: When are our activities meant to bring us into deeper interaction with an object? When are they meant to spark off creative activity beyond the work itself? When are they meant to do both–or to do something different altogether? Does it matter and, if so, in what way? (These questions remind me of my colleague Megan Laverty’s provocative idea that perhaps the main purpose of art is to generate more art.)

Elliott Kai-Kee leads group to openly explore the question "what is this particular artwork asking me to do?" — Elliott Kai-Kee leads group to openly explore the question “what is this particular artwork asking me to do?”

With these and other questions in mind, throughout the marathon, part of me kept wishing for more time to debrief and reflect on what we were all experiencing. The rest of me was content with the limited reflection time we had, however — there was something wonderful about spending an entire day in the midst of practice; a day of sharing our work in the making; our practices in all their messiness and all their (realized and yet-to-be realized) potential. Perhaps an idea for another occasion might be to have a one-day gallery teaching marathon followed by a half-day reflection session.

But back to the event at MCASD. Early in this post, I said that the Gallery Teaching Marathon left me hopeful. I meant it. As I think back to our day together, I am hopeful for what is to come for our field, full as it is of courageous and dedicated educators who continue to build from the ground up, and to push us all to think and play and interact in thoughtful, imaginative ways. This is significant work for us as educators, and I trust that in time it will lead to more meaning-full museum experiences for visitors.

UPDATE: Response from Elliott Kai-Kee, J. Paul Getty Museum

“Olga Hubard’s reflection on the issue of non-discursive and ‘poetic’ approaches versus word-based and ‘rational’ approaches struck a responsive chord with me. I like the way she cautions us against putting the two in opposition rather than seeing them as ‘intersecting,’ or even better, complementary. Indeed, I think it’s crucially important to figure out ways to work them together. I commonly see docents separate their school-group lessons into ‘activity’ stops and ‘discussion’ stops. How is it that we have defined the two in ways that result in such a dichotomy? They must get this from us somehow. Is it a reflection of an argument pitting engagement against interpretation? Materiality against symbolism? The Gallery Teaching Marathon demonstrated a wonderful variety of approaches to the practice of gallery teaching. Is there a way of thinking about teaching that brings them together in a way that would make them more powerful in combination?”

About the Author:

OLGA HUBARD: Associate professor of art education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Olga is interested in the humanizing power of art and in how educators can help promote meaningful art experiences for learners. She has published extensively about this issue, particularly in the context of museum education. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including Studies in Art Education, Curator: The Museum Journal, International Journal of Art and Design Education, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Journal of Museum Education, and Art Education: The Journal of the National Art Education Association. Olga’s writing is informed by years of experience as a museum educator and art teacher, and by her ongoing studio art practice. She holds doctoral and master’s degrees in art education from Teachers College, an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and a BA in Art History from the Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico). Olga’s postings on this site are her own and do not necessarily represent Columbia University’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

Experimenting in Museums, In Theory

Invisible Pedagogies: Expanding the Concept of Education in Museums

April 3, 2014 Mike Murawski 12 Comments

Written by Andrea de Pascual

Invisible Pedagogies (IP) is a collective that works on the creation of a space in which we can rethink the relationship between art and education. It was born in Madrid in 2009 and was formed by educators from different areas such as high schools, colleges, community contexts, and art centers. It was created of the need we felt to look for new ways of thinking about the theory and practice in art education. We met while taking a doctorate course entitled Didactics of Suspicion, whose professor, Maria Acaso, is now the director of most of our doctorate studies. A strong bond was created between us, and it still helps us to become stronger in our struggle against the establishment. We were born as a “self-doctorate” (self taught) group who deals with theory but because of our methodological nature, yet based upon action-research strategies, we were soon forced into practice.

On the other hand, invisible pedagogies is a concept that already existed before the collective, exploring education beyond the boundaries of the curriculum and considering pedagogical elements that hadn’t been addressed in the learning-teaching experience until now. Invisible pedagogies is the reflection upon the non-explicit micro-discourses that all-together form the macro-discourse that is the pedagogical act. And although they remain on a second level, they are likely to transform the body and soul of the participants involved in it.

In other words, the teaching act is a mediated performance in the same way that a theatrical performance is mediated and its different elements (micro-discourses) will make up a pedagogical narrative. What do our students in class, the participants in a workshop, or museum visitors learn beyond the contents we have prepared for them? An example we always use to explain invisible pedagogies is the door. What is the meaning of closing a door in the classroom? And of leaving it open? Or asking the students which they prefer? In a museum the fact that the entrance doors are automatic or revolving or that one must push them, will send a specifically different message to the visitor and will affect the way he or she interacts with the art inside.

“Invisible pedagogies have many ways of changing people in their participation in the educative act. They help them to learn or not; they get people to become passionate for knowledge or deadly bored, they make them feel fear or pleasure, they invite them to share or to hide” (Acaso, 2012)

Invisible Pedagogies in Museums

We do not limit ourselves to making invisible pedagogies visible, but, once we have detected them, we analyze and transform them by applying them in new contexts and using new educational theories in different projects.

David Lanau, Andrea De Pascual, and Eva Morales (IP-Museums).

In the case of the three educators in the Invisisble Pedagogies (IP) collective that work in museums and art centers (Eva Morales, David Lanau and myself, Andrea De Pascual), rather than changing doors, we are offering whole new formats that expand the concept of education in museums. Little by little, museums and art centers are changing their attitudes and are opening their minds to new educative proposals which go beyond guided tours, audioguides, or workshops out of the exhibition spaces. However, the real opportunity for us came from Matadero Madrid.

As a contemporary art center, Matadero Madrid does not have an education department as such, but it does have great interest in educative aspects far beyond offering the heritage of the institution as an educational resource available for schools to complete their curriculums, or the simplification of the contents of curatorial work. This institution gave us the possibility to design our educative actions from an approach which Carmen Mörsch calls transformative discourse:

“Practices related to this discourse (transformative) work against the categorical or hierarchical differentiation between curatorial effort and gallery education. In this practice, gallery educators and the public not only work together to uncover institutional mechanisms, but also to improve and expand them” (Mörsch, 2009)

Working for Matadero Madrid helped us to visualize the (post)museum more as “a process or experience not a building to be visited. In it the role of the exhibition is to be focus for a plethora of transient activities” (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000). And it helped us see education as “an element of ongoing personal growth, that is not limited to one particular stage of life. Education as play, a way of unravelling the media theatre. Education as an open source operating system that turns us into critical citizens. Education as a game played by all individuals, from all eras. Education as a utopia for a culture-sharing society” (Zemos98, 2012).

These are just a few of our references that helps us to transform directionality, format, and methodology (among other aspects of traditional museum education) when designing our educational actions.

Transforming Invisible Pedagogies

I will present now some of the invisible pedagogies we have detected, analyzed, and transformed during the almost 5 years we have been working together, as well as issues and goals that are part of our methodological frame.

One of the most important discourses we want to change is the power-knowledge barrier built between educators (visible voice of the institution during the praxis of museum education) and participants (individuals that in most cases feel they don’t have anything to say about contemporary art). In order to change this invisible directionality, we think that just sitting in a circle or introducing ourselves at the beginning of an activity (strategies that are already common practice) is not enough. One of our strategies to change that invisible pedagogy is to have always more than one educator per workshop. The idea is not only to decentralize people’s attention, so as not to have a single point of view, but also to show that among the “agents of the institution” there can be disagreements and even discords. It is a scheme to make the one true voice disappear in favor of a multiplicity of voices, all of them being equally valid. We also think that it was fundamental, in order to bring down this wall of conventional teaching, to introduce analytic dialogue (based on the possibility instead of the agreement) and open-ended activities receptive to the unexpected.

Contemporary art not only as content but also as a pedagogical format.

Another important invisible discourse we have to dismantle and transform is that Art and Education are two separate things. Art and Education are the two sides of the museum coin and should be approached at the same time. Just as art can be educative, education can be artistic. Why not use performance, installation, minimalism, video, body action. etc. as educative tools? We’re interested in the idea of using contemporary art not only as content of the program but also as a pedagogical format.

I think that nowadays we, museum educators, will in most cases agree that participants in our programs produce knowledge and add meaning to the exhibits but are we really honest? Are we prepared to believe it? What are we really telling our participants? If we want the museum to be a social agent and a place of action and transformation, we need to consider the participants in our actions as learning-communities capable of producing knowledge of the same quality, interest, and authenticity as the knowledge produced by artists and curators. To make this more than a statement, we never use a separate space in the museum (like a workshop reserved for education activities) and we find strategies through which participants and visitors can leave a footprint in the gallery or the museum. We mean to use the galleries, halls, atriums, or even the patios of museums as learning sites. We think of the museum as a learning laboratory in which new layers of knowledge are added to the pre-existing ones by the visualization of the knowledge production of the participants.

Last but not least, we introduce the action-research tool in museum education to change the invisible discourse that exists inside institutions around education departments. Although education departments in museums are now common and have their importance, the untold truth is that they still don’t have the resources or the tools needed to reach the status they deserve within the institution. Research is essential to change this dynamic. First, because the knowledge and research produced in museum education departments should be available to specialists; therefore archives are just as indispensable in education departments as in those of curatorship. Second, because in education there is no way of knowing how to improve the practice if you don’t analyze it.

IP Museum Projects at Matadero Madrid

Abierto X Obras -- Leaving a footprint in the museum: visualization of the knowledge production of the participants. Matadero Madrid. — Transforming the invisible pedagogies in the museum. Abierto X Obras, Matadero Madrid.

The first time IP worked with Matadero Madrid we developed a family workshop program that we called En Construcción. Disculpen las molestias (Under construction, sorry for the inconvenience) to activate a gallery dedicated to contemporary art called Abierto X Obras (Open for Repairs). IP transformed the family workshop format into intergenerational workshops, or, as we called them on that occasion, 0-99 workshops (from 0 to 99 years of age). The goal was to create a more inclusive format in which teenagers or babies could participate, or in which family was extended to include roommates, close friends, or even to allow adults (alone or accompanied with or without children) and to have them all participate in active way.

For our second project, we were invited to strengthen and activate the relationships between the audience and the art production that was taking place in El Ranchito — an exhibition that made visible the working processes of artists rather than the finished work. The project was called Espacio Visible (Visible Space), and it was literally a space inside the gallery available to educators and visitors to add meaning to the exhibition through their own contributions.

Our third project called Here, together now: Building art communities in a changing world, was a multi-national collaborative project to rethink how an art exhibition is produced, with and for whom. The three members of IP Museums were artists-educators in residence invited to create a scenario of mediation where the public could relate with what was being done.

In 2013 and 2014, we are developing the project Microondas: Recalentando la educación (Microwave: reheating the education) that consists of a collaborative-research and action group that rethinks current educational methodologies within new activist frameworks and theories. Our last seminar was called “Activist (?) Pedagogies”.

Opening the Conversation

Can you detect other invisible pedagogies in museum education? How would you transform them to change the dynamics of teaching in the museum? By incorporating invisible pedagogies in the practice of museum education, in what ways do you think they could expand the concept of education within the museum? Add your voice to the conversation below, or on Twitter with hashtag #invisiblepedagogies.

About the Author

ANDREA DE PASCUAL: A bilingual (Spanish-English) education specialist, artist, and researcher, Andrea is founding member of the collective Invisible Pedagogies and creator of the project The Rhizomatic Museum. She has worked for the past 8 years in a variety of museums, cultural institutions, and praxis collectives. Her work has focused on how the museum can be activated not only as a site for individualized contemplation, but also as a community-based site where knowledge is shared, and social, political and environmental issues are addressed. Andrea graduated from the Masters Program in Art Education at New York University in 2013 while on a Fulbright Fellowship, in connection with her Doctoral work as a candidate in Art Education in Museums at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her dissertation is titled “Non Hierarchic Knowledge Production Strategies Within Western Visual Art Museums: The Rhizomatic Museum.” Andrea’s postings on this site are her own.

Experimenting in Museums, Spotlight on Practice, Teaching Tools

What’s the Risk? Reflections on a #MuseumThrowDown

March 6, 2014 Mike Murawski 5 Comments

PJ Policarpio, Mike Murawski, Rachel Ropeik, & Jen Oleniczak

Last week, ArtMuseumTeaching partnered up with 3 amazing museum educators and the American Folk Art Museum to host the first Museum Teaching Throw Down. The event was a huge success, and I would like to thank the American Folk Art Museum as well as everyone who was able to attend on that cold night in New York. We all wanted to take this opportunity to get our post-throwdown reflections in writing, thinking about the process of exploring, envisioning, and enacting this collective in-gallery experience.

I kicked off the Throw Down by welcoming everyone, and reading a short list of reasons why I, myself, had wanted to do an event like this:

It just plain sounded fun, and a good way to geek out museum-ed style.
A gathering like this might be a different way to connect, reflect, and share, both professionally and personally.
Pushing our teaching practice in public with peers might help make us more responsible to our audience, and in turn, perhaps foster an audience more amenable to the risks we’re willing to take for them.
It has the potential to ask what museum teaching, learning, and participation can be, with the hopes of taking an active role in shaping what will come next.
A Museum Teaching Throw Down gives museum teaching a stage, and says that what we do as educators is valuable — and that we’ll pack a room to witness it. This says something powerful to me about our museum education community.

Before we jumped into the gallery teaching experiences, I also evoked Marc Smith, the Chicago construction worker who in the 1980s started the Poetry Slam movement. He would begin each slam by introducing himself, and he trained the audience to respond by shouting “SO WHAT?!?” For Marc, this gave each slam event a clear sense of humility as well as a way to declare that everyone in the room was just as important for participating. I repeated this “SO WHAT?!?” exercise to kick-off our Museum Throw Down, and I think that question stuck with many of us throughout the night and brings us to reflect on our experiences. What follows are reflections from each of the 3 Throw Down educators (PJ Policarpio, Rachel Ropeik, and Jen Oleniczak) thinking about how the night came together, what the experience was like, and some initial responses to the all-important question: SO WHAT?

PJ POLICARPIO:

When I read about the premise of the show Folk Couture at the American Folk Art Museum, I was immediately excited by the opportunity to teach from objects that I don’t usually get a chance to teach from: couture dresses and folk art. What an exciting personal challenge for me to teach from new objects in a fun, creative, and innovative way. Given the range of options from Folk Couture, I was instantly intrigued by designer Bibhu Mohapatra’s inspiration, a rare 19^th century Tattoo Pattern Book. My own fascination with tattoos and tattooing culture inspired my choice of objects for the throw down. This inspired me to dig deep and learn more about the specificity of the visual language within the culture and tradition of sailors/maritime workers. In a way, this rare Tattoo Pattern Book can serve as a visual dictionary. From here, I collected about 15 tattoo designs that carry corresponding meanings within the subculture. I imagined what kind of images I might see if I were to look through the 35 waterproof pages of the book.

My Throw Down experience started with having people pair up and share personal experiences with tattoos or tattooing. After, we looked at the Tattoo Pattern Book and I provided some information about the object. The interactive part from my teaching was an old fashioned matching game. In groups, I asked participants to match tattoo designs with their corresponding meanings. (Example: a sparrow tattoo was for a sailor who logged five thousand miles at sea. At ten thousand miles, a sailor could add a second swallow.)

https://twitter.com/mirseum/statuses/438817939568209920

@pjpolicarpio I loved matching these tattoos with their explanations! pic.twitter.com/mxJ56eA99N

— Rachel Heisler (@heisler1027) February 28, 2014

I wanted the participants to understand the rich and distinct visual language in which the tattoos communicated to those who are/were a part of this culture. Going back to the objects, we related our knowledge to Bibhu Mohapatra’s garment and his narrative & inspiration

I took home so many things from the Museum Teaching Throw Down that I would like to think about in my own teaching practice, primarily how to create engaging activities/experiences that are still centered on art/artifacts. It also reinforced my need for research (how much fun it can be!) and providing accurate information, all essential for meaningful and purposeful museum experiences. I also found out that I like working with adults (very important!).

RACHEL ROPEIK:

How can I bring this spirit into my work? That’s the question that’s been rattling around my brain since our throw down. I’ll admit, it took me a few days to come down from the high of such an exciting evening at the museum. I’m still in a bit of #MuseumThrowdownWithdrawal (a hashtag entirely too long for actual Twitter usage). But instead of being sad it’s over, I’ve been thinking about how I can keep the high going.

My own teaching philosophy (growing and changing as it does) is still very much based on the object itself, but I wanted to stretch myself and experiment with a participatory group activity that took the object as a jumping off point, and then morphed into its own entity.

So the object observation started us off:

And then we evolved into walking the catwalk in our original creations (Vine courtesy of Rebecca Mir):

The group’s energy started off impressively focused and then grew into a wonderfully playful, creative, positive atmosphere by the time everyone was strutting their stuff and applauding each newly-created look. It reminded me of the fun people can have in the museum when you don’t stick purely to focusing on the object, when you let the object inspire you to do something several degrees removed.

I know this sounds like basic Museum Education 101 stuff here, and it is. But that room full of museum adventurers of all sorts was having such a good time and thinking so creatively that I’m determined to keep (re)affirming the value of fun in my head as I go forward with my work. What can I do with teachers that takes them beyond museum-based lesson planning? What can I do with students that really captures their imaginations in the galleries?

It’ll be a stretch for some people who may not come in with the same desire to experiment that our intrepid throw down attendees had. It’ll be a push for me to keep thinking about new, creative activities instead of falling back on the tested and true. But that’s what I’m taking away from the inaugural Museum Teaching Throw Down (besides my victory, that is… #NotSoHumbleBrag); push for the unexpected and keep my audience on their toes, and maybe they’ll hit the same magical excitement that filled up the American Folk Art Museum galleries-turned-runway that night.

JEN OLENICZAK:

What risk did I take? That’s a question on my mind since last week’s throwdown. I’m not quiet regarding my feelings about improv and museum education, but it’s been something I’ve been regrettably nervous about since starting The Engaging Educator. Tableaux Vivants aside, I’ve been careful (afraid?) not to introduce too many ‘acting’ exercises into my practice among peers. Give me a group of students and I’ll have them walking through ‘jello’ while they are embodying jealousy. Even in my improv class and professional development sessions, I’ll push comfort levels.

But for the most part, I’ve been hesitant to introduce it to peers unless they signed up fully knowing what may happen. And upon realizing I wasn’t practicing what I was preaching, I decided to make my words happen. If we try not to fail, we never succeed. The likes of theatre, selfies and social media came out.

I approached the Throw Down with the opinion that if I won, I wasn’t making people uncomfortable enough. I want people to feel unnerved, out of their skin and element – like they too were experimenting with me. Even now, a week later, I don’t think I pushed people enough.

So bring on the Gallery Teaching Marathon in San Diego. Theatre and social media are coming out full force. What better place to experiment than with my peers? As for the future of NYC Throwdowns – this WILL happen again. And you better believe I’m going to continue seeing how far I can go – because really, what’s the worst that happens if it fails miserably? Nothing.

* * * * *

SHARE YOUR IDEAS: What are your thoughts about the idea of a Museum Teaching Throw Down? What is the risk? What is the value? SO WHAT? What are some ways that we can use in-gallery practice for professional and personal growth as well as the building of stronger peer communities? Is any of this new, or have museum educators always had some form of a ‘throw down’ to keep things real? Even if you could not attend the first Throw Down, we’d love to hear from you about these issues.

Interested in hosting your own Museum Teaching Throw Down? Go for it! Just please use the hashtag #MuseumThrowDown so we can all connect to the amazing experience and collectively discover new ways to challenge ourselves and our teaching practice. And try to start by having the audience shout back “SO WHAT?!?”

Drinking about Museums, Experimenting in Museums

Are you ready for a THROW DOWN?

February 12, 2014 Mike Murawski 19 Comments

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

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

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

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

Let’s meet the challengers…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drinking About Museums

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

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

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

Experimenting in Museums

Open Engagement: 100 Questions 100 Days

February 10, 2014 Mike Murawski Leave a comment

Open Engagement is an annual international conference and gathering that focuses on social practice and socially-engaged art. For several years, the conference was hosted here in Portland, Oregon, and I was fortunate enough to attend the 2013 conference which linked up with the Portland Art Museum’s Shine a Light event and the partnership our museum has with Portland State University’s Art & Social Practice program.

The conference was founded by artist and educator Jen Delos Reyes, who leads the planning and programming for each year’s Open Engagement. In 2014, the conference moved from Portland to Queens (sniffle, sniffle), and was co-presented by the Queens Museum and A Blade of Grass, and took place at the Queens Museum, New York Hall of Science, the Queens Theater, Immigrant Movement International, and various locations around New York in May.

The 2013 conference brought artists, thinkers, activists, and museum professionals from across the continent, and there were some tremendous conversations about the role of museums in social practice art, and the role of social practice art and artists in museums. We left with more questions than we had answers (which is actually a good thing — it means we’re not fooling ourselves that we have this all figured out).

To ramp up to the 2013 conference, Delos Reyes and conference organizers invited 100 contributors from the field to reflect on 100 questions collectively generated at the closing session of Open Engagement 2013. Each contributor wrote a short blog post, published online in rapid succession prior to the start of the conference. I was invited to write a short response to question #97: “Who stands to benefit from this work?” Below is my response — and I encourage you to read all 100 contributors respond to all 100 questions. And I invite your thoughts below — who do you think benefits from social practice and socially-engaged art, whether related to museums (as in my response) or out in the community?

Photo: Project by Molly Sherman, Museum Visitor (Sam), as part of Shine a Light 2011 at the Portland Art Museum. Photo credit: Jacob Iller.

“Who stands to benefit from this work?”

Originally published online at Open Engagement blog, February 9, 2014

I know that museums are not new players in the game of social practice and socially-engaged art, yet we are constantly coming back to the core questions about the value of this work. Who benefits? Who needs to benefit, especially if we are to sustain support for these types of artist-driven projects and programs? Does this work offer any long-term benefits to a museum’s communities, rather than just involving communities at the benefit of the museum? Are there any benefits at all? Do there need to be? The answers to these questions are so varied, localized, and subjective, but let me take a very quick stab at this from my perspective in museums—only a slice of the myriad responses that exist to this larger question.

While I recognize that museums only play one part in the larger developments of social practice art in recent years, these institutions do serve as major sites of public engagement with artists and their work. Far more than that, museums and social practice artists are working together to transform engagement and tap into the potential that museums have for experiences other than passive spectating. People today increasingly refuse to be passive recipients of what museums offer, and more and more institutions are working with artists in ways that expand far beyond simply placing their works on the walls. Instead, museums are inviting artists to bring their socially-engaged practice to bear on creating experiences that actively engage our public(s) and challenge them to rethink museums.

While these projects frequently meet resistance from within the museum institution for seeming frivolous or without intellectual content, this work largely succeeds in transforming museums into open spaces of curiosity, experience, collaboration, risk-taking, and creativity for our communities. Why?

Because of the involvement of artists.

Because of the process (complex and messy) of co-creation and collaborative thinking that can happen among museum staff, artists, and the public in these contexts.

Because of the potential for socially-engaged artists to pull people out of their everyday experience, break them from the familiar, and give them something to think about.

In describing his early discovery of the value of punk rock, Fugazi frontman and DIY punk guru Ian MacKaye uses this analogy:

“if you’re raised eating steak and potatoes every night and that’s dinner, when you go to a Vietnamese restaurant, you don’t know what’s in front of you. You just can’t recognize it. The thing is that not only is it good, it’s probably better for you.”

I think museums have a great deal to gain if they more frequently think of themselves like this Vietnamese restaurant, making a break with the business-as-usual ‘steak and potatoes’ experience. As Nina Simon once remarked, art museums are the least likely to empower their own staff to experiment in these ways, but the most likely to bring in artists to do this social/participatory work. So museums (as institutions, but more importantly as people) and their communities stand to benefit from working with social practice and socially-engaged artists as we work toward creatively expanding the menu of what’s possible.

* * *

Header Image: Tom Finkelpearl sharing some of the questions generated at the final event of Open Engagement 2013. Photo: John Muse, openengagement.info

Experimenting in Museums, Spotlight on Practice, Teens in Museums, Video

Letting Go and Opening Up: Teen Voices in Art Museums

January 9, 2014 Chelsea Emelie Kelly 12 Comments

By Chelsea Emelie Kelley, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Patty Edmonson, Cleveland Museum of Art

When museums share interpretive control of their collections, amazing things can happen. Many museums are reimagining how visitors can interact with and engage in their collections, through technology, after-hours adult programming, and even hacking (both sanctioned and independent).

Recording video content with teens as part of the Teen CO-OP program at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Teen programs provide a very different kind of opportunity for museums to experiment with interpretation. Because many teens participate in multiple programs for extended lengths of time, they become advocates and resources for our museums and its collections. Teens at the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art have been part of two experimental interpretive strategies that go deeper than one-day-only programs, providing not only learning experiences for students involved, but powerful tools and content for their institutions.

From the museum educator’s perspective, we—Chelsea Emelie Kelly at the Milwaukee Art Museum and Patty Edmonson at the Cleveland Museum of Art—originally connected because both of our programs create video content featuring teens for our collections. However, we’ve come to see that there are more connections and applications to what we’re doing than simply producing object-focused, teen-made videos. We share our programs and projects below, and we’re now thinking about how we can make use of this content beyond teen audiences. Read on and share your thoughts with us!

Teen CO∙OP at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Patty Edmonson, Intergenerational Interpretation Specialist

The Teen CO∙OP started in 2013, and it’s the Cleveland Museum of Art’s newest teen program. We chose ten students from a pool of applicants to participate in a two-week summer session, where we trained them to work with the public and create their own programming. They use these skills during our monthly family days, called Second Sundays. CO∙OP members work in our interactive gallery, Gallery One, answering visitor questions and starting conversations about art and the museum. During these events, they also help with studio projects, pass out the teen guide they made, and create Vine videos. The CMA is working toward a more visible teen presence and authentic teen voices.

Video has been a tool for us to hear these teen voices and get students to think about storytelling in museums. During our summer session we created short films with a local production company, North Water Partners. Each student began by choosing an artwork and we interviewed them about their initial reactions before they knew very much about the piece. After these first interviews they read about their artworks and we talked about historical context. We asked them to complete a series of small tasks: choose three words that describe the artwork; describe this to someone who can’t see; write a tagline for the artwork; tell a story about this artwork; make a Vine about it. These tasks became pieces that they could include in their storyboards. Some also created their own typography or imagery to incorporate into their video.

One of the biggest challenges was balancing fun and appropriateness. I wanted the students to feel comfortable being silly, but there were several moments when we stopped to talk about respecting the art and museum. We also went out on a limb by letting the video content come from their ideas and observations, not solely art historical information. We are not creating mini art historians here. That said, we did have to navigate one interpretation of a portrait with a shadow that looked like a bruise. The student was interested in creating a story of a battered woman, but we stepped in to talk about why this story might not be the best one to imagine, and spent time looking at more portraits and their shadows.

Through these videos, the teens learned to look closer. They seemed excited that their observations were valid and their confidence grew. I also saw their public speaking abilities improve after being behind the camera, which can be tough. One of our big goals was to capture an authentic voice, and we chose not to correct language that museums wouldn’t normally approve, like “I’m finna to the grand ball” (as in fixing to go). I felt that by letting their real voices come through, we let them know that they can be themselves in a museum.

We hope to show these videos on our website, and you can see some of the good and bad Vines under the account, CMA Teen CO-OP. Our plan next summer is to make content that can better fit into our app, ArtLens.

Satellite High School Program at the Milwaukee Art Museum

Milwaukee Art Museum Satellite Program group, 2013-14

Chelsea Emelie Kelly, Manager of Digital Learning

The Satellite High School Program is an art history focused weekly gallery program at the Milwaukee Art Museum for sixteen arts-interested teens from the Milwaukee area to connect with works of art and each other. As part of the program, teens choose a work of art in the Museum collection to study and interpret, and share their ideas in a final project. Over the past year, we’ve experimented with how they share using video in two very different ways.

In the spring 2013 program, teens had one semester to choose a work, study it, and make a creative response to it, in visual art, writing, music, or media of their choice. I wanted to be sure their work was shared with a wider audience, so I used my own personal DSLR camera to film them with their artwork and creative responses. I had them write their own voiceover explaining their piece, their connection to it, and their response project, making sure that the video was just about one minute long for quick, easy consumption. Here’s just one of their videos, featuring Joel:

That project was successful, but I wanted to turn much more of the creation over to the teens themselves. I knew I had a chance to do just that when we received funding to buy a set of iPads for the Education Department.

This fall, as part of a school year-long program, a new group of teens had a different task: they shared their personal connections to their work of art through a video they created on an iPad. Over the course of the semester, they created video blogs (vlogs) reflecting on their changing thoughts about their work of art. They also received “readers” with basic information on their work of art or artist, and led a group discussion with all the Satellite students about their piece to get others’ opinions and thoughts. At the end of the semester, they created midterm videos piecing together with their reflection vlogs to show their evolution of thought. Here is ZouaPang’s video:

Teens continually asked themselves what they were still wondering about, and much changed over the course of the semester. When asked what she learned after an early session, Alana responded: “I learned how to better analyze paintings.” Her answer to the same question at the last session of the semester was much richer: “I learned a lot more about how to analyze art and research which I think is really cool because now instead of just looking at a piece and saying ‘pretty picture’ I notice more things about the pieces I see.” Alana’s video—and all her research and analysis!—is below.

One-to-one iPads came with their own set of challenges. Instead of solo weekend troubleshooting with DSLRs and iMovie, I found myself with a wonderfully excited group who wanted to use the iPad for much longer than I’d anticipated! In fact, I learned that students about doubled the time I usually allotted to use the iPad comfortably and feel good about their work.

Next semester, the same group of students will continue to explore their artwork and create more formal videos for a wider visitor audience about their work of art. We’re going to kickoff the semester with some visitor studies: teens will go into the galleries and do a card-sort exercise with Museum visitors to discover what people actually want to know about works of art (thanks to Marianna Adams for this activity!). Then we’ll pool our data and discuss how we might format our videos for a larger audience, as well as how the teens think we should share the content.

Your Thoughts?

We’re now in the phase of thinking about what we can do with the content our students have worked so hard to create. We know their voices are important and engaging, and are thinking about how best to share them. Since ArtMuseumTeaching.com is a forum for practice, we would love to open our questions up to all of you. What other purposes might these videos serve? Would they be interesting to other audiences? Where and how should these videos be shared? Please share your thoughts with us, as well as comments or questions, below!

Experimenting in Museums, Google+ Hangouts, Spotlight on Practice

What is Museum Hack?

December 12, 2013 Jen Oleniczak 19 Comments

Written by Jen Oleniczak

“Museums Are F****** Awesome.”

The above phrase is written in bold on the back of a postcard handed out after every tour; Museum Hack believes it, and thinks you should too. The company is not associated with the museum, rather they are a band of renegade lovers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that call themselves Museum Hack.

The Company

Museum Hack, at its core, seeks to get people excited about museums. While a simple thought, and common mission for all educators, it’s a complicated formula. I’ve been working as a Hacker for the past few months, leading tours with Creative Director and Chief Hacker Mark Rosen. Small in size but big in energy, Museum Hack tours are two-hour jaunts, breaking the massive museum down into individual experiences with works of art. Working with the mindset that museums should be treated like fine dining – experiences not to overindulge in – Museum Hack encourages visitors to savor the works that resonate and ignore the urge to see it all. Tours incorporate inquiry, storytelling, movement, tour guide swaps, photo challenges, power moves, and a little sass to shake up the traditional museum visit.

Essentially, the company tries to humanize museums and art. The museum is treated like an old friend you can’t wait to see again, as tours highlight the personality of the collection in an attempt to turn even the most skeptical visitor into a Met fan. As one of the largest museums in the world, the Met is daunting to even the most seasoned visitor. With that in mind, Museum Hack decided to hack in an effort to provide the kind of tasting menu that keeps visitors coming back.

Here’s a perfect example: after teaching a group about accession numbers at the beginning of the tour, and how to use them to access the Met’s online collection, I had a group using them to figure out provenance about a work – without my prompting. Before the tour, many if not all of them had no idea what the decimal number on the label was. How empowering is that to a visitor?

How is this different from other tours? Museum Hack supplements the expected lecture-based or dialogue-focused museum tour with the kind of teaching you’d expect on the best high school tour ever given, but on speed. This fearless approach to museum education is a huge part of the success of this barely five-month-old company. Tours are also $39 per person (in keeping with private tour costs in New York City) and group size is kept to a maximum of 9 participants. Thinking less tour and more adventure, Museum Hack aims to provide visitors with an experience worth every penny.

The Museum

Museum Hack is not affiliated with the Met. The Met is aware of the company, as evidenced in a Wall Street Journal piece and multiple news segments filmed on-site. As a Hacker, there have been a few times I’ve been shushed, but I’ve also been shushed in museums that employ me. A large part of the ‘why’ Museum Hack exists is the passion about the Met – everyone truly believes it is an incredible museum, and wants to share that enthusiasm.

* * * * *

The Why & How of Museum Hack

Written by Mark Rosen

Why We Hack

Museum Hack was founded largely with museum skeptics in mind, those folks who know museums are important but don’t find them all too intellectually sexy. I often drop the line “people have been people since they’ve been people” while on tour to draw attention to how relateable the objects can be once you snap out of the usual museum-going mentality. While with us, we encourage visitors to be their real selves, and empower them to feel like they don’t have to change to fit the space.

We believe museums are SO much more than their highlights. That said, it seems most visitors come to institutions like the Met and end up resorting to a highlights checklist or squeezing it all into one frenzied visit. We believe museums really start to mean something when you’re motivated to hunt for what speaks to you. We’re hoping to inspire people to start to reexamine what it means to be cultured; visiting in a “got the postcard” kind of way is something, but wanting to be active and inquisitive in a visit is our idea of next level.

How We Hack

Hacking, in all of its buzzword glory, can be interpreted in a number of ways. To us, hacking involves studying the elements of a system so well that you can manipulate them to make them into something new. Make that system a “museum experience,” add in some renegade flair, and you have the core of Museum Hack. We’re building the company into a think-tank of sorts, creating space to muck with new ways of getting people to connect with museums.

Our hacking is best split into two categories: content hack and experience hack. We see the content hack as hacking the collection and celebrating its underdogs, those works in corners and thruways that you would never expect to have amazing stories. This is why we call our tours Un-Highlights tours; they’re about the hundreds of thousands of things most people breeze by on their way to the biggies. The experience hack comes in with style and the variety of activities we use to get visitors to engage in unexpected ways. You might be forced to spend seven minutes in art heaven or find yourself striking a pose and talking like a sculpture, you never know.

The common thread of all of our tours is passion. We feel people are most attracted to an infectiously passionate voice, so we encourage our guides to be unapologetically head over heals in love with what makes art and history juicy. Our scrappy team is made up of research-loving interdisciplinary thinkers who are given a toolbox but told to follow their intuition and ultimately give the tour they would give to their friends.

What’s Next?

Museum Hack is starting to think of thematic tours (Creepy Baby Jesus, The Metropolitan Museum of Butts, maybe a Ladies Night at the Met tour) and expansion to other museums. As the company continues to evolve, we’re interested in opening the conversation up to challenge our thinking and explore what more folks think of hacking the museum.

Learn More – view December 17th’s Google+ Hangout Archive

On December 17th, Jen Oleniczak and Mike Murawski connected via a Google Hangout on Air to chat more about Museum Hack and answer questions. Thanks to everyone who watched us live and tweeted in your questions. While Jen was lost from the connection for a bit, Mike kept the torch burning and we are able to have a great conversation about what Museum Hack means and what is next. There was also a great Twitter chat happening via the hashtag #museumhack (so check that out if you have a chance). Here were some of the questions we addressed — and you can watch the video below:

How can we hack for positive change in museums?
What does it mean to hack a museum?
Why has the term hack become so trendy in the field?
How is the trend of hacking going to impact the future of the field?
Are museum educators and institutions already doing this? How is Museum Hack different from good museum teaching?

To stay connected about this and future Google Hangouts hosted via ArtMuseumTeaching.com, join the Art Museum Teaching Google Community.

Experimenting in Museums, Spotlight on Practice

Rethink What Can Happen in a Museum: Portland Art Museum’s Shine a Light

October 22, 2013 Mike Murawski 6 Comments

“Art is a space, which we have created, where we can cease to subscribe to the demands and the rules of society; it is a space where we can pretend. We can play, we can rethink things, we can think about them backwards.” —Pablo Helguera

As museums face the current challenges to drive relevance through becoming more active, participatory, responsive, and community-based, projects such as the ones explored in this past week’s posts indicate a potentially transformative role for artists to play. Whether rethinking a museum’s visitor experience, reinventing the public spaces of and around museums, drawing on creative practice to break museums’ ‘old habits,’ or interrogating the internal culture and working of the museum, artists are effectively exploring museum institutions as sites with a distinct “possibility for evolution,” to reconnect with the powerful words from Joseph Beuys that opened this series of posts (and from which the title of my paper came).

This final excerpt from my paper presented as part of the International Museum Forum in South Korea in October 2013 discusses the artist-driven program I am directly involved in here at the Portland Art Museum. In addition, I’m concluding this post with some of the “core, burning questions” that institutions involved in this work are addressing — especially as many of these projects are in a current phase of reflection and rethinking.

Portland Art Museum’s Shine a Light

“Art and everyday life share a common and continuous border. They coexist in the same reality, divided and defined by a border that twists, turns, open and closes. The edges of the museum are part of that border, and like the imaginary line between any contested territories, this boundary does not completely reflect the reality on the ground.” —Paul Ramirez Jonas (“An Imaginary Line,” Shine a Light 2013 program)

Museum visitor engages with Duane Hanson sculpture as part of Shine a Light 2011, Portland Art Museum. Photo by Jacob Iller.

At the same time that the team at the Walker Art Center was preparing to launch Open Field and Machine Project had recently experimented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (which preceded their work at the Hammer Museum), the Education team at the Portland Art Museum began conversations with the faculty in Art & Social Practice at neighboring Portland State University around similar types of experimentations. The immediate outcome of this collaboration was Shine a Light, a new annual one-night event at the Portland Art Museum dedicated to experimentation, play, and participation. Emerging out of a collaboration between the museum and Portland State University’s MFA program in Art & Social Practice, Shine a Light invited the MFA program’s faculty and students to propose a series of projects that would experiment in and with the Museum space — conceiving the museum as a laboratory for ideas and interventions. As Christina Olsen, then Director of Education and Public Programs at the museum, recounts:

“Over lunch one day, I began to talk with Harrell Fletcher and Jen Delos Reyes—co-directors of PSU’s Art & Social Practice program—about the the ‘habits of mind’ that govern both museum visitors and museum staff, and ways we might collaborate to expand such mindsets” (Shine a Light 2010).

Inspired by the Machine Project’s Field Guide to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art one-day event in November 2008 as well as the broader approach and process of social practice art, the team at the Portland Art Museum and PSU launched the first Shine a Light event in September 2009. For six hours, the museum was a space in which sixteen artists enacted projects that offered visitors new, unanticipated, playful and provocative ways to experience the museum. The goals established during this first event—which have remained the core goals for this project up through the most recent Shine a Light event in 2013—included:

Situate art (producing, interpreting, enjoying, puzzling over) as a living activity that everyone can participate in.
Encourage an atmosphere of participation between the museum, its visitors, and artists.
Make the museum a “site” of artistic production and practice.
Inspire inquiry into the connection between art and everyday life.
Have fun!

Artist-led projects that have been part of Shine a Light since 2009 have ranged from live Greco-Roman nude wrestling, a museum cookbook, dead artist seances, and haircuts inspired by artworks in the collection to inviting visitors to have a work of art tattooed onto their body, to sing songs about a work of art, or to display their personal cell phone photos within the museum’s photography collection. Here is a video compilation that features projects from Shine a Light 2013:

http://vimeo.com/75177649

Since the project’s launch in 2009, the annual Shine a Light event has brought together more than 9,000 participants to actively engage in a total of 88 artist-driven projects spread across the entire museum campus, successfully cultivating a younger “millennial” audience as well as encouraging existing audiences to rethink what is possible in an art museum. In its four iterations, Shine a Light has built a unique framework to work closely with emerging and professional artists and to provide an ongoing platform for the Museum, artists, and audiences to actively learn and experiment with one another.

In her introduction to the 2013 Shine a Light event program, Associate Director of Education & Public Programs Stephanie Parrish encapsulates much of the museum’s current thinking about this experimental project:

“In its ideal form, a program like Shine a Light is a platform that nudges us to wonder; to consider art museum spaces as flexible sites where one’s identity as an artist, an institution, or a member of the public is increasingly fluid…. We find ourselves in a hybrid zone, somewhere on a continuum where museums not only display but also produce art, where artists shape and are shaped by institutions and are not just pitted against them, and where multiple publics see themselves as participants in and reflected through the art. Shine a Light is a space where we co-produce museum experiences and adjust our perspective of where art, artists, and institutions intersect in our everyday lives.” (Shine a Light 2013 program, 1).

Raising Core Questions

Museum visitors receive tatoos based on works of art in the Portland Art Museum's collection as part of a Shine a Light project by artist Jason Sturgill. — Museum visitors receive tatoos based on works of art in the Portland Art Museum’s collection as part of a Shine a Light project by artist Jason Sturgill.

During the 2013 Open Engagement conference — an international gathering of artists, educators, curators, and scholars in the field of social practice and socially-engaged art—one of the panel sessions entitled “Art Museums and Social Practice: Where Are We Now?” brought together nearly a dozen museum professionals and artists engaged in this type of practice within their own institutions. Facilitated by the Shine a Light team at the Portland Art Museum, the thinking around this panel session began months in advance by having museum professionals and artists define the ‘burning questions’ that were core to their own involvement with this practice in museums. After gathering ten pages filled with questions, the group was invited to “crowd-source” the most urgent questions by marking the questions most relevant to their own practice.

At the Open Engagement panel discussion, the top questions were revealed and discussed, and I think perhaps it is an appropriate way to end this paper by simply presenting these and other questions that are now sparking some open thinking in the field across institutions.

Are we doing this work to broaden our audiences or to serve existing audiences?
What’s the difference between an artist doing this work versus a public engagement or education department doing it?
What does success look like? How do we measure success?
What happens when institutions collaborate with artists? How can the questions artists ask reshape us as practitioners and reshape the museum itself?

Many of the answers to these and other questions are localized to each project and institution (some have even been addressed above by existing projects), yet certainly some common responses will emerge as institutions push ahead with experimental, participatory practices that open the spaces of museums to the work of social practice and socially-engaged artists, as well as museum staff that have been gaining a tremendous level of creative capacity through this type of work. Overall, many of these core questions bring the conversation back to the ability of these socially-engaged, participatory projects to effect change — whether that is shifting the ‘mindset’ for museum visitors as well as the communities that engage with museums, or a more broad social change felt in the community.

Getting a Better Sense of the Terrain: Machine Project at the Hammer Museum

October 18, 2013 Mike Murawski 2 Comments

This post is part of a series I am writing this week to explore the role of artists and artistic practice in the experimental work occurring in art museums across this country, and beyond. In order to more effectively examine the ways in which art museums have become sites for socially-engaged practice and new forms of artist-driven public engagement, I’m interested in taking some time to showcase three telling cases that have been developed in museums at a parallel moment these past few years:

To help get a sense of how many arts enthusiasts, museum professionals, and educators are aware of these types of experimental museum projects, I’ve been asking readers to please take a few seconds and complete the poll below, if you have not already.

Thanks for responding to the question above. Now onto the second telling case of great work being done in this area of museum practice.

Machine Project at UCLA’s Hammer Museum

“Almost every day now I think about the power that intimacy can have, and that we don’t need to serve a thousand people with each project. We’ve talked often about how you measure success: it’s not just the number of people that come through; quality is part of it.” —Allison Agsten, Machine Project Hammer Report

Machine Project’s Live Museum Soundtrack at the Hammer Museum. Guitarist Eric Klerks improvises music for each artworks this visitor views.

In 2010, the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, invited the artist/performer collaborative Machine Project to produce a year of programming which proposed new, alternative, and experimental ways of presenting work at the museum. This decision came out of a process in which the museum worked with a newly-created Artist Council to address many of the visitor services issues the museum was struggling with. Striving to be a truly artist-driven institution, the museum received funding from the Irvine Foundation to create its Public Engagement Artist in Residence program, with Machine Project being the first. Over their residency, twenty-six projects were implemented, including personal soundtracks for visitors, staff pet portraits, table tennis, printmaking workshops, micro-concerts, and a giant animatronic hand that pointed people to different areas of the museum.

The Hammer’s Public Engagement Artist in Residence program specifically sought to bring the creative process of artists into the museum, setting out to utilize artists as problem solvers for visitor services and operational concerns. As Mark Allen, Director of Machine Project, discusses in his introduction in the Machine Project Hammer Report (2012), however, this became a point of tension between the museum and Machine Project artists:

“When people at an institution speak of a problem, it is often to indicate something that interferes with their operation. From the artist’s perspective, a problem is a provocation or a site to which the artwork responds by creating something that engages the problem and makes it visible in a different light. The problem is aestheticized, framed, or reconfigured; it is seldom erased or resolved.”

micro-concert as part of Machine Project's residency at Hammer Museum. — micro-concert as part of Machine Project’s residency at Hammer Museum.

The Hammer Museum and the artists working with Machine Project have been transparent about these tensions in a unique way that spotlights how productive it can be for visitors to think critically about the museums they visit. While bringing in artists to “fix glitches” may not be a successful goal for experimental practice like Public Engagement, having artists collaborate with museums does work toward more process-oriented goals of having critical conversations about creative negotiation, of building capacities for collaboration, of encouraging museums to cede more control to their communities, and of reconsidering how these institutions engage their publics. Reflecting upon the project in 2012, a year after its conclusion, the team at Machine Project observed:

“A year later, what seems most interesting about this project is not just what the public experienced, but everything that took place behind the scenes – the conversations with artists, the challenges inside and outside of the museum, the logistic and philosophical issues involved in attempting to suggest other uses for a major cultural institution.”

This single example of the Hammer Museum’s Public Engagement Artist in Residence program clearly indicates the value of artist-driven visitor engagement, and their work has served as a guide for other institutions to have “a better sense of the terrain” in pursuing similar endeavors.

Blurring the Lines: Walker Art Center’s Open Field

October 15, 2013 Mike Murawski 7 Comments

A crowd gathers on the field for Open Exposure, a music festival organized by the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council, 2010. Photo © Walker Art Center.

Walker Art Center’s Open Field
Machine Project’s residency at UCLA’s Hammer Museum
Portland Art Museum’s Shine a Light

Selected from more than a dozen examples of this type of practice, these three projects each have stretched and pushed their institutions in new and productive ways, opening up unanticipated, thought-provoking, exciting, and even uncomfortable ways for visitors to experience an art museum. The teams and communities involved with each of these projects have certainly walked away with their own unique ‘lessons learned’ as well as several core questions that have already led to pushing this type of practice forward at these and other institutions. Given the co-produced and co-authored nature of this type of experimental practice in museums, the text for each of these posts similarly draws in many of the voices involved at each site — quoting artists and museum staff to honor their core role in this challenging and meaningful work.

Before we begin, I have a question to ask you. To help get a sense of how many arts enthusiasts, museum professionals, and educators are aware of these types of experimental museum projects, please take a few seconds and complete the poll below. I’m going to keep this poll going for a while, so please invite your peers and colleagues to submit their own response.

Thanks for responding to the question above (BTW, the first poll ever on ArtMuseumTeaching.com — don’t worry, it’s not going to become a regular feature of my posts). Now onto the first telling case of great work being done in this area of museum practice.

* * * * *

Walker Art Center’s Open Field

“What does it mean to be creative as conscious social activity—to create a commons, rather than individualizing creativity?” —artist Josh McPhee in the “Introduction” to Conversations on the Commons

Open Field is the Walker Art Center’s experiment in participation and public space. Taking place outdoors in the summer months since its launch in 2010, the project invites artists and visitors to imagine and inhabit the museum’s campus as a cultural commons—a shared space for idea exchange, creative gatherings, and unexpected interactions. The Walker’s backyard has been home to numerous planned and spontaneous activities during its three years of Open Field, including music performances, artist-in-residence projects, Internet cat video festivals, juggling lessons, Drawing Club, pickling workshops, yarn-bombing, temporary sculpture installations, a concert of people mowing the field in tandem, and so much more. The initiative began with a simple question: “What would you do in an open field?” Through this experiment in ‘letting go’ of cultural authority and control, the Walker Art Center has been pioneering in its rethinking of public gathering spaces and the role of the art museum in creating something with its public rather than simply for its public.

Northern Spark's night-only programming at Open Field. Photo at http://www.walkerart.org — Northern Spark’s night-only programming at Open Field. Photo at http://www.walkerart.org

In addition to being an open creative space for public participation, the Walker Art Center also imagined the potential for professional artists to experiment with public practice in the commons. Working with artists and collectives who embraced their vision for public engagement and collaborative investigation, the Walker Art Center commissioned groups such as Futurefarmers, Machine Poject, and Red76 to envision and implement projects during the summer—both pushing the creative and artistic thinking about the space, as well as to model possible creative activities to the larger community (who were interested in participating, but nervous about what this might look like in the context of a contemporary art center). In the 2012 publication Open Field: Conversations on the Commons, which documented the first two years of the project, Open Field co-creator Sarah Schultz describes the vital role that these artists played:

“The socially engaged practices of these artists and the intellectual and creative rigor with which they approached the aesthetic, social, and political implications of commons-based cultural practices were crucial to project’s evolution.

“The resident artists’ openness and warmth toward the public and their willingness to allow their work to unfold alongside whatever else was happening on the hill played an important role in what Open Field would eventually become: a porous environment that blurred the lines and leveled the playing field between professional and nonprofessional artists, weekend hobbyists, and creative enthusiasts.”

As the Walker Art Center’s education and public practice staff continue to reflect upon Open Field and plan for future directions for this project, there is little doubt that they have shifted the conversation about museums, public practice, and community participation as well as the ways in which museums can collaborate with artists and artist collectives.

An estimated crowd of 6,000 gathered at sundown outside the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for the first "Internet Cat Video Film Festival," August 2012. — An estimated crowd of 6,000 gathered at sundown outside the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for the first “Internet Cat Video Film Festival,” August 2012, as part of that summer’s Open Field. Photo from http://www.twincities.com.

Did you get the chance to visit Open Field and attend any of their programs so far? What were your experiences? What is the role of a space like this at an art museum? Does it matter if anyone actually enters the museums itself? What does the future hold for projects like this? Please chime in below and add your perspective.

Possibilities for Evolution: Artists Experimenting in Art Museums

October 14, 2013 Mike Murawski 9 Comments

Written by Mike Murawski

The second International Museum Forum was hosted in October 2013 in Yeongwol County, South Korea — a location targeted in 2004 for economic and cultural development through the creation of an expansive museum district. As of 2013, as many as 25 museums have been built, ranging from art, photography, and crafts to natural history, science, and mining. The International Museum Forum was supported by Yeongwol County and Yonsei University to bring leaders in the field of museums from across the world to have substantive and comprehensive discussions on the immediate and necessary tasks to realize the ‘Museum City’ in Yeongwol.

I was honored to have been invited to participate as a speaker at the forum, presenting in the area of “Social Responsibilities and Roles of Museums for Participation, Communication, and Change.” I took this opportunity to spend time thinking more about the role that artists play in museums working toward a more participatory, public, and social practice. At the Portland Art Museum in 2013, we were entering our fifth year of collaborating with social practice artists, and our “Shine a Light” program has been developing in parallel with (and informed by) several other such programs across the country. For the international audience at Yeongwol, I chose to take a few steps back and reflect on the importance of artists in the experimental work of museums, bringing to the foreground projects at the Walker Art Center, Hammer Museum, and Portland Art Museum. Below is an excerpt from my paper (you can view my presentation slides here), and I have followed-up with individual posts focusing on each of these three institutions as well as some core questions that emerge as institutions push ahead with experimental, participatory practices that open the spaces of museums to the work of social practice and socially-engaged artists.

* * * * * *

“Art is the only possibility for evolution, the only possibility to change the situation in this world.” —Joseph Beuys

Students from Portland State University's MFA in Art and Social Practice at the Portland Art Museum, 2010. Photo: Jason Sturgill — Students from Portland State University’s MFA in Art and Social Practice at the Portland Art Museum, 2010. Photo: Jason Sturgill

In a rapidly transforming world of social media, massive open online learning, and increasing demands for active participation and collaborative engagement, museums have been faced with the challenge of redefining their public practice. As Graham Black states in his recent book Transforming Museums in the Twenty-First Century (2012), “people today increasingly refuse to be passive recipients of whatever governments, companies, or cultural institutions such as museums offer” (3). Instead, museums need to engage with users as active participants, contributors, and collaborators, continuing to change and take on new meanings and roles as society continues to transform itself. Nina Simon’s pivotal book The Participatory Museum (2010) firmly established the need to develop a more participatory mindset and to reconnect with audiences through diverse forms of participatory experiences—a text that has remained at the core of conversations about this element of museum practice since it’s publication, in part due to Simon’s widely-read blog Museum 2.0. However, the broader arts and culture sector in the United States has also seen this shift occurring.

Machine Project's — Machine Project’s “Live Personal Soundtrack” at the Hammer Museum, May 2010. http://hammer.ucla.edu

The 2011 study published by the James Irvine Foundation entitled Getting In On the Act: How Arts Groups Are Creating Opportunities for Active Participation draws insights from a much wider field of nonprofit arts groups and experts to explore a new model for understanding and supporting active, participatory practices. The Irvine Foundation report suggests that “the value of the arts in this participatory culture is its ability to connect people through shared experiences and to contribute to vibrant, livable communities.” The report’s human-centered focus brings much-needed attention to the value of the arts—and especially arts institutions such as museums—to connect people, to create shared social experiences, and to contribute to the cultural fabric of the communities in which we live and work.

Over the past few years, the Irvine Foundation’s Arts Innovation Fund has supported arts organizations across California—including 7 art museums—to experiment with innovative projects geared toward achieving new relevance for audiences, communities, and artists. One example of such a project is the Public Engagement Artist in Residence program at UCLA’s Hammer Museum. Outside the boundaries of the museum’s traditional curatorial operations, this recently developed initiative brings artists together with museum staff in a collaborative process to investigate public engagement and, according to artist Mark Allen, to open up a more exciting and fundamental challenge:

“to rethink the way museums operate and to propose changes that would make the museum as an institution better attuned to contemporary art practices” (Machine Project Hammer Report, 12).

The Hammer Museum is now one of several institutions bringing artists and artistic practice into their efforts to become more audience-centered, community-based, and participatory. As artists gain more creative input in museums and activate museum spaces and publics in new, unexpected ways, it is important to take a closer look at these emerging experimentations and consider their place in the evolving practice of museums.

ARTISTS EXPERIMENTING IN ART MUSEUMS

“I don’t think ideas are very valuable in themselves. It’s only in the doing of the idea that you learn anything, or anything interesting happens.” —Mark Allen, Machine Project Hammer Report

Experimental work in museums has been a growing topic of conversation among museum professionals, and an increasing number of institutions have gone down the path of taking risks and developing new kinds of projects that consider the roles of art, artists, and visitors from a fresh perspective. As part of this shift in museums, more and more institutions are working with artists in ways that expand far beyond simply placing their works on the walls, instead inviting artists to bring their artistic practice to bear on creating experiences that actively engage visitors and, in many cases, also interrogate the role of the museum within their community. While they frequently meet resistance from within the museum institution for seeming frivolous or without intellectual content, these projects largely succeed (because of the involvement of artists) in transforming museums into open spaces of curiousity, experience, collaboration, risk-taking, and creativity. In writing about the November 2012 panel discussion entitled “Do We Need Artists in Art Museums?” held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Annelisa Stephan aptly remarks:

“Inviting artists into the institution … has ramifications far beyond any individual project. Including artists means taking risks and ceding control; it means changing how museum staff work together; and it even means shifting what a museum is, from a space for art to a space of art.”

During the 2012 American Association of Museums Annual Meeting, a group of museum experts including Maria Mortati (independent exhibit developer), Sarah Schultz (Walker Art Center), Susan Diachisin (Dallas Museum of Art), and Stephanie Parrish (Portland Art Museum) came together to address some of the issues and questions surrounding experimental projects in art museums, thinking about public practice as well as working with socially-engaged artists. This important session explored how to support, realize, and engage with a variety of experimental projects, leaving attendees—and the entire museum community—with an “An Elastic Manual for Experimental Museum Projects.” Thinking critically about why art museums would do this type of work, they laid out a series of key statements supporting projects driven by these artistic practices; among them were:

It will expand your role in the community: the work is more social and each project appeals to different audiences. It relies on networks inside and outside the museum to function and therefore has a greater reach.
It pushes all departments: it innovates all areas of the museum, by engaging them in the art-making.
It is the closest thing so far to working in line with how artists create.
You are furthering a conversation with contemporary work: these projects directly engage with new art forms.

A growing number of art museums have, in recent years, been working towards a more participatory practice, partnering directly with artists and the community to develop new forms of engagement that extend the boundaries of what is possible. Projects like the Walker Art Center’s Open Field, Machine Project’s residency at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, and the Portland Art Museum’s Shine a Light—along with several other initiatives—have encouraged a rethinking of the traditional museum experience as well as a closer interrogation of the museum itself as an institution and its role in the community.

image from www.santacruzmah.org — image from http://www.santacruzmah.org

In a March 2013 article entitled “Outside the Citadel, Social Practice Art Is Intended to Nurture,” New York Times arts writer Randy Kennedy examines the recent rise of social practice art and its connection with museums. “Its practitioners,” states Kennedy, “freely blur the lines among object making, performance, political activism, community organizing, environmentalism and investigative journalism, creating a deeply participatory art that often flourishes outside the gallery and museum system.” As he notes, social practice artists more frequently find themselves in dialogue with museums through the education and programs departments rather than through the traditional curatorial route — this would be true of the institutions and projects described here. In an interview with Helen Reed, Artist and educator Pablo Helguera discussed how institutions, and education departments more specifically, can provide some safety to these types of socially-engaged projects. He suggests that:

“the reason why education departments appear to be very welcoming and very appropriate for this kind of stuff is because they are designed for people. Education is about people and about visitors and they are adjusted to the porosity of social relationships.”

* * * * * *

A series of subsequent posts (see links below) shed some light on 3 projects that are working to redefine how art museums work with artists and their publics via a new form of participatory practice. And be thinking about some of these core questions as you read this series of posts, which will end by grappling with some of the challenges:

What happens when institutions collaborate with artists?
How can the questions artists ask reshape us as practitioners and reshape the museum itself?
What’s the difference between an artist doing this work versus an education department doing it?
What does success look like? How do we measure success?

* * * * * *

Header Image: Photo of “The Serenades” from https://publicwondering.wordpress.com, taken at Portland Art Museum during a Shine a Light event. The Serenades were a series of performances by Portland based musicians for the Shine A Light event at the Portland Art Museum. Artist Ariana Jacob invited each musician to compose an original piece of music specifically for an artwork of their choice from the museum’s permanent collection. The performances explored and modeled creating direct and personal relationships with visual artworks using different forms of music, including pop, electronic, spoken-word/hip hop and classical. Original songs written and performed by: Mirah; Joe Preston of Thrones; Honey Owens of Valet; Khaela Maricich of The Blow; Christopher Doulgaris of Hooliganship & Jonathan Sielaff and Drew Slum, Terms None & Blacque Butterfly.

‘Getting in On the Act’: Exploring a More Participatory Arts Practice

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Category Archives: Experimenting in Museums

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“I would encourage people to think of this as an opportunity to try something new, take risks, and know that you will be among supportive colleagues, peers, and educators.”

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UPDATE: Response from Elliott Kai-Kee, J. Paul Getty Museum

About the Author:

What’s the Risk? Reflections on a #MuseumThrowDown

PJ POLICARPIO:

RACHEL ROPEIK:

JEN OLENICZAK:

Are you ready for a THROW DOWN?

Let’s meet the challengers…

Drinking About Museums

Letting Go and Opening Up: Teen Voices in Art Museums

Teen CO∙OP at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Satellite High School Program at the Milwaukee Art Museum

Your Thoughts?

What is Museum Hack?

*“Museums Are F****** Awesome.”*

The Company

The Museum

The Why & How of Museum Hack

Why We Hack

How We Hack

What’s Next?

Learn More – view December 17th’s Google+ Hangout Archive

Getting a Better Sense of the Terrain: Machine Project at the Hammer Museum

Machine Project at UCLA’s Hammer Museum

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

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A Forum for Reflecting on Practice

“I would encourage people to think of this as an opportunity to try something new, take risks, and know that you will be among supportive colleagues, peers, and educators.”

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UPDATE: Response from Elliott Kai-Kee, J. Paul Getty Museum

About the Author:

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“Invisible pedagogies have many ways of changing people in their participation in the educative act. They help them to learn or not; they get people to become passionate for knowledge or deadly bored, they make them feel fear or pleasure, they invite them to share or to hide” (Acaso, 2012)

Invisible Pedagogies in Museums

Transforming Invisible Pedagogies

IP Museum Projects at Matadero Madrid

Opening the Conversation

About the Author

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PJ POLICARPIO:

RACHEL ROPEIK:

JEN OLENICZAK:

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Let’s meet the challengers…

Drinking About Museums

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“Who stands to benefit from this work?”

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Teen CO∙OP at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Satellite High School Program at the Milwaukee Art Museum

Your Thoughts?

Share this:

“Museums Are F****** Awesome.”

The Company

The Museum

The Why & How of Museum Hack

Why We Hack

How We Hack

What’s Next?

Learn More – view December 17th’s Google+ Hangout Archive

Share this:

Portland Art Museum’s Shine a Light

Raising Core Questions

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

RELATED POSTS:

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Machine Project at UCLA’s Hammer Museum

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

RELATED POSTS:

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Walker Art Center’s Open Field

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RELATED POSTS:

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ARTISTS EXPERIMENTING IN ART MUSEUMS

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

* * * * * *

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A Forum for Reflecting on Practice

*“Museums Are F****** Awesome.”*