Tag Archives: Nina Simon

Inclusive Practices, Writing in a Time of Crisis

Refocusing Museums on People: my dreams for museums in a post-COVID world

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Written by Isabel Singer

Reposted with permission from American Perceptionalism, a site dedicated to examining how museums are reinventing themselves in a changing world.

As I watch museums lay off thousands of highly qualified underpaid staff during this pandemic, I have been asking myself why I keep investing in museums.

Museum staff are overwhelmingly white, straight, and able-bodied, and museum leaders are overwhelmingly male. For centuries museums have told stories about a diversity of people, presenting these stories from the perspective of those in power. Thereby, museums have bolstered white supremacy, sexism, colonialism, ableism, heteronormativity, and a lot of other icky isms. The pandemic layoffs are only exacerbating this situation. 

In fact, museums were explicitly designed to reinforce these icky isms. In a blog post for the SuperHelpful newsletter, I wrote about the book Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge by Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, relaying her argument that:

“our modern museums are based on the model of early nineteenth century French museums. The French government invested in these museums to mold French people into ‘good’ citizens. They empowered experts (curators) to organize collections and tell visitors what to think about the world (interpretation). Through their interpretation, the experts encouraged individuals to obey societal norms, such as those around dress, communication style, physical gesture, family structure, sexual ethics, gender presentation, and more. They marked people and objects that strayed outside of these norms as disruptive or dangerous. The French model spread throughout Europe, leading to many of the best practices and physical infrastructure of nineteenth and twentieth century museums. Although the way we structure museums has significantly evolved over the past two hundred years, much of our practice is still rooted in this public museum model.”

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I don’t want to live in the world that museums have helped to create. 

I want to help create a world where…

  • Every person matters equally. Everyone is needed. No one is disposable. 
  • “Normal” is not venerated. Difference is just different, not disruptive or dangerous. 
  • Empathy is the most venerated trait. Not intelligence. Not wealth.
  • Individuals and organizations are judged by how well they live their values. Feelings and statements are not enough. 

Maybe I am crazy, or hopelessly naive, but I believe museums could become a nursery for a better world … if they make a lot of changes.

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Museums were designed to tell stories about the world; we can change what stories they tell and how they tell them. As Hooper-Greenhill reminds us in her conclusion to Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge:

“the radical potential of material culture, of concrete objects, of real things, of primary sources, is the endless possibility of rereading.… because meanings and interpretations are endlessly rewritten, we too can seize the opportunity to make our own meaning, and find our own relevance and significance” (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, p. 215).

However, telling new stories about material culture and primary sources is as much about who tells the stories as it is about the content. We need to empower historically marginalized groups to tell their own stories in our spaces. In the book Emergent Strategy, the social justice organizer adrienne marie brown describes the type of storytelling I dream of more eloquently than I ever could. “We are in an imagination battle,” brown states.

“Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many others are dead because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous.… Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free…. We have to ideate – imagine and conceive – together. We must imagine new worlds that transition ideologies and norms, so that no one sees Black people as murderers and Brown people as terrorists and aliens, but all of us as potential cultural and economic innovators. This is a time-travel exercise for the heart. This is collaborative ideation” (brown, 2017, pp. 18-19).

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In order to create space for real “collaborative ideation” in museums, we need to transform our view of audiences; instead of seeing passive visitors, we need to invite active co-creators. We need to transform our storytelling process by becoming participatory cultural institutions. In The Participatory Museum, Nina Simon defines a participatory cultural institution as:

“a place where visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content. Create means that visitors contribute their own ideas, objects, and creative expression to the institution and to each other. Share means that people discuss, take home, remix, and redistribute both what they see and what they make during their visit. Connect means that visitors socialize with other people—staff and visitors—who share their particular interests. Around content means that visitors’ conversations and creations focus on the evidence, objects, and ideas most important to the institution in question.” (Simon, 2017)

I believe that when participatory cultural institutions facilitate collaborative ideation, they help change who holds power in our society and how that power operates. Tony Bennet argues in the introduction to his essay collection Museums, Power, Knowledge that historically, when museums changed the stories they told, they served “as a prelude to the production of new regimes of truth” that “in turn, produce their own distinctive power effects.”

For example, before the British Great Exhibition of 1851, museums told stories that made “royal power manifest and, accordingly, the pinnacle of representation governing the ordering of things was the prince or monarch.” The Great Exhibition told new stories centered around capitalism and industrialization. Following the Exhibition there was a huge boom in the development of public museums. The new approach to storytelling fostered at the Exhibition helped shape these new museums into places that produced and reinforced governmental and biopolitical power, instead of the older system of sovereign power (Bennett, 2017). When we democratize storytelling in museums, we help produce a more equitable distribution of power in our society.

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The most effective way to make museums participatory is by pivoting our primary focus away from the institutions and their stuff and towards investing in relationships and people – custodians, security guards, ticket takers, docents, educators, exhibit developers, registrars, project managers, co-creators (formerly known as visitors), board members, executive directors, and other stakeholders. As the Cooper Hewitt toolkit for transforming the museum experience states, “people, not objects, are the vital spirit of museums” (Brackett et al., 2021, p.10).

Investing in relationships is the best path towards change because, as adrienne maree brown taught me, change happens in fractals. “The patterns of the universe repeat at scale,” she said.

“What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system… transform yourself, transform the world. This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation and alignment with each other and the planet.” (brown, 2017, p. 52-53)

In short, if we invest more in the people who make museums, we can make museums work for more people.

Most of the museum people I know, especially emerging professionals, are smart, idealistic, hardworking, thoughtful, and care about making our society more equitable. I am asking myself “how might we advocate to get museum people the resources they need to transform museums into nurseries for a better world?” – resources like training in facilitation techniques for collaborative ideation, the time to build strong relationships with prospective co-creators, the freedom to be more creative, and the salaries they deserve for their expertise and experience. I am brainstorming ways can we better support each other. Will you brainstorm with me?

I have a few small ideas to start us off:

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Sources

Bennett, Tony. Museums, Power, Knowledge: Selected Essays. London ; New York: Routledge, 2017

Brackett, Shanita, Isabella Bruno, Kayleigh Bryant-Greenwell, Alexandra Cunningham-Cameron, Silvia Filippini-Fantoni, Marie Foulston, Rachel Ginsberg, et al. “Tools and Approaches for Transforming Museum Experience.” Cooper Hewitt Interaction Lab. Accessed March 25, 2021. https://www.cooperhewitt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Tools-and-Approaches-for-Transforming-Museum-Experience-v.1.0.pdf.

Brown, Adrienne Maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.

Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1992.

Morgan, Kelli. “To Bear Witness: Real Talk about White Supremacy in Art Museums Today,” October 24, 2020. https://burnaway.org/magazine/to-bear-witness/.

Munro, Jeremy. “Why Do We Keep Working in Museums?,” March 24, 2021. https://itsfreerealestate.home.blog/2021/03/24/why-do-we-keep-working-in-museums/.

Simon, Nina. The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, CA: Published by Museum 2.0, 2017.

Singer, Isabel. “Museums Are Perfectionist Control Freaks.” SuperHelpful Letters. Accessed February 8, 2021. https://letters.superhelpful.com/p/museums-are-perfectionist-control-freaks.

About the Author

ISABEL SINGER (she/her) is a content strategist, experience designer, and museum blogger. Located in Chicago, Isabel is a Senior Exhibit Developer at Luci Creative and a Chairperson of the Chicago Museum Exhibitors Group. Her blog, American Perceptionalism, explores how museums can reinvent themselves in our changing world. She received her B.A. from Yale University and her MPhil from the University of Cambridge, where she researched the history of slavery in the Atlantic World during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In her free time, she enjoys hosting big Shabbat dinners and searching for good Queer representation on television.

Social Action, Writing in a Time of Crisis

How Can I Contribute? Four Steps I’m Taking to Figure it Out

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Reposted with permission from Nina Simon on Medium. Visit her page there to read more.

Written by Nina Simon

I have the profound privilege to experience COVID-19 as a source of stress, not crisis. My family is healthy and able to shelter in place. My organization is well-funded enough to support our staff and continue our work. Like most folks, I feel waves of panic and fear. But my primary emotion is gratitude.

There are many, many people who don’t have my privileges right now. I’m talking daily to people who are losing income and housing and security and health. All this suffering makes me wonder: how can I contribute? What is the best way I can show up for others right now?

I started answering this question with the basics: staying home and practicing physical distancing. Reaching out to loved ones who are struggling. Donating to people and communities in crisis. Ensuring my colleagues have secure jobs and expanded benefits to support their well-being.

That all feels good. But I feel called to do more. And more is presenting itself to me — more opportunities to give, to volunteer, to be of service. So now I have a different problem: how to figure out what to do.

Don’t Let Production be the Enemy of Good

I’m not alone with this problem. In my industry — the nonprofit cultural sector — I see many organizations scrambling to engage right now.

In some cases, rapid response is phenomenal and highly relevant. I’m thrilled that art museums are donating personal protective equipment to healthcare workers. I’m amazed by historic sites that are offering their facilities up for hospital beds and food distribution centers. I’m grateful arts councils are setting up emergency funds for artists. I’m glad nature centers and parks are staying open as places of connection and healing.

These forms of rapid response are timely and meaningful. But I had to hunt for the above examples. Meanwhile, without my asking, my inbox is overflowing with a deluge of virtual museum tours, live-streamed opera performances, and digital educational resources. And it makes me wonder: is this the most meaningful way cultural organizations can contribute — or is it just the fastest way?

I’m not opposed to these offerings. I can see the hope and pleasure small snippets of art, music, history, and nature provide. But why are we doing it? Are we doing it based on some kind of expressed community need? Are we doing it with an eye towards serving communities that are struggling most? Or are we doing it to assure ourselves that we are “doing something,” to assure our donors we still exist— and that our jobs are worth keeping (which is in itself important!)?

You could argue that these organizations are contributing what they do best. But we’re a creative sector, and I think we could get more creative. In the race to deliver, I worry we may distract ourselves from the potential to envision and deliver true community value.

At first, I too felt pressure to produce and perform. I felt guilty that I wasn’t doing enough, that I wasn’t using my platform to be of great service right away. But then I realized — I don’t know how to do that yet. There was a real possibility I might burn myself out producing something mediocre instead of figuring out what might be most useful.

So I gave myself permission to slow down. I thought about my organization — OF/BY/FOR ALL — and how we coach cultural organizations to learn from communities and increase their relevance and public value.

Here are the steps I’m taking to find a better answer to the question of how I can contribute.

If you’re like me, holding privilege and wondering how you can be of service (whether as an individual or on behalf of your organization), I offer this process to you.

1. SELECT A COMMUNITY OF FOCUS.

You can’t help everyone. So ask yourself: what community especially matters to you right now? Who do you care about who might be particularly vulnerable or at risk? Maybe it’s elderly people in your neighborhood. Maybe it’s immigrants without a safety net. Maybe it’s nurses. I believe in targeted, community-centric approaches — and that starts with identifying specific communities to support.

2. LISTEN TO THAT COMMUNITY.

If you take a blind guess as to what a particular community might care most about, there’s a good chance you’ll guess wrong. But there’s an easy alternative: listen to them. Find ways to hear and learn directly from individuals and community organizations. You can search for information online. You can follow community leaders and activists on social media. Try to learn as much as possible by observation and listening (as opposed to asking people to give you their time) so you don’t add to burdens that struggling folks are already facing.

3. MAP YOUR SKILLS AND ASSETS.

At the same time as you learn what matters most to the communities you care most about, try to learn more about yourself. What can you uniquely offer? What existing assets and skills do you have that might be relevant? If you’re exploring this as an individual, you might have assets like your time, your bilingualism, or your ability to cook. As an organization, you might have assets like a building, a digital following, or the ear of the mayor.

For me, the most important part of this step is creative dot-connecting. How can you use your creativity to make unexpected connections between what is desired and what you have? These connections don’t have to be huge to be meaningful. For example, my sister (who lives alone) was feeling socially isolated. She mentioned on the phone that she was going to see if she could foster a furry companion. When that didn’t work out, we gave her our dog for a few weeks.

I probably never would have put my dog on a list of assets I have that can help right now. But he is, and he does.

4. CHECK YOUR ASSUMPTIONS.

Once you have an idea that matches your assets to your perceived community interests, take a pause. Check in with community representatives before hitting go. You might think something’s a great idea, but value is in the eye of the community.

I didn’t drive up to my sister’s house and drop a 70-pound dog on her porch without asking. I heard her expressed interest. I thought I had a matching asset. And then I checked in to confirm if that was the case. I want to give communities the same respect and forethought I give my sister.

WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE

I’m going through this process at different speeds with different communities. Here’s how I’m approaching it with two communities that matter to me right now: homeless people in my county and cultural organizations around the world.

Move Fast When There’s an Obvious Best Way to Contribute

When it comes to homeless people in Santa Cruz County, I’m moving quickly. I’m learning what matters most via communication from organizations I trust. I’m hearing what matters most is funding to fuel critical services during the crisis. I have a corresponding asset to offer — my own cash. So I’m increasing donations to homeless-serving organizations I trust. I’m also encouraging and supporting my husband in more direct service to homeless people (which is part of his daily work). I don’t have to get too creative here to make a difference.

Move Slow When the Path is Not Obvious and Creativity Could Lead to Better Results

When it comes to cultural practitioners around the world, I’m moving slowly. I think I have more potential to contribute something unique here, and I’m not sure what it is. So right now, I’m doing a mix of steps 2 and 3. I’m learning about what matters to this community, and I’m mapping my own skills and assets.

I’m learning what matters most by listening to cultural practitioners in my own professional network — in OF/BY/FOR ALL programs, emails, calls, and tweets. I’m focusing my listening on voices of black, indigenous, disabled, and people of color. I’ve made some small donations (like to the Arts Leaders of Color Emergency Fund). But mostly, for now, I’m listening.

To map my assets, I’m trying to stay curious and creative about what I might uniquely offer. There are others who are better positioned than me to provide cash to cultural organizations— and I’m thrilled several foundations are stepping up to do so. I believe there’s another way for me to support this community. I’ve got some assets at my disposal: a big online network, a history of leading change at an organization in crisis, an amazing team committed to equipping teams for transformation, and time to commit. I’ve got some skills to offer, like writing, dreaming, coaching, tool creation, and framework creation.

I don’t yet know how I can be most useful to cultural organizations. So I’m listening and mapping, mapping and listening. As I listen, I’m jotting down themes and trends. I’m starting to connect the dots with my assets and skills. I’m starting to dream about ways I might be able to uniquely contribute.

I think it will take me 3–4 weeks to come up with viable, concrete ideas grounded in what I’m hearing from the community. At that point, I’ll move into step four, and talk with colleagues and peers to check my assumptions and select a path forward. I believe I’ll come up with an answer that uses my skills in the best possible way to generate the most possible value.

This process is grounded in a fundamental realization (and acceptance) that I don’t have the skills and assets that are most needed right now. I’m not a health care provider, or a farmer, or a social worker. If I worked in health care or social service, right now I’d value expediency and rapid response. But I don’t. So I’m banking on a different skill: creativity.

Don’t burn yourself out before you can do the most good. Give yourself permission to get clear on which communities are most important to you right now. Listen deeply to what matters to them. Think creatively about how you can deploy your skills and assets to support their ability to thrive.

I hope we can use this time to create value in ways that nudge the world to greater interconnectivity, resilience, creativity, and care. If it takes a few weeks to figure out how you might be of best service, that’s ok. Take the time — and then take the action. The world will be better for it.

Featured Image caption: My sister and my dog sharing a moment.

About the Author

Nina Simon: Spacemaker/CEO of OF/BY/FOR ALL. Best-selling author of The Participatory Museum (2010) and The Art of Relevance (2016). http://www.ninaksimon.com

Inclusive Practices, Social Action

Towards a More Community-Centered Museum, Part 2: Is ‘Community’ a Meaningless Word?

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Written by Mike Murawski

The term ‘community’ may very well be one of the most frequently used words these days when it comes to describing the shifting goals, values, programs, exhibitions, staff, audience demographics, and communication strategies of museums.  To be honest, I use the word pretty regularly myself.  For decades, museums (and most funding organizations) have been increasingly using phrases like “aiming to serve our community,” “reaching out to our communities,” and “strengthening our community” to create a sense of a museum’s broader mission and social purpose.  In describing some of its more recent funding initiatives, for example, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) states that “museums are at the forefront of change in our communities” and they serve as “strong community anchors.”  In their  thirteen-page Strategic Plan for 2018-2022 entitled Transforming Communities (which is worth a read), the word ‘community’ or ‘communities’ is used thirty-six times.

Museums and cultural organizations are constantly being asked how effectively we’re serving our communities and how well we represent our community.  But foundations, granting organizations, civic entities, and funders do not have a consistent definition of what they even mean by community.  We can begin to read between the lines when we are asked about the ZIP codes we serve, the number of Title I schools visiting, and what programs we have for “at-risk” youth or “underserved” audiences (I really dislike those labels, BTW).  In many cases, community is defined as “people of diverse geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds” or “families and individuals of diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds and needs.”  Whether we are defining these groups based on geography, interests, or experience, are we essentially talking about people who are not engaging with our institutions?

Nina Simon writes about this common misuse of the word community to refer to the general public or “everyone who doesn’t currently visit here.”  Inclusion catalyst and museum expert Porchia Moore discusses the dangers of using the word ‘community’ in a reductive way, such as when it is used to describe a large group of different people by focusing on a single attribute.  In the context of discussions about inclusion, Moore writes, “‘Community’ becomes code for discussing black and brown visitors.”  Referring to a group as “the black community” or “the LGBTQ community” can be problematic when groups are perceived as a monolithic or singular community.  Moore advocates for museums to dig deeper into this language and how it reflects the decisions we make to develop one-off programs or exhibitions.

Museums have certainly been dedicating significant time and resources to reach this elusive and mysterious ‘community’ we so badly want to connect with and engage.  Institutions large and small now have staff positions dedicated to Community Outreach, Community Programs, or Community Partnerships, indicating this increased investment in what engaging community means for many institutions.  There also seem to be more departments or divisions within museums with “Community” added to the title—Learning and Community Programs, Family and Community Programs, Community Engagement, Access and Community Initiatives, etc.   And I must confess, I’m regularly interested in changing the title of my own department from Education and Public Programs to something that more closely reflects the work we’re doing to advance community-centered practices.

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community social justice art project at Portland Art Museum, 2016

Overall, there is a generally agreed-upon sense that reaching out to and engaging with community is a good thing for museums.  When we add this word to a staff position, department, or to our mission statements, it is done as a symbol of good intentions. Yet how do we effectively do this work and advocate for it if we don’t truly have a sense of what it means beyond connecting with “those other people” out there?

As museums vaguely define community or communities as groups that might not be engaging or connecting with the museum, there is also a troubling binary and divide we have created between ‘museum’ and ‘community.’  It’s so ingrained in the way so many of us talk about our work, myself included.  Museums are perceived as separate from communities; they are seen as buildings with collections, objects, exhibitions, and experts that are made available to communities on a limited basis.  Referring to some functions of the museum as “outreach” just reinforces this separation.  By default, museums then exist as disconnected, disengaged, and distanced from this idea of community.  And not thinking about where museum staff and volunteers fit into the idea of ‘community’ is problematic. When we use the word ‘community’ in our institutions, are we thinking about staff and those who work for the institution?  Overall, we are really feeding this gap by simply not addressing it.

So has the word ‘community’ just become a vague and almost meaningless expression?  Museum professionals use it too frequently and in ways that overlook its inherent complexities.   I fully realize that by writing this series of blog posts, I’m engaging in overuse of the term myself, but my interest here lies in unpacking the term and opening up many of the rich complexities tied up in this concept.

Rather than stop using this word or replace it with something else, I’m advocating for those working for and with museums to gain a deeper understanding of what community means.  I believe it is an extremely meaningful concept, and I am thoroughly excited to see it being used more frequently by museums and funding organizations.  We just need to explore and address the complexities involved with defining community and communities for our institutions.

Stay tuned for my next post in this series, which will lay out some of the ways we can define community in our practice.  Future posts will also address strategies for thinking more deeply about these issues and developing ways to bridge these gaps.

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ABOUT THE SERIES: Through this series of posts, I am exploring a range of ideas, challenges, and strategies for building community-centered practices in museums and advocating for deeper connections between institutions and community.    What do we mean by ‘community’?  How can we value community?  What are some strategies for change that we can enact now in our institutions?

I’m open to all types of critiques and questions, as long as they are aimed at moving this collective work forward.  My ideas, thoughts, and questions have emerged from decades of meaningful conversations with others, so I don’t claim ownership of these ideas — I simply hope they can spark new conversations and allow us all to add to our learning and growth as we work to transform museums.

Other Posts in This Series:

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About the Author

MIKE MURAWSKI: Founding author and editor of ArtMuseumTeaching.com, museum educator, and currently the Director of Education & Public Programs for the Portland Art Museum. Mike earned his MA and PhD in Education from American University in Washington, DC, focusing his research on educational theory and interdisciplinary learning in the arts. Prior to his position at the Portland Art Museum, he served as Director of School Services at the Saint Louis Art Museum as well as coordinator of education and public programs at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University.  He is involved in the Museums as Sites of Social Action (MASS Action) initiative, contributing author to the MASS Action toolkit, and co-created the #MuseumsAreNotNeutral tshirt campaign with LaTanya Autry to erase the myth of museum neutrality. As a cultural activist and museum professional, he is passionate about how we can come to see museums as agents of change in their communities as well as sites for transformative learning and social action. He has led workshops and presented at conferences and institutions nationally and internationally, including a keynote at the 2016 MuseumNext conference. Mike’s postings on this site are his own and don’t represent the Portland Art Museum’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

Inclusive Practices, Social Action

Towards a More Community-Centered Museum, Part 1: Let Your Community In

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Written by Mike Murawski

Last summer (2017) I made my first-ever visit to the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH)—a long overdue pilgrimage to this institution led by author and change agent Nina Simon.  She had invited me to be a ‘camp counselor’ for their summer MuseumCamp, and I could not turn down a chance to visit the MAH, see what makes it tick, and be a part of this community of changemakers that gather each summer for the MuseumCamp experience.  Not only have I known Nina for several years and been a dedicated reader of her Museum 2.0 blog and her books on museums, but the MAH had just officially opened Abbott Square, an adjacent public plaza that the museum converted to a bustling community gathering place and food market. For me, the Santa Cruz museum is fundamentally one of the exemplars in turning an institution toward a focus on its local community.  Since arriving in 2011, Nina has worked with her team to tirelessly transform the MAH into a thriving museum and community center for Santa Cruz.

I was fortunate to visit during their exhibition Lost Childhoods, an issue-driven exhibition that the MAH staff created with their community.  Showcasing the stories, struggles, and triumphs of youth who are aging out of foster care, this powerful exhibition was co-created with the Foster Youth Museum and a group of over one hundred local foster youth, artists, and youth advocates.  This community was at the core of the exhibition, and there was even a large wall text that boldly declared “We made this with our community.” Through years of getting to know its local community and becoming intertwined in its people, the MAH team has embodied a shift from being a museum ‘for’ its community to being a museum ‘of’ and ‘by’ its community.  And most recently they launched the global OF/BY/FOR ALL movement to bring these community-centered practices to institutions everywhere (watch the MuseumNext 2018 keynote presentation by Nina).

Amidst all the workshops, small group discussions, beach trips, and conversations with over a hundred passionate changemakers last summer during my first MuseumCamp experience, one moment still resonates with me more than any other—perhaps because of how simple and straightforward it was.  Portland-based writer, game critic, and creative entrepreneur Josh Boykin stepped up to the microphone during a series of fast-paced lightning talks.  Josh works outside of museums yet cares a great deal about building community; and while he lives and works in Portland, Oregon, our paths had not yet crossed.  His lightning talk was personal and inspiring, yet there’s one simple thing about his talk that has stuck in my mind.  Projected on the screen behind him during the entire duration of his talk were four words, large and bold: “Let Your Community In.”

Photo from Dalila Huerta, Instagram dlhuerta1848

Since that moment, Josh’s message has become one of my mantras when it comes to museum practice.  How do museums let community in?  Is community always separate and outside of museums, in need of being ‘let in’?  What does ‘community’ even mean?  Like many museum professionals, I have grappled with these questions my entire career, yet the complexities and challenges of engaging communities has come into focus in recent years as my own institution has created opportunities to advance this work.

It’s so important for museums to be a local place intertwined and inseparable from local realities and issues.  We are located in our communities, but we’re also a part of those communities.  How do we, as museum professionals, define our place, our town, our city, our neighborhood, our community?  How do we identify ways to break down the barriers between museums and their communities as well as build relevance through local community partnerships?  How do we learn about the people of our places (past and present), learn about what connects us and what brings people together into a community?

Right now, at this moment, some of the more challenging questions for me are: why open up museums to the challenges and potential failures of community-centered work?  Why invest the time, staff, energy, and resources it takes to do this work really well?  Why take on such risks?  Wouldn’t it be easier to just keep with business as usual?

When faced with these questions, I often find myself going to museum scholar Stephen Weil’s befitting statement: “The museum that does not prove an outcome to its community is as socially irresponsible as a business that fails to show a profit. It wastes society’s resources.” (Weil 2003, p. 43, as cited in Watson, ed. Museums and Their Communities, 1).  As museums and other institutions take steps to embrace community engagement, it is important to understand why this shift is occurring toward working with communities and local residents.  The meaning of community requires more thoughtfulness and deliberation than we typically give it. Going forward, museum professionals and leaders must embrace this complexity as they strive to understand and create social change.  It is not enough for museums to become an essential part of our communities—our communities also need to become an essential part of our museums.  Are we ready to let our community in, as Josh Boykin proclaimed, and allow neighbors, local residents, community members, and those who may have traditionally been excluded from our institutions to shape practices, programs, and policies?

Echoing the words of bell hooks, what would it mean for museums “to be in community, to work in community, and to be changed by community”?

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ABOUT THE SERIES: Through this series of posts, I am exploring a range of ideas, challenges, and strategies for building community-centered practices in museums and advocating for deeper connections between institutions and community.    What do we mean by ‘community’?  How can we value community?  What are some strategies for change that we can enact now in our institutions?

I’m open to all types of critiques and questions, as long as they are aimed at moving this collective work forward.  My ideas, thoughts, and questions have emerged from decades of meaningful conversations with others, so I don’t claim ownership of these ideas — I simply hope they can spark new conversations and allow us all to add to our learning and growth as we work to transform museums.

Other Posts in This Series:

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About the Author

MIKE MURAWSKI: Founding author and editor of ArtMuseumTeaching.com, museum educator, and currently the Director of Education & Public Programs for the Portland Art Museum. Mike earned his MA and PhD in Education from American University in Washington, DC, focusing his research on educational theory and interdisciplinary learning in the arts. Prior to his position at the Portland Art Museum, he served as Director of School Services at the Saint Louis Art Museum as well as coordinator of education and public programs at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University.  He is involved in the Museums as Sites of Social Action (MASS Action) initiative, contributing author to the MASS Action toolkit, and co-created the #MuseumsAreNotNeutral tshirt campaign with LaTanya Autry to erase the myth of museum neutrality. As a cultural activist and museum professional, he is passionate about how we can come to see museums as agents of change in their communities as well as sites for transformative learning and social action. He has led workshops and presented at conferences and institutions nationally and internationally, including a keynote at the 2016 MuseumNext conference. Mike’s postings on this site are his own and don’t represent the Portland Art Museum’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

Experimenting in Museums, Inclusive Practices

Be a CHANGEMAKER – Apply for MuseumCamp 2017 Now!

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Written by Mike Murawski

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

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

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

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

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

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

Museum-Camp-2014

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

  1. Dive into co-creative project design. A month before MuseumCamp, the MAH is opening a new exhibition, Lost Childhoods, co-developed with foster youth, youth advocates, and artists in our community. You’ll tour the exhibition with the team, discuss its impact, and explore the process behind it. This project is experimental, complicated work. Foster youth are central to every decision and direction. Artists are striving to follow their direction to beautiful ends. Dozens of youth advocates and partners co-own the process and are bringing their own dreams, talents, and connections to the work. At MuseumCamp, we’ll pull back the curtain on Lost Childhoods’ process and product. We’ll brainstorm how to partner with your community on projects that ignite social action.
  2. Meet amazing colleagues and counselors. MuseumCamp attracts creative changemakers of all stripes and backgrounds. Last year Camp welcomed academics, museum folk, librarians, poets, artists, bike advocates, engineers, and one American Ninja Warrior. This year’s applicants include social scientists, activists, entrepreneurs, educators, and artists. We’ve got two incredible outside counselors–Ebony McKinney and Mike Murawski–and more partners coming onboard. You want to meet these people. You want to learn with them. MuseumCamp will help you build a diverse network of inspiring compatriots for your own personal journey to creative change.
  3. Build – and share – a creative action plan for change. The central activity of MuseumCamp is a whole-camp project where we work in teams to make something. (Check out past projects here.) This year, we’re building a creative change toolkit. As a team, you will design it. After Camp, the MAH team will turn it into a beautiful product for you to keep. You’ll create it, use it, and share it with others around the world.
  4. Find out what happens when a museum breaks out of its building. Later this spring, the MAH is opening a major expansion in Abbott Square, the plaza adjacent to the museum. Abbott Square will be a creative heart for the city, offering free events, workshops, performances, and playful programs in partnership with community groups. At MuseumCamp, you’ll be among the first to experience it. If you or your organization are considering doing more work in public space, this is a great opportunity to learn more firsthand.
  5. Relax, recharge, and explore. Swim with sea lions. Ride a 100-year old wooden roller coaster. Sleep in a museum. All optional. All incredible. All at MuseumCamp.
You can apply for MuseumCamp until March 15. Now’s the time. Let’s do it.

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

Spotlight on Practice, Teaching Tools

Crowdsourcing in the Art Museum

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“Crowdsourcing poses a tantalizing question: What if the solutions to our greatest problems weren’t waiting to be conceived, but already existed somewhere, just waiting to be found, in the warp and weave of this vibrant human network?”

-Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

How many times have you been facilitating a learning experience with a group of teachers, docents, or public visitors in the galleries, and the best ideas or questions come from someone in the group?  This is a pretty regular occurrence for me, as visitors and students bring new noticings, insights, and wonderings to the process of experiencing a work of art.  But I wonder how many times we neglect to solicit the ideas, thoughts, and questions of visitors and learners in museums.  Are the “solutions to our greatest problems” simply waiting to be found in the crowds of people that enter our doors every day?  What are some ways we might tap into the “power of the crowd” to drive forward our work as educators?

So what is crowdsourcing anyway?

There are several definitions of “crowdsourcing” out there, but the popularity of the term seems to have originated in an article written by Jeff Howe in Wired Magazine back in 2006 called “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.”  The use of the term — and the concept — has exploded since then, with cultural and corporate phenomenons such as American Idol, Wikipedia, Flickr, Amazon, and even the New York Times using crowdsourcing strategies to create, organize, share, filter, judge, or sell their content and products.  Check out 4 great examples of the most recent social crowdsourcing projects.  At the core of most crowdsourcing is an open call to a diverse, heterogeneous group for their involvement in a task, inviting them to bring their experiences, what they already know (the ‘wisdom of the crowd’), and their likes & dislikes to the process. Customers, consumers, and audiences now become potential partners or creators — part of building something new.  With the internet and social media making it easy to gather a ‘crowd’ of millions online at no cost, the strategy of crowdsourcing has become largely based on technology.

Here is a succinct video from Jeff Howe that helps define crowdsourcing (from his perspective):

Several art museums have utilized various crowdsourcing strategies to allow the public to curate and plan exhibitions.  The most trail-blazing example is probably the Brooklyn Museum’s Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition, which involved an open call for people to submit photographs, an online audience evaluation of those images, and then finally an exhibition in 2008 of the crowd-curated photographs. Nina Simon praised this project on her Museum 2.0 blog as “what museum innovation looks like.”  During the run of the exhibition, she wrote:

“A wise poet once said to me: the only way to get any better is to change. We have to do these experiments, explore the different and new, if we ever hope to get better at what we do. Click! may not be the future of museum exhibitions. But it’s the best thing we have so far to help us get there.” (Museum 2.0)

Other art museums have also recently engaged in the crowdsourcing craze, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s somewhat controversial “The Art of Video Games,” the Plains Art Museum’s “You Like This: A Democratic Approach to the Museum Collection” and the Walters Art Museum’s upcoming exhibition “Public Property” (a title selected by the public through their crowd-curating process).  So it appears that several museums have taken up the torch to further explore these participatory strategies, and I know there are many I’m not listing here.  Museum visitors are, to use Jeff Howe’s words, beginning to “participate meaningfully in the process” by which their experience is created, and they are in a way becoming the “people formerly known as the audience.”

How can we bring crowdsourcing into museum teaching?

crowdsourcing during a high school tour

As an educator, I have been more interested in the ways that we might bring crowdsourcing beyond curating and into museum teaching and learning experiences in the galleries.  I first got to play with crowdsourcing in the galleries when my work with the CoLab began a few years ago. Working with groups of teachers to envision and prototype transformative learning experiences for the museum and their classrooms, we have used some crowdsourcing strategies to allow the ‘wisdom’ and experiences of the group to bring certain questions and ideas to the surface.  I’ve used this strategy with docents as well as teachers, and it has been a fun and effective teaching tool.  Here is one easy crowdsourcing exercise you can try out (since the groups are small, it’s probably not officially “crowd”-sourcing, but let’s not split hairs):

Generate some data: Engage your participants (students, teachers, visitors) in a brainstorming process focused on a single task. For example, you might ask a group of visitors on a tour to come up with as many questions as they can about a work of art we have been exploring. After each individual generates a list of interesting and creative questions, they get into groups of three to share their questions and decide on the three best questions from their group. Each group writes these questions down on individual slips of paper.

Crowdsource it: Now you have some data to be crowdsourced … let the craziness begin!  Each participant should have a slip of paper in their hand with a question written on it.  The group stands in the middle of the gallery, and they are asked to rapidly exchange their slips of paper (emphasis on rapidly).  After the facilitator says “stop,” people pair-up, read the questions they have, evaluate them, and then each pair works together to assign points to their questions.  We usually ask each pair to assign exactly 7 points to their two questions (meaning that if one question gets a 5, the other gets a 2; or one can get a 7, the other a 0).  We do this rapid exchange and scoring for several rounds, adding some fun twists to the exchange process (participants might be asked to dance as they exchange slips of paper … something to keep it silly is always good).

See what surfaces: After several rounds of scoring, participants add up the total score, and now you can see how the group filters, organizes, and evaluates the data they were provided.  People can stand in a line according to the total score of the question they have, and we begin to see what are the most important ones to bubble to the surface that day.  Present the top three or top five items to the group.

Act on the results: It is important not to stop there.  Do something with the results of this process.  If you uncovered 3 really juicy questions about a work of art, bring those questions to the work and spend some time thinking deeply about how you might respond to them.  During a recent teacher institute at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, we asked a group of educators to crowdsource some prototypes for new ways the museum could engage its community, and we then focused on the top three ideas and envisioned how they might be enacted through a more extensive process.  I always feel like the success of any participatory strategy hinges on whether it goes anywhere or leads to something new.  For public crowd-curating, I think much of the success depends on people having the benefit of seeing their input manifested in the product or exhibition itself.

Have you experimented with any crowdsourcing in the galleries?  What are some things we might learn from crowdsourcing tactics, both in-person and online?  Are there ways we can push these strategies into more public, social learning experiences in the museum (other than exhibition curation & design)?  Stay tuned for updates as I experiment further with crowdsourcing in the art museum.

Reposted through the National Writing Project’s Digital Is website.

UPDATE: I wanted to add a link to this post through the Center for the Future of Museums in which guest bloggers Wesley Hsu and Vivian Haga tell us about the My Gallery Interactive project:

Integrating Collaboration and Technology to Create a Crowdsourced Experience