Museums Respond

The Tufts Museum Studies blog has an excellent roundup of museum response to Monday's tragedy at the Boston Marathon. Many of the city's institutions have stepped up and opened their doors to help people in their grief and functioned as community anchors in the best possible way.

How to Build Community

This is a poster displayed just inside the entrance of my local library here in Vermont. It's a terrific library on many levels, and when I noticed this poster I stopped cold. What great advice!

If you can't read the photography (sorry for the quality!) here's what it says:

How to Build Community

Turn off your TV
Leave your house
Know your neighbors
Look up when you are walking
Greet people
Sit on your stoop
Plant flowers
Use your library
Play together
Buy from local merchants
Share what you have
Help a lost dog
Take children to the park
Garden together
Support neighborhood schools
Fix it even if you didn't break it
Have potlucks

Honor elders

Pick up litter
Read stories aloud
Dance in the street
Talk to the mail carrier
Listen to the birds
Put up a swing
Help carry something heavy
Barter for your goods
Start a tradition
Ask a question
Hire young people for odd jobs
Organize a block party
Bake extra and share
Ask for help when you need it
Open your shades
Sing togther
Share your skills
Take back the night
Turn up the music

Turn down the music
Listen before you react to anger
Mediate a conflict
Seek to understand
Learn from new and uncomfortable angles
Know that no one is silent though many are not heard. Work to change this.

Arts Organizations and Community

Somewhat delayed by unexpected events including Sandy, I'll be publishing a series of blog posts inspired by the proceedings at the Salzburg Global Forum, an annual leadership seminar for 50 young nonprofit leaders in the arts organized by National Arts Strategies. Bloggers have been asked to address a series of questions facing the nonprofit arts world similar to those being considered in Salzburg.

Arts Organizations and Community

In a post-recession world, institutions which survive will be those grounded deeply in a sense of community. By community, I mean that linked group of people who establish connections with one another and with others based around an idea or a place.

Communities of ideas can exist the world over, and may never even meet physically. The internet has provided an easy way to replace the physical with the intellectual, and has provided virtual meeting spaces to encouraging the sharing of ideas. Communication has always been at the heart of communities of ideas, and that communication grows faster and more sophisticated every day. “Web 2.0” and “social media” are both buzzwords of this new, more sophisticated linking.

Communities of place are much more traditional, and foster connections by the simple virtue of familiarity breeding not contempt, but mutual reliance and affection. Small towns and neighborhoods are the ultimate example of this type, which fluctuates widely as demographics shift from urban centers to rural areas. “Third places,” such as coffeehouses, bars, and other physical institutions are also a small-scale example.

These communities can co-exist and co-create – those interested in fiber arts might congregate at a yarn store, or those in a neighborhood might form a jogging group. Communities of ideas might create brief, intense communities of place, such as a Renaissance fair or science fiction convention, and communities of place might band together to promote an idea, such as an inner-city neighborhood advocating for music education in its schools.

Museums can and should participate in both types of communities. First, all museums have subject matter expertise and collection items that can speak directly to one or more communities of ideas. Engaging with those communities can activate their passion on behalf of an institution, and they can serve as valuable advocates worldwide, no matter the location of the museum. The key to this type of engagement is consistency and transparency – regular new content accompanied by honest dialogue with those who may be more expert in a subject matter than the museum itself. This type of community engagement is much more familiar to museums, but many have yet to take full advantage of its new digital possibilities

Museums have struggled as members of a community of place. Some have succeeded brilliantly for a time, only to fall behind with a change in leadership or staff. Some have eschewed their physical communities entirely in favor of connecting only with those who have particular interest in their collections. Museums can no longer be the temple on the hill that preaches down to the masses; they must now be equal community members. This requires a great deal of flexibility and understanding, as a museum must participate equally, sometimes allowing its own identity to recede (not disappear!) to allow for another member of its community to take center stage.

Ultimately, when the time comes to prove necessity, a museum that has integrated its planning, programs, and exhibitions fully with both its virtual and physical communities will survive.

Does an events-driven museum = a low-impact museum?

I don't have fully-formed thoughts on this one yet, but I have been thinking a great deal about events and programs and their place in a museum in the last few weeks. This line of thought was kicked off by this guest post on Museum 2.0 about community events at museums, and then brought to the forefront by my exciting new job at the Vermont Historical Society.

I've long believed that transformative, community-based events at museums can be incredible catalysts for connecting people to museums and their collections. Many people who would never come through the door for "another exhibit full of old stuff" will be lured in by a creative, fun program. The tour-de-force of the Minnesota Historical Society's AAM event - Beer, Burlesque, and Babe (the Blue Ox) - utterly carried me away and made me want to duplicate its quirky, fun, involved atmosphere in other museums.

The philosophy of the events-driven museum was laid forward by Nina Simon in this post originally, and then given a one year update here. She provides some pretty compelling evidence for the audience and revenue benefits of events at museums. I'm not sure I will follow her as far as the idea that events should entirely drive a museum - rather than collections, exhibitions, and a solid education program - but I find many pieces of the idea compelling.

Recently, Reach Advisors threw a monkey wrench into all my thinking and reading about events in museums with this blog post on finding meaning in museums. They found, fairly conclusively, that an overwhelming number of positive, transformative experiences in museums happened in exhibits and galleries - not during programs or events, and not even during direct interaction with staff in galleries. The comments on the post bring up some of my initial questions, and Susie Wilkening answers them effectively - in short, there isn't a "terms bias" here; visitors simply described their experience, and Reach Advisors then coded based on the context and description. (In other words, it's not that visitors couldn't tell the difference between an exhibition and an event.)

So where do we go from here? Does this provide a way to more closely tailor programming to provide lasting, meaningful experiences? Does this mean that programs have a short-term impact only? Does this mean that programming should really ultimately serve as an introduction to the museum galleries and exhibits? Do you think there's more meaning yet to parse from these results?