Adam Yauch Makes Me Wanna Holla: Generation X Session at #AAM2012

By James G. Leventhal

Beastie Boy Adam “MCA” Yauch and The Venerable Palden Gyatso, Tibetan Freedom Concert, SF, CA 1996

So quotes my friend Jennifer Caleshu:

These times especially call for more than mere incrementalism. Let’s demand that our leaders get in over their heads, that they remain a little bit naive about what they’re getting into.

It’s from WIRED.

And my friend Erin Potts wrote about Adam Yauch, our “MCA”:

He was deeply strategic–most of the time–always passionate, and always welcoming. He believed in our team of inexperienced but determined 20-somethings, and our ability to do the impossible. And with that belief in us and in nonviolence, together we DID do the impossible. Never before has more fun been had while changing the world!! Yauch’s work for Tibet helped jumpstart and nurture an international youth movement for Tibet and nonviolence–the best example of which can be found in Students for a Free Tibet, our sister organization and partner during all of the Tibetan Freedom Concerts. That this organization and movement is stronger today than when the last Concert ended is a testament to Yauch’s vision, leadership, and belief in young people.

Adam Yauch died last week at the age of 47.

Jennifer Caleshu, Director of Earned Revenue and Project Management, Bay Area Discovery Museum at the podium at AAM in Minneapolis, MN

At the tailend of last week’s American Association of Museums meeting in Minneapolis I had the good fortune to be part of a panel about Gen X leadership in museums.

It was on honor to be there with you on stage, Amparo Leyman Pino and Stacey Swigart.  And it was fun.  Were we the only session with a DJ?!  Thanks, Scott Stulen…and what you do at the Walker rocks our worlds!  Thank you, Jennifer for bringing us all together.  To see the slides, please click here.

This post is intended as a rally cry, a gathering place and a link garden.  Were you there?

With the passing of Adam Yauch, I am overwhelmed at the need to plant this seed as a tribute, without a ton of exposition.

Please can I encourage others who weren’t at the podium to craft longer posts or comments and submit them here? @Louiseoffcourse? @jolifanta? @bathlander?

And a more cogent post with more links and documentation is forthcoming.

‘Til then let us celebrate our own potential, in life and what’s next.

Museums on Parade – The Smell of the Dinosaurs, the Roar of the Crowd

By: Victoria France

I was watching the 123^rd annual Rose Parade, January 2, 2012 in Pasadena, CA – one of the brightest and warmest Rose Parade days anyone seems to remember. And if that isn’t remarkable enough, among the marching bands, surfing dogs, equestrian units and gigantic flower bedecked displays of commercial and civic pride, there was a museum float!  Ok, yes, it’s disguised as a dinosaur trio,  which everyone can relate to, but it was a MUSEUM FLOAT!  The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles presented their first-ever float for this most historic parade,  featuring the museum’s newly renovated 1913 building, and in true LA style, three major “stars” were ready for their close up – Thomas the T. rex, an immense Triceratops, and the long-necked Mamenchisaurus.  And unlike the movie Jurassic Park, these dino’s didn’t lunge into the crowd to snap up tasty parade viewers along the route.  It was truly remarkable – the museum raised money through all private donations, used volunteer labor, partnered with the LA Visitor’s bureau, and pulled off a beautiful and creative float.

How unique is the Natural History Museum’s float?  I’ve done some searching and can’t find ANY reference to ANY museum presenting a float in the 123 years of the Parade – the closest I have found are some equestrian riders in years past from the Roy Rogers Museum.

With millions around the world watching the famous and historical Rose Parade, the Natural History Museum certainly racked up a lot of “visitation” – can they count those visitation numbers when applying for grants or when listing their visitation numbers in the Official Museum Directory?  What’s next, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?  A Super Bowl advertisement with Betty White? The opportunity to present the Museum before the millions of viewers was priceless.  What will the resulting visitation figures be for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in the months to come after the Rose Parade viewing?  We’ll have to check back and see……….hopefully their gift shop ordered extra little stuffed dino’s and t-shirts to satisfy the increase in visitors!

But seriously, why is this the first time (that I know of, correct me if you know differently!) a museum has joined in presenting in such a VERY PUBLIC parade, seen by millions around the world? Is this a trend now to be repeated in other parades and festivities?  Why not? In my imagination I picture many more museums in future Rose Parades……..such as, a Getty Museum float,  with the “Getty bronze” (Victorious Youth) articulated to wave at the crowds, covered in pepper buds and seaweed, standing amid a field of black amphora (amphorae?) and Etruscan bronzes, and in the float’s background a to-scale model of a portion of the Getty Villa ,with to-scale sculptures of ancient Gods and Goddesses, Satyrs and Nymphs, and the float populated by, of course, Getty Museum staff – curators, preps, and of course, the dedicated registrars, wearing period-appropriate garb, also waving to the crowds and the cameras, while monitoring the hygrothermograph and vibration, with float-walkers along the route passing out brochures and discount coupons for the gift shop.

Now, about that surfing dog……….

 

Victoria France
Managing Director, Fine Art Division
Robertson Taylor International Insurance Brokers
Sherman Oaks, CA

Victoria brings more than 23 years experience in the fine arts and collections insurance field, in addition to her prior professional museum and art gallery experience.  Victoria serves on the Board of Directors of the Western Museums Association; and the University of California, Riverside, Dean’s Advisory Council for the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and UCR ArtsBlock Committee.

WMA on TV: Kippen de Alba Chu on Hawai`i News Now Sunrise

Thank you, Honolulu and the Hawai’i Convention Center for a great meeting!  To read more click here.

Iolani Palace Executive Director and WMA VP Kippen de Alba Chu on Hawai`i News Now Sunrise. Click image to watch the video

WMA 2011: Street Banners at Hawaii Convention Center

 

Check out the awesome street banners that we be outside the Hawaii Convention Center during the Annual Meeting!

What a great welcome to what is going to a be great conference. Mahalo, Honolulu!

The double-sided banners will be hung on 8 street poles fronting the Convention Center.

Make sure to check the banners out when you arrive next week!

Sign Up!: Social Media Workshop Session

By James G. Leventhal

Not too long ago, museums didn’t have email. Or websites. Or e-blasts. We’ve simply incorporated these new technologies as they’ve arrived. In many cases they’ve improved our work and made our professional lives easier. Really, it’s not even that long ago that we didn’t use direct mail and I remember when it was a question as to whether we’d accept credit card donations.  Social media’s just another chapter in this story, and something of a game changer.  Whether you are fully engaged with social media or just getting started, it’s as important to spend time talking about strategy, documenting it and to learn from each others’ experiences.

The Western Museums Association has been helping museums and museum professionals get together and think about social media, including having helped to organize a presentation at the SFMOMA with Seb Chan of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia.

Join us for one of the key pre-conference workshops at this year’s Western Museum Association’s Annual Meeting on Sunday, October 17th from 1-5 pm. Adam Rozan, Marketing Manager for the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) and Stephanie Weaver, Principal, Experienceology and I will be running a workshop called the Portland Arts & Culture Social Media Convening in the Stevens Room at the Portland Art Museum.

Rozan on stage with colleagues at OMCA reopening, tweeting #california

Rozan recently organized a really great piece of crowdsourced community engagement by bringing together all the “tweeters” and social media mavens from museum throughout the SF Bay Area, when the OMCA recently reopened it’s art and history galleries with a massive 31-hour-straight party.

This event on Sunday afternoon October 17th at the Portland Art Museum is not free.  The $30 fee covers refreshments and a copy of Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s book The Networked Nonprofit.  Online registration is closed. You can register at the door, but please RSVP to let us know you are attending to Stephanie Weaver: sweaver [at] experienceology.com so we have enough food and books.

The Portland Arts & Culture Social Media Convening will bring together social media staff from the greater Portland area arts and culture community.

This four-hour workshop will open a dialogue on social media as it relates to:

• Best practices
• Metrics and Presentation of Value
• Growth opportunities
• Strategy and documentation
• Potential Return on Investment (ROI)
• Internal communications
• Organizational change
• and other key issues

And most importantly, this workshop will bring us together, museum professionals learning from each other.

Join us for this workshop, discussion, tweet-festival, and social media community-building exercise. If you are working in social media for your cultural organization, are thinking of jumping in to social media, or cover the cultural scene in the Pacific Northwest, join us!

The Bold New Look of WMA

By James G. Leventhal

In its inimitable first-class volunteer fashion…and to celebrate the blogsite westmuse‘s first year birthday, the Western Museums Association has a new look!

Oo, you gotta love a “new look and feel.”  Here’s a big thank you to the logo’s designer Nicole Trudeau.  Trudeau has also designed the forthcoming 75th Anniversary program for Portland.

California Video at the Getty © J. Paul Getty Museum

Over her 10-year career at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Senior Designer Nicole Trudeau has helped to realize over 40 exhibitions for both the Getty Center and the Getty Villa, including most recently

• The Chimaera of Arezzo
• The Golden Graves of Vani
• The Society of Dilettanti and
• California Video.

She is currently working on The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gerome, opening June 16th at the Getty Center.

And Trudeau is currently in the process of rebranding the entire suite of Education materials for both Getty sites – an exercise which will be presented as a pre-conference workshop at the WMA Annual Meeting this year in Portland, Oregon.

Prior to her career at the Getty Museum, she dabbled in various design disciplines: graphic, interior, industrial, environmental, retail, web and advertising, which prepared her for the diverse career she enjoys today.

Thanks, Nicole!

Determined to Trend: #california

By James G. Leventhal

Crowds Gathing at New De Young 2:49 a.m.

The San Francisco Bay Area has seen some extraordinary museum openings over the past several years.  When the New de Young opened it did a 32-hour party and community celebration, starting a trend that was then picked up by the Contemporary Jewish Museum with Dawn in 2008 and now the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA).

“The newly transformed Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) opens Saturday, May 1, with  31 hours of continuous, round-the-clock free programs and events until we close at 6 p.m. Sunday.”  Wow.

For a lot of folks, the Oakland Museum of California is something of a standard bearer of community engagement and the building itself is a harbinger of today’s museums.

When it opened in 1969, OMCA’s design by Pritzker prize–winning architect Kevin Roche was acclaimed for its bold and innovative premise: a museum that also serves as a vibrant urban park and public space.

OMCA

Amongst the long list of activities planned, one of the more interesting is that a dedicated local team of social networking museum professionals from the Oakland Museum of California (@oaklandmuseumca), the Contemporary Jewish Museum (@jewseum), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (@sfmoma), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (@ybca), the Exploratorium (@exploratorium), the California Academy of Sciences (@calacademy), and the Asian Art Museum (@asianartmuseum) are going to try and make the “topic” #CALIFORNIA trend on twitter.  California is part of the OMCA’s mission.

If you follow museums on twitter, a lot of what you find is that the “institutions” are communicating with each other in ways that are novel, educational, engaging, droll or banal — reflecting the overall tone of “dialogue” in the twitterverse.

And what’s also interesting about this is how it reveals that there are typically individuals who are responsible for these “tweets.”  This provides a new level of transparency for the museum worker, and a higher degree of exposure.  Ironically, the “tweeters” often mask their true identities.  In fact, this group of professionals in the SF Bay Area all know each other and refer to themselves as the “superfriends,” referring perhaps more to their masked identities than their kinship.

It is also interesting because museums have come to play a cherished role in our civic constructs as the development of new museums and major renovations in the SF Bay Area reveal.  But they still suffer for issues of relevance.  With Twitter and other so called social networking tools, the question of relevance is now in the hands of individuals, the audience even.  And it is smart for museums like the OMCA to leverage their ability to make something trend, to reveal their networks.  Trending topics show up on CNN.

The Oakland Museum of California has been “in the trenches,” so to speak and crowdsourcing community engagement for decades.  It’s a good thing that its marketing team can tap into a technology that’s just now catching up.  For more information click the flyer below.