More San Diego #wma09: “The Buffalo in the Room”: Talking about the Tough Stuff at Native Museums

From disease and death to land loss and forced subjugation, native museums often have the daunting task of exploring difficult issues and events. Too often, as museum planners and exhibit designers, we talk around these subjects without fully confronting them. Three museum professionals from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. and Bishop Museum and ‘Iolani Palace in Honolulu, Hawai’i will share their efforts to shed light on these dark chapters. What problems did they encounter? How did they work with community members? And how did museum visitors respond?

Karen Kosasa, Director, Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program, Department of American Studies, University of Hawai’i at Manoa handled introductions and then presentations were made by:

• Kippen De Alba Chu, Exec Executive Director, Iolani Palace
• Alexandra Harris, Editor, National Museum of the American Indian
• And Noelle Kahanu, Project Manager, Bishop Museum

Talking about the Tough Stuff at Native Museums #wma09

By Karen Kosasa

We owe Noelle our thanks for organizing the panel and soliciting our participation on it.  As the moderator, I had the privilege of speaking with Kippen, Alexandra, and Noelle before they had to pare down their presentations from many topics to a few.

What I appreciated most was their willingness to talk about highly sensitive issues with candor and care.  Candor because talking about these issues is absolutely critical to our efforts to transform museums, and care because what they discuss is part of an ongoing process they cannot afford to jeopardize.  In her panel description Noelle refers to these issues as “the buffalo in the room”—the things that museum planners and exhibit designers talk around and rarely confront.

This panel marks a stage in a journey toward what some are calling the “inclusive” museum.  The inclusive museum is notable for its efforts to include diversity, and not just the “feel good” strain, but the type of diversity that museums generally avoid for fear of alienating their audiences or infuriating their staff or board members.  Here, diversity often includes the views of a museum’s harshest Native critics as well as the hopes of those who envision the museum as a place for conversations about complexity and controversy.

The museums mentioned in these presentations—‘Iolani Palace in Honolulu; the Barona Cultural Center and Museum in

Bishop Museum was founded in 1889 by Charles Reed Bishop in honor of his late wife, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the last descendant of the royal Kamehameha family.

Lakeside, California; the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.; and the Bishop Museum in Honolulu—are presented as Native museums, but they speak to larger issues that concern non-Native institutions and cultural centers.  As a non-Native educator, I thank the panelists for allowing us to learn along with their institutions as they tackle the “tough stuff” and transform themselves and their relationship with Native communities and visitors.

I would like to summarize a few things about each of the presentations.  (Perhaps in the future we can put together an anthology where we can discuss these issues in more depth.)  It is interesting to note that some of the most compelling insights shared by the panelists concerned “internal” debates that took place among museum staff or between staff and board members.  At times these internal criticisms weighed more heavily on staff than external criticisms.  In certain cases it may have been due to the respect a staff person had for a colleague’s expertise, in others it may have been the result of being outranked, and in still others, of having no means to appeal a decision.

In Kippen’s presentation he described the significance of ‘Iolani Palace as an “emotional symbol” for many Hawaiians.  Although it was not the official seat of government for the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, it was the site of the last monarch’s imprisonment, and eventually housed the offices of the territorial and Hawai‘i state governments for many years.  In recent years, it has been “taken over” and public access temporarily blocked by different Hawaiian sovereignty or independence organizations seeking to restore the Hawaiian kingdom by bringing attention to a range of issues including the overthrow of the Hawaiian government in 1893 (by white settlers and the U.S. military), the illegal annexation by the United States in 1898, and the illegal process by which statehood was achieved in 1959.

As the director of ‘Iolani Palace, Kippen has had to work with many different constituencies to protect the palace and ensure that it remains open to all visitors.  He described the continuous challenges he confronts from questions about the historic interpretation of the period rooms, to whether educational programs can be relevant without making references to “politics,” to discussions about acceptable funders/donors, and in 2009, to mediating conflicting views over how the palace grounds should be used to commemorate (not celebrate) the 50th anniversary of Hawai‘i statehood.

It is obvious that Kippen and his staff must carefully negotiate issues of interpretation, collections care, and heritage management that in most institutions are routine matters, but at ‘Iolani Palace, quickly become the subject of media attention for local, national, and international audiences.

Alexandra began by describing the many issues the staff at the Barona Cultural Center & Museum considered in developing a major history exhibit to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Barona Indian Reservation.  (To view Alexandra’s slideshow click here.)  A significant number of elders wanted to avoid representing the past in a negative way that would depict Indians as victims and make non-Indian visitors feel uncomfortable or guilty.  They emphasized the need to portray positive factors.  At the National Museum of the American Indian, she explained, everything is “potentially controversial” because it is committed to dismantling myths about Native peoples and replacing them with stories or perspectives that are generally unfamiliar and hence disturbing.  In order to assist the museum in this difficult task, it has conducted surveys to find out what visitors know as well as how to encourage them to engage with new information and experiences.

The rock-and-roll innovator Jimi Hendrix often spoke proudly of his Cherokee grandmother. He was one of many African Americans who cite family traditions in claiming Native ancestry.

To illustrate some of the challenges facing NMAI, Alexandra described two upcoming exhibitions, “Indivisible” on African-Native Americans (opening in November 2009), and “Treaties” (opening in 2012/2013).  Let me mention a few things she presented about the latter.  Although many Native people believe that treaties are “universally bad” and should be discarded, the exhibition developers hope to change these beliefs.  Past treaties acknowledged Native sovereignty and can be used to argue for tribal rights in the present.  With the help of explanatory texts, displaying a Kiowa pipe can help visitors to understand its function and meaning within treaty negotiations—the telling of truth and the sealing of agreements.  A pipe thus stands as a witness to the existence of treaties and the fact that two or more parties consented to them in good faith.  What happens, then, when one party violated an agreement after it was sealed?  For me, crucial and disturbing topics of conversation open up.  For instance, what are the implications when the violator was the United States government and its representatives?  What is our ethical obligation to right historical wrongs?

Noelle started her presentation by locating the Bishop Museum within two histories—first, the historic decline of the Hawaiian population since Western contact and the political dispossession of the Hawaiian people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and second, the history of the museum itself.  While Bishop Museum began auspiciously with collections of treasured objects from three Hawaiian royal women, it eventually devolved into portraying Hawaiians from a non-Native perspective and relegating Hawaiian culture to the past.  Hence, she emphasized the importance of the museum’s newly re-opened Hawaiian Hall in August 2009, and its efforts to present an Hawaiian worldview.

For many in the Native community, the renovated exhibits are more than beautifully redesigned displays, they are restoring “health, trust, faith, foundation, and a nation.”  According to Noelle, most of the “buffalos” in the museum were/are congregating on the third floor of Hawaiian Hall.  Here, controversial political issues are directly addressed by Bishop Museum for the first time (e.g., the events leading up to the 1893 overthrow, the 1898 annexation process and its protesters, opposition to statehood in 1959, and the rise of the contemporary Hawaiian “renaissance” and independence movements).

Like Alexandra, Noelle described the concerns of staff and board members that the exhibition team avoid developing negative portrayals of historic events.  Because they could not completely avoid this problem, Noelle ended her presentation by noting the presence of an important exhibit on the third floor that includes a large painted mural and a video.  Both works refer to a prophecy chant that foretells the rise of the Hawaiian people (“that which was below would rise up…”) after experiencing profound changes.  In these two pieces, the museum hopes its uplifting message about the resiliency of the Hawaiian people will resonate with all visitors who have experienced difficulties and grown stronger because of them.

I believe these three presentations have opened an important space for future discussions about topics we have avoided in both Native and non-Native museums.  I hope all of us will take the opportunity to join Kippen, Alexandra and Noelle and carry the conversation further.

Thank you.

Rights and Repro Discussion at the Gilcrease in Tulsa

By Michelle Maxwell

The gardens at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, OK

Recognized as one of the nation’s premier museums, Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum features some of the finest and most-renowned collection of art, artifacts, and historical archives that document and depict the American experience. The Museum is a national treasure that generations of supporters have been proud to call their own.

I came on board the Gilcrease in July 2008 when the University of Tulsa and the City of Tulsa entered into an historic partnership to begin a new chapter in the life of the Gilcrease Museum.

In its new role as steward of the Museum and its collection, TU is leveraging its nationally recognized academic expertise in history of the American West, art history, anthropology and archaeology, law, management, and marketing to propel Gilcrease into a new era. Security and protection of the collection are important parts of our stewardship. Today, many museums are facing the challenges of maintaining current operations with a dwindling budget.

Protecting the collections includes not just the physical collection but also the intellectual property rights of that collection. The digital age has changed the rights and reproduction process making it much more complicated than it was in the ‘old’ days. Because of confusing, sometimes contradictory issues regarding intellectual property rights, many rights and repro staff are scrambling to keep up with the digital age. Registrars, curators, rights and reproduction coordinators, photographers, and collection’s managers have voiced a clear and growing need for reliable and understandable guidance on rights and reproduction issues.

The Gilcrease Museum is organizing a webcast that will feature two of the leading rights and reproduction attorneys from across the nation who will address some of these issues. This first webcast will be held in late February. If you are interested and would like more information, please contact me directly:

Michelle Maxwell, Rights & Reproduction

Gilcrease Museum

michelle-maxwell@utulsa.edu

(918) 596-2788 (918) 596-2770 fax

Engaging Diverse Audiences

Margaret Kadoyama's thirty years in the museum profession embrace extensive experience in audience development, community involvement and education strategic planning.

by Margaret Kadoyama

I was fortunate enough to attend the recent WMA conference in San Diego.   The conference provided at least one significant outcome for me — the discovery of a new report on engaging diverse audiences from the Japanese American National Museum, published in August 2009.

I attended a session on programming for Latino audiences.  The session, Museum Mission and Audience: Tips from Collaborations with Latino Communities, was moderated by Elizabeth Morin from Youth Arts and Education for the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

The presenters were Lisa Sasaki from the Japanese American National Museum, Lorraine Yglesias from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and David J. de la Torre from La Plaza de Cultura y Artes.   The session provided many great tools and tips for engaging Latino audiences, from David de la Torre’s articulate and compelling list of strategic issues (focus on mission, diversification of board and staff, marginalization, and cultural insensitivity, among others) to Lorraine Yglesias’s focus on marketing.

Lorraine shared some great resources, including the tip to subscribe to email reports from www.mediapost.com, which provides current information on marketing for different audience segments, including Latino audiences.

Lisa Sasaki shared tips from the JANM’s Boyle Heights project, and included information on museum attendance before, during and after the project.  Lisa also shared information about a white paper that JANM recently published called The Cultural Museum 2.0: Engaging Diverse Audiences in America.  It is available to download at http://www.janm.org/projects/innovation/.

The white paper is the result of a three year project, funded by The James Irvine Foundation, in which JANM was able to holistically reassess itself and its relationship with its audiences.  I read through it and found it articulate and very timely, focusing on the issues that culturally specific museums are grappling with right now.

The section on essential questions was particularly significant.  During the course of the project, the Museum began looking closely at the interests, wants and needs of its potential audiences.  According to the report (pages 12-13), the Museum addressed questions such as:

• To what extent is the visitor experience influenced by cultural or ethnic self-identification?
• What is the relevance of the Museum to younger, multi-ethnic audiences?
• How can the Museum develop programming to engage and sustain these audiences?
• How can the Museum engage new audiences while sustaining and satisfying its current constituency?
• What impact does engaging these audiences have on the ability for the Museum to sustain itself in the future?

These essential questions mirror concerns voiced by many museums, and the report goes on to include the results of the project’s research and recommendations to address these issues.  It is timely and relevant.  I teach the JFKU Museums and Communities course, and this will definitely be required reading for the spring M&C class!

Joining Forces for Sustainability: Balboa Park Cultural Partnership (#WMA09, Monday at 1:35 pm)

How do we make it through these challenging times with museums and historical societies closing their doors or implementing hiring freezes after a sustained period of expansion?  One approach is to join forces.

To quote from one of the underlying themes of the work occurring in the San Francisco Bay Area as part of the National Arts Marketing Program:

As more and more advertisements try to capture your prospective patron’s attention, it‘s becoming clear that it is no longer enough to just do more. We have to start marketing smarter because, honestly, there’s only so much that an arts organization can do by itself to gain a foothold. We have to collaborate.

On Monday, October 26, 2009 the afternoon session of the first full day on the Western Museums Association meeting in San Diego will include a session to discuss the formation and strategic planning of the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership (BPCP) and describe its activities including the Balboa Park Learning Institute, business services, advocacy, sustainability, marketing, public relations, governance, parking and on-line collaborative.

Gail Anderson

Presenters: David A. Lang, Executive Director, Balboa Park Cultural Partnership; Paige Simpson, Director, Balboa Park Learning Institute; and Rory Ruppert, Collective Business Operations Manager and Director of the Balboa Park Sustainability Program will be joined by Gail Anderson, President, Gail Anderson and Associates as moderator.

Foundational work in the creation of the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership has occurred with two studies:

• The Soul of San Diego (2006)
• Keeping Balboa Park Magnificent in its Second Century (2008)

David A. Lang, Executive Director, Balboa Park Cultural Partnership

As an overview Executive Director David A. Lang summarizes BPCP’s history:

Established as a nonprofit organization in 2003, the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership is the collaborative body and collective voice for 24 diverse arts, science and cultural institutions in Balboa Park whose 500 trustees, 7,000 volunteers, and 3,500 staff serve more than 6.5 million members and visitors annually. Our mission is to enrich the cultural life in and beyond San Diego by facilitating collaboration among Balboa Park’s cultural institutions and with the community; to enable the cultural institutions to achieve their full individual and collective potential; and, to preserve, enhance, and make accessible the arts, science, and cultural assets of Balboa Park for present and future generations. The Partnership facilitates collaboration in areas such as education, operations, governance and advocacy, marketing and PR, and sharing and communication.

While neither part of the session, nor really a part of the Western Museums Association, per se, another amazing aspect of the collaborative work at play in San Diego, Rich Cherry heads up the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC).

Cherry is more focused on the Museum Computer Network (MCN), amongst other professional organizations.  In fact the upcoming 37th Annnual MCN conference later this year has the working theme of “Museum Information, Museum Efficiency: Doing More with Less!”  And Rich Cherry and the Balboa Park Online Collaborative helped bring together the #sfmetrix session WMA co presented last August at the SFMOMA.

Legler Benbough, Philanthropist (1909-1998)

The Balboa Park Online Collaborative is made possible in large part by the The Legler Benbough Foundation.  For many decades, the Benbough family helped shape the City of San Diego. Legler Benbough’s father, Percy Benbough, founded the Benbough Mortuary and was mayor of San Diego from 1935 until his death in 1942.  Legler Benbough, as a businessman, civic leader, philanthropist and rancher was an important contributor to the civic and cultural life of the City throughout his lifetime. He expanded the mortuary business after his father’s death to become owner of the largest group of mortuaries in the United States.  With no direct heirs, Mr. Benbough made a decision in 1985 to establish a charitable Foundation that would promote his interest in helping improve the quality of life for San Diegans.

The Foundation was initially funded with proceeds of business operations. In 1987, the Benbough ranch in Rancho Santa Fe was transferred to the Foundation and sold. In 1999, the principal funding of the Foundation occurred on the settlement of Mr. Benbough’s estate.  As of December 31, 2008, the grants from the Foundation to date totalled Twenty Million Eight Hundred one Thousand three Hundred thirteen Dollars ($20,801,313) and the assets on hand net of liabilities were Twenty Nine Million Eight Hundred Fifty Four Thousand Three Hundred and Forty Eight Dollars ($29,854,348). (source: The Legler Benbough Foundation)

San Diego is lucky.  And as many of us know, the best way to cultivate, engage and encourage extraordinary support is to keep friends and donors informed.  But what do you do if there are limited resources?  An extremely important part of the ongoing collaborative experiment is underway in San Francisco — the Bay Area Big List.

According to those who are running the Big List:

In many cities across the country, arts groups have started new experiments in collaborative marketing designed to harness the collective energy of the community. These have helped increase both first-time and return attendance levels for the community at large — essentially raising the tide by working together instead of working against each other.

Later this week in the San Francisco Bay Area there will be free workshops that will focus on how 112 arts organizations of all types have collaborated to form one of the largest “Big List” list cooperatives in the country. The Bay Area Big List, which currently holds information for over 430,000 unique arts-going households, is fast becoming one of the largest list co-op programs in the country.

This collaborative model, in which companies gather their mailing lists together in a centralized pool to be cross-referenced, checked for accuracy and tagged with demographic information, allows arts organizations to market smarter, reach new arts-hungry patrons and get a higher return on investment.

Each convening will feature a panel of local arts organizations and Big List administrative staff discussing the impetus of the Big List, the other collaborative efforts that have emerged in conjunction with that program, and the future of collaborative marketing in the Bay Area.  Panelists will include representatives from SFMOMA, ACT, Berkeley Rep, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Oakland East Bay Symphony, and more.  A full description and the RSVP form (required) can be found at www.theatrebayarea.org/tide.

The free sessions will be

• Thursday, October 22 (San Francisco), 10AM-12PM (SFMOMA, Wattis Theatre)
• Thursday, October 22 (South Bay), 3PM-5PM (San Jose Repertory Theatre)
• Friday, October 23 (East Bay), 10AM-12PM (Aurora Theatre, Berkeley)
• Friday, October 23 (North Bay), 2PM-4PM (Cinnabar Theatre, Petaluma)

It is programs such as these above that help the big arts organizatiosn equal as much as they do the small ones.  Everybody benefits.  And what’s this year’s theme for #WMA09?  “A Rising Tide,” right.  All boats, people.  All boats.

And these sessions in the San Francisco Bay Area about the Bay Area Big List?  Their theme/title?  Raising the Tide.  All boats, people.  All boats.

See you in San Diego!

(Raising the Tide is part of the NAMP/Wallace Marketing Workshops series. The National Arts Marketing Project (NAMP) is a program of Americans for the Arts and is sponsored nationally by American Express. In the Bay Area, these free workshops are further supported and developed with a grant from The Wallace Foundation in partnership with The San Francisco Foundation, Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund and Theatre Bay Area.)

The Mythological Museum Visitor – The Young Cosmopolitan

By Adam Rozan

The author at the Oakland Museum of California, showcasing and Creative Time presents Mark Tribe's Port Huron Project 5: The Liberation of our People.

The Targeting Young Cosmopolitans in Museums study was born out of a 2009 session of the Association of Midwest Museums conference entitled, The Next Generation: Targeting Young Audiences in an Uncertain Economic Climate.

The report was designed to measure the energies involved in young cosmopolitan programming by examining 170  museums, varying in size, affluence and scope.

The term “young cosmopolitan” describes a hybrid generation born out of Generation X (those born between 1967 and 1977) and Generation Y (those born between 1978 and 1993). They “are exceptionally social, ethnically diverse, college educated, technologically savvy, and have a creative and open mindset.” Alexandra Gregg, co-author of the Targeting Young Cosmopolitans in Museums survey, wrote earlier in a post on WestMuse:

YoCo – young cosmopolitan – because it focuses more on a psychographic than on specifically drawn lines of age, gender, etc. YoCos are the people who are highly social, are all over Facebook and iPhones, and are curious, creative, and cosmopolitan. It’s the people who go to the Hirshhorn’s famous after-hours event in DC, or the Hammer’s Bike Night in LA… But YoCos can still be understood in terms of geography and economics – they tend to gravitate around cities and have a general US buying power of $924 billion.

A recent cover from Time Out New York reads, “You’re smart. Cultured. And you’ve never been to the Rubin?… Museums: The Actually Cool Guide.” Inside the article reads as a tasting menu of New York city’s many museums, highlighting various activities, events and parties held each month targeting this cosmopolitan audience.

Despite such articles, this scene is not the norm across the country, rather the opposite–only 37% of museums that participated in the Targeting Young Cosmopolitans in Museums study offer such programs.

With the key attributes of the YoCos in mind (e.g. highly social, college educated, creative, etc.), why are the other 63% of museums studied in this survey not engaging these audiences? Funding, limited staff time, lack of board support, and “not enough time to organize an effective program to YoCos,” prevailed as the primary reasons provided. Furthermore, 8% of those surveyed felt “this demographic cannot be reached” and accordingly another seven museums provided that this target group was not relevant to their institution. While seven museums are far from a majority, can any institution truly afford to ignore this diverse and knowledgeable audience?

YoCo programming remained the primary responsibility of the education and programming departments for 51% of the study, and sadly, only 7 museums reported “cross-departmental collaboration (primarily between education and marketing),” and only one institution had a “YoCo team with representatives from marketing, events, development, etc.”

The 77% of museums that host YoCo programs reported having clear goals and objectives, and used terms like “attract,” “welcome,” “target,” “reach,” or “increase attendance” to describe some of their goals; another group used “engage” or “educate” to best describe their objectives. Because only 23% of respondents “have or consult a young adult advisory board or related committee,” it is not surprising that some of the museums felt they were not adequately targeting the YoCo audience.

What is to be done with YoCos?

Time Out New York’s article on museums highlights activities such as “behind the scenes tours, lectures, films, and even the quirky B-movie nights,” which are similar to those mentioned by the museums surveyed. These events usually occur at night and are aimed at attracting YoCos to museums. The evenings differ between alcohol and no alcohol, tours to lectures, and so as I have written earlier here at WestMuse:

At first, with young adults the need was to create the parties, and provide the invitation. Now, that they are arriving, and are interested–isn’t this the time to change our programs, exhibitions, and other existing models of activity? Let’s begin to re-think how visitors act and interact inside galleries, and with our collections. Asking what is the role and purpose of exhibitions, and programs, and how our visitors are to use them and participate. Maybe the best place for the deejay is inside the gallery, on a Saturday afternoon, next to the collections?

Rethinking our visitors and the visitor experience is paramount to the successful museum, not just in outreach exercises, but in the delivery of the modern museum visit. What that means is unique to each museum: however, we can no longer avoid the new rules assumed by today’s modern audiences. The lives of YoCos are defined by their digital identities and social and cultural connections with their psychographic interests. The balance between one’s iPhone and one’s personal life has merged, and yet at the same time the need to socialize, learn, and interact has never been more present.

Museum of Modern Art Twitter Sign in to Recommend STRETCH A yoga class at MoMA surrounded by a video installation by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist.

In many ways we are entering an era focused on experiences. In the 2009 Museum Section of the New York Times, Carol Vogel writes:

Yoga classes and bicycle get-togethers may not be your typical museum fare, but in these rough economic times, anything goes…But lean times are bringing out a pioneering spirit as museum officials strive to develop creative strategies for what is undeniably a new world… Most, if not all are expanding their public program. More than before, institutions big and small have adopted the same mission: to transform once-hushed museums into vibrant cultural centers where the activities go far beyond what’s hanging on the walls.

Today’s economy has given permission to experiment, and has required us to evolve.  Audience development for museums is not by any means a new pursuit, nor is recognizing underserved audiences within our institutions. Moving away from demographic pursuits to psychographics and augmenting our institutions to today’s audiences is necessary to captivate today’s audience and tomorrow’s patrons.

(Note: Special thanks to Kathleen McNally for her assistance with this article!)

Climate Change Pilot Workshop at Oakland’s Chabot Space & Science Center …glub, glub, glub…

By Melissa Rosengard

How can the public become educated and prepared for a global natural disaster that may not fully realize for several decades?  One of the most critical roles a science museum can play is to be an active participant in educating their constituents on the science and practical realities around climate change and the subsequent consequences on the earth’s water levels.

David Herring, Communications Program Director, NOAA

Chabot Space & Science Center (CSSC), in partnership with the Association of Science- Technology Centers (ASTC) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently hosted a group of invited community members and experts in a pilot initiative of community conversations.

The fundamental goal of the workshop was to determine the most effective method to communicate climate change information through science learning centers across the U.S.

The Oakland workshop on October 10 was the second pilot “Water in California: Too Much and Not Enough,” after the first workshop was piloted in May at the Arizona Science Center in Phoenix (also with a water resource topic focus). The topic chosen for this coastal venue centered on the disastrous impacts in the Bay Area that scientists anticipate will occur as a result of climate change. Speakers included Norm Miller, Staff Scientist, Earth Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab, Matthew Heberger, Research Associate, Pacific Institute, and Emily Limm, Ph.D researcher on plant use of water resources, UC Berkeley.

The partnership between ASTC, NOAA and the two science centers is a strong example of museums, a museum service organization, and a federal agency (NOAA is part of the Department of Commerce) collaboratively engaged in finding ways to educate the public about one of the world’s most pressing issues.

Youth from the Chabot Galaxy Explorers Program reporting on their group discussion

ASTC (www.astc.org) has incorporated climate change education as an organizational priority, for instance launching their IGLO project. This project is designed to raise worldwide public awareness about global warming and ways the polar regions profoundly influence the earth’s climate, ecosystems and human society.  The climate change workshop in Oakland was joined by ASTC staff Walter Staveloz, Director, International Relations, and Kate Crawford, Project Manager Communicating Climate Change.

NOAA’s Climate Program Office has many initiatives and outreach efforts to communicate current climate science and impacts. They know that museums and science centers provide an ideal venue for informal education on this topic. Several NOAA staff have been instrumental in the development of these workshops including Frank Niepold, Climate Education Coordinator, David Herring, Communications Program Director, LuAnn Dahlman, Communications Specialist, and Ned Gardiner, Climate Visualization Project Manager.

This workshop was a great opportunity for CSSC, an organization fully committed to climate change education. The center is currently in the development and funding phase of a future exhibit and website on the topic entitled Bill Nye’s Climate Laboratory.

After the workshop in Phoenix, organizers further strengthened this second event by implementation of suggestions made by participants in a Phoenix workshop post-evaluation (see the report at http://www.climate.noaa.gov/news/2009/docs/AZConversationsSummary_22June-1.pdf )

Eric Havel, Environmental Education Manager, Chabot Space & Science Center

For example, the afternoon in Oakland included a full 2-hour round table breakouts with different groupings focused on solutions. I was asked to the event to facilitate one of these breakouts, and the format proved to be very effective in drawing out personal initiatives.  After lunch and some simple, but compelling, hands-on demonstrations illustrating concepts such as glacier ice melt impact on sea levels, snow pack vs. rain on water storage, and forest dependency on fog levels, the attendees were gathered in a large space to group into interest levels.

In other words, they were asked to join discussion groups based on where they (as individuals) could best effect change…at the neighborhood, community, state, national or international level.  There was also a table of teenagers “Galaxy Explorer” members comprising the youth group discussion. My group, at the community level, included about 8 inspiring and activist citizens with a wide network of nonprofit groups and homeowner’s associations (fellow WMA member Kathleen Brown was among this group).

Hands-on Demonstration illustrating glacier melt on land and in water.

After the two hours we had a list of projects that each of us committed to complete, from organizing lectures for our neighborhood associations, to planning a “blue line” event in our city (blue taping houses and commercial buildings in a town to illustrate how high up the sea might rise), to recommending to a condo association the purchase of a shared electric vehicle for grocery runs. At the end of our breakouts we reported back to the full group, which provided a second wave of group inspiration.

Congratulations to Chabot Space & Science Center staff, Etta Heber, Director of Programs, Eric Havel, Environmental Education Manager, and Autumn King, Public Programs Manager, for a very successful event and for stepping up as a partner in this initiative.

Trans-Civic Arts Marketing: 510Arts.com Launch

Four Cities One Web Site

Public/Private/Community Partnership Shines Spotlight on Diversity, Quality, Volume and Accessibility of Arts in the East Bay as one of America’s Highest Per Capita Arts Regions.

By James G. Leventhal

Today there was a press conference to launch the 510Arts.com portal website.  I live in Oakland.  I work in Berkeley and the Western Museums Association has its central office in Berkeley.  Around these parts, there’s the Oakland Museum, the Richmond Art Center and the Berkeley Art Center.  And Emeryville’s opening its annual  Celebration of the Arts tonight.  I’m all about the “510,” I guess.  It’s the local area code.  San Francisco’s is 415 and further east in the growing expanse that is the Bay Area it’s 925, and down on the peninsula, it’s…well, you get the picture.

Irvine and Hewlett Foundations and the EBCF

At the press conference, the cities of Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland and Richmond announced an unprecedented four-city collaboration that promotes the arts as a “proven catalyst for economic revitalization and community sustainability.”

Each city — Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland and Richmond — was represented at Oakland’s City Hall this morning, along with a small host of institutional funders.  It was a great kick-off event.  Today’s launch was the culmination of a two-year initiative, with early champions in John Killacky of The San Francisco Foundation, Mary Ann Merker of Berkeley and Steve Huss of Oakland.

It’s funny being a once New-York based transplant, because there are parallels here in what’s known as the San Francisco Bay area that are similar to the relationship between Manhattan and, say, Brooklyn, Queens etc.  And when I was leaving Manhattan some years ago, the Brooklyn and Queens art scenes were really taking off.

Artists and younger, new arrivals were settling in “the outer boroughs.”  Manhattan was too expensive and the art scene felt entrenched.  Arnold Lehman had overseen a significant expansion of the Brooklyn Museum, some years earlier the Sensation exhibition had drawn huge attention and then later the Brooklyn Museum’s social media presence and collections activation through those pipes expanded to be identified as maybe THE leader in the field.

Now the Oakland Museum is gaining in national attention with their successful expansion, thanks in large part to the leadership of Lori Forgarty.  Fogarty recently recruited René de Guzman from SF’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  One of America’s most promising curators.  The East Bay, as this area is also known, waits with bated breath to see what he will unleash in the new Oakland Museum of California.

Oakland’s Art Murmur gives on the feeling the “scene” is gaining traction.  Berkeley’s theater scene, represented by the Berkeley Rep, Aurora Theater, Central Theater Works and others, is doing things like launching Green Day’s American Idiot.  Berkeley’s own Judah L. Magnes Museum has been curating traveling exhibitions getting national reviews.  The Berkeley Art Center has new leadership in Suzanne Tan.  And Richmond’s East Bay Center for the Performing Arts is developing a new space.  With Pixar Studios expanding in Emeryville, the city’s poised for big things, and it’s been a home for artists for decades.

510Arts.com designer Nicole Neditch

But really, all that’s “old news.”  Soon enough, and if the “portal” gains traction, if you want to know what’s going on right now in the four cities that make up a large portion of what’s known locally as the East Bay, you can now go to 510Arts.com.

The East Bay Culture Corridor is one of the highest per capita arts regions in the nation. This four-city collaboration is believed to be the first of its kind in the US and is designed to serve as a model of forward-thinking, economically and socially viable partnerships that put the arts forward as a proven catalyst for economic development, quality of life and community sustainability.

Wilchar and Sullivan of Emeryville

It’s hoped that with the increased focus on the East Bay Cultural Corridor and the development of this new web portal, it will foster relationships between the diverse arts communities of each city, leverage new audiences and resources for the arts, increase the visibility, accessibility and sustainability of arts communities, leverage new resources for each partner city and benefit local businesses through partnerships with the arts.

Together, the East Bay communities boast:

● One of the highest per capita artist populations in the country with more than 6,000 professional artists calling it home.

● More than 150 languages spoken and many times that number of culturally specific art forms practiced.

● One of the nation’s largest per capita collections of public art.

● For decades East Bay communities have consistently ranked at the top of national city diversity figures and their arts reflect this depth and variety.

● Hundreds of non-profit visual arts, music, dance, theater, culturally specific, multi-disciplinary and innovative organizations from the internationally known to neighborhood programs, education programs and offerings for youth, seniors and others.

● Alameda and Contra Costa Counties are home to 5,532 arts-related businesses that employ 21,477 people

Sanchez and Killacky

Hats off to the funders.  The developed understanding for an East Bay Cultural Corridor and the creation of 510Arts.org, through focus group work with artists, was supported by grants from the East Bay Community Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation and Leveraging Investments in Creativity.

It’s this kind of forward thinking that helps to combat the often entrenched or unmovable ideas of locals.  The Oakland Tribune already ran a piece about the new portal this morning before the launch and wrote, “…wishful thinking that a regional cultural identity will become a lucrative reality.  Besides the 510Arts Web portal, there is no hint of a concrete project or money flowing to any arts organizations.”

Horton and Merker

It’s O.K.  For me, it is the very nature of the not-for-profit and arts professions that they remain eternally optimistic.  In fact, it is the very act of facing a blank canvas and seeing more that can define much of art making.  The same goes too often for keeping cultural organizations afloat today.  And a perfect example is the success of the Oakland Museum’s continued expansion despite the current economic downturn.

Sure, a web site is not going to address the deep-seated issues that consistently present comparative economic challenge to the  decentralized areas that surround and comprise a megalopolis like the San Francisco Bay Area.  It’s the tourism and high real estate value in the center that often keep capital near to the core.  But as Diane Sanchez, Director of Grantmaking and Donor Services for the East Bay Community Foundation is quoted as saying on the Oakland Tribune piece:

…the project was an extension of an ongoing program to help artists become more successful. “This is just one piece,” she said.

That Night's Opening in Emeryville

Really, it is both the effective integration of the use of the 510Arts.com portal, along with an understanding that the portal itself is emblematic of a desire to work effectively across boundaries of commerce and art, and a heartfelt desire for recognition balanced with an understanding for integrity and the need for informed philanthropy.

There have to be other geographic areas that can learn from this kind of collaboration, transcending city lines and arts organization limits.  While these other regions in America may not be able to claim the kind of per-capita artistic concentration cited above, it is still an important collaborative, civic model to explore.

And not just for larger, richer areas like the Twin Cities or Tampa and “St. Pete,” where there must be issues related to limited resources and need for increased exposure for distributed arts offerings.

It is also important for other regions around the nation to consider, like those known to themselves as “Tri-cities” like northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia to “Quad-cities,” like around Davenport, IA.

The Statement of Operating Principals listed on the site makes for a substantial case study and starting point for most any exploration into the arts, civic engagement and economic stimulus.

Are there other places served by the Western Museums Association where you think this kind of approach can help?  I am looking forward to watching this new portal gain traction and, more, watching how this trans-civic collaborative arts and cultural marketing impacts on the individual artists and cultural organizations its been built to serve.

Visitor Comfort: New Approaches in San Diego

Hi, I’m Steve Tokar, and I’d like to invite you to a couple of San Diego Conference sessions that we’ve organized on the topic of visitor comfort.

Here’s what we mean by comfort. The last time you and your family visited a museum, could you find your way around easily? Were there enough places to sit? Were the labels readable? Were there multiple/alternate ways to enjoy and learn? Were the restrooms comfortable? Was there reasonable food, and a nice place to eat it? Were there spaces to just chill out and take a break from museum-ing?

Think about it for a minute, then sign up for our Pre-Conference Workshop and/or Session. Also, please share your thoughts on the topic here on this blog.

Pre-Conference Workshop

Increasing Visitor Comfort to Encourage Return Visits

Sunday, October 25, 1-5:30 PM

In this tough economy, we need to do everything we can to welcome visitors and encourage them to return, become members, and support the museum financially. Visitor comfort is known to aid learning, promote mental and emotional receptivity, and increase the likelihood of a return visit; yet in many museums, comfort is not a priority.

In this pre-conference workshop at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego’s Balboa Park, participants will explore practical, economical, and simple ways that museums can help make visitors comfortable by accommodating their physical, psychological, neurological, and social needs. Participants will work together to assess public areas of the host museum in terms of comfort and accommodation and suggest potential improvements.

Most critically, they will collaborate with the host museum staff to examine potential barriers to making those improvements and create strategies to address and overcome those barriers. Findings will be presented in a session at the conference.

If you can’t make the workshop, please come to our session. Prior attendance at the workshop is NOT necessary in order to have a good, meaningful time!

Conference Session

Getting Comfortable with Visitor Comfort

Wednesday, October 28, 9:55-11:15 AM

This session offers practical and simple visitor comfort tools to apply at your museum, using the results from our pre-conference workshop at the Museum of Photographic Arts as a starting point.

Joan & Irwin Jacobs Theater at the Museum of Photographic Arts

Experts in design, visitor experience, and physical and learning disabilities will deconstruct what we learned from our host museum and how it might be more broadly applied to museums in general, while museum staff weigh in on the workshop results and share what they learned. Panelists and attendees will suggest and critique practical, economical, and simple ways in which all museums might increase visitor comfort-physically, psychologically, neurologically, and socially.

Meet the presenters:

Steve Tokar Writer, exhibit developer, media consultant, advocate for seating, readable labels, & more comfort in general “Please Be Seated” blog: http://stevetokar.wordpress.com/

Stephanie Weaver Founder and Principal, Experienceology http://www.experienceology.com/

Paul Gabriel Educational Consultant and Learning Specialist – advocate for those who process information in non-standard ways

Vivian Kung Haga Deputy Director, Museum of Photographic Arts, Balboa Park, San Diego http://www.mopa.org/

Beth Katz Registered Nurse, museum evaluation consultant, advocate for museum environments that enable, not disable.

See you in San Diego!

Mapping the Digital from Minnesota to #sfmetrix

By Lesley Kadish

San Francisco Elevation and Right of Ways

Before I came to San Francisco for Seb’s talk, I read a post on SFStreetsblog called “Eyes on the Street: The Ghost Streets of San Francisco” about ‘secret’ right-of-ways around town. You know, those steep steps that lead through an art garden or behind a house, where you’re never sure if you’re on public or private property. Being a map person, I majorly geeked out: I downloaded the San Francisco street centerline GIS shapefile, sorted the attributes by class code, added an elevation map, located the SFMOMA, and plotted my little adventure!

It only took an hour… and all with publicly available data! I’ll admit, before Seb’s talk, I would not have considered this  little exercise more than pre-trip geekery. What Seb highlighted was the fact that this is happening all over the place, all the time, with an ever increasing availability of data. Folks like me, with interests in snooping around urban nooks, are taking what’s out there and making it their own.

I’m always excited to see what emerges with maps and public data. My name is Lesley. I’m the Curator of GIS at the Minnesota Historical Society. A funny title, right? I’m not lucky enough to rest on the laurels of a historic title like Curator of Art. You guys have it easy!

As the Curator of GIS, I spend a good amount of time mulling over the quandary of archiving born digital material. But I spend even more time thinking about place… as you can imagine.

So, I was especially excited to see the Powerhouse Census Explorer, and their new Collections Mapping interface. It’s a direction we’ve been heading in for a while. A couple of years ago we launched something in a similar vein. But rather than use the maps as a background to collections data, we wanted the layers of MAPS to tell the stories themselves. We gathered the available GIS layers from state agencies and created an online GIS tool for school kids to layer up to 150 transparent maps atop each other.

For example, 6^th grade classes studying immigration could see areas where people settled, with maps of soil productivity, original vegetation, and natural disasters overlaid atop. At the end of the day, an average kid could say, “Why yes, the Germans Did take up the heavily mollisol area, because they Are good at Farming, but Too Bad, they lost their crops to a grasshopper plague when trying to tame the Prairie!”

Throughout the Minnesota Historical Society, we’re engaging ‘place’. We’ve tweeted photos like the White Castle on Wheels, asking followers Where was This? We have a wiki about place, called Placeography, for the public to add content about places in their own lives. We’re experimenting with fun little KMZ files to see our historic map collection in Google Earth, and we’ve even got a searchable database of Minnesota placenames. I’ve found that it’s one thing to geotag land-based objects, like maps, or things that don’t move, like buildings (oh, nevermind White Castle). That stuff is FAIRLY straightforward. But it’s a whole other thing to talk about geocoding collections. I imagine Seb and his team are working through some of the same things we are.

I think we’ll all agree, when collections get digitized and put ‘out there’ they can become imbued with new life. New contexts are discovered, old stories are told. Take the fireman’s hat that gets recognized when it’s put online. Before, its provenience is listed only as Minneapolis Fire Station No 18, circa 1920. But suddenly, with recognition, the hat has a head it belonged to. Fires it fought, cats it rescued. Thinking somewhat philosophically, how would we place this canary yellow No18 hard hat on a map? Certainly it could be located at the old station (now an artist’s loft). Or at the fireman’s house (his daughter still lives there, even better). Or at that big blaze down on Lexington where ten lives were saved in a moment.

Digitizing a collection lets us see its multidimensionality. Here’s where this principle of whakapapa fits in, I think. My take on whakapapa is that objects, like people, carry history with them; each has a genealogy of life and place. Thinking this way about collections fits with the semantic web and can be somewhat confounding for old school curators.  But it may help us take a step closer to understanding the layers our collections have and create when we put them out there.

Oregon Heritage Commission: Facing Adversity

By David Porter

To follow up on my earlier post, I wanted to note that the Oregon Heritage Commission,  a state chartered entity which oversees grant programs and other similar activities, heard testimony about the challenging state of affairs among heritage groups across the state at a meeting early this summer.

Under the leadership of Chairman George Kramer,  the Commission pledged to charter an investigation of the situation and to use its standing to make recommendations to the Legislature early in 2010.

The starvation budget which Oregon’s government is operating under, combined with the continuing economic gloom, will make their work more challenging.  Importantly,  the idea of engaging in global scrutiny of the situation and looking for broad solutions is a first.

It may well set the stage for a stronger fabric to support heritage museums and related institutions in the future.