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.

They Called Me Mayer July’s Second Life

By Stephanie Gabrielle Almeida

Click image to see more screen shots from They Called Me Mayer July opening in Second Life

Look no further than the nearest comfy couch or recliner for the future of Museums and Museum exhibitions.

I had the honor of attending a gallery opening at the Tachles Gallery in Second Life for the Mayer July (First Life name:  Mayer Kirshenblatt) exhibition.  I met up with others from across the world – some of the cities represented were Warsaw, New York City, San Francisco and Stockholm.

I looked at vibrant acrylic artwork alongside the other avatars in attendance, and learned the reasons behind each figure represented within the art and each design and symbol in the background of each piece.

I did this from the comfort of my living room wearing a tee shirt, track pants and bare feet with a dog sniffing elbow and an eight year old girl shoving Barbie dolls with broken legs waiting to be snapped back into place into my line of vision every few minutes.

click to see more

I learned a little bit about the town of Opatów (Apt, in Yiddish) in Poland.   During the 1930’s, about 10,000 people lived in Apt.   Of that 10,000, more than 6,500 were Jews.   The paintings, which in my opinion could be best described as Jewish Folk Art, were a study of Mayer’s experiences as a child growing up in this town in pre-WWII Poland.  I was transfixed by the use of color and the sheer number of subjects in the works we looked at.

One of the paintings that I think will stay with me forever was called “Synagogue”.  This piece depicted a synagogue with interior walls covered with stained glass windows and beautiful interior paintings including a coat of arms of the twelve tribes of Israel and zodiac signs.  This work actually contains more than one hundred and thirty people (I counted personally!) – many of them carefully painted

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with delightful facial expressions.  There is a holy ark with torah scrolls, a Rabbi, a Cantor and a host of men, women and children attending the service.  The women were separated from the men (so as not to distract them from prayer) and some of the brightest colors in “Synagogue” are found in the clothing that the children are wearing.

Another favorite of mine in this exhibition was called “Shaving the Corpse”.  It depicted more than fifty people all focused on a body outside a cemetery in the center of a village.   The note card that is given when the work is clicked on contained a story about the work.  A rich man in the town had abandoned his religion.  He cut his hair and shaved his beard, wore non-traditional clothing and attended synagogue only once a year.  The man became very ill and during that time his hair and beard grew back.  He soon passed away.  The Rabbi ordained that before the man could be buried, he needed to be groomed back to his cut-and-shaved look.  The reason for this?  God wouldn’t recognize him any other way.

Each work in this wonderful exhibition is a combination of experience, personal recollection and even a lesson in history.  There were a number of times that an avatar in attendance said “wow, I had no idea…” and I feel so strongly that art like this has an important place in every group or culture.

The Second Life exhibition of Mayer’s work was actually a simultaneous presentation of the work.  People in New York City and Warsaw had the opportunity to attend the opening in First Life (affectionately known by many as Real Life).  The images have been shown already at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkley, CA and in Mayer’s hometown in Apt.  They are currently able to be seen in First Life at The Jewish Museum, New York and in the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, Poland.  Some of Mayer’s works will be soon traveling to Amsterdam for an exhibition there as well.

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Of course, if you’re not a world traveler, you can see this exhibition from the comfort of your own home – just like I did – if you are ready to take the leap into a Second Life and join in the culturally rich environment waiting there for you.

Social media strategies for museums

By Stephanie Weaver
San Diego hosted this two-day conference, sponsored by the Balboa Park Online Collaborative and funded by the Benbough Foundation. This was an amazing opportunity to hear some cutting-edge experts on museums and social media, and organizer Rich Cherry did a fantastic job bringing them all together.

Speakers included Peter Samis, Associate Curator of Interpretation for SFMOMA, open content expert Susan Chun (founder of Steve, the museum social tagging project), Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology for Brooklyn Museum, and Seb Chan, Head of Digital, Social & Emerging Technologies, Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. For a wonderful analysis of Seb’s content, read Susan Spero’s blog post here.

I had the chance to interview some of the speakers during the day, and ask them a few questions for people who weren’t able to attend. First, how do you go about creating a social media strategy for a museum?

I was especially interested in how they’ve gone about creating the cultural shift necessary for integrating social media (including open content) into their institutional cultures.

One issue that comes up a lot is who gets to speak for the institution? Who becomes the voice? How do you define it? And, how do you integrate this entirely new set of tasks into people’s already-busy work loads?

Last, I asked them to comment on the benefits of using social media.

Thanks to Peter, Susan, and Seb for their time, and the San Diego Hall of Champions for hosting.

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.

A response to “More thoughtful learning”

Dear Leslie,

"Those About to Die Salute You," hosted by Queens Museum; artist Duke Riley. Photo by Frantz Vincent courtesy of Flickr

Thank you for the fantastic post. I too am approaching professional development through social media, as a consultant who serves this field. I wrote this post on my blog about how four museums in New York staged an art event using Twitter. I think it’s a dynamic example of what you’re talking about.

I began my museum career 20 years ago at Chicago Children’s Museum. I was lucky enough to receive my first professional development at the Midwest Museums Conference. Over the years I began speaking at conferences: always a prerequisite for being able to attend a conference. Some employers paid my way, others allowed me to attend on the clock if I covered the costs.

I managed to get to at least one conference a year, which I found stimulating and enriching. One of the rules at the places I worked was that you had to do a presentation for the staff when you returned, so early on I began synthesizing the conference experience for my peers. [I don't know if this is common practice but I highly recommend it as a way to foster an atmosphere of professional development, as well as getting the most bang from your conference buck.]

It frustrated me that one association, like attendees at NAI , often had no idea about resources available through another, like VSA. I made it part of my core message to cross-pollinate ideas so that people weren’t reinventing the wheel. Social media is ideal for this.

In the last five years I’ve heard these messages loud and clear: Conferences are expensive. Front-line staff can rarely afford to attend. Small and rural museums have a tough time ever affording consulting… maybe once in 25 years if they are doing a capital campaign or get a huge grant from IMLS or NSF. And when the economy tanked, so did conference attendance.

Dena'ina historian Aaron Leggett at the spirit houses in Eklutna at WMA '08. Online learning can't replace experiences like this, but used well offers great value.

When I was at WMA in Anchorage last year, I thought about all the museum staffers from Alaska who were able to make it to Anchorage, but aren’t able to come to the Lower 48. While of course there is huge value in face-to-face interaction, I do believe there is a role for online experiences and training.

I hope I can encourage the field to utilize online learning and social media, as I think it’s an incredible way to deliver assets, affordably, where they are most needed.

I look forward to hearing everyone’s responses.

• Are you willing to try online learning?
• Have you attended a webinar? What did—and didn’t—you like about it?
• What kinds of topics would you like to see offered in tech tutorials or online classes that relate to the visitor experience?
• What guest speakers would you like to hear from?

I am very open to everyone’s thoughts and comments, as this is a new venture. It’s such a privilege to serve this field. Leslie, thanks again for your thoughtful post. Sincerely,

Stephanie Weaver

Stephanie Weaver is the author of Creating Great Visitor Experiences: A Guide for Museums, Parks, Zoos, Gardens, and Libraries (Left Coast Press, 2007). She is a WMA professional member and visitor experience consultant based in San Diego, and is excited to be part of the WMA Host Committee for this year’s conference. Her online learning website is experienceology.com/classes, and you can email her at sweaver [at] experienceology.com