Museum Blogging

Lately I’ve been pondering the question, “Who qualifies to be a curator?” I suppose I’ve been thinking about this issue since I first walked into a museum as a child, looked up at a dinosaur mount, and thought, “I want to get my hands on that!”

Michelle Kasprzak’s Curating.info post “Agile and open – DiY Curating” renewed my interest in grappling with this issue. Kasprzak observes that “the very definition of ‘curator’ is certainly more open than it used to be,” and points us toward an article, “Do-it-yourself curators create art opportunities in out-of-the-way places,” in the October 10 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The article in the P-I shares the stories of several young freelance curators who have mounted exhibits in places as diverse as a university gallery, bars, Second Life, and the back of a U-Haul truck.

Reading the article, I was particularly intrigued by a comment by Fionn Meade, assistant curator for public programs and outreach for the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery. “We have to be flexible,” he said, “about where we organize shows and what kind of shows they are. I’m thinking about a publication as a project space, not for reviews but to create an arena of provocation and response.”

Democratizing the exhibition for viewers and curators: rethinking exhibition spaces

I’m a big believer in setting up exhibits in such a way that people view them on their own terms, in the context of their everyday lives. That may mean creating exhibits in places where people stumble upon them, say in a doctor’s office waiting room, while waiting for their number to be called at the local Department of Motor Vehicles, or even setting exhibits into the hardscape as was done with two installations related to the life of Angeleno Biddy Mason, House of the Open Hand and Biddy Mason’s Place: A Passage of Time. For that reason, I love the idea of staging an exhibit in the back of a U-Haul truck.

I also like the concept of producing an exhibit in publication form. No, it’s not a substitute for standing before an actual painting, 3D work of art, or historical artifact, but being able to take an exhibition with me to page through at my leisure really appeals to me. I’d consider it an exhibition catalogue without an exhibition site.

In such a view, the Internet becomes a legitimate space for an exhibition. Collectors, or anyone with photos they have th right to publish, can set up virtual galleries. One particularly well-done example of this phenomenon in blog format is Artists and Ancestors – A Miniature Portrait Collection. In its organization, this exhibit mirrors ones in the physical world: it has an exhibition catalogue, an explanation of the collection’s focus, and historical background on miniature portraits. However, online curators need not be tied to the traditional, relatively linear or room-by-room progress of exhibits.

Another fine example of online curation is the Los Angeles Conservancy’s exhibit Curating the City: Wilshire Blvd. Although this exhibit explores a place that is physically linear–Los Angeles’s Wilshire Boulevard–it allows visitors to explore locations along the street in the order than makes sense to them. It also provides a search function for people wanting information on a particular building. What I especially like about Curating the City is that although it’s evident a lot of technical resources went into the making of this online exhibit, it provides a model for freelance historians (if there are such beasts) that is largely lacking in the coffeehouse and bar contexts of the freelance art curators profiled in the Seattle P-I article. Anyone with a camera, a bit of Web savvy, and access to a library, historical society, or residents could curate an exhibition on just about any urban, suburban, or small town street.

Who gets to curate?

As I mentioned in my previous post, at a recent conference I heard Christiaan Klieger of the Oakland Museum of California talk about challenges facing curators who aim to represent as broad a sample of their constituency as possible. Klieger declared that this project will only be successful if curators are willing to give up some of their authority to “facilitators,” community stakeholders who have more lived knowledge of the group being represented than do the curators.

There is already a history of museums allowing community members temporary authority to select the objects for an exhibition. A recent example of this is Gems of the Collection: Community as Curator at San Antonio’s Witte Museum. The San Antonio Express-News provides an explanation:

Everything on display was selected by community curators — everyday folk who answered a Witte survey.

Opening Saturday, it presents 80 exceptional artifacts — paintings, gems, minerals, textiles, furniture, gowns and one-of-a-kind objects — that have stayed in the memory banks of loyal Witte supporters.

The Witte opened in October 1926. That’s a lot of memories for visitors, and some of them are plain weird — from shrunken heads to a stolen diamond.

The most popular items, however, are more palatable, truly historic and include a bejeweled ivory elephant, Fiesta gowns, swords, American Indian artifacts, ceramics, Jose Arpa’s Rose Window, a ghost dance dress from Wounded Knee, stuffed birds, extinct mounted animals and much more.

It’s all about nostalgia, revelation, enlightenment and wonder, according to organizers.

Whether such an exhibition qualifies as curation is up for debate. Curation includes more than merely selecting objects or asking people to nominate pieces for an exhibition. I do like the sense of serendipity that arises from such a method of assembling an exhibit, and I wish I could visit the museum myself. That said, is the Witte’s process really curation? I’m not convinced it is.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I think community members shouldn’t be involved in creating exhibits. Far from it. In fact, I’d like to see more community participation, especially in the form of freelance curators like those described in the Seattle P-I article: people who are on the margins of their professional community, who may have alternative views of art and culture, and who have a tremendous energy and passion for their work.

What makes a curator? And could you be one?

Traditionally, a curator has been someone trained to acquire, identify, assess the value of, and catalogue objects as well as present a selection of these objects in exhibitions. Curators may (and usually do) have additional administrative responsibilities as well.

At heart, however, a curator is simply someone who is, or has the ability to become, an authority on a subject or a connoiseur of a class of objects. The best curators are passionate people with research skills and a knack for storytelling.

Do you fit this description? What might you curate? And who would be your audience?

Further online reading:

/seconds issue on curating.

Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems by Joasia Krysa.

Last week I attended an American Studies Association conference session titled “Curating Community: Navigating the Terrain between the Museum World and the Communities.” I left the panel once again considering the big question that has been on my mind for some time: Who gets to be a curator? What counts as curatorial work?

The panel featured Christiaan Klieger, Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, Holly Alonso, and Raymond Codrington. (Scroll down to the bottom of this post for speaker bios.) The panel was among the best at the conference, and I admit my notes on it are sketchy because I was so much absorbed in the panelists’ talks that I didn’t want to miss a moment while taking too many notes.

A running theme throughout the session was how to engage meaningfully with the community during curation while still creating a high-quality exhibition. The concern was not so much that community input into an exhibition would water down or somehow sully the content–in fact, the speakers clearly felt quite the opposite was true. Rather, these leaders seemed worried that others in the museum profession didn’t share their enthusiasm for true community involvement in exhibitions or for projects that begin in the lives of community members.

As an example of such a project, Codrington spoke of how he used popular culture, in particular hip hop, to draw people who traditionally weren’t interested in museum programming to cultural events celebrating art, music, and community in Los Angeles. Alonso spoke about the necessity of welcoming children to the Peralta Hacienda because children playing on the Hacienda’s grounds may draw their families to the site’s events. LeFalle-Collins discussed her year working with the Museum of the African Diaspora, a project that, as you might imagine, required her to think very broadly about community.

In his talk, Klieger wondered aloud if it was possible for a museum to function without curators and their (to the public) mysterious ways of determining what belongs in an exhibit and how to best interpret those objects. He asked if it might be possible to use community facilitators instead. He argued that curators must learn to give up at least some, if not most, of their authority.

He asked what training qualifies a curator to serve as the sole filter for the stories of 36 million living Californians and asked that we consider who, among many possible gatekeepers, might be best qualified to decide which stories to feature in a museum. One solution he proposed was to provide stations within galleries where visitors could engage with the exhibits and each other in meaningful ways. I wasn’t sure what form Klieger was suggesting these stations take, but I agreed with Klieger’s declaration that it’s time to go beyond the visitor comment cards that curators rarely have time to read. Klieger also mentioned alternative ways visitors might engage with the museum’s exhibits, for example through audio commentaries delivered via cell phone or mp3 player.

LeFalle also spoke of her new online project, the Open Door Contemporary Art Program (ODCAP), which is set to launch any day now at OpenDoorLLC.com. Through this virtual gallery, developed using open source software, LeFalle-Collins hopes to change long-held community assumptions about artists and curators through shifting curatorial practice to an online space. It’s not clear to me–because of gaps in my notes, not because of LeFalle-Collins’s talk–whether ODCAP will involve community members as curators or whether its goal is rather to make the process of curation more transparent to the community. Regardless, I’m excited about the project, and I’m checking its URL regularly in anticipation of its launch.

A quick web search turned up bios of the session’s speakers:

Dr. Codrington “is a cultural anthropologist whose work brings popular culture into non-traditional settings by collaborating with artists, educators, museums, and community based organizations. His expertise uses hip hop and popular culture as a tool to generate new approaches to developing exhibits, research, and public programs. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and museums nationwide. Dr. Codrington is the author of numerous publications and is currently working on his forthcoming book on the globalization of hip hop culture.”

Dr. LeFalle-Collins is the owner of LeFalle Curatorial. She “is an independent scholar/art historian/curator and owner of LeFalle Curatorial a curatorial and research firm in Oakland, CA. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California, Los Angeles with an emphasis on American Modernism. Her present research focuses on painting and assemblage art from the 1960s forward.”

Dr. Klieger is senior curator and chair of the history department at the Oakland Museum of California.

Holly Alonso is executive director of the Friends of Peralta Hacienda Historical Park.

Podcasts

I hadn’t visited MuseumPods for some time, so I was delighted today to rediscover their extensive catalog of museum podcasts. Go check it out!

Podcast User Magazine offers tips to both those who produce and those who listen to podcasts. Issues are free PDF downloads. (via Past Thinking)

Also, The Museum Detective now has podcasts. You can either listen to them on the blog itself or subscribe to the series in iTunes. Good listening!

History

I recently revisited NPR’s very strong Hidden Treasures series. Have you listened to any of the episodes? They provide a good model for museum pocasts about material culture.

I just discovered the extremely well done Sacramento History Online, a project of California State Library’s California History Room, the California State Railroad Museum Library, the Sacramento Archives and Museum Collection Center, and the Sacramento Public Library’s Sacramento Room. The site has a ton of fabulous images, and I hope in the future the site expands to cover more than agriculture and transportation. Here’s a sampling:

Southern Pacific Railroad Sacramento Shops complex: celebration to mark arrival of SP steam locomotive No. 5000. California State Railroad Museum Library, CSRM Negative 28153.

Fruit packing shed. California State Library, California History Room, Negative 5073.

Just as impressive–and greater in subject scope–is the Powerhouse Museum’s Powerhouse Museum Collection 2.0 database. I could play around conduct research in these databases for hours at a time.

Miscellany

Tom Scheinfeldt of Found History ponders exactly what makes a museum. His reflections are in response to the NPR segment inspired by Coudal Partners’ wonderful Museum of Online Museums.

Have you heard of Zotero, the Firefox extension previously known as Scholar for Firefox? Dan Cohen of Digital History Hacks showcases how to use this tool for collaborative work.

Mister Jalopy celebrates some unusually themed dinnerware. An excerpt:

I was not prepared for The Hippopotamus Service as it changed the way that I view the world. On the best days, you see something that you are absolutely positive you will remember for the rest of your life.

I believe in objects – worn, proletariat, celebrated, tiny, grand, sitting on dusty shelves in suburban garages, rusty, forgotten, reviled, behind glass in museums, praised, mechanical, pristine, decorative, functional, authentic, playful, historic, perfect, personal and profound.

Good news: Museum Blogging has returned from its hiatus. Blog “curator” Leslie Madsen-Brooks has completed her Ph.D. in cultural studies and is now ready to take this blog to another level.

Future plans (6-month to 1-year timeframe) include interviews with leaders in the museum and cultural resources fields, podcasts, book reviews, forums for museum professionals, new content channels aimed at parents and teachers, advertising opportunities, and more.

If you’re a cultural resources professional, publisher, or vendor who would like to participate in any of these projects, please drop me a line. I’m interested in conducting interviews by e-mail or phone, welcoming guest bloggers who are experts in their fields, sharing success stories from your museum or cultural site (photos and video are welcome!), and more.

Webcast September 28-30

The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s symposium, American Art in a Global Context, will be webcast live on September 28th through the 30th. Viewers may launch the webcast each day from the symposium home page, which also includes the schedule of program events. The symposium opens at 2 p.m. on September 28th. Each day’s sessions will be archived and accessible for viewing afterward as well.

Free monthly e-newsletter

The Smithsonian recently launched Smithsonian Focus, a free monthly e-newsletter. From the site:

In Smithsonian Focus you’ll find links to exciting Smithsonian exhibits online, engaging activities, and few features, along with advance notice of events and exhibitions on the National Mall and in your neighborhood.

I signed up. Have you?

What can Second Life do for your organization?

That’s the question that’s been floating around the blogosphere of late. I think, though, that the question needs to be asked in two ways.

1. What can your museum do for residents of Second Life?
2. What can participating in Second Life do for your museum?

Once you answer the first question, you can answer the second. I’ll attempt to answer these questions with some specificity after we consider more broadly the advantages and liabilities of participating in Second Life.

If you’re not familiar with Second Life, scroll down to the bottom of this post and explore some of the links in the “Second Life roundup.”

Learning curves and marketing budgets

I admit that I joined the world of Second Life (SL) only recently, and I’ve explored only about eight to ten hours “in world.” That said, I’ve spent far longer researching the possibilities within Second Life.

I haven’t spent more time in world because the learning curve is, in my opinion, rather steep for those of us who have no background in gaming. The learning curve is even steeper for organizations that want to have a “physical” presence in Second Life.

I’m highlighting this fact because whether you allocate time for someone on your staff to learn how to navigate Second Life, and then to create objects and buildings in world, or whether you hire someone to design your museum’s in-world environment for you, the cost of a Second Life presence can escalate rapidly. Before diving into Second Life, you’ll need, of course, to consider whether your marketing and PR dollars are best spent elsewhere.

Note: If you haven’t yet checked out Second Life, and you have some time on your hands, head on over and sign up for a free account. Depending on your personal comfort with virtual environments and your propensity for getting sucked into such activities, plan on spending an hour or two exploring the world. Having an idea of how people, as represented by avatars, navigate Second Life will help you better understand what follows.

What can your museum do for residents of Second Life?

To answer this question, turn to your museum’s mission statement, exhibition history, program guide, and curriculum. What does your institution do best?

Ask yourself if your institution’s capabilities and activities would translate well to this world.

Find out if someone else is already offering such activities. If so, don’t despair–there’s plenty of room for new participants, even if your offering overlaps with existing activities. However, you might consider collaborating with other institutions to create a single, multi-institution location for residents to visit.

For example, there are already galleries of art in Second Life. What will your art museum bring to the table that’s new? Will you innovate in interpretation?

As far as I know, no science centers have yet to build in Second Life. If your designer can replicate some of your real-world hands-on activities and exhibits, those would definitely be a novel addition. Remember, however, that adults are not allowed to participate on the mainland of the youth world on Second Life and vice versa. There are ways for educators to reach young people, but initially you’ll need to focus on either youth or adult patrons, not both.

If you represent a living history center or a historic house museum, your staff members’ avatars can be outfitted in period attire. Depending on the era on which your institution focuses, there may already be a logical place to build in Second Life. For example, there is a Victorian village in Second Life where avatars wear nineteenth-century garb and participate in role play.

You should also, however, take into account the kinds of things that are possible in Second Life that aren’t possible in the real world. You can animate paintings, for example, or provide bodily and mental experiences that the average person would not have in their daily lives. Take, for example, one doctor’s creation of a schizophrenia simulator.

In addition, be sure to check out the blog Second Life Library 2.0, as well as the libraries in-world, for more organizational and institutional inspiration.

Might you provide informal educational content in audio and visual formats? For example, the public radio show The Infinite Mind is broadcasting in Second Life and welcoming residents to participate in the broadcasts.

Will your institution have a physical presence in Second Life in the form of a building? If so, will you charge admission, ask for donations, or admit people for free? If you build, be sure to include a virtual store where residents can purchase fun, stylish, or elegant accessories for their avatars and their homes.

Once you have brainstormed a bit, you should ask residents of Second Life if they’d be interested in such activities or sites as you wish to provide. You can interview residents in world–an admittedly labor-intensive process–or survey participants in any number of Second Life forums on the web.

What can participating on Second Life do for your museum?

It’s hard to say. People participating in Second Life have leisure time, current computer technology, and high speed internet access, so it’s likely they have some disposable income as well.

But are they museumgoers and prospective donors? That much is unclear.

You can learn more about marketing to avatars at Brands in Games, which has published a transcript of an in-world panel on marketing to avatars in Second Life. The panel was convened by Harvard’s Berkman Center.

In addition, Clickable Culture offers some reflections on an article on marketing to avatars recently published in the (subscription-based) Harvard Business Review.

Second Life roundup

If you’re not familiar with Second Life, you can get the opinions of its fans and detractors by clicking on the links below.

Second Life resources and evangelists

College Web Editor provides a brief guide to resources on Second Life. She also considers whether Second Life might help institutions raise awareness and funds for their real-life construction projects.

A magazine on conducting business in Second Life made its debut today. While focused on entrepreneurs, it may provide museums with ideas, tips, and inspiration. Details on SL Business, “The Premiere Virtual Branding Magazine,” may be found here.

C.C. Chapman is a fan of Second Life. Browse the archive of his podcasts at Managing the Gray to learn more about the possibilities of Second Life.

Beth Kanter is exploring the usefulness of Second Life to nonprofits. Check out these posts for ideas and inspiration:
Nonprofits in Second Life: Avatar Marketing, Fundraising, and TechSoup’s Plans
Reflections on Mixed Reality Events in Second Life
A Conversation with TechSoup’s Susan Tenby on Virtual Nonprofit Communities

TechSoup has put together a directory of nonprofits in Second Life. You can read about these groups’ activities and in many cases learn where to find them in-world. TechSoup also hosts a listserv for nonprofits in Second Life.

Second Life detractors and the unimpressed

Darren of Capulet Communications warns us not to jump into Second Life just because it’s the latest trend.

Branded Newb says Second Life is

a waste of time for marketers. When the real virtual world comes (and it will), the experiences in SL will provide little value (probably as valuable as logos on Pogs). I’m sure many marketers know this but until they stop looking good posing with the facade, they don’t care. For example, did American Apparel really open up a store in SL so they can market to the 300,000 registered users of SL? I doubt it, 300,000 nerds that never get out is a waste of time for a clothing company. What it is is good PR and that’s all that really matters to everyone involved.

Michelle Murrain asks

What’s the point? I spent about five hours in SL with a new account, exploring, talking to people, trying to figure out a good reason to keep going. Being in SL keeps me plastered in my chair, in front of my screen, when I’d rather be reading a book, or out walking on the beach, or taking to a real live human being, or if I’m going to be plastered in my chair, writing something interesting.

I think that the internet has created amazing opportunities to bring people together from disparate places so that they can work together in ways that they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. I’d bet that the text based methods that we already have (IRC, IM, email) actually would be more efficient, because you wouldn’t have to spend that time flying around and futzing with your avatar.

Ethan Zuckerman elaborates on what he sees as the current failures of Second Life, as well as how organizations might better serve residents. He focuses on the virtual Darfur within Second Life:

It’s possible that simulations will be a valuable tool for communicating the reality of situations like Darfur… if and when they get the details right… which they can only do if data is coming from the places they’re trying to simulate. The creators of virtual Darfur – who I suspect are smart, well-meaning people – probably put in this firewood not because they thought it was authentic, but because it was an object easily available elsewhere in Second Life which they didn’t need to custom create. But it ends up masking one of the more powerful details about the conflict, which you’d get from any competent newspaper account or from looking at photos of refugee camps.

The problems of virtual Darfur doesn’t mean that Second Life and other metaverse spaces won’t have a social impact in the future. But asking a technology to rise to this social purpose as this stage of its development may be unfair and unwise. It’s possible that hundreds, possibly even thousands of Second Life users will encounter this space – James speculates that, for some, it will be the first time they’ve ever thought about Darfur. This worries me – if you’re so deeply disconnected from the reality I live in that a Second Life space is the first time you’ve encountered this issue, then we don’t have much common context. (Do such people exist? Do they vote?)

The reason Second Life bugs me is not the fact that it slows my computer to a crawl, that most of my fellow characters are impossibly thin girls with overinflated breasts, or that most of the activity of the world seems to rotate around real estate and sex. (It reminds me of Reagan’s America, without the cocaine.) No, it’s the cyberutopianism. What bothers me is the fact that every presentation I’ve heard from Linden Labs has focused on the social implications of the space, the ways interaction in these new spaces will change fundamental economic and social dynamics of people all around the world.

Of course, this post represents but a sampling of opinions and resources on nonprofits, marketing, and Second Life. A Google search on the keywords marketing, avatar, and Second Life or nonprofits and Second Life will provide you with further resources.

What do you think? Is your institution considering participating in Second Life? If so, why, and in what forms?