Posts tagged engagement

"Your Labels Make Me Feel Stupid"

Moving away from the “priestly voice of absolute authority” in art museums to providing more context and and information that encourages people to respond in their own way. 

Interesting article via artnews.com. 

museumproblem: SUMMER. VISITORS. GUIDED TOURS. Mine are feeling a little stale, so i brainstormed some ways to spice things up in this crappy lil’ drawing. Perhaps more constructively, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum has some of the best facilitated dialogue tours around. A couple years ago they commissioned this study on engaging visitors in actual, critical conversations about immigration, worker’s rights, community, etc. as part of the tour. And they’re committed to thoughtfully, actively integrating the study’s findings, resulting in totally rad tours! (Seriously, as a visitor, it was a unique experience.) No bears, though.

museumproblem:

SUMMER. VISITORS. GUIDED TOURS. Mine are feeling a little stale, so i brainstormed some ways to spice things up in this crappy lil’ drawing.

Perhaps more constructively, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum has some of the best facilitated dialogue tours around. A couple years ago they commissioned this study on engaging visitors in actual, critical conversations about immigration, worker’s rights, community, etc. as part of the tour. And they’re committed to thoughtfully, actively integrating the study’s findings, resulting in totally rad tours! (Seriously, as a visitor, it was a unique experience.)

No bears, though.

museumproblem

26 Treasures

26 Treasures was a project that began at the V&A and soon spread across Great Britain. 26  writers (including ex-Poet Laureate Andrew Motion) wanted to investigate how they could encourage people to engage with museum objects in a more emotional way. Each writer was randomly assigned an object from the museum’s collection and asked to write a 62 word piece about it. The website  offers a blog, creation stories and more as insight into the process and the outcomes. 

Items range from Chinese porcelain figures to a 16th century Scottish guillotine, and the results are now being compiled in to a book. Much like Kickstarter, Unbound is a website that asks you - the public - to help fund projects (in this case books) and offers you something in return, with different packages available, determined by how much you donate. The book is now funded, but the various packages are still available (starting at £10 for the ebook and your name at the back in thanks). 

Does anyone else know of any other such museum-related funding projects?

Museum Engagement and Applied Anthropology

Conference to be held in Seattle next year and sound pretty interesting (call for papers here):

The session is conceptually framed around The Participatory Museum by Nina Simon and the contribution that applied anthropologists bring to the discussion.  Simon (2010:ii-iii) defines a participatory institution as:

a place where visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content. Create means that visitors contribute their own ideas, objects, and creative expression to the institution and to each other. Share means that people discuss, take home, remix, and redistribute both what they see and what they make during their visit. Connect means that visitors socialize with other people—staff and visitors—who share their particular interests. Around content means that visitors’ conversations and creations focus on the evidence, objects, and ideas most important to the institution in question.

The session aims to discuss participation in the building of sustained and engaged relationships and the methodological and theoretic contributions of applied anthropology to the process.
Relevant questions session papers may address include:

  • As cultural institutions how can museums demonstrate their value and relevance in the 21st Century?
  • Can museums serve as “third places” for social engagement?
  • What is the relevancy between shifting demographics and museum inclusivity in community engagement?
  • How do theoretic orientations, such as the constructivist approach and free-choice learning inform on the Participatory Museum.
  • How does the Participatory Museum influence the authority of voice in both content and function of cultural institutions?
  • What can applied anthropologists add to the discussion of Participatory Museums?
  • How can museums function as dynamic venues for sustained and engaged relationships with a diversity of communities.