Come Behind the Curtain on December 16
Posted by Nina on December 15, 2011
Photo by Lena Borsuk
As you’ve probably figured out, we’ve been making a lot of changes at the MAH. New programs. New interactive exhibition elements. New dangerous sculptures featuring fish and hammocks.
Tomorrow (Friday), we’ll be having an evening event to brainstorm with you about where we’re going, what’s going on, and what you think we should be focusing on. You can check out our new not-quite-finished exhibitions, take a stab at writing your own labels, paint a mural with an artist, tell stories about the old county jail, get your hands on our collections objects, explore the back rooms, and dance. There will be a crazy dance workshop based on the museum experience. Plus interns showing off their projects, opportunities to get involved as volunteers and members, and an idea jam in the auditorium where you can tell me exactly what you think I should be doing and where I should stick it. Or hopefully, ask some tough questions, come up with some wild ideas, and generally help make the museum a more vibrant place.
The event is from 5-9pm tomorrow. It’s $5 for adults, $3 for students, and free for members. There will be great activities for kids and families as well as adults.
We’re working hard, and we can’t do it without you. Please come down and get involved. And on that note, check out this awesome blog post by our thirteen year old volunteer Lena about her experience here rocking the paper cutter.
A shoutout to our ESRRA volunteers
Posted by Nina on November 16, 2011
Gary Neier and friends from Homeless Services working at Evergreen Cemetery.
We had a great meeting yesterday with staff and interns discussing the role of internships at the museum and how to make them as effective as possible going forward. One of the central things we discussed was the difference between volunteers and interns. We have interns who lead specific projects, and we have volunteers who help out in amazing ways. We wanted to make sure that our superb volunteers don’t feel like second-class contributors as we formalize what it means to be an intern. We decided we need a new term for volunteers who are incredible contributors to the museum but for whatever reason–interest, type of work they do, independence, schedule–are not interns.
So today, a quick shoutout to our ESRRA volunteers – Extra Special Really Really Awesome folks who make the museum fabulous. There are too many to count, so we’re focusing this week on five of them.
THANK YOU TO:
- JENNA CONWAY, who designs gorgeous posters, advertisements, and invitations so that people can’t wait to come to MAH events.
- GARY NEIER, who works tirelessly with shovels and community partners to help Evergreen Cemetery stay evergreen.
- ALVERDA ORLANDO, who shares the story of the Davenport Jail Museum through fabulous tours and research projects.
- JANET RYMSHA, who is bringing our Sculpture Garden back to life by clearing dried brush and planting succulents.
- RACHAEL TORRES, who takes killer photographs at exhibitions and events so everyone can experience them, even from afar.
Thank you to all our volunteers and interns. We couldn’t do it without you. And if you are reading this and YOU want to be an ESRRA volunteer, join us now.
Join the MAH in November and Support Second Harvest
Posted by Nina on November 1, 2011
Like food? Like art?
So do most people in Santa Cruz County. As a museum that is dedicated to being a strong community center for everyone, we’re thrilled to team up with the Second Harvest Food Bank for the month of November to support their work ending hunger in our region. If you buy a new membership in November at any level, the MAH will donate $10 of that membership fee to Second Harvest. Throughout the month, Second Harvest will be present at museum events, with a big kick-off at November Free First Friday featuring healthy food made and sold to support feeding hungry families.
It may seem strange for a museum and a food bank to partner up in this way. Our missions are pretty different on the surface, but fundamentally, we’re both focused on providing people with sustenance–creative, physical, emotional, intellectual–to feed both body and soul. I believe strongly that our museum has to be a good community partner to be a good community center. Partnerships like this one allow people to make new connections–between art and food, between history and hunger–that ultimately bring us closer together as a community and support our growth as a society.
Please celebrate this partnership with us in November by becoming a MAH member, buying a gift membership for a friend, and enjoying our fabulous food-themed events throughout the month. These include Free First Friday (November 4), Bubbles and Cheer tasting night (November 10), Play with your Food family art workshops (November 12), and a radical craft night with a food component (November 18).
Photos from the Wearable Art Ball
Posted by Nina on October 31, 2011
It’s official: museum revelers are a creative crew. This past Saturday, we celebrated Halloween in style with the first annual Wearable Art Ball. The theme was “fractured fairytales” and the costumes were terrifying, delightful, and altogether fab. Costume contest winners included a “fractured folklorica,” a twisted clown, and a couple portraying the 99% and the 1%.
More analysis soon on all our experiments with new programs at the MAH, but in the meantime, enjoy these fabulous photos taken by intern Stacey Garcia.
Balancing Participation with Information
Posted by Nina on October 18, 2011
Note: this post was also cross-posted at the Museum 2.0 blog.
We’ve been doing a little experiment at the MAH with labels. The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum recently loaned us some fabulous surfboards that tell the co-mingled history of surfing and redwood trees in Santa Cruz. In our quest to make the public areas of the MAH more reflective of Santa Cruz culture, we moved these boards from a comprehensive display in the history gallery into a main stairwell, prominently visible from the lobby and throughout the building.
The surfboards are beautifully hung in their new location, but they present a new challenge: we have to write very short labels. They’re no longer “an exhibit” per se—more of an evocative design element that hints at an important story told elsewhere in the museum.
We decided to approach the label-writing for these boards in a participatory way. We blatantly borrowed the brilliant technique the San Diego Museum of Natural History used to write labels based on visitors’ questions. We put up the following label along with a pedestal with post-its and pencils:
We’re writing a description* for these surfboards and we need your help.
- What do the surfboards make you think about?
- What do you want to know?
Understanding what you think helps us think about how we display our collections.*note: originally, this said “we’re writing a label” but with that phrasing, lots of people wrote creative titles for the surfboards (like the title for a work of art) instead of talking about content of interest.
We can certainly write a decent label based on this activity. But one post-it threw me for a loop. It said:
“you should do something to spruce these up a bit. I wouldn’t have noticed the boards except for the post-its.”
Maybe this person was writing about his or her preference for neon paper products, but I doubt it. It was the activity that drew this person (and probably others) to the surfboards—not the objects themselves.
And that leads me to a basic question: Is it better to replace the post-its with a label that answers visitors’ questions, or to continue to support this participation? Instead of clearing the post-its and putting up a nice, discreet label (my original plan), we could keep the post-its and just write answers to the questions directly under them. Or, we could write a starter label based on the questions asked thus far, but then invite (and respond to) additional ones.
The fundamental question here is how we balance different modes of audience engagement. You could argue that visitors are more “engaged” by an activity that invites inquiry-based participation than one that invites them to read a label, even if they never get answers to their questions. Or, you could argue that this kind of active engagement should be secondary to sharing information, which can be more efficiently communicated by a label.
If museums are truly about inquiry-based models for learning, we need more tools—especially in history and art museums—to promote inquiry-based engagement. Science centers and children’s museums promote inquiry-based learning with multi-sensory experiences that are focused more on igniting curiosity than providing answers. Seeing how people responded to these simple post-its made me consider the relative paucity of tools we have to “ignite curiosity” in art and history institutions. If museums of all kinds are going to make serious claims about being places for 21st century, multi-modal, inquiry-based learning, we’ve got to have robust, diverse onsite experiences to back them up.
In this case, given the location on the stairs, we’re likely to replace the post-its with a label as planned. But the bigger question remains: How can we promote true inquiry in our institutions, and how can we give visitors the tools not just to ask but to debate, discuss, and address their questions with each other? What kind of balance of participation and content delivery is most appealing to you?