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- Hello.
There we go.
Thanks to all of the organizers
and everybody behind the amazing exchange,
all the funders and all the people
that have been putting all this programming together.
It's been great.
It's been great to participate over the years too
and see how many different sort of touchpoints
you guys have created for us.
So I just wanted to express that first.
And I want to take you guys back
to a previous Arts Learning Xchange event
with our friend Seth here.
And his title included the phrase
"invisible or remarkable,"
and that really resonated with me
and with a couple other staffers at MCBA--
and here we are attending that lecture--
because we sort of felt both sides of that equation.
We-- [laughs]
We feel a little bit invisible and remarkable.
So a couple of disclaimers up front.
This is less of a case study and more of a work in progress,
as you'll see.
And the takeaway may resonate a little bit more
with folks our size, the smaller organizations
and especially those working in a niche,
because it's sort of a little bit about our journey
and sort of defining
and then hopefully beginning to start owning that niche.
So "invisible" is a little bit of an overstatement.
We do serve tens and tens of thousands of folks every year,
and we are the largest and most comprehensive
book arts center in the nation.
We have a great reputation
within the book arts community here locally
and within the book arts community nationally
and internationally.
We have visiting artists, visiting scholars
who come present.
Recently, we had a New York artist,
Maureen Cummins, come and do a workshop,
and she spent the first sort of 10, 15 minutes
of her workshop
walking around sort of agape at the facilities,
because they just-- they're really unmatched.
We're really quite proud of it.
We also offer access to a wider variety of programming
than any other center like us.
We hear time and again from people who are coming to MCBA
that they were hooked,
that after they first set foot in the door,
they've really just, like, been amazed
at all the stuff they can find.
And there, we find our challenge
is that they have to get through the door first
before they can have that reaction.
We often hear from folks who are new to the center
that they are amazed that we have been around
as long as we have.
We're 26 years old here in the Cities.
And for people to just be discovering us now,
that's a really perplexing question for us, why that is.
One of the reasons-- one of the challenges
that we've identified
is that we're a relatively obscure art form.
Or, perhaps more accurately, people know the art form;
they just don't know they know it.
They don't identify what they know
in the contemporary arts as book arts.
Another sort of challenge that we have
is that it's really difficult for us to just tell one story,
because we offer a really wide breadth
of types of programming and also types of art form.
Here we've got images from youth programs,
teen programs, artist programs, adult education programs,
which, you know, a lot of our organizations
do carry--wear all those hats.
But we also have a lot of different art forms represented.
We have papermaking, printmaking,
typography, collage, calligraphy, bookbinding,
anything that has to do with this, you know,
sort of centuries-old, millennia-old tradition
of making the book.
So we have to find a way to tell people
all of these things you already know--
printmaking, bookmaking, papermaking--
this is book art.
So this has sort of become our mantra
over the past year or so, "This is book art."
We're hoping to sort of really capture the niche
and help people identify what they already know and like
and that we're the place to come find it.
So we have been working on about an 18-month initiative
with the in-house studio at Target Corporation
to identify some opportunities for us in the field, sort of,
of rebranding.
We've also been doing a lot of different things
with programming,
but we don't have time to talk about that right now,
so I'm really going to focus on the rebranding.
One of the things they identified,
as Mu so elegantly described,
is that to communicate those things
that people already know but don't know they know,
we really need to sort of leverage photography.
We need to show people physically what we do,
because it's so hard to express sometimes in words.
We also wanted to reinforce the fact
that we are a contemporary arts center.
We've sort of, over the years, developed perhaps a reputation
of being sort of ye olde print shoppe,
so we wanted to again use photography
and our different kinds of marketing pieces
to really reinforce that idea
of the contemporary art and design.
As we--these are conceptual pieces
that the Target design studio created for us.
At the conceptual level,
we started finding little bits and pieces
that we thought would really resonate with our folks.
We see again that use of photography
became really central
to the ideas they were generating for us,
as well as this sort of new, more streamlined,
more modernist approach to all of the pieces.
We started talking a little bit more in depth
about the brand and about our brand positioning,
and we've decided to focus our efforts
in five different areas
to really reinforce the sort of areas of expertise
offered by MCBA.
Oh, this is in a different order.
Excuse me.
All right, well, let's go to this.
[laughs]
So the identity system that we're developing
is an interesting sort of hybrid
of logo and use of photography.
So these are just a few mock-ups,
and apologies for the quality of that photograph.
It came from my phone.
But it's sort of an initial step
toward incorporating photography of all of the different elements
of what falls under our great big umbrella of book art
and then creating our materials in a way
where you wouldn't just see one thing appear
again and again,
that when you receive materials from us, you'll see sort of
a rotating cast of characters of these photographs.
So you're always seeing something new.
You're seeing a variety of things.
So you start to hopefully understand,
"Oh, it's not just this one thing,
but it's also this and this and this."
So here's our five core sort of constituencies.
We've got printing and printmaking represented,
papermaking, bookbinding--
some really just interesting and beautiful detail shots--
and then two new areas
that we sort of want to increase our audience in,
and that is typography
and especially an outreach effort toward graphic designers.
The Twin Cities has an amazing creative community,
and we feel that the graphic design community,
who is becoming more and more and more focused on digital,
is really craving
that tactile and sort of hands-on experience
that MCBA is extremely well positioned to offer.
So here's a couple of screen shots
of some of our new pieces.
Our audience is very print-oriented,
so we are doing a lot of the digital stuff
and the social media,
but we always maintain a focus on the print.
So that, we feel, helps us maintain
our authenticity with that constituency.
We're not Luddites, but we really do love ink on paper,
and so we are very conscious
about the types of paper we're using,
the quality of printing, those kinds of things.
It's very important to our core audience.
And then as we roll out pieces, you'll see we're utilizing--
on, you know, this new recommendation,
we're utilizing
some big, sort of splashy photography throughout.
And this, too, like Lyric mentioned,
this is our first sort of use of full color
in a very long time.
So our budgets are feeling that,
but it's really important to sort of increase the impact
of that new investment in photography.
But we're offering, you know,
great big, beautiful detail shots of these studios,
the equipment, of artists working,
of work being made in our studios.
And like I said, you'll see
sort of a rotating cast of characters here.
Our space is also really sort of underutilized
not space-wise but maybe brand-wise.
We have a beautiful space on the ground floor
of the Open Book building in downtown Minneapolis,
and we have a great expanse of storefront space,
which is great to see into the gallery
and into the studios but may be underutilized,
like I said, on the brand aspect.
So we're working on a couple of different things,
some relating with sort of spatial planning
and programming in the space to make it more visible
but also some interesting signage
to sort of reinforce this new brand and identity.
And the last thing that'll I mention,
because, like I said, it's sort of a work in progress,
the last and probably biggest step
is a total revamp of our electronic identity,
and that's a new website,
as a couple of folks have mentioned.
We have not changed ours since 2008,
but we are in the process of changing it.
We've been strategizing about it
for about the last year,
and actual design work will begin in January,
so we're very excited.
Please keep an eye out for "This is book art."
And I have a new goal:
I hope that we do as nice a job as Mu did.
So thank you.