Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
- Hi.
I'm curious how all this change in social engagement
affected your exhibitions,
your curatorial work,
and the content you normally--
- That's a great question.
And I want to show you something
so you can see how dramatic a question that is for us,
which is about attendance.
So this is a six-month attendance comp,
so this is January to June 2011 when we had 10,000 people here,
and what's important is the top one is school tours,
the next one is community programs,
which is basically events,
and then all those smaller chunks
are all daytime visitation to exhibits.
Okay, so here's that same period a year later.
Huge increase in numbers.
We went from 10,000 to 23,000 people for that period.
But you can see that almost all the growth is in events.
If you look down that daytime line,
that is not--
it's not like people are coming more and more for daytime.
What happened when I came,
I sort of thought, "Okay, we are going to start
"doing events for our community,
and then people will be introduced to the museum."
And then they'll decide, "I want to come back during the day
for exhibits."
And instead what we found out was, no,
people come on Friday night for an event
and they want to come to the next event
that's on a Friday night or that's like that,
or something like that.
And so that's been really interesting for us,
and I think from a marketing perspective,
one of the challenges has been trying to disentangle:
are people coming on Friday night 'cause there's an event,
or is that the best time for them to see the exhibits,
and the event is what's getting them in the door
to then see the exhibits?
Our exhibitions have changed quite a lot in content.
We wrote some exhibition goals, which are on our website,
where we say, you know, "Our exhibitions
"are on broad interdisciplinary human themes now.
We're not doing art shows separate from history shows."
And that they are all immersive, social, participatory.
You know, we have a few key goals like this,
and what we say to artists in particular
is we believe strongly in this participatory approach.
We want to work with you to present your work in this way.
But if you aren't interested in being part of that,
it's still nonnegotiable.
It's the experience the visitors are going to have here.
And so we have had some tough conversations
with some artists in particular
who really want a white wall gallery experience
and are very comfortable with a more participatory approach
or who feel like, "Why do you have children's art
"next to something that's more formal?
"You know, are you demeaning my work, or are you--
You know, what's going on as you scatter all this stuff around?"
So I think we are finding that as we kind of find our way
with what these exhibitions look like,
the more of them we do, the more clear it is,
and the more clear it is to people
that they either like it or they don't like it.
And so some other things we've done
that have been really tangible,
we switched to first-person labels
so that, you know, when you're reading
a curatorial introduction to an exhibition,
it is written in first person,
the curator signs it,
so you know this is that person saying,
"Here's why this is important to me" kind of thing.
Wherever we can, when we do exhibitions
that have a community component to them,
we add that person's voice or, you know, in text
or their photograph to the label
so you're getting a sense of who's in your community.
This exhibition we just closed called "Santa Cruz Collects"
was all focused on why people collect.
And we had invited hundreds of people
from throughout our community to tell us what they collect.
We picked 20 of them to showcase.
And so that ranges from, you know,
American flags worth millions dollars
to balloons that were collected while hiking in the Sierras,
and those things are right next to each other.
So I think that for some of the presenters,
there is a stress,
and we have lots of conversations with people
about, "We want people to engage more with your work.
"We know the data shows that otherwise
"they're only gonna spend three seconds with your work.
You know, let's create some ways in that really work for you."
But we've also had a lot of people step up
who are excited about this new approach,
particularly practice space artists
who haven't had an exhibition opportunity before
because of the nature of their work.
We're just about to open an exhibition series
called "Work In Progress,"
where we're opening the museum empty,
and then we're working with artists
to create work in the space over the time of the exhibition.
And so that will be an interesting experiment, too,
to see, "Will people come back again and again during the day
if it's changing?"
You know, for me, my background is in exhibit design,
so it's really challenging for me
to see this kind of attendance shift,
and it's hard for me to tell what it's about.
I see that people are enjoying and engaging
with our exhibits during events,
but at least in our community,
people do not wake up on a Sunday and say,
"Let's go see the exhibit,"
and I don't know that that's something we can change.