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- Hi.
Wow. Thank you, Sharon.
Thank you.
It's great to be here
in one of the most awesome cities for arts
in this country.
[applause] Yeah, really.
You know, I love living in California.
I'll just mention, because they didn't know in Charlotte.
So Santa Cruz is just below San Francisco.
We're an hour and a half south of San Francisco.
Can we switch to my slides?
Yes. Okay, great.
Thank you. Okay, great.
So just a couple of logistics before we get started.
First of all, if you want to download the slides later
or give me your opinion or tell me you hated this
or ask me about my--I'm not wearing anything exciting today,
on Twitter, this is my information,
and this is the information about these slides.
Also I just want to let you know,
in the spirit of participation,
this is gonna be a participatory session.
So here's how it's gonna work.
I'm gonna spend the first half of the time, about 20 minutes,
sharing with you some of the ideas that are on my mind.
If you were at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference,
the first half is a good time for you to do something else,
'cause you have heard this before.
But the second half is gonna be based
on whatever you guys want to talk about.
So we have some mics,
and so when we switch to the second half,
if you feel that you have not heard what you wanted to hear,
if you want to see a certain kind of example,
if you want to talk about something in particular,
please come to one of the mics,
and we will kind of cocreate the second half.
So this means that everybody in this room
has a responsibility for making this session awesome.
If you are not happy at the end of the first half,
it is your opportunity and your responsibility
to make sure you are happy after the second half.
Okay? Okay, great.
So Sharon started by talking
about a lot of the positive things
that are going on throughout arts organizations
in our communities,
and I have to say that I sometimes come at it
from a little more of a negative starting point,
maybe a starting point that doesn't involve this working.
Oh, yes. Okay, great.
It did work. Okay.
I really think of myself as an activist,
somebody who believes strongly
that our arts organizations
have the potential to be amazing,
spaces for community engagement,
for cultural enrichment,
for really powerful social work
to change and improve our communities,
but unfortunately I think in many cases
we're not really doing that work.
I see so many organizations
with incredible mission statements
that only live on pieces of paper.
And so I feel really strongly
that the thing that I'm passionate about
is making sure that we live up to those statements we make
about how we can change the world,
how we can change our communities,
and that we really let our work be infused,
not just with those ideas,
but that we're really able to act on them.
And for me, the reason, the core reason,
that our organizations-- and I focus--
my work has been in museums.
I focus on the museum side.
But the core reason that I think our organizations need to change
fundamentally comes down to this.
Maybe. This.
People think of us at elitist institutions,
as places for somebody else, you know.
Somebody who is whiter, older, more educated
than the general public.
We've seen all the research about this, right?
And so when people go looking
for cultural or creative experiences,
they're not turning
to traditional arts institutions, you know.
Anybody who read the NEA
public participation in the arts paper from 2008 knows this,
that people today are incredibly creatively engaged,
but they're taking that engagement
and that experience and that excitement
outside of our organizations.
You know, that means that people are more likely
to get together in bars and knit
and less likely to go to an art museum.
You know, they're more likely to rent their own space
to do science experiments
than they are to go to a science center.
People are more likely to pick up an instrument,
less likely to go to the symphony;
more likely to get together and do art,
less likely to say, "Let me buy a ticket
and be an audience to art somewhere else."
And so for me, I look at this shift,
this huge rise in participatory culture,
and I think, "We've got to get in on this."
You know, these are people who are really excited
about engaging with the core content
that our organizations are about.
And when I talk with museum folks about this,
I hear interest,
but I also hear trepidation.
This is a quote from a friend of mine
who works at the Smithsonian, who said,
"I know many art museum workers would recoil in horror
at the idea of being inundated by Sunday painters."
Well, I'm sorry, but if people who paint on Sundays
are not the core audience for an art museum,
than I don't know who is.
You know, it's not just a problem in museums, right?
We see this in performing arts as well all the time,
people saying, "These people who are blogging
at theater performances are ruining the experience."
And I'm sorry,
but if there are people who want to write and talk
about the work that you're producing,
those are people we need to be really excited about.
And so for me, when I look at this kind of thing,
I say, "We have to not be
"recoiling in horror at these folks.
We have to find a way to embrace them."
So a year and a half ago,
I took over as the director
of a small museum in Santa Cruz, California,
and we decided we are going to take this opportunity,
we are going to embrace participatory culture,
and see if it can make a difference at our organization.
Because when I came, we had two really big problems.
The first one was money. We had none of it.
None of it like, lay people off my first week on the job,
all of us took 20% salary cuts right away.
Really no money.
But we had a second problem, too,
and that problem was about community awareness.
These were a lot of people in our community
who had no idea that this museum existed.
In fact, the museum is in what used to be the county jail,
and there are more people in Santa Cruz
who knew, "Oh, that's the jail building"
than knew, "Oh, there's a museum there."
And for me, these two problems,
lack of money and lack of community awareness,
meant something really exciting could happen.
I'm just curious.
How many people here
have one of these two problems
at your organization?
How many people have both?
Oh, you guys are doing pretty well in the Twin Cities.
Well, for me, these two problems meant,
"Gosh, we can do something different here."
We had our backs against the wall,
and we said, "We're gonna take a risk,
and we're gonna try this."
Because we didn't have money,
we didn't have a community awareness opportunity,
but what we did have was this vision.
Before I came, the board had written
this new vision statement.
They said, "We want to be
"a thriving central gathering place
for our community."
And I said, "Great. We are gonna do that.
"That is a strong vision for this organization,
"but if we do this,
it's not going to look like a normal museum."
So, yes, we invite people to come in
and paint with us on Sundays
to remake our spaces with us collaboratively.
We invite in all kinds of groups from our community
to coproduce programming with us.
We encourage people to use our space
to teach each other their creative skills,
and sometimes that involves some tools
that are a little more exciting than paintbrushes.
And so what I want to share with you in this next 15 minutes
are just three ways
that we've opened up our organization to our community
and how it's changed both how our institution works
and hopefully how our community works as well.
So the first of these openings
is really about active participation,
looking at every visitor who walks in the door of the museum
and saying, "You are going to be a useful, productive contributor
to make this place better."
And for us that means
that literally from the moment you walk in the door
you'll be invited to write a comment
about how we can improve what we do.
If you're in our history gallery,
you can write a poem about a part of history
that's important to you.
We just closed this exhibition
related to collecting and collections
that included this memory jar installation,
where you could come into a space,
use some craft materials,
bottle up a creative representation
of a personal memory in a mason jar
and put it on a wall
to create this community, collaborative exhibition,
created entirely from the memories in our community.
And we do tons of participatory experiences
throughout our museum,
and over the last year and a half,
thousands of people have contributed creative work,
thoughtful suggestions,
and really terrific stories from their own history
to make our museum better.
But I think we're all realistic
about the fact that not all public participation
is really high quality work.
You know, we've all been in museums
and seen comment books like this.
And certainly, you know, anybody who's been on the Web
has seen comment streams like this.
Now, I don't think the people who are sharing these comments
about this video on YouTube are idiots.
I think that they are operating in a designed environment
that isn't asking them to do anything interesting,
and so they're responding
by doing something that is not very interesting.
And one of the things that I've really learned
from doing a lot of participatory projects
is that design matters.
The way you invite people to participate
will have a direct correlation
with what they choose to give you in return,
and I want to give you a couple examples of this.
The first example comes from LACMA,
the L.A. County Museum of Art.
They did a study a few years ago, very simple.
They put out a question for people in an exhibit,
and for the first couple of months,
they put out white cards and golf pencils
for people to answer the question.
Then they just took those away, they kept the question there,
and they put up blue hexagonal cards and full pencils
for people to answer the question.
And what they found was that people wrote more on topic
and specific answers
with the blue and the big pencils than with the white.
Now, does this mean blue is, like, the magic color
for participation?
No.
But it means that even making this small design change
changes how people respond and what they do.
Let me give you another example.
I worked on an exhibition a few years ago in Seattle
about advice,
and there were lots of different ways in this exhibit
that visitors could give and get advice from each other.
You're looking at two different versions of people--
participation in that exhibit.
On the left, there was a comment board for Post-its.
You could write a question you had on a big Post-it,
and people could give you advice on those small Post-its.
What's the best way to cure a hangover?
Ginger ale and french fries.
Drink more.
You know, we didn't vet the advice,
but I will tell you that every Post-it on those walls
was absolutely on topic and related to the question
that was being asked.
Now, there was another part of the exhibit
which you can see on the right,
where we had made a fake bathroom door
and just attached a Sharpie to it
and let people do whatever they want.
And you can see that mostly what people did is,
they scribbled or they'd write, you know,
"For a time, call Jen," that kind of thing.
And it's not like when visitors came into the exhibit we said,
"Okay, if you're well-meaning, Post-its.
"If you want to just screw around,
go over to the bathroom door."
No.
The same people did both of these activities in the space,
and the difference in what they brought to the table
was in the design of what was offered to them.
And here's my thesis about this.
I believe that every one of us
has something really meaningful to share.
In the context of an art and history museum like mine,
I believe everybody has something creative to share.
I believe everybody has a story that can be useful
in making our institution better.
But I also know that all of us have the ability to be idiots.
We can all be banal if we want to be.
And the difference in how we act is in the invitation,
is in what is given to us and what is offered to us
for our response.
So I want to show you a couple examples of this at our museum.
Doesn't have to be expensive
to really think about the design in this way.
When we had an exhibition about love,
we wanted to collect people's breakup stories,
so we just painted a broken heart on the wall
and put up this little sign that said,
"After the breakup, I..."
and let people share their stories.
These stories were funny. They were poignant.
These are just a couple of my favorites.
This one on the right, I think,
is, like, one of the best pieces
of micro nonfiction ever, you know.
Took her sweatshirt forever.
You can just imagine this person.
We received hundreds of these kinds of stories.
When we had an exhibition about coffee
and we wanted to ask people
about their experiences with coffee,
we gave them real coffee beans to vote with
to walk through the exhibit and to drop them into the cups
indicating how they felt about things.
And just that simple thing,
giving people the smell and the feel of coffee,
kept them engaged with that activity.
Sometimes for us it's just about giving people
a different kind of tool to work with.
This was, again, during our love exhibit.
We invited people to write love letters with this typewriter.
This college student ended up being in this space
for over two hours,
and I just kept, like, looking back and being like,
"Really? She's still here?"
And I talked to her about it.
I said, "Wow. Why are you so into this?"
And she said, "You know, I've never used a typewriter before,
"and this feels so much more intimate
"than when I use my computer,
and I feel like it's bringing different things out of me."
And then there's things like the memory jars.
So we just closed this exhibit.
Right now people are coming into the museum in droves
to take home their memory jars.
We had over 700 people make a memory jar
in the last three months at our exhibit.
All kinds of stories were shared.
I just want to share with you one of them
that I took a photo of the other day.
This memory jar, it says, "Mark's memory jar.
"I remember when you were alive before Iraq
"and opened pit burns which gave you cancer.
"I remember when we learned that you died in Iraq
"in our arms at home.
I miss you. I miss you."
I don't think that visitor walked in the museum that day
expecting to share this story.
But there was something about this activity, the space,
the way we were inviting them to participate
that brought it out of them
and created something really powerful
to contribute to making our museum and our exhibit better.
All of these kinds of things throughout our museum,
they're not just creating better content;
they're also really changing the way people see the museum.
We've had a lot of positive response in the last couple--
the last year,
but one of my favorite comments
is one that I heard from a 16-year-old girl
during the Love show.
She said, "You know, my family has been to Europe.
"We've seen famous art exhibits,
but this is the first exhibit that makes me want to do art."
And for me, this kind of sentiment,
especially in a time of participatory culture,
means that this is a girl
who's not only gonna come back to
and be engaged in our museum;
hopefully she's somebody who's going to be engaged in the arts
for a long time because of this experience.
And I don't want you to think
this is just, like, a few
handpicked heartwarming anecdotes,
so I want to just show you the numbers briefly on this.
So we're on a July to June fiscal year,
and so this was the year just ending when I came.
So it went from July 2010 to June 2011.
That year we had about 17,000 visitors.
We had about 800 people come on our busiest day,
and you can see we had about $12,000 in the bank.
So compare that to the year that ended in June of 2012,
our attendance more than doubled in a year.
Our busiest day went up to about 2,800 people,
and we went from being in a really dicey financial position
to running a surplus for the first time
and getting some cash into the bank.
For us, this strategy of participation
wasn't just a nice idea
to invite people to have a different kind of experience.
It really changed our museum, and it really--
[applause] Yeah. I'm excited about it.
Thanks, Emily,
And just opening up in this way made that possible.
Now, I just wanted to show you as an example
of how much our regional traditional museum has changed.
I want to show you what was happening on that busiest day.
It was a festival that we did called GLOW.
Is the sound on? Okay, great.
It doesn't need to be loud. You can keep it down.
I'm gonna talk over it.
GLOW is a fire art festival.
What happened was, a guy came up to me at a museum event,
and he said, "You know what,
"we have some of the best fire artists in Santa Cruz
"in the world,
"and they never get to show their work here.
"They only get to do so at Burning Man.
Can we create a fire festival for Santa Cruz?"
And I said, "Yes," and we did,
and I can't tell you how it feels as a museum director
when you suddenly realize,
"Oh, we're having a rave" and...
[laughter] "I'm in charge of this,
"and we have some 19-year-old volunteers
helping us, yeah, keep it safe."
This was an incredible two-night experience
that we're now making an annual event.
It brought thousands of people to downtown Santa Cruz
on a cold winter night,
and I had so many people coming up and just saying,
"I never thought this was possible.
"I can't imagine seeing this in Santa Cruz.
And this is our community and our artists."
Everybody who participated in this event was a volunteer.
We had the propane donated,
but otherwise people were volunteering their time.
And even this video--
this video was created by a volunteer
who came to the museum to work off community service hours.
He had a traffic ticket,
and he's working in the galleries,
and then he comes to one of our events,
and he says to me the next day,
he says, "Oh, I made this little video,"
and I was just like, "Oh, my god.
You should just do this."
And we've since hired him as our graphic designer.
[laughter]
So this is the kind of thing we're doing
and the kind of real change that we had to make
to how we thought about what we did
to be able to be successful in this way.
Okay.
So the second part I want to talk about
is about objects.
So we're a museum.
Museums are about artifacts, you know.
Or you're an arts organization, and you have your content,
whether it's the plays or the performances,
or whatever it is.
What about those things?
Where do they go in this participatory world?
And for me, this part is really important,
because for me, the thing that is unique
about our organizations
is that when we invite active participation,
we can do so around the content this is our focus.
So it's not that it's something that happens
as a distraction or outside,
but that the content, or in the museum case, the artifacts
become the locus of that experience,
of that social experience, of that conversation.
And so I like to use this term "social object"
for this idea of an artifact or a performance or an artwork
that serves as a kind of meeting place for different people.
And let me give you an example from outside the art world.
How many people here own a dog?
Okay, great.
So you've all had this experience, right?
You're walking with your dog,
and a stranger starts talking to you,
and they're not so much talking to you.
They're sort of talking through the dog to you.
The dog has become this social object
that mediates a conversation that wouldn't otherwise happen.
So I look at this, and I say,
"Okay, how can we make artwork more like dogs?
"How can we invite people to see these content pieces,
"see these artifacts as opportunities for conversations
they wouldn't otherwise happen?"
And the reason I care about this
is because the conversations we have around art
are more important
than the conversations we have about our dogs.
You know, the conversations
that people were having in Grand Rapids
looking at this artwork,
talking about what it's like to go to war,
what it's like to be an obsessive artist
who works so *** something,
those are more important conversations
than the ones we're having at the mall.
You know, these kids at the Science Museum of Minnesota
looking at stacks of money that indicate income disparity
between whites and blacks in the US,
they're having a conversation
that they're not gonna have in a coffee shop.
This is the power
of what our artwork and what our objects can do,
to unlock conversations that we have to have
to move our communities forward.
And so, again, we spend a lot of time at our museum
thinking about, how do we design opportunities
to unlock those conversations?
You know, sometimes it can be something
like letting people vote
about which objects they think
we should have in our collection or not,
engaging them in that question
about why there's a community collection.
What does it mean for a museum to steward things
that belong to our community?
Sometimes we invite people to use parts from our collection
as the basis for craft activities
so that they're really engaged
in the way that they want to be creatively engaged
around these objects at the center of our collection.
Sometimes it's just about giving people
a comfortable place to sit
so they can talk about the artwork or the object.
You know, there are so many times
when we're in these uncomfortable situations,
and it's like, this isn't about eating vegetables;
this is about engaging with each other,
and let's give people some space for that.
When we work, for example, with performers,
we always do so in this context
of thinking about creating social conversations.
This is a band called Corpus Callosum,
and they've worked with us a couple of times
on craft activities that relate to music.
So when we work with a performer,
we don't say, "Here's the stage, and there's the audience."
We say, "We're gonna work together
"to create something co-creative like a cardboard tube orchestra
"so that you can engage the people who you're working with
"in making the art together
and having that conversation around it."
And I think for me why this is so important
is because we all know that the right kind of social object
can connect us to people
in ways that we really wouldn't anticipate,
that there are conversations we can have
that we would never expect.
This is from our street art event.
We actually had a problem with this guy on the right.
He was running a graffiti spray painting activity,
but he got so fascinated by these knitters
that he, like, completely left these kids with spray cans
to just do whatever they wanted
so he could go and learn more about this hand crocheting.
And, you know, these kinds of conversations
and these kinds of partnerships,
hybridity across different kinds of art forms,
are really powerful for moving our community forward.
I mean, I think every one of us has had an experience
where a social object has connected you
with somebody you never expected you would talk to otherwise.
And that kind of brings me to my last point,
that I think when we do these things,
when we invite people to actively participate,
when we invite them to see the work that we do
as locuses of conversations that otherwise wouldn't happen,
then we can create really relevant meaningful stuff
for our communities.
And, you know, this isn't just happening
in some crazy little museum in Santa Cruz.
It is happening all over the place, right?
It's happening down the street at the MIA,
where every ten years they do this foot in the door exhibit,
where if you have a piece of art
that is 1 foot by 1 foot by 1 foot or smaller,
you can be in an encyclopedic amazing museum.
It's happening at the Brooklyn Museum,
where they're using technology to connect people each other
in galleries in new ways.
And obviously it's not just happening in museums.
You know, it's happening in places like Streb Llabs
where they're rethinking the way
that people can engage with modern dance
and the way that they can participate in it,
both meaningfully as audiences and as participants.
It's happening in places like Busboys and Poets in D.C.
This is an amazing cafe, a literary cafe,
where they really intentionally focus on bringing together
multiethnic and multiracial communities.
They literally work with their floor staff to seat people
in ways that encourage conversations
and crosspollination
that otherwise wouldn't happen,
and their owner and founder is very, very clear
that their goal is about peace.
It's not about cafe; it's not about literary events.
It's happening down in North Carolina
at one of my favorite spaces, maybe,
the Elsewhere Collective.
This is a former thrift store.
This guy, his grandma died,
and she left him her thrift store.
It was full of all this weird hoarded stuff,
and they invite artists to come in and make installations
with the community,
using this very basic, very found collection.
And so when I look at all these things,
and when I think about what we're trying to do,
I look at these kinds of opportunities
for us to be doing something
that isn't just about the art activity at hand.
So for example, at our museum,
when people are making collages of leaves,
I don't just see people cutting up paper.
You know, I see a family, I see college students,
I see an older adult
who are brought together around a table
by this really simple activity,
and we've seen again and again that this means
they are having conversations and meeting people
they otherwise wouldn't have.
And for me, and this is very personal, I would say,
this idea of bridging social divisions,
of bringing together people across the boundaries,
is one that's really personally resonant.
You know, I think we all know
that we live in a really divided world,
and it doesn't matter what those divisions are.
It's harder and harder
for you to find places
where you will be peaceably and positively connect
with people who are genuinely different from you.
And for me, if we can do that at our museum,
that's a really powerful thing.
One of the examples of the ways that we're doing that
that's been most successful
has been through a historic project
out at a historic cemetery called Evergreen Cemetery.
And when I came to the museum-- so the museum owns the cemetery.
It's one of the strangest parts of my job,
dealing with calls from people who need to be buried.
Well...
they're relatives.
[laughter]
So when I came to the museum last year,
Evergreen Cemetery was in a really bad state.
There was a ton of drug use out there,
I was getting calls from the cops all the time
about smashed headstones and trash,
and we decided, "Okay, we got to do
something different out there."
And so we partnered with the homeless service center,
which is in that neighborhood,
and every week we have a team
of museum volunteers and homeless volunteers
who work together
to do restoration work in the cemetery.
And they are literally uncovering history
as they peel back brush
and they discover gravestones that we didn't know were there.
You know, stories of Chinese railroad workers,
of early pioneers.
A homeless guy the other day showed me the grave
of the first *** in Santa Cruz.
So everybody who works out there is learning about history.
But the other thing that's happening
is that they're learning about people
who are different from them.
And I have talked to so many museum volunteers,
you know, ladies in their 70s
who will tell me that they came out Evergreen
and it was the first time
that they had a positive human interaction
with somebody who was homeless,
and it's changed the way they look at the issue
in our community.
You know, that's the kind of work that I want us to be doing.
And I want to share with you
just one more story on this, guys,
and then we'll jump into
whatever you guys want to talk about.
A few months ago, we had a space in our museum
set up to make collages.
We're big on collages at our museum.
And I walked by, and I saw this pretty normal museum setting.
So in the foreground you're seeing our staff member Stacy,
this is Stacy,
talking to a local artist Kyle, who's brought his baby with him,
and they're meeting to talk about an upcoming project,
and in the background there are some visitors,
a group of late teens or early 20s
who are there making collages.
So I come through, this is what I see.
Now, the next time I come through,
it turns out that the collages and the baby,
two really great social objects,
have created an opportunity for a conversation
that otherwise wouldn't happen.
A conversation about making art, about making children,
and a conversation between people
from different walks of life.
Now, the next time I walk through,
and I wish I had a picture of this,
Kyle has handed his baby to these girls.
They are sitting down and crafting with it,
and he has just turned back to his conversation with Stacy.
I thought, "My god.
"You know, if our museum can be the kind of place
"where a person will willingly hand their baby to a stranger
"and think this is a good idea,
"then we're doing something really special
for our community."
And for me, when I think about the ultimate measure
of what we do at our museum,
it's not so much about how many people come in the door
or the educational experience or the arts experience
they have inside.
What's important to me is the experience they have outside,
that when people walk down the street in Santa Cruz
and they see somebody who's different from them,
they don't say, "Oh, that's a person
who I need to turn away from,"
or "I'm not interested in that person,"
but instead there's an inkling of a possibility, right?
"I could collaborate with this person.
I could be interested in this person."
You know, you may not hand your baby
to that person on the street,
but that's okay,
because they can come to our museum and do that.
Thank you.
[applause]