Last week, I did something I hadnt done in ten years. I walked into a boxing gym. In college, Id boxed a bit recreationally, and it seemed like a good time to pick it up again. In the fall I bought a...
Last week, Douglas McLellan of artsJournal ran a multi-vocal forum on the relationship between arts organizations and audiences, asking: In this age of self expression and information overload, do ou...
A few weeks ago, the MAH Director of Community Programs, Stacey Garcia, came to me with an idea. Stacey has been collaborating with local artists to produce a series of content-rich events that invit...
When talking about active audience engagement with friends in the museum field, I often hear one frustrated question: how can we get adults to participate? Many exhibit developers create thoughtful i...
For years, Id give talks about community participation in museums and cultural institutions, and Id always get the inevitable question: "but what value does this really have when it comes to doll...
Last week, I finally watched The Art of the Steal, an arresting documentary on the controversy around the evolution of the Barnes Foundation from a suburban educational art facility to a major u...
Weve been offering a host of participatory and interactive experiences at The Museum of Art & History this season. All of them are cheap, mostly simple, and occasionally, dangerous. I loved Jaspe...
Its that time of year when inboxes fill up with digital thank yous, happy holidays, and end-of-year solicitations. At the MAH, we had an intern who worked this summer and fall to create a video (her ...
Two weeks ago, two of my staff members came to me with a problem. They were planning a wall mural for our classroom. They planned to paint the outline of Santa Cruz County, print out photos of a seri...
I have a confession to make: Ive never cared much about museums on the Web. Im focused on the onsite, in-person experience. When smart people talk about digital museums and virtual experiences, I nod...
Pop-Up Museum [n]: a short-term institution existing in a temporary space. a way to catalyze conversations among diverse people, mediated by their objects. Over the past few years, there have b...
An exhibiting artist approached me recently at an evening event at the museum. "Hey!," he said, "I have some feedback for you. You know, the hours that youre open--theyre not very accessi...
When I started at The Museum of Art & History (MAH) in May, one of my priorities was redesigning our website. I didnt want to do anything fancy--just make the site more functional, lively, easy t...
Last month, the Irvine Foundation put out a new report, Getting In On the Act, about participatory arts practice and new frameworks for audience engagement. Authors Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak-Leon...
Its November, and that means we start looking around nervously at our fabulous fall semester interns and worrying about all the light that will go out of the world when they head back to school, home...
At my grocery store, if you bring your own shopping bag, they give you tokens that you can use to donate money to local nonprofits. As I drop 5 cent tokens into my slots of choice, I often wonder: co...
We’ve been doing a little experiment at our museum with labels. The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum recently loaned us some fabulous surfboards that tell the co-mingled history of surfing and redwood trees...
This week, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy released a new paper by Holly Sidford called Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change. The title may sound innocuous. The paper is anythin...
Im working on a keynote address for next weeks Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums conference in Baltimore. The speech is in memory of Stephen Weil, one of the giants of contemporary American museum ...
Its a Saturday night when I get the email. "Sharon D. Payne," member of the incredibly popular Santa Cruz roller derby team, wants to pitch a partnership with our museum. She doesnt have a sp...
Last Friday night, my museum hosted a fabulous (in my biased opinion) event called Race Through Time. It was a local history urban scavenger hunt that sent teams of 2-5 people out into the city to tr...
"Fundraising is about relationships.""The key to fundraising is listening.""Developmen t works when you are responsive to the donors needs, not just presenting your own."Anyone...
This guest post was written by Laurel Butler, Education and Education Specialist at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco, CA. Laurel is the "Art Coach" who runs an unusual ...
Psst... want to move to Santa Cruz and work at my museum? Or do you know someone who might be perfect for this job? We are looking for an obsessively detail-oriented, highly resourceful, financially ...
There is a long interview with me in this weeks Good Times (Santa Cruzs leading weekly). I had a wonderful conversation with Geoffrey Dunn and he did a great job pushing the conversation all over the...
Many people (Paul Orselli, Linda Norris, Pete Newcurator) in the museum field have written about the question of museum "tribes"--based partly on Seth Godins book, partly on the longstanding ...
Note: Thanks to Lisa Hochstein for allowing me to quote her emails in this post. She is a fabulous and thoughtful artist. You can learn more about her work here. Two weeks ago, we inaugurated a Creat...
We just opened new exhibitions at The Museum of Art & History, including one on woodworking that includes QR codes. For those who dont know, a QR ("quick response") code is a two-dimensio...
Yesterday, I had lunch with Monica Martinez, the ED of Homeless Services for Santa Cruz county. I was amazed not only by her energy and intelligence but by her simple, transformative goal: to end hom...
As a freshly-minted museum director, I knew Id develop at least one micro-managing quirk, something that would drive me totally nuts (and drive me to drive my staff nuts in response). Ive found that ...
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