Provocation - ‘New ways to engage people in exhibitions’

Andrew Pekarik, Program Analyst, Office of Policy and Analysis, Smithsonian Institution

Museum visitors are attracted by one of three different things – ideas, objects or people. It’s important museums balance their curatorial staff with ‘people’ people as well as ‘ideas’ or ‘objects’ people. The best exhibitions use ‘3D’ objects that work for all three tastes simultaneously – so the display not only meets the needs of every category of visitor but also challenges their preferences. Making the process of understanding, embodying, using and testing difference central to the production of museum galleries ensures their dynamism.

Co-Curation: International examples

Karen Fort, Senior Exhibit Coordinator, National Museum of the American Indian

Part of the museum’s mission was to move beyond standard anthropological representations of the American Indian – reflecting this aim, every aspect of the museum‘s development was facilitated by multiple representative groups of American Indians. Although the gap between the museum and the people whose life and culture it represents was closed the subsequent difficulty has been in engaging the overwhelmingly Western audience. Museums have to take responsibility for their content, pay attention to the expectation of visitors and strategically plan the involvement of co-curators.

Jaime Kopke, Founder/Director, Denver Community Museum (via video link)

The Denver Community Museum was a pop up museum that ran a changing monthly exhibition of objects donated by the local community. Everything was accepted, participation was free. Over time, the nature of the objects donated, and the exhibitions themselves became more fluid, while the exhibitions themselves also prompted new social connections. Although the exhibitions depended entirely on the contribution of visitors, the role-of the curator remained a central contextualising presence.

Lynda Kelly, Head of Audience Research, Australian Museum Co-curation: does it work...and how?

Traditional social science methods of audience research have the museum sucking information out of the audience. Alternatively, the consultation model of engagement in workshops etc has the beginnings of a two-way conversation. In the user-generated content model – as in the Australian Museum’s ‘All about Evil’ exhibition, content was developed online via blogs and Facebook. The most sustained model of engagement is the ‘building community’ model, which can persist online beyond the opening of the display. Museums of the future will need to adapt to the challenges of new technologies that blur the lines between the museum and the online environment.

Public History: Participating with the past

Helen Weinstein, Head of Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past

The boom in the ‘participatory past’ has seen history programmes develop along four narratives lines. The presenter-led narrative (which tends to appeals to older men), the drama recreation (which skews the demographics towards women), the reality show (which can bring in families) and the emotional beat, which combines elements of all three. Programmes like Who do you think you are?, move between emotional highs and lows and use the notion of a celebrity’s ‘journey’ to attract mass audiences. Often the narrative structures derive from the teachings of Hollywood ‘guru’ Robert McKee. Future developments will make more of the interplay between formats and encourage viewers to pursue their interests elsewhere.

Roger Lewry, Archives Liaison Officer, Federation of Family History Societies

Interest in family history often begins with curiosity about family stories or characters. While certification, census records, parish records, wills, newspapers and record offices are crucial, museums can add an extra dimension by rooting family stories in local history or by locating past experiences in the tools and trades of the period. Museums can vividly bring to life the challenges and experiences faced by our ancestors.

John Wood, Head of Training & Skills Development, The National Archives

There are two historic problems with widening access at the National Archives: the government documents stored by the Archive are only on loan from government departments;  and all the information is stored according to the individual filing systems of the various government departments. The increased visibility and popularity of family history has raised expectations, online access has increased demand for physical access – the Archive has had to respond by building research trails that guide the public and by retraining staff and re-writing advisory documents that are tailored to how the public search for information rather than how the state files it.

Andrew Chitty, Managing Director, Illumina Digital 

The value in film archives lies not in the films themselves, but in what the public of the present find fascinating about those films. To ensure participation, archives must also be catalogued in a way that interests the audience – for the London Recut project his meant organising the archive clips by place and by themes. Television can provide a signpost to other more detailed forms of knowledge and encourage participation in ongoing public research.

Provocation - The ‘do’s and don’ts” when collaborating with visitors and amateurs’

Nina Simon, Experience Designer, Museum 2.0

Visitor participation in museum events is usually more weighted towards ‘contribution’ and even full co-curation projects tend to demand that large amounts of resources are focused on small groups of people. To extend the benefits of this collaboration with the public, museums need to clearly state what they need and then assign participants a distinct role which treats them, and the contribution they make, seriously rather than just as consumers. Successful co-curation needs the museum to be clear on both its goals and the ways in which the museum would be improved by working more directly with the public.

End of Day Discussion:
Key questions that arose during the day include:

The distinctions between a process-orientated practice of co-curation that marks a shift in the relationship between the museum and its public, or co-curation as an activity that is focused on a distinct material end. There’s an emphasis on the demarcation and articulation of the roles that the Museum and its audience are expected to play. There has also the question of how to amplify the effects of co-curation. The museumness of museums is important – narratives that popularise popular history on television may not be effective if translated into ‘bricks and mortar’. Conversely, as well as utilising the strengths of the building, there may also be scope for utilising the strengths of the museum’s objects by taking them out of the museum and placing them into new contexts. ‘The value of archives is what people find interesting about them.’