Exploring ideas and engaging in conversation
by columnist Catherine Sigmond
Finally, Google has brought its widely acclaimed Art Project to science museums… sort of.
Lately, I’ve been indulging my penchant for travel by exploring the world through Google Street View (did you know you can tour the Galapagos?!).
So when I read about how Google Street View had recently released a virtual tour of the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto I was pretty intrigued.
by columnist Madeline Karp
There is a trend here in Philadelphia that I think you should know about.
It’s called “Boy-lesque” and it combines burlesque dancing – an artistically-minded nude show – with boys. You could call it male stripping…but that’s not exactly accurate. It’s more about pushing the audience past their comfort zone than the sex. It forces you to talk about objectification, and to think about gender, and consider what it is, exactly, that makes you so squeamish about naked people. (After all, we’re all naked under our clothes, right?)
The thing is, classic burlesque dancing has become passé in the age of HBO and Fifty Shades of Grey. It has lately been repurposed to empower women and promote positive body image. It could be used to talk about serious issues, but it’s hard to shock someone into discussion when the shock of seeing mostly naked women in public has all but worn off.
by Cira Louise Brown
Over the past few months, I have been working to develop an exhibition catalog from an exhibit currently on display. The exhibition explores the topic of time from various cultural, scientific and mechanical standpoints, and uses artifacts from a variety of institutions and collections. I find the show to be very successful in its ambitions, and the content has even been integrated into a college class. Given that it’s a temporary exhibition, lasting less than a year, there was a need to preserve the content in the form of a catalog, in both eBook and iBook formats. I was tasks with laying out the book, using the existing style of exhibition.
As with so many design projects such as these, the task seemed straightforward enough. The exhibit content was done, photography of the objects was mostly completed, and the design standards had already been decided upon. Yet translating an exhibit into a book remains a tricky task.
So, in my brief foray into exhibition catalogs, here’s a little list of what I’ve learned. Continue reading
by Tegan Kehoe
This fall, the museum where I work is having an exterior restoration project done, and this means the building will be enveloped by scaffolding with dark mesh covers. The gallery, which is largely lit by natural light, will be considerably dimmer. After a staff meeting that included a lot of joking around about lending out headlamps in admissions, a few of us realized that now would be a great time to create large print exhibit guides, which had been in the back of our minds for a while. I volunteered to spearhead the effort.
I set about looking for resources and examples to make the guides as useful as possible. In doing so, I learned that there are few universally-accepted standards in this area. In addition to making the font large, it is important to print on opaque, non-glossy paper, to minimize special formatting, and to use a clear and readable font, but often, I found I just had to read what many different groups had to say and choose what seemed to make the most sense for this particular project. I wish we had a focus group of testers, but it doesn’t look like that will happen. Continue reading
by columnist Kacie Rice
The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.
One of my favorite things to do is when I travel is to see new museums, and I and a friend recently had a chance to visit Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), one of North America’s major natural history and anthropology museums. Founded in 1912, the museum serves over one million visitors a year and acts as Canada’s largest field research institution. ROM has a much more encyclopedic collection than we might expect of a typical natural history museum in the United States, more closely following the European model of the “cabinet of curiosity” than the American system of division between subject areas. In addition to dinosaurs, minerals, stuffed animals, and anthropology collections, the museum also houses arts from around the world and artifacts from Canadian history. The ROM’s collections are almost impossible to visit in a single day: in four hours, we weren’t even able to see half of the permanent exhibits – but what we did see was terrific! Continue reading
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