Description: The Fitchburg Art Museum is seeking a Collection Management Intern for Fall 2018 (September 4 – December 20). The Intern will assist the Collection Manager in overseeing the care of FAM’s collection of over 5,500 works of art including sculpture, painting, prints, drawings, and …
The International African American Museum, a museum planned to trace African-American history in America from slavery to today, has hired a rapid response educator to help create exhibits in response to current events. Brenda Tindal had previously done this work at the Levine Museum in …
Fellow millennial colleagues, get ready: the Color Factory is opening in New York next month. This interactive and immersive exhibition features site-specific palette installations, including a massive bright yellow ball pit that participants can jump into, a room comprised entirely of confetti, and a larger than life size Lite Bright wall. Sound familiar? We have all seen these installations online or on our feeds. When the Color Factory first opened in San Francisco last year, it took the internet by storm, becoming an especially popular platform for colorful Instagram posts.
As an art historian and museum studies student, I’m somewhat uneasy about this latest museum fad: the pop-up museum. These “museums,” such as the Museum of Ice Cream, Candytopia, and 29Rooms strategically provide multi-sensory experiences that are often geared towards a younger audience constituency. However, with their commercial and social media appeal, instant entertainment, competitive ticket availabilities, and expensive entrance fees (with some tickets as high as $38 per person), I have to wonder if this pop culture fad is threatening, or helping, the integrity of art museums. Where museums were once thought of as a place of quiet respite and serious contemplation of the art and information available, many museums are now social gathering hubs for millennials, as a place to go to get that perfect Instagram shot. Are the days of “cultivating a broad public for high art” gone? Can we even compare the pop-up museum with other museum institutions?
Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Met, has argued that quick turnover rates for such exhibitions, while fantastic for a museum’s finances, is sacrificing connoisseurship and education. This is especially true of hyped-up immersive installations; many people pay for the experience, and not to understand the idea behind the artwork- and that is okay. Pop-up exhibitions and installations are still succeeding in bringing in more visitors, many of whom may not have visited in the first place.
The high prices of these installations themselves are a problem. For instance, when the immersive Rain Room experience was at LACMA in 2015, tickets completely sold out in just days. With its widespread, if slightly pervasive, advertising, and the prevalence of the installation on social media, everyone was trying to get their hands on a ticket. However, upon inquiry with a staff member, I discovered I could receive a coveted ticket by simply “signing up for a museum membership for $110.” This was a proposal I declined, not only for the price, but also for the rather unethical nature of the offer. It didn’t sit right with me that those who were able to afford the membership fee would gain immediate access to this in-demand experience, while others, like students, would either have to wait in standby lines or pass up the experience altogether.
Similarly, the Cleveland Museum of Art is currently showing Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, an immersive environment installation like the Rain Room. Although entrance to the Museum’s collections is free, tickets to this experience are expensive, at $30 per person, and almost inaccessible, considering the speed in which they sell out. This is another disheartening example of the threat to the integrity of art museums. It appears that individuals are traveling to the Cleveland Museum of Art in mass numbers to wait in line for hours for this experience, rather than taking the same amount of time to enjoy the Kara Walkers’, Mark Rothkos’, and Paul Cézannes’ all available to view in the adjacent galleries. I hope that visitors to these popular installations also take the time to visit the other collections on site after their three-to-five minute immersive and selfie experience is complete.
Moreover, ‘Instagramable’ exhibitions do not always align with the museum’s mission, and in fact the “museum’s basic mission can be directly contradicted by shoddiness of product,” as Montebello has observed. I contend that LACMA had its financial interests in mind over that of the public when they installed the Rain Room. LACMA’s mission statement is “To serve the public through the collection, conservation, exhibition, and interpretation of significant works of art from a broad range of cultures and historical periods, and through the translation of these collections into meaningful educational, aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural experiences for the widest array of audiences.” I will agree that the Rain Room experience achieved the “aesthetic experience” section of its mission, but what about the “educational, intellectual, and cultural experiences to the widest array of audiences?” Ultimately, it appears that a cultivation of commercial experiences, to the detriment of the inherently scholarly nature of some museums, is the latest threat to an art museum’s integrity.
The Fitchburg Art Museum is seeking enthusiastic volunteers to help with kids’ art projects and a Treasure Hunt during its Free Fun Friday event on Friday, July 27th, 2018. This is a great opportunity to see a large community event in action and be a part of …
DeCordova’s Learning and Engagement Department is seeking an enthusiastic, motivated graduate or college (juniors and seniors only) student for assistance in researching and developing exhibition-related programming for Fall 2018. Responsibilities will vary, but may include: researching artists and exhibition-related content, assisting in the development and …
Is it via attendance or admissions fees? The size of the collection or the amount of funding it receives? By almost any measure, the Philadelphia History Museum has not proved its worth, for it shut down indefinitely at the end of June.
The museum, which is designated in the city charter to be the repository for artifacts relevant to the Philadelphia’s history, closed last month after a significant reduction in funding from the city. Talks to partner with other institutions, most recently with Temple University, fell through. For at least the next year, the museum will be closed and the collection will be reviewed with an eye toward figuring out a new direction for the museum to take. It is unclear if that direction will include re-opening to the public.
The reduction in funding was the hiatus-blow for the organization, but thriving museums rarely experience cuts like this. Attendance was low, despite efforts to revitalize the museum, including a recent renovation in 2012. The museum had also collaborated last year to create a new curriculum for Philadelphia public schools that centered the life of free Black resident, Octavius V. Catto. Shot by two white men who were never convicted for their crime while urging citizens to vote on Election Day, the exhibit sought to tell an important story with relevance to today. This is a moment in America that begs for interesting and relevant retellings of history, and Catto’s story certainly fits the bill. But it is hard to demonstrate relevance if no one seeks it out.
This is not an admonishment to the people of Philadelphia for not supporting their museum. Nor is it a diagnosis of what went wrong, for this blog does not have insight into the marketing plan, visitorship goal, or budget needed to make the Philadelphia History Museum a world-class institution, or at least, a city-class one. Rather, it is a recognition that a lot of museums in the United States are missing the mark when it comes to attracting audiences and money, despite possessing compelling stories.
There are many reasons why this is happening, but in thinking about the Philadelphia History Museum, it is worth pointing out that Philadelphia’s population is less than 50% white. As we have discussed previously on this blog, museums are not neutral spaces. Museum audiences tend to skew heavily white and affluent and often potential local visitors are alienated from spaces that don’t strive to create content of and with the surrounding community. There are museums that have bucked this demographic trend. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA has tripled its non-white visitors in recent years, to the point that the museum’s visitors are starting to resemble the city’s racial makeup. They have done this with a mixture of initiatives that included highlighting artists of color within their collection, reaching out to local potential visitors in multiple languages, diversifying docents, and reassessing ticket prices. Other museums have also looked into their collections to find ways to create new relevance for existing content.
Hopefully the Philadelphia History Museum’s assessment will include considerations about community outreach, public programs, and exhibition content and interpretation, as well as the price of admission (at closing time, the adult admission was $10, in a city where the median income is only $41k/year, well below the national median).
The Philadelphia History Museum is the designated keeper of historical objects for the city of Philadelphia. Although it’s archive remains intact for now, it is not a library. Part of a museum’s mission is to take those objects and documents and interpret them for the public, helping the citizens of the city remember and understand their history. This requires support and support includes money. While it is perfectly acceptable and necessary to demand that museums present innovative exhibits and engage with audiences in current fashion, it is also necessary to provide the support that those museums need to be good and useful and interesting institutions. Art and history and culture require patronage, to see the work through periods of devaluation and maintain these common goods for all.
Our best museums are building collaborative experiences that decenter authority, tell important stories from their collections, and engage with local populations to create community spaces that are compelling, inclusive, representational – and thriving. Our best cities deserve nothing less.