#MuseumsRespondtoFerguson

Today I join colleagues across the country in calling for American museums to engage with their communities in the difficult but essential work of racial justice and equality. Please read and circulate our group statement (below) as you see fit. This has everything to do with city museums. Urban structures of segregation and discrimination have long been major contributors to the complex system of racial inequity that continues to smother so many Americans. And the history of protest is inextricably linked to the history of cities—not just in this country and not just this issue, but all over the world and addressing the broadest spectrum of social and political problems. City museums can document protests by their citizens, use urban history (and urban sociology, politics, and economics) to shed light on complicated racial systems, provide a venue for contemporary urban artists who ask hard questions, convene public discussions, and support community building and civic engagement in the service of racial equality. Across the United States people are turning out on city streets to seek change. They need cultural institutions that care. Please find ways to let them know you are listening. And now for the statement:

Joint Statement from Museum Bloggers and Colleagues on Ferguson and Related Events

The recent series of events, from Ferguson to Cleveland and New York, have created a watershed moment. Things must change. New laws and policies will help, but any movement toward greater cultural and racial understanding and communication must be supported by our country’s cultural and educational infrastructure. Museums are a part of this educational and cultural network. What should be our role(s)? Schools and other arts organizations are rising to the challenge. University law schools are hosting seminars on Ferguson. Colleges are addressing greater cultural and racial understanding in various courses. National education organizations and individual teachers are developing relevant curriculum resources, including the #FergusonSyllabus project initiated by Dr. Marcia Chatelain. Artists and arts organizations are contributing their spaces and their creative energies. And pop culture icons, from basketball players to rock stars, are making highly visible commentary with their clothes and voices.

Where do museums fit in? Some might say that only museums with specific African American collections have a role, or perhaps only museums situated in the communities where these events have occurred. As mediators of culture, all museums should commit to identifying how they can connect to relevant contemporary issues irrespective of collection, focus, or mission. We are a community of museum bloggers who write from a variety of perspectives and museum disciplines. Yet our posts contain similar phrases such as  “21st century museums,” “changing museum paradigms,” “inclusiveness,” “co-curation,” “participatory” and “the museum as forum.” We believe that strong connections should exist between museums and their communities. Forging those connections means listening and responding to those we serve and those we wish to serve. There is hardly a community in the U.S. that is untouched by the reverberations emanating from Ferguson and its aftermath. Therefore we believe that museums everywhere should get involved.

What should be our role—as institutions that claim to conduct their activities for the public benefit—in the face of ongoing struggles for greater social justice both at the local and national level? We urge museums to consider these questions by first looking within. Is there equity and diversity in your policy and practice regarding staff, volunteers, and Board members? Are staff members talking about Ferguson and the deeper issues it raises? How do these issues relate to the mission and audience of your museum? Do you have volunteers? What are they thinking and saying? How can the museum help volunteers and partners address their own questions about race, violence, and community? We urge museums to look to their communities. Are there civic organizations in your area that are hosting conversations? Could you offer your auditorium as a meeting place? Could your director or other senior staff join local initiatives on this topic? If your museum has not until now been involved in community discussions, you may be met at first with suspicion as to your intentions. But now is a great time to start being involved. Join with your community in addressing these issues. Museums may offer a unique range of resources and support to civic groups that are hoping to organize workshops or public conversations. Museums may want to use this moment not only to “respond” but also to “invest” in conversations and partnerships that call out inequity and racism and commit to positive change.

We invite you to join us in amplifying this statement. As of now, only the Association of African American Museums has issued a formal statement about the larger issues related to Ferguson, Cleveland and Staten Island. We believe that the silence of other museum organizations sends a message that these issues are the concern only of African Americans and African American Museums. We know that this is not the case. This is a concern of all Americans. We are seeing in a variety of media—blogs, public statements, and conversations on Twitter and Facebook—that colleagues of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are concerned and are seeking guidance and dialogue in understanding the role of museums regarding these troubling events. We hope that organizations such as the American Alliance of Museums; the Association of Science-Technology Centers; the Association of Children’s Museums; the American Association for State and Local History and others, will join us in acknowledging the connections between our institutions and the social justice issues highlighted by Ferguson and related events. You can join us by...

• Posting and sharing this statement on your organization’s website or social media

• Contributing to and following the Twitter tag #museumsrespondtoFerguson which is growing daily

• Checking out Art Museum Teaching which has a regularly updated resource, Teaching #Ferguson: Connecting with Resources

• Sharing additional resources in the comments

• Asking your professional organization to respond

• Checking out the programs at The Missouri History Museum. It has held programs related to Ferguson since August and is planning more for 2015.

• Looking at the website for International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. They are developing information on how to conduct community conversations on race.

Participating Bloggers and Colleagues:
Gretchen Jennings, Museum Commons
Aletheia Wittman and Rose Paquet Kinsley, The Incluseum
Aleia Brown, AleiaBrown.org
Steven Lubar, On Public Humanities
Mike Murawski, Art Museum Teaching
Linda Norris, The Uncataloged Museum
Paul Orselli  ExhibiTricks: A Museum/Exhibit/Design Blog
Ed Rodley, Thinking About Museums
Adrianne Russell, Cabinet of Curiosities
Nina Simon, Museum 2.0
Rainey Tisdale, CityStories
Jeanne Vergeront  Museum Notes

What My Favorite Meteorologist Has to Do with City Museums

For the first time in my life I have found a weather forecaster who actually matters to me. His name is David Epstein, and I am a big fan of his blog Weather Wisdom on boston.com. So are many of my local friends. Why do I care so much about David Epstein? Because he is the first meteorologist I have encountered who not only delivers the forecast, but then truly explains how it is going to affect my life. Take his post yesterday about the impending Hurricane Arthur. He was precise and thorough in describing exactly where and when to expect significant weather across southeastern Massachusetts. But more importantly, he told me what I needed to know to effectively adjust my plans for the July 4 holiday weekend. Yesterday afternoon many Bostonians were still trying to figure out whether it would be okay to attend last night's outdoor Boston Pops concert at the Hatch Shell, a local Fourth of July tradition. Knowing it would be on our minds, Epstein made sure to advise us that as long as we cleared out of the Esplanade as soon as the concert ended, we should be able to avoid any significant downpours. He also knew many Bostonians would be thinking about today's Red Sox game, so he told us what to expect there too: it would probably get cancelled, and if wasn't then count on getting soaked (eventually it did get postponed until Saturday). Indeed, he advised that any outdoor events for this afternoon and evening would get cancelled if they hadn't been already. He even weighed in on flight delays. And finally, he told us it would all clear out for a beautiful Saturday and Sunday: dry, not too hot, and great for all outdoor activities except ocean swimming (currents will still be strong). Which lets me know definitively: Pops but not Sox; no to my friend's outdoor picnic this afternoon but yes to my other friend's indoor party tonight; and Saturday's farmer's market—as well as brunch afterward on the patio—will be glorious. Weekend planned. All last winter, whenever snow was predicted in my city, David Epstein told me whether to head out early, on time, or late—or to skip going out altogether. He also gave me shoveling advice: was it going to be the kind of light, powdery snow where we can save the shoveling til the next morning, or a wet, heavy snow that means we need to shovel every 2 hours or risk throwing our backs out. Because some storms bring down trees on power lines and others don't, he told me which one I would be dealing with so I'd know whether it was worth my time to get out the flashlights and fully charge devices. And all year long he has been telling me what the weather is going to mean for my yard—when to plant, when to water, when to protect from frost. Other forecasts simply don't provide this context. They give me some information, and then it's up to me to interpret how this information is going to affect me. Therefore they are interchangeable. They come and go, from one weather service or another, hovering right at the line of mediocrity where they're neither remarkably bad nor remarkably good; they just are. But not David Epstein's forecasts. He understands his audience's needs. He knows right now we're thinking about the holiday weekend, and on Monday morning we'll be thinking about a whole different set of concerns, and we'll always be thinking about the Red Sox. He understands that the whole reason to have a forecast in the first place is so people can apply it to their daily lives, and so he helps me make good decisions. For this reason, I am loyal to David Epstein. I recommend him to everyone I know. If boston.com tried to drop him I would care; I would fight for him. And I suspect I'm not the only one.

So what does David Epstein have to do with city museums? The shift that he has made in terms of delivering a useful forecast is the same shift that city museums need to make in delivering useful content. Most city museums think of themselves first and foremost as history museums, dealing with things that happen in the past. But just as it's not enough to get the forecast right but leave your audience on their own to apply it, it's not enough to get the history right without explaining what it has to do with everyday lives right now. For city museum workers, this means paying attention to what's going on in your city—following local news and social media, talking to fellow residents—and then looking for opportunities to make connections between past and present. If your city is in the midst of a particularly intense local election, dig up some stories that help put it in context. If it's the first day of spring and everyone has turned out on the street with bare arms and legs for that collective joy that only the first day of spring can elicit, find some photos in your archive of spring 50 years ago and post them on your social media channels. Moreover, your content doesn't have to be historical to be meaningful and mission-driven for city residents; holding a town hall forum about an important local issue or investigating the here and now in urban neighborhoods is also compelling work for city museums. Anticipating audience needs and delivering content that applies to everyday lives right now is how city museums build loyal fans who will recommend the museum to friends and neighbors, and fight for the museum when it's threatened. It's how city museums rise above mediocrity to become institutions that matter. 

So Happy Together

Something came across my desktop today that I had to share. It touches on everything I care about: the power of story, the way that people inhabit and experience cities, museums, creative practice, how objects can be reframed to shine a spotlight on their meaning and emotion, and simple human kindness. In this case the story in question is that of Loes Veenstra, the city is Rotterdam, the museum is Museum Rotterdam, the creative practice is knitting, the objects are sweaters—many, many sweaters—and the kindness comes from neighbors.Loes Veenstra spent the last 60 years compulsively knitting sweaters, until she had amassed 550 of them. They were never worn—each time she finished one she would put it in a box in her apartment and start another. Last year folks from Museum Rotterdam discovered her collection and asked if they could exhibit it as part of a project on her neighborhood, Carnisse. Then artist Christien Meindertsma got involved, and low and behold one day this happened, on the street outside Veenstra's home:

I've seen photos online of the exhibition of the sweaters, and that's beautiful too—a sea of colorful forms, suspended from the ceiling like a sculptural installation. But this video—it's something different, something much more. First, the sweaters are worn. Standard museum practice is that nobody gets to touch the objects—they must be protected and preserved. But see what happens when these sweaters are put on bodies and come to life: they are human kindness animated. And second, the sweaters come to life not in the exhibition gallery but on a residential street. In this context—in this sense of place—they become an instrument of community.I think a lot about the hyperlocal experience—what it means to know every nook and cranny of a five-block square, how each of us is an informal historian, logging the small changes that happen each day in our neighborhoods. We come to learn a lot about our neighbors, and on the other hand, there is always more to learn. I am imagining how this flash mob has changed the hyperlocal history of Carnissestraat—not just for Loes Veenstra but for all her neighbors who participated in and witnessed it. And I am imagining what it would be like if museums' treatment of objects were always this powerful. Imagine me and you, so happy together.

Our Collective Memory

All week I have been trying to look at the events unfolding here in Boston through the lens of city museums. Boston doesn’t have a proper city museum. If Boston did have a proper city museum, I would’ve wanted it this week to open wide its doors to the city for solace and reflection (many existing museums in Boston did in fact do so) and to serve as a place for civic dialogue while Bostonians struggled to understand and respond to the bombings, individually and collectively. I would’ve wanted it to collect and document the material culture of this event, and I would’ve wanted it to actively participate in city-wide efforts to interpret and memorialize the bombings.Museum workers are not first responders—let’s be clear about that. But they are part of the second and third and fourth waves. They are public servants, and in times of crisis their job is to collect and document, tell the story, keep the memory, and help the public make meaning of it all. Boston doesn’t have a city museum to do that work right now. I am writing this post to call attention to what we are missing without one, and also to do my part as an urban public historian to capture and frame the details of what Bostonians experienced this week. Right now I’m not so concerned about the facts and timeline—plenty of people are recording and analyzing the chain of events. Rather I care about ordinary Bostonians: what they felt and expressed, and how they are integrating the bombings into their own personal narratives of the city.As most of you know by now (if you didn’t know already), Marathon Monday always takes place on Patriots’ Day, which is a state holiday that commemorates the Battle of Lexington and Concord and the start of the American Revolution. It also launches April school vacation week and serves as Boston’s unofficial first day of spring. Every year on Marathon Monday thousands of Bostonians turn out to support and cheer on the runners along the course. And if they aren’t at the marathon, they’re at the Red Sox game or at gatherings of family and friends all over the city. For all these reasons Boston’s collective emotional barometer was particularly high on April 15 just before it sunk so precipitously.As Bostonians tried to make sense of the bombings this week they turned to history for signs of past resilience: the city that withstood the Siege of Boston and “invented America,” the city that survived the Molasses Flood and the Big Dig. They turned to the brand Boston projects to the world to reassure themselves about the city’s essential character: John Winthrop’s city upon a hill, with one of the best medical communities in the country; a city that welcomes thousands of people from all over the world each year to its universities. They turned to Boston’s popular culture—Dirty Water, Cheers, Good Will Hunting—to express their love and fidelity. And they turned to Boston’s sports teams—the closest thing we have to urban warriors in 2013—for signs of continuity and strength. As they did so, Bostonians were not all on the same page about what constitutes an appropriate level of tolerance, empathy, or law and order; they were not all on the same page about how to mourn and when to get back to business as usual.Every urban resident carries a mental map of their city inside their head. It’s how they navigate on a daily basis, and it’s layered with personal memories and landmarks. Most Bostonians had to look up Norfolk Street in Cambridge and Franklin Street in Watertown on Friday during the manhunt for suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. No one had to look up the finish line stretch of Boylston Street where the bombings took place; it’s on every Bostonian’s mental map. They could instantly reel off the landmarks on those two blocks: the Copley Green Line station, Boston Public Library, Old South Church, the Lenox Hotel, Lord & Taylor, Marathon Sports. They could instantly recall years of personal memories—some mundane, some poignant—that were created there.What a city museum would understand better than anyone else is that the bombings tore a hole in our mental maps. On Saturday afternoon I went down to the bombing site to try to get a handle on the exact nature of that hole. I took the Orange Line to Back Bay Station, walked up to the south side of Copley Square, and then skirted the southern and eastern edge of the secured crime scene perimeter. On one hand what I observed was comfortingly the same as always. The flower stall outside Back Bay Station was selling spring tulips in every color imaginable. The doormen at the Copley Plaza were at their post, greeting guests in tuxedos and evening gowns arriving for a wedding. Runners were running; college students were turning up for a Saturday night out on the town. The landmarks themselves—the library, the churches, the Hancock Tower, were all still there. On the other hand it was disturbingly, radically different. Even after the barricades are gone and the city returns to some version of normal, we need to remember that radical difference.Every flag I saw was at half mast. Wolf Blitzer and a half-dozen TV journalists were broadcasting cheek-by-jowl on the corner outside the Copley Place Westin, lights blazing and TV trucks humming. Across the street from the news teams, roughly eight men in camouflage and bullet-proof vests, along with several armored jeeps, guarded the barricade at the southwest corner of Copley Square. By that point, with the threat to the city subsiding, they were spending most of their time making small talk with passersby, posing for pictures, and giving directions. Lots and lots of directions—many pedestrians were having trouble figuring out how to get where they were going without crossing Copley Square. A Boston traffic cop was also there directing cars that were having similar difficulty navigating around the hole in the city.I walked east toward the corner of Clarendon and St James, where the lawn of Trinity Church was still strewn with plastic cups and marathon debris. No one had gotten around to removing the Family Meeting Area signs attached to the lampposts, one for each letter of the alphabet, that on Marathon Day give runners a way of finding their loved ones in the finish line crowd. At Boylston and Berkeley I stopped at the makeshift memorial and watched people pay their respects. Many of the items that had been placed there were still wet from that morning’s rain. Two older men were tending the memorial; one of them gave single yellow roses to kids in the crowd so they could lay them near the three crosses at the center of the memorial. Five or six therapy dogs were on hand and getting lots of attention.I caught the Green Line at Arlington Station, heading outbound to a friend’s birthday party in Newton Centre. As the digital announcement system in my subway car flashed Entering Copley, we rode through but did not stop at Copley Station. The station was empty and dark except for a few dim security lights, still closed as part of the crime scene.On Thursday night I talked with the students in my material culture course about the bombings and I asked them what they thought should be collected and preserved in order to capture the experience of Boston this week. With a few additional objects added in by me, their ideas included:

• Marathon medals, bib numbers, space blankets, and yellow runner bags
• The international flags from the finish line
• Yellow Boston Police and BAA Physician vests, marathon volunteer jackets, hospital equipment
• Bill Iffrig‘s orange singlet
• Carlos Arredondo's bloodied American flag
• Martin Richard’s “No more hurting people. Peace” poster
• Signs and t-shirts of support—local, national, and international
• Slain MIT police officer Sean Collier’s uniform
• The makeshift memorial at Boylston and Berkeley
• Red Sox and Bruins memorial jerseys
• Mayor Tom Menino’s hospital bracelet
• The technology of the police investigation
• The recovered lid from the pressure cooker bomb
• The covered boat on Franklin Street in Watertown where suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hid on Friday
• Photographs, video, news and social media feeds, oral histories, statements by public officials, luminaries, and celebrities
• The soundscape of the week: the typical happy sounds of the marathon (the starting gun, cheering spectators, cowbells) giving way to the explosion and confusion at the finish line; ambulances and helicopters, gunshots and house-to-house searches; and finally cheers of relief and gratitude as the second suspect was taken into custody

And this has been my growing concern throughout the week: that in the absence of a proper city museum, Boston is not prepared to document and collect this story. There is no museum in the city that has a mandate to collect contemporary Boston history. There are several institutions that will likely preserve paper records and photographs, but objects—particularly a collection of this scale—are another matter. I am reaching out to local colleagues to find out if efforts are underway that I just don’t know about yet, and if not, to see if something might be done.I want to end by urging you to read a piece from today’s Boston Globe Ideas section by Stephen Heuser titled Vulnerability in an Open City. If I were planning an exhibition about the marathon bombings for a Boston city museum, this essay would be my compass. Heuser sets out to make larger points about social capital, openness, and risk that apply to any city, but he does it against the backdrop of Boston. In the process he captures in vivid detail the experience of everyday Bostonians this week. In his telling, we see the moral of this story and a value every city museum should hold: “cities bring us together in spite of ourselves.”

Objects in the Wild

I am traveling in Italy at the moment, and earlier this week I had an opportunity to visit the new Museum of the History of Bologna, which opened in January of this year. It's housed in the former palace of the Pepoli family, and it's part of a larger project, Genus Bononiae, initiated by the Carisbo Foundation to restore and link together eight cultural sites in Bologna. The Museum of the History of Bologna is a particularly interesting city museum for several reasons, one of which is that it's a distinct departure from the "museo civico" model found in so many Italian cities. At some point I need to write a proper blog post about my experience there. But as is often the case when I visit for the first time a museum I really like, the seed of a new idea is planted in my head and I feel compelled to spend my post sharing that instead.The idea I had in Bologna was sparked by a gallery at the city museum called "Your Museum" (pictured above). Its goal is to involve Bologna residents by inviting them to bring their own objects to be exhibited in the museum. Massimo Negri, the museum's scientific director (i.e. chief content developer), told me he had originally hoped this gallery would be much bigger, with a system where people could bring in their objects and on the spot have them added to the display. Unfortunately, due to space and logistical constraints, he had to settle for the iteration I saw.Many museums are now interested in public participation, and they have been experimenting with the best ways to do it; Your Museum in Bologna is one example. At the same time, we also acknowledge that the museum collections we have inherited, formed in previous centuries, were assembled haphazardly, with major gaps in the stories they can tell. They leave out large groups of people and do not adequately represent the breadth of our history and culture. In short, the objects that have made their way into our museum collections represent only a tiny fraction of our entire material heritage. I've been thinking about these challenges a lot recently, as have many of you, I'm sure. I've also been thinking a lot about my recent visit to the Museu da Maré, a community museum in a favela in Rio de Janeiro. Museu da Maré has a much more flexible collections policy than museums are normally used to: a member of the community can donate an object to the museum and then, if later he or she wants it back, the museum gives it back. Community members might also technically give the museum an object but still keep it in their home. I have heard that the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa has a similar policy. Mix all of these concepts together and you end up with my Idea du Jour:Can a city museum catalog the material life of its city without actually acquiring and owning it? Imagine a zoo that collects animals from the wild and puts them together in cages. Currently, our museums are like zoos. Now imagine a biologist who tracks and studies animals, but never takes them out of the wild. We have sophisticated RFID tags and we have extensive object database software. Why not conduct a material culture census, or inventory, of a city, but not actually collect anything?This may seem like a lot of work for nothing. I would have said that too five years ago, but the museum landscape has changed enough that I think we could start to see the potential. There are so many opportunities here for public participation. Residents can catalog their own objects, with or without the help of a curator. People can "like" the objects they are particularly drawn to, or contribute additional information about objects posted by other people. Curators can put out a call for certain gaps in the "collection" that need to be filled. But perhaps also a resident can recommend that her neighbor's object be added to the collection because it has a great story. And perhaps if an object gets many, many likes, it is then recommended for physical acquisition by the museum (subject to the owner's approval, of course), a kind of crowdsourced method of determining which artifacts are most important to preserve, combined with some gentle community pressure for public ownership of them. Individuals could also recommend a neighbor's object for exhibition at the museum, and so on. The role of the museum curator, then, is to highlight really interesting objects, monitor and improve accuracy, draw connections, and start conversations.Because, as you know, I am obsessed with geotagging objects, I think it would be great to have a mapping component where you can see all these objects existing out in real space, out in "the wild," across the city. Although that may present a security risk that could serve as a deterrent to community members. If people know you have special things in your home then maybe they want to steal them. (And who knows what other practical considerations this idea raises since I'm really just thinking it off the top of my head.) On the other hand, many objects no longer live in the place where they had the most geographic meaning, so the tags on the map don't necessarily have to represent current location, just location of meaning. Also, it would be easy enough to hide the identity of object owners so that only the museum has personal contact information.But wouldn't it be interesting to see what happens when the material culture of a place is collectively exposed in this way, regardless of whether it is owned privately or publicly? Would it make us rethink what cultural heritage means, and perhaps assume a different kind of shared responsibility? I wonder if anyone out there has already experimented with this concept--if so chime in and let me know. Otherwise, let's make it happen somewhere as a pilot project.

#CitizenCurators

As the London Olympics draw to a close, I want to call attention to a lovely project by Museum of London (partnering with the University of Westminster). It's called #CitizenCurators and it aims to document the life of everyday London residents during the Olympic Games. The museum appointed 18 official citizen curators, chosen to be representative of the makeup of the city. But also, anyone who tweeted with the hashtag #CitizenCurator will have their tweets archived by the museum. An edited version of each day's tweets are posted on Storify.I browsed the tweets and found a mixture of interesting scenes captured on the street (like the lovely Jamaica fan above), Olympic material culture (like these Union Jack hijabs; the coordinators specifically asked citizen curators to document objects), reports on Londoners' experiences watching events or trying to get tickets, and snarky comments or complaints from a local point of view ("Wenlock pens people. Pens. How? Why? What have we done to deserve this?").It's so important that the Museum of London, as collector and preserver of the city's history, chose to turn its Olympic attention to everyday residents. So often the city archives of such major events contain a whitewashed, top-down version of history. But this project represents a turn to a much more participatory and granulated historical record.I'm reminded of the coda to the last chapter of Carol Kammen's On Doing Local History. She writes about the importance of documenting your place in the present, while it is still fresh. Kammen suggests a more analog methodology, mind you, but the spirit is the same as #citizencurators. She includes a three-page list of phenomena one might want to document, and enlist other locals in documenting, about their city or town. Here are a few of my favorites: local signs of the change of seasons; routines of place: rush hours, quiet times; those out of sight: who is not seen; and what sits at the curb for the garbage collector. Expect to see more like this in the years to come.

Disruptive Objects, on the Streets

You know how I'm obsessed with geotagging objects, right? We lost a lot of meaning when we separated artifacts from their places of origin in order to assemble our museum collections—especially in the case of our local history collections—and geotagging gives us a chance to get some of that meaning back. I preach about this concept to anyone who will listen, and I've even played around with pinning some objects from New-York Historical Society's collection to the Google Map in historypin (until historypin told me to stop because they want people to stick to photographs).This evening I had a conversation with Chris Chelberg, a library science grad student I met back in May at THATCamp Museums NYC. We were following up on a session Chris led at THATCamp about disruption theory, Clayton Christensen's argument from the business world that the real threat to established companies comes not from their conventional competitors—the companies selling the same product they are—but from products brand new to the market that offer a "good enough" solution to fill the consumer need at a much cheaper price. At first these new products are so shoddy that the established companies don't pay any attention to them, but eventually they improve to the point where they take off, and by then it's too late to do anything about it. Christensen cites a number of real world examples, the most interesting of which (to me at least) is that online degree programs like University of Phoenix have the potential to disrupt universities like Harvard and Yale: online learning might seem like no match for such prestigious schools now, but it's getting more and more sophisticated with time, and it fills the need for a credential at a fraction of the cost. If disruption theory is new to you and you want to get caught up, you can read Christensen's books, or I recommend this short and sweet New Yorker article by Larissa MacFarquhar.Chris and I were talking about potential disruptions to museums; can we anticipate them and how they will affect our work? One of the big challenges museums face is the burden of caring for their collections. This is an essential function of museums, mind you, but it is so expensive that it leaves us particularly vulnerable to disruptions from cheaper, more flexible sources. We talked about the things that museums think are poor quality but that the general public often thinks are good enough, and cheaper: popular historical fiction, video games, anything labeled edutainment. Community-curated exhibitions. Pop-up projects. Reproductions.This last one elicited the most interesting conversation. Right now, reproductions are no match for the real thing, and museums hold tight to the notion that authenticity is their trump card. I firmly believe this myself; In fact I wrote about authentic objects in History News last year. But maybe it's just that reproductions are no match for the real thing yet. Is it possible that in 5-10 years they will be good enough? Are you following what's happening with 3-D printers these days?What Chris and I came up with is that maybe 3-D printing, as it evolves, can finally address some of the major access challenges museums have been grappling with for years. So we put everything in glass cases because we don't want visitors handling and stealing our precious artifacts. But who cares what happens to the 3-D reproductions? Let them get breathed on and licked and caressed to death, Velveteen Rabbit-style. Put them in a room without climate control; heck, put them outside.Which leads me back to geotagging. I would love to see a city museum take 100 of its most significant objects, partner with a 3-D printer manufacturer (or better yet, as Chris suggested, crowd-source it to the local maker community), and then install these 3-D reproductions out on the streets, where the original [authentic] objects came from. What would we learn from such an experiment? Could we own the disruption? Let me know if you want to find out.

The Power of 10 Revisited

This week while visiting friends in Maine I had an opportunity to explore this lovely little library on Hancock Point, a peninsula that juts out from the mainland, just across Frenchman Bay from Mt Desert Island and Bar Harbor. It's the kind of place where you wave at every car that passes you on the road, and you borrow from your neighbor when you're out of sugar because getting to the grocery store feels like a production. The library is only open in the summer when the population of Hancock Point swells significantly, mostly with folks whose families have been vacationing there for generations.

The summer season isn't in full swing yet; I observed some of the library's particulars myself and then my friends filled in other details. The building has the scale and feel of a house. In fact, a summer librarian lives on the 2nd floor and cooks her meals in a kitchen just off the main reading room, which has a fireplace. The library offers wi-fi (still relatively hard to come by on the Point) so it's not unusual on a sunny day to see folks sprawled out along the porch, checking their email. There's a bulletin board by the front door, which serves as a convenient place for community messages. There's a story hour for kids. There's an awesome climbing tree in the front yard. There are historic photographs of the Point on the walls. And, of course, there are the books, with emphasis on the kinds of stuff you want to read in the summer; from what I could tell, the two wings, which supplement the main reading room, are dedicated to mystery novels and children's books, respectively.

The Hancock Point Library struck me as the kind of place that works for its community: appropriate in scale, an authentic place, a 3rd place. I was telling my colleague Linda Norris about it in our weekly Skype meeting, and she made an interesting comment: why is it that so many libraries seem to have found ways to meet larger community needs (besides just the books), and so many museums have not? Libraries offer internet access, meeting space, a copy machine, a free cozy place to hang out, extended hours (the Hancock Historical Society is open 4 hours a week in the summer, compared with the library's 20+), and so much more. There are multiple reasons to visit a library, not just one.

I'm a big fan of the Project for Public Spaces' simple but compelling Power of 10 rule. I've written about the Power of 10 before on CityStories, and I also refer to it regularly when I give talks about city museums. To quote my previous blog post:

The idea is that to make a really great public place that is used regularly and cherished by many people, it needs to have at least 10 different amenities working in concert, not just one or two. And then a neighborhood needs 10 different great public places–not just one or two–to be a great neighborhood. And a city needs 10 different great neighborhoods, and so on.

In the past when I have applied the Power of 10 to museums, it has been in the context of providing at least 10 amazing objects in each exhibition or at least 10 great programs on the calendar—in other words, in relation to the core work of interpreting the collection and educating the public. But when Linda and I were talking today it occurred to both of us that the Power of 10 might also apply to the kind of amenities that museums, as public spaces, could provide for their communities, above and beyond the core collection and programming. And that in general, maybe part of our problem in trying to carve out the role of museums in 21st-century society is that we aren't meeting a Power of 10.

Linda and I spent a little time talking about cheap and easy ways to increase the number of services and amenities museums provide. Installing a wi-fi router with a guest login, if you haven't already done so, is a no-brainer—it's incredibly cheap and easy. A lot of us have cafes, definitely a plus one. Most museums have meeting rooms; only some of us make it available for everyone to use. Do you have enough outdoor space to host a farmer's market one day a week? A great place for people to walk their dogs? And what else could we come up with if we got creative? For example, the library at the Massachusetts College of Art has a hedgehog in residence this summer, and he's bringing in lots of extra MassArt community members (it turns out adorable furry creatures are an amenity).

This concept seems particularly applicable to rural communities like Hancock Point, where the museum or historic house may be one of a small group of public places, along with perhaps a town hall, post office, library, or general store. But I think you can make just as strong a case for city museums serving the public to the power of 10. City museums ignore the contemporary city and the daily life and needs of city residents at their peril. So host the community forums, the political debates, the clubs and support groups, the blood drive, and the polling place. Ask local food trucks to park outside your door on nice days. Tap into the skillshare movement. Put some comfy couches in your lobby. Come up with more than one reason to let the city in so you stand at its heart, not on its periphery.

There has certainly been plenty of ruminating on how museums can better serve their communities, and on museums as 3rd places. But the Power of 10 has gotten a lot less attention in our field. So I throw it out there once more in this new light, in case it helps us see the way forward more clearly.

The On-Air Forum

My husband Graham is a journalist who has mainly worked in public radio, for talk shows like On Point and The Takeaway. He gets dragged to a lot of city museums and I end up in a lot of conversations about the current state of news media. Usually our two fields feel very different, but every now and then we are reminded that they are actually very similar: we both work to engage and inform a public audience.He made an interesting analogy the other day about an issue that museum folks grapple with a lot: are we temples or forums? I'm going to share it with you here in case it gives you a slightly different way of understanding the nature of our current debate. To paraphrase, he said:

Most of the time history museums seem to give their visitors all the answers. It's like starting off an hour-long radio show saying, 'We already have the answers for you; here they are.' But the whole point of a public radio talk show is to say instead, 'We have a lot of questions so we're bringing in some experts to debate them, and if you call in you can debate them too.'

Do hosts like Tom Ashbrook, John Hockenberry, and Celeste Headlee provide a model for the 21st-century museum curator, facilitating conversations between experts and interested listeners/visitors? What could we borrow from public radio to improve our museums?

What I've Been Up To

I know posts have been a little thin on this blog over the past few months. One of the reasons is that I've been working on two other projects that I'm now ready to share with my CityStories readers.The first is an exhibition that came out of a fellowship I had in fall 2011 at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage (JNBC) at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. I was at JNBC to continue my research on city museums, but while I was there I also worked with five JNBC graduate students to develop an exhibition about what it means to live in Providence, drawing from the field of psychogeography for our methodology.Pyschogeography isn't exactly a household word. Loosely defined, it involves mapping abstract concepts like emotion, sensory experiences, and personal meaning, in contrast to our traditional concept of mapping physical elements—roads, landmarks,  topography. I had been grappling a lot with the disconnect between what city museums think is worth knowing and preserving about their cities, on one hand, and what city residents know and preserve as living, breathing "archives," walking around their cities each day, on the other. The exhibition was an experiment to see what it would be like to create a city collection where the emotional, sensory, and personal experiences of residents command center stage. After this project I am further convinced that city museums should be incorporating psychogeography into their ongoing work. The exhibition, You Are Here: Archiving Providence in the Present, is documented here.The second project is a little more personal, but still strongly tied to my professional practice. I've been developing a blog for my five-year-old cousin Thomas, who wants to be an explorer when he grows up. I post photos from cities I have visited as part of my research, and I challenge Thomas to figure out the location of each photo. When he solves one, he and his mom report on how he did it, which gets posted on the blog. It's called Thomas Sees the World.The blog happened organically. Thomas was working on one of Andrew Sullivan's "View from Your Window" challenges, but it was really hard. I offered to send him a few of my own photos that I had screened to make sure they contained enough visual clues. Thomas attacked these photos with an overwhelming eagerness to learn, and I was fascinated by his thought process, which almost never conformed to my expectations. After four or five of these challenges yielded such rich responses from Thomas, his mom and I decided to try a blog. We are developing a small but devoted following, and this game is bringing us all a lot of joy. I think about cities—and the differences between them—all the time, but I have never thought about them quite this way before. I am learning all sorts of new things as I look at cities through Thomas's eyes. Take a look at the blog and you'll see what I mean.

The Greatest Grid: Great for Visitors?

A few weeks ago I spent a couple of hours at the Museum of the City of New York seeing the temporary exhibition The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, which runs through April 15. I'm really glad I got down to New York for this show, because it reinforces a lot of the concepts I've been exploring on this blog, and in my research on city museums in general.I got there around 1:00 pm, and the museum was a lot busier than it had been the last time I visited in July 2011, when the main temporary exhibition was about colonial revival architecture. I had to wait in a line 20 people deep at the admission desk, and it was a good thing I arrived when I did. By the time I left at 3:00 not only had the admission line gotten longer but there was also a separate line for The Greatest Grid; the exhibition was so popular that the gallery housing it reached fire code capacity. I talked to a security guard who said it had been that crowded every weekend since the exhibition opened. At one point the exhibition curator, Hilary Ballon, showed up to do a gallery talk and had to use a microphone to be heard amidst a sea of attentive visitors.Blockbuster exhibitions happen all the time at art museums, and at a lot of science museums too, but they are rare at city history museums. Why is The Greatest Grid so popular? From what I observed during my visit, I would say that MCNY struck a chord with New Yorkers. The museum could've presented a fairly standard urban planning exhibition, filled with historic maps, and gotten a reasonable turnout. But instead a decision was made to structure the exhibition around the concept of the Manhattan street grid—why and how it was developed, and what effect it has had on the city over time. That's a concept that New Yorkers can really sink their teeth into.Anyone who lives or works in Manhattan contends with the grid on a daily basis (click here to see an excerpt from 12x155, a video installation by artist Neil Goldberg, included in the exhibition, that illustrates this point quite effectively). Not only (says the gal from Boston) is it a particularly easy system to navigate—because of the grid you always know which way is north, and how long it will take to get from one place to another—but it also has a lot to do with what makes New York, New York. For example, the 19th-century real estate boom set in motion by the introduction of the grid is one of the big reasons NYC became such a financial powerhouse. And because the grid doesn't really allow for inner courtyards, it constantly pushes Manhattanites out on the streets, ratcheting up the energy to that frenetic level we all associate with NYC.Consequently, what I observed at the exhibition was a gallery packed full of locals in small social groups, spending a very long time pointing and talking about this grid and what it means to them. Often they were trying to find themselves—their home—on the historic maps, but just as often they were pointing out all the interesting things they noticed about how other parts of the city had changed. Here's my slide show of all the pointers:[slideshow]Anyone who follows Nina Simon's Museum 2.0 blog knows that museums have a new imperative to craft social experiences that compel visitors to engage with one another while learning. The Greatest Grid is very effective on this level.Another thing the exhibition team did really well was to develop a small companion exhibition, The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan, installed upstairs from the main gallery. It features the eight winners of a call for ideas sponsored by MCNY and the Architectural League of New York that asked architects and urban planners to envision ways of improving the grid for the 21st-century. These proposals are quite creative, and pull in visitors even further by asking them to consider whether the grid actually works in its current form. They also reinforce a theme introduced by the main exhibition, that the grid was not inevitable but exists because of—and will continue to be shaped by—a series of urban planning decisions. I've written before about the need for city museums to address not just the past but also the present and future of their cities. Therefore I was glad to see The Unfinished Grid help visitors extend the historical timeline to include both contemporary urban life as well as hopes and dreams for a New York still to come.But the exhibition team missed an opportunity to address another new imperative that Nina Simon regularly writes about: creating experiences where visitors actively participate in making meaning, alongside the curators. If I were a New Yorker visiting this exhibition, filled with excitement and new knowledge about something that feels very personal and real in my daily life, I would want to express it beyond my own social group. I would want to stick comments on a giant map of Manhattan, or photograph myself sharing the most interesting thing I learned, or vote on my favorite avenue. And doing so would help me see beyond my own experience, to the collective life on the street that all New Yorkers share.New Yorkers, get thee to MCNY to see this exhibition, and then tell me what you think. Do you find it compelling? Did it make you want to share your own experience of the grid? What did you point at?

Urban History Exhibited in Aarhus, Denmark

 [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h2d3gNBCf0]In October I flew to Aarhus, Denmark, to give a paper at an urban history conference hosted by the open air museum Den Gamle By. The Aarhus City Museum just merged with Den Gamle By, and the conference was organized in part to guide strategic planning efforts under the new management structure. This is a video of my talk; it's a half-hour in length. Hardcore city museum folks will also want to check out the other conference presentations, not only from Aarhus but also Copenhagen, Rotterdam, and Ghent—each one has a different take on urban history.

What Can TripAdvisor Tell Us about City Museums?

I make a lot of qualitative comparisons of city museums. But recently I've been thinking about quantitative comparison; what do the numbers say regarding which city museums are working and which ones aren't? Annual visitation is one useful comparison, particularly annual visitation in relation to overall population, or annual visitation as compared with the art museums in the same cities. I'm slowly compiling the data on this—not every museum publishes their numbers, and there are a lot of variables in terms of how visitation is counted.A few weeks ago I realized that comparing TripAdvisor reviews might also yield some interesting information. TripAdvisor reviews are posted by members of the general public, not by museum professionals like me (at least most of them aren't posted by people like me), and unlike the visitation figures, all of the scores are crunched using the same formula. So I took a look at the TripAdvisor reviews for 32 city museums in Europe and North America. I mainly stuck to the ones I have personally visited, although I threw in a few additional ones (Ghent, Vancouver, Liverpool) I want to visit because they are generating buzz. First, a little context:

1. Most of the reviews on TripAdvisor are posted by tourists, not locals. Occasionally a reviewer's profile location matches the review city, but most of the time these are folks assessing their sightseeing experience while traveling.

2. TripAdvisor reviewers (if their profile locations are to be believed) come from all over the world (TripAdvisor provides a Google Translate button).

3. Fifteen of the 32 city museums each had 5 reviews or less, which means we have to take the scores with a grain of salt.

4. Not every place in my survey is a spot-on city museum in the traditional sense (run by a non-profit organization or the local government, with a mission to preserve and disseminate the history of its city). I included a few outliers that offer city history exhibitions but don't fit the standard mold (the for-profit Story of Berlin, for example).

With that background in mind, how did these city museums rate? On one hand, very well. 24 of 32 received scores of 4 stars or better, on a 5-star scale. There was only one score lower than 3 stars. This may simply mean that the kind of folks who visit city museums while on vacation, and then rate them, are the kind of folks who are predisposed to like city museums. The following museums scored a 4.5 (with number of reviews in parentheses after the name): Museum of London (104), Atlanta History Center (46), Story of Berlin (33), Museum of the History of Barcelona (29), Heinz History Center/Pittsburgh (28), People's Palace/Glasgow (16), STAM/Ghent (5), Detroit Historical Museum (5), Stockholm City Museum (4), and McCord Museum/Montreal (3).On the other hand, the TripAdvisor ratings suggest that city museums are rarely among the top things to do in their cities. TripAdvisor ranks all the attractions in any given city based on number and quality of reviews. Only 5 city museums ranked in the top 10 for their cities: Atlanta History Center (3/167), Heinz History Center/Pittsburgh (3/50), STAM/Ghent (5/27), Vapriiki Museum Centre/Tampere (9/26), and Turku Castle and Historical Museum (9/14). With the exception of Atlanta, these seem to be cities with few attractions overall. If I try to control for number of attractions in each city, the city museums that come out ahead are Atlanta History Center (3/167), Museum of London (16/720), Heinz History Center/Pittsburgh (3/50), People's Palace/Glasgow (11/135), Museum of the History of Barcelona (17/204), and Pointe-à-Callière/Montreal (19/199).I noticed a couple of other themes from the textual reviews. First, TripAdvisors made note of free admission as something they valued (Helsinki City Museum, Musée Carnavalet/Paris, Museum of London, Museum of Edinburgh), not surprising. Second, some museums have unusual features you don't see other places (Mannekin Pis wardrobe at Museum of the City of Brussels, the Kaiser Panorama at Markisches Museum/Berlin, the nuclear fallout shelter at Story of Berlin, and the archaeological excavations on the lower levels of Pointe-à-Callière/Montreal and Museum of the History of Barcelona), which then get reinforced in the reviews as a reason TripAdvisors think other people should visit.Lastly, it's interesting that several of my personal favorites (Helsinki City Museum, Museum of Copenhagen, Amsterdam Museum) did reasonably well (4 stars each) but did not stand out. And Museum of the History of the City of Luxembourg wasn't reviewed at all. Maybe they would fare better with local reviewers?I learned a little from this exercise but not as much as I'd hoped. I'm going to keep my eyes out for other numbers to compare. In the meantime, it looks like I've got some reviews to write...

Did You Hear the One about

My own joke repertoire is pretty slim, but I did just hear about a really interesting collaboration between the Chicago History Museum and the improv comedy group The Second City. They are teaming up to create a new show about the history of Chicago. The Chicago History Museum is providing guidance and historical materials while Second City develops the show, and last month CHM hosted eight preview performances where the audience was invited to provide live feedback on the work in progress. Second City is scheduled to debut the completed show in December. A recent writeup on redeye gives this description of the preview:

Though in this construction phase the performances are different each night, but if a recent show was any indication, the comics don’t plan to hold back on much. Chicago Public Schools, aldermanic elections, Chicago police, Chicago politics, Wrigleyville, trolley tours, Schaumburg, and the bean (“It looks like a lady’s pleasure button”) all fall under the satirical scrutiny of the show....If this performance was any indication, the show will blend those kind of catnip-for-the-audience jokes with more esoteric references to Chicago’s long history.

There are two things I like about this project. First, it looks at history in a different way, always a positive in my book. Second, it makes sense from a collaboration standpoint. The Second City is a venerable Chicago institution in its own right, but it is not the traditional kind of partner for a city museum. Therefore Second City brings a lot to the table: fresh ideas, and a new audience. So look around your city: what are the beloved institutions, no matter the field, that might make interesting partners? And let me take that one step further: maybe city museums should establish residency programs, inviting specialists from a variety of different fields to spend a few months to a year creating collaborative work. I would like to see the results of such cross-pollination, comedic or otherwise. In the meantime, I'll keep an eye out for reviews of the new Second City show at the end of the year.

Let's Make Him Proud

I just found out about the sudden death of Bob Cassilly, founder of the City Museum in St. Louis. This is the saddest of news for St. Louis, and for museums everywhere.Cassilly's City Museum is not your traditional city museum; it's not really a traditional museum of any kind. But it should be an inspiration to all of us, nonetheless. It is a place for full-blown imagination and play, with caves, multi-story slides, a roof-top ferris wheel, boxing robots, a Wurlitzer pipe organ, all made from found objects. It's a place "where people can come and do things they’re not supposed to,” according to Cassilly. It's a children's museum on steroids. Or what a theme park looks like when it's designed by an artist instead of by Disney.Cassilly and the museum attracted a fair amount of controversy over the years, but the most interesting projects usually do. If the city museums I work with and study, the traditional city museums, could harness just 10% of the sense of wonder Cassilly produced at his City Museum, they could create a much more engaging visitor experience. So all of you city museums out there, in honor of Bob Cassilly, today is the day to do something creative. Put an artist on your board of directors. Tell visitors a joke about your city when they check in at the front desk. Figure out what urban history tastes and smells like. Think about what it would mean to create a museum that's like no other place on the planet. Let's make him proud.

My Favorite New Yorker Issue in Recent Memory

Is the one from April 18, 2011, with the “Journeys” theme. Fittingly, this is the issue I happened to grab for my trip to Europe last month, and I read it slowly, on a train in northern Scotland, in a small town in southern Italy, during the white nights of Helsinki's midsummer. Under the heading "Coming to America," it has one-page reminiscences from six different writers about their experiences immigrating to the United States. I was particularly struck by Lore Segal’s piece, “Spry for Frying,” in which she talks about her memories of moving to New York City from Austria, by way of Dominican Republic. She writes at the end:

“The refugee in me still feels displaced when I leave New York. It’s not in America, not in the United States, that I’ve put down roots. It is in Manhattan.”

This quote reminded me of a point Jette Sandahl, the director of the Museum of Copenhagen, made in a talk she gave at Harvard back in April. She said that one either is or isn’t a Dane—this is determined by where you are born—but one can choose or not choose to be a Copenhagener:

“In the city we are more interested in where we are going than where we came from.”

Sandahl went on to say that city museums have a duty to emphasize diversity and teach tolerance, because part of the experience of living in a city means learning to share the same apartment building, or subway car, or park bench with the many different kinds of people who have also chosen that city to put down roots.In my own way I am an immigrant in Boston. It's true that I was born an American, but I come from a part of the US that's quite different culturally from this New England city. I have chosen to be a Bostonian, and I love my city all the more for the ways it reveals itself to me slowly over time. I like the idea of a city museum that has room for me and all the people I see on my block and in the subway and the park. So how do we make that happen? The Museum of Copenhagen is taking on these issues this year in an exhibition, Becoming a Copenhagener. I look forward to seeing it this fall.

DC Tries Again

The George Washington University has announced a major gift from Washingtoniana collector Albert Small. Small's collection of rare books, maps, documents, and ephemera comes with a $5 million dollar fund that will be used to create a new museum of Washington history in the 19th-century Woodhull House on the GW campus.In 2003 the Historical Society of Washington DC opened a new City Museum in the old Carnegie Library at Mount Vernon Square. Although there was considerable buzz when the museum first opened, it closed a year later due to lack of funds and poor attendance. It has since reopened with a smaller staff and a more limited range of programs and exhibitions. Local history can be complicated in Washington, where the Smithsonian museums, and the federal government in general, loom so large. The needs of tourists, as well as those of transient federal workers, often overshadow the needs of longtime locals. The new Small museum at GW seems to be a more focused project and it has the backing of a major university—hopefully it will fare better than the City Museum, and will provide some meaningful programming to help the residents of DC understand their city.Meanwhile, I'll take this opportunity to point out one thing I love from the DC urban history scene, something that does work for locals. It's the Art on Call project, which restored police and fire call boxes throughout the city, and partnered with contemporary artists to fill them with interesting installations:  (Photos by Nick Eckert © 2009 via Cultural Tourism DC)Each neighborhood chose its own theme for its call boxes, so they really do have a local, community feel. They often allude to nearby historic buildings, or to famous people who lived in the neighborhood. The Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood even has a call box website with images of each box and a map of the box locations. So next time you are in DC put these call boxes at the top of your must-see list. Air & Space Museum can wait.

Dog's Eye View

Last week one of my students, Madeline Karp, told me about her family's visit to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. She was particularly struck by the Hall of Birds, which she described as a long hallway lined with glass cases displaying the bird collection, some stuffed in poses and some displayed more as specimens, flat on their backs. One case was filled with comparisons: birds from popular culture (Tweety, Opus from Bloom County) next to their counterparts from the natural world. Here's the photo she took of Toucan Sam:According to Madeline, there was a lot of intense birdness in the Hall of Birds. It was maybe even a little disturbing if you weren't used to seeing bird specimens flat on their backs like that. The experience led her mother to comment that it looked like the exhibition had been made either for or by cats.I was thinking about Madeline's story the next morning while I was walking my friends' German wirehaired pointer. I was imagining cats roaming the Hall of Birds, noses pressed to the cases, and a team of cat curators making decisions about the most tantalizing specimens to display (maybe throw in some fish for variety, and open the window shades to make plenty of sunny spots on the floor).Meanwhile, here I am walking the dog, and she's investigating every nook and cranny of the neighborhood streets with the kind of enthusiasm and detail that I wish every city resident would display. And it hit me: cats don't get out in the city all that much, but dogs certainly do. Has any museum ever done an exhibition depicting their city from a four-legged point of view? The urban history of things dogs care about: hydrants, parks, smelly things, leash laws, dogcatchers. Historic photographs taken from two feet off the ground. I would give a nice tasty chew toy to see that, and I don't think I'm the only one.

21st-Century Warriors

I was in Amsterdam a week after this summer's World Cup championship game, in which Netherlands lost to Spain, 1-0. At the Amsterdam Historical Museum I saw this exhibition case, built out from the side of the building into a public courtyard:It normally houses just the medieval armor, but was updated to include the orange dress and vuvuzela in response to the World Cup. Here's another angle:In a previous World Cup match against Denmark, 36 young women were thrown out of the game for allegedly participating in a publicity stunt by Bavaria beer in orange dresses like this one. Several online sources quoted museum spokesman Hester Gersonius: "The orange dress stands for 'originality, cheekiness, entrepreneurship, creativity and humor, in short, all qualities that belong both to Amsterdam and our museum." I love the contrast with the armor, and the fact that the museum was able to respond so quickly to an incident that everyone in Amsterdam was talking about.Of all the city museums I visited in Europe this year, Amsterdam Historical Museum was one of my favorites. Stay tuned for more discussion of its strengths in subsequent posts.

The Power of 10

ParisCarousel

SkateParkParis

I've been thinking a lot about a concept put forward by the Project for Public Spaces in New York. It's called the Power of 10. The idea is that to make a really great public place that is used regularly and cherished by many people, it needs to have at least 10 different amenities working in concert, not just one or two. And then a neighborhood needs 10 different great public places--not just one or two--to be a great neighborhood. And a city needs 10 different great neighborhoods, and so on.

I spent the better part of a sweltering summer afternoon in Parc de Bercy in Paris last week and I watched the Power of 10 in practice. There were the usual park amenities--benches to sit on, ample shade, flowers and trees to soothe the eyes. But there were also many other special treats that kept my small group--ranging in age from 3 to 50--occupied for hours. There was a water feature--a river cascading down a steep flight of steps--that drew children like a magnet (see above). There was a quintessential Parisian carousel, broadcasting Pachelbel's Canon in D (and other classical greatest hits) as it spun. There was a basketball court. There was a place to buy water, coffee, ice cream. There was a skate park. Parc de Bercy was a really great place that afternoon, and it was full of people.

I have been considering how one might apply the Power of 10 to museums. Afterall, museums are public places too. It would mean that you can't have just one or two powerful artifacts that fascinate visitors; you need 10. Not just one or two  "aha" moments where everything is illuminated, but 10. Not just one or two visual delights but 10. And, increasingly, not just one or two interactive components that really work, but 10.

My FME (Favorite Museum Ever) is the Victoria & Albert in London. For a material culture person like me, they have achieved the Power of 10 several times over--the Great Bed of Ware, the enormous Cast Court, the Breathless sculpture suspended in the floor-ceiling, the rows and rows of medieval keys, the pull-out cabinets in the Textile Study Room that are like a treasure hunt, the modern furniture collection, the Dale Chihuly installation in the main lobby, and on and on. Unlike my recent experience of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, which is a museum of a similar scale but one where everything blended together visually, at the V&A there is a new experience around every corner that looks completely different from the room you just came from.

On our way from Paris to Berlin, we decided almost at the last-minute to stop for a few hours in Luxembourg. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Luxembourg city museum seems to have achieved the Power of 10. Here's a list of the things that captivated me there:

1. An introductory light and sound feature about the myth of the mermaid Melusina and Count Siegfried, Luxembourg's founder. It may seem kind of cheesy at first glance, but it was well-executed and set the scene for the rest of the museum.

2. The Panorama Room: a 360 degree trompe l'oeil mural of the Marche-aux-Herbes (a square in Luxembourg) circa 1655

3. Exceptionally excellent interpretive text throughout the museum. It was articulate, educational, and even lyrical at some points. Plus, there wasn't very much of it, which meant our "museum fatigue" took a lot longer than normal to set in.

4. The "Laws and Debates" room of the permanent exhibition. Normally I would breeze past such a topic (sorry, all you lawyer friends out there). But it turned out to be really interesting because of the particular Luxembourg laws the museum chose to highlight, laws that got to the heart of Luxembourg culture: the end of the monarchy, universal suffrage (both 1919), issues of social welfare, a voluntary army (1967), no corporate tax (1929). Fascinating. No, really.

5. A stereoview machine with a loop of 3D historical images of Luxembourg, some as "before and after" pairs. For me, this never gets old.

6. In the "City and Facilities" section of the permanent exhibition, there was an installation of contemporary photographs by Julia Schorlemmer and Andreas Tilch. It featured portrait photos of the people who clean various public buildings in Luxembourg, paired with images of the overhead lighting in each of these buildings. Most but not all of the cleaners were immigrants (the ID labels listed each home country). It was a beautiful piece that drew attention to aspects of public infrastructure that most people never notice.

7. Speaking of people we never notice, another installation of contemporary photographs called Objects, this time by Patrick Galbats, focused on the material possessions of Luxembourg's homeless population. Originally the idea of Klaus Schneider of the European Anti-Poverty Network, the project involved approaching homeless people at the Luxembourg train station and asking each of them to arrange all of their possessions on the ground, on a big sheet of plastic. Galbats would then photograph everything from above. As I have mentioned before, city museums aren't very good at documenting the bottom rungs of the urban experience so this...

8. ...and another project by Galbats photographing the interiors of the living spaces occupied by Luxemburgers living on social security checks, really stood out.

9. A temporary exhibition on the 1960s included a period turntable that visitors were encouraged to use. There was a rack of about 20 records you could choose from. A few years ago this would've been no big deal, but in 2010 it became a striking experience. My husband chose "I Started a Joke" by the Bee Gees and we slow-danced in the gallery like total dorks.

10. Another temporary exhibition about teenage life in Luxembourg, Born to Be Wild, didn't shy away from the topic of sex. On display was a notebook of anonymous questions asked by teenagers at sex education workshops run by the organization Planning Familial. There were also some graphic photographs, and a discussion of virginity. Wow. That would be difficult to pull off in an American city museum.

11. The architecture is pretty special. The suggested trajectory is to start out at the very bottom and then gradually make your way to the top floor of the museum. The lower levels are built into the old medieval walls of the city, and you can see the stone all around you. Four town houses were combined to create the upper floors, and even though the rooms look like modern galleries, there are small touches--a fireplace mantel here, a carved wooden staircase there--that serve as reminders of the former spaces. At the end of the permanent exhibition a roof deck, presumably part of one of the original townhouses, gives a spectacular view of the city. So you feel like you are in a completely modern museum, but with these understated traces of history all around you.
    
    That's 10 plus one for good measure. I don't think you necessarily have to be a huge museum to get to 10. It might take a little creativity, but the Power of 10 can be low-budget. So let's all go out and follow Luxembourg's example.