When exhibit planning intersects with community dreams

Earlier this month Museum Explorer was recognized as part of a team from the Evanston History Center that won an Award of Excellence for Exhibitions from the Illinois Association of Museums. The award-winning exhibit, "Lifting as We Climb: Evanston Women and the Creation of a Community," presents and celebrates women and women's organizations in Evanston's history. We were grateful to learn that IAM made particular note of the team's "excellent planning process" and the "remarkable record of women's achievement" that the exhibit documents and displays.

We love being recognized for an "excellent planning process." Yet no amount of excellent planning holds water without complete support from the client museum. We were privileged to work closely on this project with EHC archivist Lori Osborne, who served as exhibit curator, and EHC director Eden Pearlman. At the Evanston History Center, Eden Pearlman has created and continues to nurture a collaborative environment that elicits the very best effort each team member has to offer.

Even more important than any planning process is this. In the last 10 years there has been much discussion about how museums need to serve their communities. In our opinion, these communities aren't just neighborhoods, or lines drawn on a map. Instead, community is mapped on the mind--a set of common interests and perspectives. Good museums, like the EHC, help focus interests not just in external content areas like art, science, and history, but also in internal realms such as identity, self-worth, and self-actualization.

Museums serve communities by helping visitors realize goals. Could a new age for museums be at hand, as various political groups, commercial ventures, and cultural bodies begin to see that the act of exhibit development itself can catalyze mutual interest and cooperation? As everyday people learn that exhibits can excite and inspire a local community, exhibit development becomes a tool through which communities can consolidate knowledge, cultural energy, and material wealth to achieve a common agenda.

The Evanston Women's History Project and its exhibit, "Lifting as We Climb," does just that. While the Evanston History Center is a small museum with a tight resources and a small, hardworking staff, they are playing the big game with big success, in ways that great--and greatly endowed--museums can only dream about.

When it all works out

How often do things work out just the way you want them to, with a minimum of fuss and bother? In the museum exhibit business, there's usually no shortage of haggling and hand wringing between the revelation of an idea and the Big Opening. But every once in a while we get lucky.

The new reading rail on the pedestrian bridge overlooking the pond at Cafe Brauer, at Lincoln Park Zoo, is one of those lucky projects. Step 1: A simple idea. People walking across the bridge see the gorgeous Chicago skyline in the background. Let's put a "map" of the skyline right at their fingertips so they know what they're looking at. Step 2: Museum Explorer creates concept drawings.

Step 3: Chicago Architecture Foundation generously shares existing graphics files with the metal fabricator so no one has to re-invent the wheel, i.e., create new scale measurements and drawings for each building. Step 4: The metal fabricator builds the reading rail just the way we drew it.

Step 5: Bingo! People love it.

The bridge over the pond is part of the larger Nature Boardwalk project at Lincoln Park Zoo. Catch up on Nature Boardwalk news and see great photos of plants and animals that live there: check out the blog written by Vicky Hunt, the zoo's coordinator of wildlife management. Barbara Brotman of the Chicago Tribune wrote a recent column about Nature Boardwalk; take a look at it here.

Or better yet, hop on the train or the bus and head out to Lincoln Park Zoo, wander around, and see the Nature Boardwalk--and much more--for yourself. Can't beat the admission price: it's free.

A big idea in a small package is about to hit Chicago's streets

As exhibit developers and designers, we're lucky to have the chance to explore intriguing topics. Like reporters on late-breaking stories, we get the scoop--sometimes from the discoverers themselves--on intriguing finds: dinosaur fossils, new (non-extinct!) species, artifacts from archaeological digs in exotic places. We get to suggest ways to present cool stuff and amazing ideas to the public. We get to tell museum audiences some thrilling stories.

And sometimes . . . we get to work on a real hidden treasure.

Something that's not just interesting, but special. A unique way of delivering a message. A gem.

That gem is the Story Bus of Chicago's DuSable Museum of African American History. The DuSable had the idea of putting an exhibit into a small bus, then driving that bus to neighborhood festivals, branch libraries, malls--places where school-aged children gather. This little exhibit rocks because it rolls! And while the bus is only about 20 feet long and 8 feet wide, the exhibit inside covers 130 years of Chicago's growth and change, and delivers a hopeful message about a great person.

The person? Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, the founder of Chicago. From the exhibit introduction:

He settled here among native peoples and raised a family. He ran a successful business, working with customers from many different places. He worked hard. He earned admiration and respect from people who knew him.

What we learned about Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable moved our entire exhibit team. The more we read about du Sable and his achievements, his creativity and his instincts as a frontiersman and entrepreneur, the more we realized what an amazing person he was.

It became clear that du Sable's story carries a powerful and relevant message for people of all ages. During this time of economic uncertainty, we can all be inspired by this man who had a vision, took a risk, and worked hard to make his way in the world. In the words of the exhibit:

Each day, we build on du Sable's legacy

Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable was the founder of what has become one of the most exciting cities in the world. Chicago has grown by leaps and bounds since du Sable's time, though, and he didn't make that happen by himself.

Chicago has been home to many famous people. But the people who built up this city, brick by brick and block by block, aren't always the ones whose names we know. Or whose autographs we'd love to have.

Du Sable's vision lives in people who work hard. Who see a need and figure out how to fill it. Who see a chance and grab it. Who help their neighbors. Who have a dream, and take a risk to make that dream come true.

Look around. Du Sable's legacy is found in people you meet each and every day. And in people like . . . you.

So keep your eyes open for the DuSable Museum Story Bus. It just might come to your neighborhood one of these days. When it does, step inside to see "Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable: Legend and Legacy." We were inspired by the story of Chicago's founder. We hope you will be too.

Chillin' with the rhinos at Lincoln Park Zoo

Unless you're a visiting scientist, or working on behalf of science, animal welfare or conservation, it's nearly impossible to get behind the scenes on a summer day at Lincoln Park Zoo.

But every once in a while it pays off to be an exhibit developer. On a recent sweltering afternoon, we at Museum Explorer found ourselves inside an enclosure, gazing face-to-horn with the zoo's two large male rhinos and trying to wrap our brains around rhino ways as we gear up to develop new interactive interpretive signage for LPZ.

We spent almost an hour with the rhinos, some of it literally hands-on, as we got a feel for what they're like. We patted their heads, touched their massive horns (which felt kind of like giant toenails, in case you were wondering) and stroked their immense flanks. Petting those powerful flanks was like rubbing your hand across a hot sidewalk, dense and dry and rough.

During our visit, we learned that rhinos love to munch on bright green golf-ball-sized food pellets that are surely made from some sort of super-concentrated healthful rhinoceros nutrients. After the main course, their keepers let us offer the rhinos handfuls of alfalfa. Those long rhino lips nibbled skillfully around our hands to pluck out the alfalfa stems, more nimbly than our own human fingers could have done it.

And what goes in . . . comes out. In a big way. Amazingly, the rhinos themselves are pretty much odor-free. But their poop is another story. Mostly it's just huge, as in XXXXL. Each rhino drops about four loads a day, at about 20 pounds a plop. Eighty pounds of poop . . . hmmm. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the interactive for that one! Now we know why zookeepers are in such great shape.

On the road….Out and about with Museum Explorer


Here’s what we’ve been up to lately. . . .


Making History Irresistible

For the Downers Grove Park District Museum, one major responsibility is historic preservation. But today’s audiences (and boards) expect more than the traditional tasks of collecting and preserving objects and information. So Museum Explorer has been working with DGPD Museum’s Executive Director, Christa Christensen, to help the museum forge new connections with its audience by interpreting history in accessible and appealing ways.

By presenting its museum as a place for understanding and enjoying history, and as a link for the past, present and future, the Downers Grove Park District will move from offering “just the facts” to offering an experience rooted in history yet connected to today, with exhibits and programming that stay fresh and up-to-date.


Wheeling Visitors In

At the American Association of Museums annual meeting in Philadelphia, Museum Explorer’s Rich Faron took part in the panel session “Wheeling Visitors In!” Session participants explored the use of custom-designed program carts to integrate the needs of designers, educators and visitors.

In Museum Explorer’s repertoire, carts have become a go-to solution for many of our clients. Not only can carts deliver information in engaging ways, but they offer plenty of bang for the buck!

An audience of nearly 100 museum professionals heard Rich and colleagues Lynn McRainey (Chicago History Museum), Michelle Nichols (Adler Planetarium) and Susan Nichols (Smithsonian American Art Museum) discuss the amazing potential of carts. You can access session handouts and links to recordings at http://www.aam-us.org/am09/

Planning to Promote an Up-and-coming Exhibit

Museum Explorer recently completed a planning document that the DuSable Museum of African American History has begun to circulate to potential donors and supporters for its upcoming exhibit on African American Olympians. While the exhibit is independent of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics, it embraces the spirit of the Games and the idea that Chicago will be a magnificent host city.

The following passage from the planning document sums up the essence of DuSable’s exhibit:

Young people today see and hear a lot about the glory of sport. But all too often this glory is defined by headlines and dollar signs. Kids (and their parents) know about the millions of dollars star athletes earn, and they know what this money can buy. They know who endorses this product and who endorses that one; they hear how colleges recruit talented players; and they dream of the day their turn will come.

What they may not hear about so often are the less glamorous—but more widely available—life lessons that sports participation can offer, even to those who never compete professionally or at an elite level. And these lessons are exemplified well by those who aspire to compete before the world, on the Olympic stage.


Keeping Lincoln Park Zoo in the Pink

Museum Explorer continues to pitch in with the ongoing spruce-up of graphics, labels, signage and exhibit elements at Lincoln Park Zoo. One of our more intriguing recent tasks there involved the replacement of large graphic panels in and around the Pink Flamingo Pond.

Like most wild animals, flamingos are sensitive to changes in their surroundings, so working in the pond area demanded everyone’s careful attention. Thanks to guidance from Zoo staff, we managed to finish the job with no problems or surprises, although we got some idea what the animals must feel like as visitors on the other side of the railing gaped at us as we went about our business!


Performing Check-ups for Carts

Museum Explorer worked with the Chicago History Museum to assess the condition of the museum’s mobile “Activity Stations.” The museum wanted to find out what needed fixing, upgrading or replacing so the carts could be spruced up, fixed up and ready to roll by the time school started in the fall.

Five carts—Prairie, Architecture, Bridges, Maps and Fire—had to travel off-site to receive their bumper-to-bumper tune-ups. (And no, we didn’t wheel them down Clark Street! They were carted away in a well-appointed vehicle.) The carts returned home to CHM during the summer, in plenty of time for those thousands of curious hands expected during the school year.

If you’d like to learn more about the CHM carts check out: http://www.chicagohistory.org/education/fieldtrip/museumvisit

Or if you’d like to learn more about Museum Explorer’s Program Carts go to: http://www.museumexplorer.com/program_carts/program_carts.html


Revising Exhibit Elements and Labels

Based on the results of a recent evaluation conducted by Morton Arboretum staff, Museum Explorer completed work with Children’s Garden Director Katherine Johnson to update graphic elements for exhibit labels and experience boxes used in the Morton Arboretum Children’s Garden. Included were graphics for two experience boxes, Beaver Pond and Evergreen Lookout, along with redesigns of four Growing Garden labels and two Rules signs, and the addition of three Joke signs. Take a look at the Morton Arboretum Children’s Garden at http://www.mortonarb.org/index.php?Itemid=127


Charting the Future of Museums

Rich Faron has been named as an Influential Advisor to the Center for the Future of Museums (CFM), an initiative program of the American Association of Museums. The aim of the CFM is to build influence through building engagement and recruiting key representatives as museum futurists. CFM will create and test innovations in museum practice, expand the horizon of museum planning, acquire and use information about trends, exercise leadership in the museum field to provoke discussion and build connections to innovative thinkers in all sectors.

Influential Advisors are independent museum professionals, consultants, faculty members in museum studies programs and field services providers who support the work of the Center for the Future of Museums. As forward-thinking, creative leaders in the museum field, Influential Advisors play an important role in shaping the knowledge, behavior and attitudes of museum leaders.

Making News

The July/August issue of MUSEUM magazine features Museum Explorer’s ninth published “Letter to the Editor” since 2002. In the latest issue Museum Explorer advocates for keeping museums networked with a learning landscape that includes all kinds of learning—formal and informal, directed and self-guided, in traditional and non-traditional settings.

Writing and sharing letters and articles in print and online is important to Museum Explorer because we treasure innovation. And we believe that contributing to a continuing dialogue about what best serves our clients (and their clients) is what keeps the business of informal learning moving forward.


There you have it—a sampling of our work with recent clients. Is there something we can do for you?


Museum Explorer creates experiences to delight visitors. As we plan exhibits and programs, we put the visitor front and center. We aim to set a welcoming stage for people to delve into ideas, see relationships, kindle a passion, consider beliefs in a different light or just learn a little something new. Our hope: to ignite excitement! We work hard to prepare thoughtful spaces where people enjoy learning in non-traditional ways—and find themselves motivated to learn more.

We imagine the visitor as a good friend, and the exhibit as an enthusiastic conversation about a subject we love. How to start that conversation? That’s where we roll up our sleeves.

Afterlife
MUSEUM magazine / November-December 2009

Is there a museum afterlife? Following a dignified demise what awaits the typical American museum on the other side? Reboot, retool or reprogramming? Will museums restore old routines and ‘software’ or embrace new and progressive operating systems?

At the close of ‘Death with Dignity’(MUSEUM magazine, July/August 2009) the alternatives are clearly outlined in ‘Tough Calls for Tough Times’. Whether museums are looking to simply get healthy or more remarkably, return from the dead, tomorrow’s bottom-line mission statements might read:“Pay attention, be efficient and remain relevant.”

For perhaps the first time in museum history, almost every size venue- small, medium, large and extra large- now confront the same issue. In order to compete, maybe even survive, museums must increase revenue streams by attracting and holding the attention of millions of potential new customers. The upside is that there are super-informed consumers out there just waiting to make a decision, a huge available audience free to select from a nearly unlimited menu of leisure time choices. But in order grab and hold a share of the marketplace, museums must be prepared to make changes.

Banking on reputation, relying on experience and managing the marquee by growls of gut instinct won’t cut it anymore. Prior to the recent economic meltdown there were indications that change was imminent however the collapse has compressed the timeline for change and brought things into sharper focus. There exists real pressure to make honest evaluations and size things up. The traditional field of play has been leveled and democratized, impacting how museums will operate and communicate in the immediate future. There needs to be attention paid to answering questions like how do museums fit on the "new worldwide" stage and how will they be identified moving forward, hopefully as competitive players within an ever evolving education-entertainment marketplace.

But the question remains as to whether the next generation of museums is truly prepared to leap forward and inspire audiences in memorable ways. Can modern institutions continue, as they once did, to impress visitors by leading the way and employing innovative means for expressing big and difficult ideas? This is something that museum spaces are uniquely organized and outfitted to do. Risk taking ought to be the hallmark trait of the museum reputation. After all it was the American museum that helped frame and bring contemporary non-objective art into view, planted evolutionary theory and climate change issues inside everyday conversations and pushed the social histories of civil rights, tenement housing and many other relevant topics out in the open.

Can museums build upon these past achievements or are they liable to eventually succumb to the pressures and burdens inherent in administering and maintaining their own virtuosity? Is there a price to pay for maintaining and perpetuating outdated traditions that often cause museums to forego risk? Is there danger in being too careful and cautious regarding the need to make big changes?

Perhaps in the near future museums should seek to take the next logical step and work to inspire more than just inform. To allow people to intuit instead of only interpret and to live up to the promise of informal learning by pushing people to not only experience things but to engage intimately as well as intellectually. Maybe in this fashion museums can coax visitor’s to record memories instead of simply pocketing meaning and with that done museums will indeed enjoy a useful life or afterlife.

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek.”

Barack Obama

Museum-People




I’m willing to come clean. I confess to being a serious geek for MUSEUM’s ‘People & Transitions’ and the AVISO job classifieds. I usually can’t wait to get my hands on the latest updates and job scripts. They’re ideal for raking insights and gathering gossip regarding the state of mind and level of energy at work behind all those closed doors marked ‘Staff Only’.


‘People & Transitions’ acknowledges promotions and lifetime achievements:


…to assistant curator of decorative arts


…to education director


…to vice president of institutional development


…to executive director


…to CEO


Job posts are even better. They’re such a reflection of our industry and of ‘museum-people’.


Job Description (2009): Executive Director


The successful candidate will have strong leadership skills with experience managing people and resources in a nonprofit setting. Key qualifications include working with a board; fundraising and networking experience; marketing expertise; and proven business and administrative skills. A reputation for strategic thinking is a must. The ideal candidate should have a general understanding of museums and an enthusiasm for managing an institution with a long standing, historic connection to the community. The successful candidate will increase and diversify the sharing of the museum's collection and properties through effective and enticing programming for children and adults, residents and tourists. The new Director will work with the staff to conceive, implement, publicize and evaluate new and existing educational programs to inform the public, raise the museum's profile in the community, increase membership, and attract additional funding.

(Actual Excerpt) AVISO www.aam-us.org

But times have changed. ‘Big Time’! What was a fun; private game now weighs like a guilty, empty pleasure. An indulgence better suited to a more emotionally prosperous time. So I’ve quit reading them. I still admire the faces pictured on the ‘People & Transitions’ page but I’ll wage 30 years on the job that behind every smile there’s a bit of real heartache for a colleague, more likely a friend, a museum-person downsized or detached from their livelihood, career, passion and dream. It’s a shame and even more unfortunately, its bad timing.


Today, we are about to welcome the first wave of Americans to grow up ‘inside’ museums; an entire generation of new visitors is about to come on line and of age. They’ve been toddled, middle-schooled and teenaged with hands-on experiences, customized field trip programs, outreach and web-based connectivity; a next generation completely absorbed by the promise of informal learning.


For 25 years museum-people have worked to implement an industry wide shift, bringing about dramatic ‘change’ and installing a new strategic model. Retooling the way we meet and greet visitors, altering how we test, design and present our exhibitions, overhauling our strategies for developing and delivering programming, restructuring our methods for wooing and engaging donors. ‘Museum-people’ have brought on progress and near total industry revitalization. A ‘cradle to walking cane’ business model is now in place and we can take pride that we’re beginning to serve our visitors well.


Unfortunately as we are about to embrace our success the economic crisis stands poised to stall or even crash the accomplishment. Money is a problem. There is no way around it. Dramatic reductions in cash flow have put all kinds of endeavors at risk and on hold, real projects and virtual ones ranging from infrastructure to outreach. But our greatest loss might be the loss of our true creative engine; the human resource.


Recently, Nina Simon writing in Museum 2.0 has suggested that we must now face an even bigger challenge. The challenge to move our industry beyond mere survival and the never-ending search for sustainability and to push past this toward what Nina so spot-on describes as ‘supreme awesomeness’.


But it’s not only museums that must change. We need to reinvent ourselves and our career goals, because without us, without museum-people, it’s only a venue; buildings, galleries, storerooms, offices, schedules and budgets. It is we who make the difference. We make the plans and set the goals, craft missions, collect, preserve and interpret and it is us that make things happen.
Museum-people are already ‘Awesome’ but museum-people are going to have to work even harder in the future. We’re going to have to change. Change our hearts, minds and job descriptions to meet the demands of working tomorrow.


Future Job Description: Executive Director


The successful candidate will possess strong interpersonal communication skills including a temperament for managing collaborations with staff, communities and local resources in order to visualize the nonprofit setting as an alternative business environment. Key qualifications include experience working with a youthful, goal driven and diverse board. Ability to achieve balance by employing a flexible hour’s staff working both inside and outside the museum and volunteers ranging from teens to retirees. Fundraising and social networking skills a must; bricks & mortar building experience along with knowledge of the virtual marketplace are needed as are traditional skills in collections administration. Ability for future oriented thinking will be put to the test; therefore the ideal candidate should love museums and possess an enthusiasm for knowledge and an understanding of what it means to be awesome.

(Imagined) AVISO www.aam-us.org

Alas in the future it might be a bit challenging to reach MUSEUM magazine’s ‘People’ page but the journey will be much more interesting…


…to assistant curator of decorative arts for building and curating the graffiti and street artists collection


…promoted to education director for establishing an on line database allowing public school teachers to match state learning goals & standards to existing field trip programs


…to vice president of institutional development for implementing a micro-loan financing program allowing the public to participate in making investments that support small exhibits and customized programs


…promoted to founding executive director, the new museum aboard the International Space Station


…to CEO?



Rich Faron