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The Event-Driven Museum?
This is the casual attendance data from my first full month as the Executive Director of The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz. It doesn't include school groups or facility rentals, but it does include everyone else who walks through our doors during open hours. This graph is making me change the way I think about what our museum is for and how we should market it.
Let's say you've gotten excited about some innovative ideas for your institution. You want to get some projects going, but you're not in any particular position of power. Where do you start? Ruth Harvey has a brilliant solution to this problem. Ruth is a curator of pictorial collections for Puke Ariki, a museum/library/visitor center in the small city of New Plymouth, New Zealand.
The Ruru Revolution
What kind of support do you need to be confident about taking a risk in your work? What are you willing to risk to pursue your professional dreams? Last week, at the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums in Houston, I was honored to chair a fabulous panel on empowering museum staff to take creative risks ( slides here ). This is a topic of particular fascination for me as someone who has worked as an external consultant/provocateur/risk-encourager and is now in the director's seat for the first time. I was joined by Lori Fogarty (ED of the Oakland Museum of California), Adam Lerner (ED and Chief Animator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver), and Beck Tench (Director for Innovation and Digital Engagement at the Museum of Life and Science). I learned three big things from this panel:
Empowering Staff to Take Creative Risks
