Museums

When I travel and talk to museum officials, they often ask me to share ideas from other museums.  Recently, one such question put me in mind of something I’d read during Minnesota’s “Museums Month,” when Kaywin Feldman, director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Olga Viso, director of the Walker Arts Center, gave a joint interview to the Star Tribune.

At one point, Feldman says “One area we struggle with is lectures. We offer a lot of great speakers throughout the year, often doing lectures related to the collection, and I notice an older and older audience coming to those lectures. So we’re thinking about how to engage a younger generation in content delivery. We recently tried a pecha kucha [Japanese for “chit chat”], where our curators showed 20 images in 20 seconds. It was a way to deliver content but keep it very short and lively. We also followed a lecture on still-life paintings with a demonstration by a food stylist.”

She comes back later, adding: “I don’t mean to dwell on the lecture thing, but it really worries me, in part because I’m one of those people who really loves a lecture. I think we’re both experimenting with new ways to deliver content to people. We’re still content-generators; that’s the heart of what we do. But the way people receive it and participate has changed.”

So how is the MIA experimenting, with the ultimate goal of course of both educating and — if a museum plays it right – attracting a broader, younger audience. I spoke with Alex Bortolot, the Adult Programming Associate at the MIA. Read more about him here — he’s pictured at left.

He works on several programs, but the most relevant here seemed to be “Cross Talk: Two Experts. Two Angles. Too Interesting.” For Cross Talk, the MIA brings in an academic, who brings historical insight, and someone from the contemporary creative economy to present, for 20 minutes each, his or her angle on the chosen topic. Then, the audience gets its say.

The topics so far: “Manga, Anime, and Pop;” “What Fonts Say;” and “Playing With Our Food.” The art connection? Pop, the MIA’s poster collection, and the visual representation of food, going back to 17th century Dutch still lifes.

Broadly speaking, the MIA got about 25% more people for Cross Talks than for ordinary lectures. At Cross Talks, more than 60% were 45 or younger, while at lectures, about a third were 45 or younger.  The younger generation comes more often in groups, with friends, than as singletons — though older people also come in twos or larger groups.

There’s more: Bortolot says that the 45-and-unders are more interested in local experts than in someone flown in to talk about art. They want the connection to the “creative economy,” and they want to network. They don’t want merely to listen; they want to participate. They want a tone that’s lighter than a lecture.  “It becomes a professional schmoozefest,” he says. Bortolot isn’t bothered by that as long as “we give them a deeper understanding of the collection.”

All of that makes sense to me — MIA stresses that it is not cutting back on its straight lectures – and is probably transferrable to other museums.

I discovered another idea talking with Bortolot that I liked even better: MIA, which is free, tries to time its Third Thursdays to the opening of special exhibitions, which are not. Then it offers TT attendees (like those making T-shirt, at right) the chance to be members for a day if they sign up and provide contact information. When the time comes for member solicitation drives, those members for a day convert to real members “at a much higher rate,” Bortolot says. Smart.

 

Glass is having a moment. This is the 50th anniversary of the Studio Glass movement, and Color Ignited: Glass 1962–2012, “an enticing ‘coming of age’ look at the medium” that is international in scope, starts next week at the Toledo Museum of Art, which is where it all began. (A piece by Paul Seide is below right.)

In August, the new permanent Rooms for Glass, an exhibition space designed by Selldorf Architects of New York, will be inaugurated in Venice. The opening show is Carlo Scarpa, Venini 1932-1947, more than 300 works by Scarpa. The center will showcase the Venetian art of glassmaking in the 20th and 21st centuries and, eventually, establish a “General Archive of Venetian Glass” that will be accessible to scholars and to used to revive the art of glassmaking there.

And today came word that the Corning Museum of Glass has chosen a preliminary design for its proposed new North Wing, “featuring light-filled galleries for its collection of contemporary works in glass, as well as one of the world’s largest facilities for glassblowing demonstrations and live glass design sessions.” The architect, Thomas Phifer and Partners, has created a 100,000-square-foot expansion that, Corning says, “will dramatically enhance the visitor experience for the Museum’s growing domestic and international audiences.” The cost? $64 million, funded entirely “before groundbreaking” by Corning Inc. The building is scheduled to open in 2014. You can find more details here.

Karol Wight, executive director of the museum (formerly antiquities curator at the Getty) was quoted in the press release saying: “Over the past decade, we’ve experienced tremendous growth: in our collections; in our increasingly diverse audiences; and in the breadth and ambition of our public programs, especially those that allow visitors to experience the energy of artists and designers at work. This is a transformative design that responds to those demands and further enables us to bring glass to life for the 400,000 people who visit our campus each year.”

Until I learned the number of visitors, I was surprised by the scope of the expansion. Attendance of 400,000 puts the Corning Glass Museum, which after all is located a four-and-a-half hour drive from New York, the nearest major city, among the nation’s top 25 art museums by that measure. It puts the glass museum ahead of, say, the Whitney, the Frick, the Morgan and the Newark museums — all of which draw on the huge NYC metro area and more easily on the Northeast corridor — not to mention tourists from near and far.

I was less impressed, though, after I did some digging. That 400,000 is a precipitous drop. According to clips in The New York Times, the Corning museum “expected” 1 million visitors in 1962. In 1980, it had 800,000 visitors. I have no comparative figures for other museums at those times, but the drop probably says more about what interested Americans in those days, versus now, than it does about the museum.

If then glass is having a moment, and people are getting more interested in the medium, Corning is on the right track. I really hope this isn’t another case of overexpansion.

Photo Credits: Courtesy Toledo Museum of Art (top); Corning Museum of Glass (bottom)