Increasing Impact
Van Gogh Connects: Engaging Immigrant Communities with the Museum
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marjelle Vermeulen, Filip Vermeylen, Karen Maas, Martin Van Engel, Marthe De Vet
The Van Gogh Museum (VGM) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is highly aware of their limited visitor diversity. In this light, in April 2017 VGM launched the program “Van Gogh Connects” to learn how to become more relevant for eight- to thirty-year-old Amsterdam residents with Surinamese, Turkish, Antillian, and Maroccan roots. The approach is to learn in an iterative process with the audience through a series of pilots and impact research how to become more relevant to this audience (VGM, 2017). With this program, VGM wants to strengthen its legitimacy and make a valuable contribution to society. Based on a mixed method approach, we want to analyse if and how interventions within this program of VGM indeed impact young people with a migration background. Based on a mixed methods approach, which exists of both a quantitative empirical impact measurement and a qualitative analysis of focus groups, we are able to test if engagement with the museum impacts the beneficiaries. Moreover, the qualitative analysis of focus groups enables us also to understand how the program contributes to the intended impacts. Not only does this paper provide insight in the potential of museums to be inclusive and the interventions museums can execute in order to achieve this, this contribution also bridges another important research gap: we try to enlighten the social value of cultural participation.
Forcing Representation: How an Encyclopedia Museum Selects Nine Artworks to Represent Its Collection
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kelly McHugh
How do you create connections in your collection between time, place, and gender when you work at an encyclopedic museum? In 2016, the Art Institute of Chicago received a grant to produce a short video series that visually explained critical analysis terms through the lens of artworks in our collection. The catch? We had to chose three works per video that were representative of our collection's diversity through time, geography, medium, and maker. With over 300,000 works in our collection and only a handful of works allowed for selection, we needed to think strategically about the works we selected. This exploration runs through the criteria we determined to help pick artworks, the challenges in selecting works, and how we created unique connections across works that seemingly had nothing in common.
