New Needs (Asynchronous - Online Only)
Why Contemporary Art?: Enhancing Cultural Learning in a Museum View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jungwon Lee
Museums provide a wide variety of historical and cultural experiences, showing diverse artworks and artifacts to the public. Major roles of museums are making museum visitors connected with and enhancing their curiosity for various cultures. Museums should allow visitors to interact with artworks and artifacts in a culturally diverse setting and encourage the participation of various population groups across culture, age, sex, religion, and national origin. Museums, however, cannot easily attract visitors to the collections from other cultures without making special efforts. For the purposes aforementioned, I assumed, contemporary art from other cultures rather than traditional art would significantly contribute to the attraction of local visitors to the collections from other cultures. Unlike traditional art, contemporary art shares a common theme of popular culture in our society. My questions are whether contemporary Western art is more familiar with and more interesting to Korean visitors than traditional Western art and what kind of meaning and importance contemporary Western art has to the local Korean visitors. I selected the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea for this study. The purpose of this study is to find out how a museum can be transformed as for a local community into a culturally diverse learning place across various population groups and how effectively a contemporary Western art creates and facilitates visitors’ cultural experiences. Finally, I suggest how museums can collaborate to provide visitors with rich, interactive, and experimental environments.
Managing Community Engagement in Sites of Conscience: A Managerial Strategy to Achieve Social Sustainability View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Isabelle Donetch
Over the last decades, sites of conscience (SCs) have been defined as a new kind of museum. SCs are places where people can learn about their own history and become engaged in current issues. Furthermore, SCs and community are connected by the significance the sites have to their communities and by how engaged are communities with the site’s interpretation and presentation. Thus, the recognition of community engagement as an essential aspect in managing SCs will contribute to the preservation of these sites for future generations. This study then seeks to explore community engagement at SCs, in order to recognise the factors that contribute and hinder community engagement. The study focuses on the case of Villa Grimaldi, the biggest detention centre in Santiago, Chile during Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Currently, Villa Grimaldi is one of the most important and well-known SCs in Chile and the Southern Cone. In order to carry out the research, two main qualitative methods are proposed. Firstly, the analysis of visitors reviews on online platforms, which seeks to identify the main aspects in visitors’ experiences at the site that promote community engagement. This method aims to describe how visitors oriented their cognitive and emotional experiences towards the site and its interpretation, from being passively to actively engaged. Secondly, interviews with Villa Grimaldi’s managers are expected to give insight on the main managerial issues that hinder engagement and what actions should be taken to address them, especially in the current global health crisis caused by Covid-19.
No More Boxes: The Move Towards a More Overall Inclusive Museum Policy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bart Ooghe
For years, museums have been developing programmes that improve access for a wider range of visitors. But by labelling these offers as ‘special interest’, do we run the risk of maintaining an ‘us and them’ attitude even amidst such important inclusive work? This paper presents the policy shift within the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent towards a more inclusive approach. Over the last five years, we’ve developed offers with and for families, visitors with dementia, visually and auditorily impaired art lovers, youth, and non-native speaking newcomers. But simultaneously we’ve also appealed to move these out of their ‘special interest’ boxes. The paper presents how this took (and is taking) shape. Several offers that were available on request are now being integrated into the permanent presentation, allowing visitors to approach the collection on their own terms and inviting them to step into someone else’s shoes. The galleries have been vetted by an accessibility focus group, and temporary focused projects now start explicitly with the aim of also translating them into a permanent offer that’s accessible to wider audiences. Finally, close discussion with collection and exhibition teams led to rewriting gallery texts, so that multiple viewpoints are now integrated. In short, while the work is far from finished, the museum is moving away from viewing certain visitors as ‘specialty groups’, and towards more inclusively viewing each individual visitor as someone with their own special needs, which have to be considered.
Small Stories and Paired Listening: Learning from Visitor Responses in the Art Museum Using Qualitative Strategies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Deborah Randolph, Ann Rowson Love
More than ever before qualitative research is necessary to better understand inclusive practices in museums through the stories of visitor experiences and their meaning making. In this paper, the authors provide an overview of qualitative research methodologies used in art museums through an interactive matching game. Following the session we explore two specific qualitative methods involving visitor comment cards and recorded conversations in art museum exhibitions called small stories and paired listening respectively. Oftentimes, qualitative research entails long-term, in-depth investigations. The authors propose two strategies that are currently used in museums and are being further developed by the co-presenters. Small stories are a form of narrative inquiry research and analysis first articulated by sociolinguist researchers Bamberg and Georgakopoulou as early as 2006 to separate narrative research’s focus on long form biographical life stories toward valuing and understanding small stories—short responses that reveal social identity perspectives. One co-presenter is developing this as a methodology for use in art museums to analyze comment cards to understand visitor responses to contested or controversial content in art museum exhibitions. Likewise, paired listening conversations involve a record of dialogue between two people discussing a work of art. A form of ethnography, these recorded conversations provide insight into visitor experience by “listening in” on the exchange. Stainton (2002) writes, “Capturing the conversational construction of meaning by visitors with respect to aspects or features of the artwork gives the researcher critical insights about the visitor experience as it happens.”
The Guerrilla Museum: Landscapes of Learning View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Susan Moffat
The inside-out museum was a necessity during COVID-19, when gathering indoors was prohibited. During the pandemic, UC Berkeley students created an outdoor environmental history museum via a multi-media tour and exhibition at a construction debris landfill on San Francisco Bay. They used the mile-long peninsula of debris, which is un undeveloped public park, as an observatory to explore California histories of resource extraction by focusing both on the rubble underfoot and the landscapes visible across the water. The project combined a mobile podcast, art installations, augmented reality, and a 360-degree virtual tour. Monument to Extraction, as the project was called, provided multiple portals of entry for park visitors, engaging sports fishermen, dog walkers, and others who may not be regular museum-goers. The exhibition examined nearby histories of racial segregation, oil refining, and wartime industry, linking them to global histories of mining, container shipping, and industrial agriculture. This paper examines issues including guiding students in the creation of an exhibition; managing installations in an exposed and uncontrolled site; and ownership of stories of indigenous peoples, of the homeless community that once occupied the landfill, and of marginalized people impacted by extractive industries.
