Museumhive

Museumhive is a new Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded project spearheaded by Brad Larson and the New England Museum Association (NEMA) that I'm extremely proud to be an advisor for.

Museumhive will promote informal gatherings of people connected with museums to explore new community-centered visions for cultural institutions. Museumhive will also host social events and create content via Google Hangouts and additional social media platforms in the process. Real-life meetups + virtual followup = fun & effective thought leadership!

The Museumhive project will start out by supporting six in-person meetups featuring presentations by national thought leaders.  Join us in Boston on the evening of Wednesday October 26, 2016 at District Hall in Boston as we host special virtual guest Nina Simon via Google Hangout!  You can sign-up to attend the FREE event via Eventbrite.  I'll also be posting via my Facebook and Twitter feeds about ways to plug into the event if you can't join us in Boston.

Some of our aims for  Museumhive (and we're just getting started!) include:

• Creating a series of meetups in innovative environments where museum staff and emerging professionals can socialize and explore new visions.

• Using live Google Hangouts with national thought leaders to serve as the hub for each meetup.

• Indexing and archiving the Hangout videos, summarizing the events on the museumhive.org website, drawing participants further into an exploring a vision of the community-centered museum.

• Preparing short e-publication summaries designed to help museum and other cultural institution professionals connect the meetup topics to their own experiences.

I'm buzzing with excitement over Museumhive!  I'll continue to post here on ExhibiTricks and on my Facebook and Twitter feeds to spread the word and encourage IRL or electronic participation by both seasoned museum workers and emerging museum professionals.

Click on over to the Museumhive website to find out more about the project.

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Money, Politics, and Museums

The intertwined issues of money and politics are on full display with the U.S. Presidential Campaign in full swing.

I can't help seeing parallels to the issues being raised by the candidates, and the challenges of museums.

Starting with money, of course.  In both cases, one has to wonder if the needs and interests of the "people" (the vast majority of voters, in the case of political elections, along with visitors and most staff members, in the case of museums) are being swamped, if not completely lost, by the sway of big money donors and funders.  Recent revelations concerning the sway of funders in exhibitions that touched on issues of climate change are disappointing.  There is no such thing as a "neutral" exhibition, so why do museums continue to claim otherwise?

Fortunately, groups like The Natural History Museum are pushing museums to be more transparent and thoughtful in considering the implications of who their funders and trustees are.  


Wages and demographics are two related issues in the political process, but also in museum operations.  Politicians (and museums!) seem to have any number of excuses for not being able to pay some of their employees a living wage.  Lucky you if you work for a Wall Street firm or in the Development Department of a museum.  Too bad if you are a woman art museum director, or are part of the front line or education staff at most cultural institutions.

Again, groups like #MuseumWorkersSpeak and Museum Hue are bringing forward issues of inclusion and social justice in museums.

More than anything my takeaway from all this is to try to call out issues to be examined rather than hidden or "hushed up" in the museum community.  Kudos to museum organizations like NEMA who are building their conferences around such topics of common interest to museum workers.  I, and the general public, hold museums to high standards, and consider them highly trustworthy institutions.

But let's continue to earn that respect as a field by not falling victim to institutional laziness or craven pandering to funders.

Onward!





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Objects + Emotions

The recently concluded NEMA (New England Museum Association) Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts was BIG.

Over 1200 attendees jammed the sessions and hallways of the conference hotel.  I'm sure the promise of Cambridge (and Boston) drew many of those conference goers (as a comparison, the recent ASTC national Conference drew around 1700 people) but over 1200 attendees for a regional conference is fantastic!

Part of this has to do with the incredibly strong work the staff of NEMA does all year long in putting together excellent programs for the NEMA membership. The Annual Conference is just the culmination of those efforts.


So what stood out for me this year in Cambridge?  I felt that many of the ideas in sessions (and in after-session conversations) revolved around the intersection of objects and emotions.  As a matter of fact, one of my favorite sessions from this year's conference was entitled "Objects & Emotion" and was presented by Linda Norris and Rainey Tisdale.  The presenters started off by emphasizing the important ways that emotion and memory are connected, and led session attendees through exercises with real objects and memories.

Along the way Rainey and Linda cited research by John Falk that points to the importance of emotional content for long-lasting memories of visitors' museum experiences (handouts from this and other conference sessions can be found on the NEMA website) as well as a great quote from a blog post by Alli Burness:

"I’m aware of missing out on stories, context and learning by disregarding interpretive text even when accessible to me in my own language. But by playing around with looking as I travel, I’m learning to see differently, rediscovering how my subjectivity and emotions can have a role in my museum experience.  When researching later, I’ve found the emotions I feel when looking are rarely at odds with the story or meaning these objects are widely accepted to have. In fact, the emotions join hands with the meaning and both ring out louder. I’ve felt more deeply connected to these objects. I wonder if museums design exhibitions to allow a valuable experience to be had if the labels are ignored or read?"

Lastly there was a shout-out during discussion about the Significant Objects project, itself a nimble intersection between object and emotion.



Many other sessions during the NEMA Conference could also be viewed through the object/emotion lens as well.

"Pop-Up Programming and Exhibits in the Community" touched on the wide range of programming (involving real objects) and the strong emotional chords that were struck by bringing experiences out of the museum and into non-traditional spots in local communities.  Presenters from The Providence Children's Museum, The Peabody Essex Museum, The Maria Mitchell Observatory, and The Vaughan Homestead Foundation shared their experiences.

In general every speaker emphasized that different forms of pop-up programming have existed over time, and that many, if not most, programs that head out into local communities are a result of "too much stuff and not enough staff."

In the end, especially for smaller or remote museums, a primary aim for pop-up programming is to "go where the people are" and connect (emotionally!) with folks through objects and stories in a way that will encourage a visit to the actual "bricks and mortar" museum bringing these programs to the public.



One sessions that was not directly about objects and emotions, but that definitely stirred strong feelings from session attendees was "The Graduate School Conundrum."

The session asked whether getting a graduate degree in Museum Studies (or similar programs) was "worth it."  It was clear that many recent graduates in the audience, along with job seekers struggling to find a spot in the museum profession, were very conflicted about that question.  There was a general concern about whether more and more graduate programs turning out more and more graduates for a relatively small number of museum jobs was ethical, let alone practical.

Lively interchange with the audience provoked comments such as: "getting a graduate degree for a museum job is a form of academic hazing" and a question of whether Museum Studies programs were a "Ponzi scheme" !   (You really had to be there to appreciate the strong emotions in that packed conference room!)   Of course nothing was definitively settled, but I'm still thinking about that session!


Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention a session that I was involved in called "Pulling Back the Curtain: Sharing Exhibit Development Choices with Our Visitors."  My co-presenters Sari Boren, Kate Marciniec, and Christina Ferwerda dealt with an exhibit development question directly tied to the intersection between objects and emotions, namely, how much of our internal development process (the choice of objects, the selection of topics, the decisions about editorial points of view ...) should we share with visitors, and how?

We started the session discussing two recent art exhibitions, Cy Twombley's  "Treatise on the Veil" 
which very deliberately brought the viewer into the artist's process, and Kara Walker's "A Subtlety" which, I would argue, very deliberately kept many of the artist's goals and intentions opaque.

We broke out into small groups to discuss the possibilities of "Pulling Back The Curtain" in the context of four different exhibitions (in four different types of museum) Slavery in the context of a Historic House, Climate Change at a Science Museum, Introducing different communities in a Children's Museum, and Food-related cultural traditions in an Art Space.

While each exhibition/venue presented different challenges, one common thread that emerged was the importance of including real stories (and visitor stories, where possible) in the development process and in the final exhibition.  That was one way to break down the (perhaps artificial) wall between "Us" and "Them"  --- the museum and the audience.

And ultimately that feels like an ongoing personal takeaway from this year's NEMA Conference, as well as an on-going professional challenge --- how best to break down the barriers of traditional practice that prevent us from sharing the strong intersection between objects and emotions with the communities we are trying to best serve at our museums.



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And last, but not least, you can find out more about Paul Orselli and POW! at the main Paul Orselli Workshop website.

Moving Minds and Bodies: An Encore Interview with Christina Ferwerda

The New England Museum Association (NEMA) Conference will be taking place next week in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  In addition to POW! being one of this year's Conference Sponsors, I'm also really looking forward to being a session presenter.  Follow my Twitter feed (@museum_exhibits) for live updates from the conference!

I'll be part of a spirited session called " Pulling Back the Curtain: Sharing Exhibit Development Choices with Our Visitors" taking place from 8:45 – 10:15 am on Friday, November 21st.  I'm fortunate to be presenting alongside three exemplary museum professionals: Sari Boren, Kate Marciniec, and Christina Ferwerda.  Given that, I thought now would be an excellent time to post an "encore" version of the interview I did with Christina last year.  Enjoy!


Christina Ferwerda is an independent professional who bridges the worlds of museums, education, and movement. Her practice drawing from museum experiences, and moving (dance, yoga) has been an important part of her development as a teacher and a learner.  Working in Museum Education for over 10 years fueled Christina's desire to make varied cultural spaces more user-friendly for people of all ages, and led her to start working in Exhibition Development.  She currently works with partners in New York City (her home base) and North America as well as on projects abroad.

I was excited and pleased that Christina was able to provide this interview for ExhibiTricks!



What’s your educational background?  Well, I had a really hard time deciding what I wanted to do - I think as you grow up, there is a certain pressure to know what you want to "be" when you get older.  I started college as a journalism major, but found the field so cutthroat and competitive: it was a real turnoff. Therefore, my undergrad degree became a mishmash of a variety of fields - journalism, art history, studio art, and theater. I was surprised that Marquette University let me graduate! Now that I work on exhibit development, I can see how all of those fields fit together, but at the time I just wanted to finish, and felt like that combination of fields represented a path of some kind.

After I finished undergrad, I moved to Paris (by accident! I went for vacation and didn't return for 2 years). While there, I studied French history and culture at La Sorbonne. And when I moved to New York, all of these experiences came together with a graduate degree at Bank Street College of Education. It became clear that my skills could be used to create education programs and exhibits for everyone to enjoy.



What got you interested in Museums?  I grew up in a very small town in New Hampshire, and therefore museum-going didn't really figure into my young life - I spent most of my time finding bird feathers in the woods with my sister. However, in college I started to notice how much imagery and art helped me understand and express myself. When I went to Europe for the first time in 1998, I went to basically every museum I could find. And the true, transformative experience came when I found a late Picasso painting "The Matador and the Nude" (1970). I sat in front of that painting for about 2 hours, just thinking about the various shapes, lines, emotions and experiences that must have informed its making. After that, I was hooked. Today I go to tons of museums, as well as performances of various kinds.

Why Yoga AND Exhibits?  Great question - so many people ask me about that, and are curious about how I can make a living doing both.  So many of the experiences that museums provide center around providing a very concrete bit of information in a creative way - as institutions strive to help the public understand complex ideas and opinions. The goals of a regular yoga practice are very similar, however the ideas that are being communicated are often very philosophical and internal. What interests me is the intersection of the two - the very generalized idea and the personal embodiment. Making physical shapes that are connected to things we see and concepts we understand bring a more developed grasp of the information.

A very simple example that I use very often in teaching yoga is to cue my students to imagine that they are in a comic book, as Superman, and that their foot or hand is being accompanied by the word "POW" in the jagged text box. The visual informs a very physical and concrete movement and a sensation of energy in that part of the body, and the movement of the body brings a real visceral understanding of the image.



Tell us a little bit about how your “non-museum” skills/activities inform your exhibit design work?  I think the most important connection for my personal work is through yoga.  I really learned about having  a "practice" - coming back to the same ideas and goals, but constantly trying to explore and be inventive with them to find new and interesting approaches. Very often when I'm working on complex projects, I'll find a related movement goal and try to push the two forward together. This past winter, when we were working on the first children's museum in Bulgaria together,  I was struggling with language and the language barrier. Therefore, I chose a complex yoga pose that is highly connected to creativity and expression (the famed Scorpion pose). Of course, as you practice, you embody and think about those goals. I found a great method of communication that worked for the project and moved it forward.

What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out about the intersection between movement and museums.  Of course, there are quite a few resources online to learn about the latest in movement research and museums. However, I tend to try and go to as many things as I can in person - performances, exhibits, and especially performances or movement classes AT museums. The two fields are starting to intersect and overlap more and more, as the divide between performance and art becomes blurred into performance art. I also find it incredibly important to watch the way people travel and move within an exhibition - are they comfortable getting on the floor, or attaining a different view of an object, and is that posture available to them? I learn quite a bit that way.

I've recently been a bit disappointed in yoga classes that are offered in museums and cultural institutions - its such a rare opportunity to draw from the surroundings, and I haven't often found classes or teachers that make reference to the artwork or setting that surrounds them. I'm hoping to see a more conscientious connection between the two in years to come.



What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?  I'm a huge fan of Olafur Eliasson - I will go and find his exhibits whenever and wherever I can. His work has a really nice physical and visceral quality. I saw him speak, and he discussed striving for his work to have a "wow" moment, followed by an "aha" moment - one gets excited and hooked, but that curiosity fuels a revelation. That goal shines through his work and is something that I try to keep in mind when I'm thinking about yoga classes or museum experiences - that the experience should be physically and mentally exciting, and that the experience will feel more complete if there can be an educational realization tucked in there somewhre. I think the museum I've been to the most is MoMA, I like the way that sightlines and divisions of space create little "surprise" moments with art. To me it feels very personal, like I'm getting a special showing of the artwork. 



Can you talk a little about some of your current projects? Well, I'm about to head to New Orleans to install Moviehouse NOLA, a small social history and contemporary art exhibit. It's been a very challenging and rewarding process, building an exhibit about movie theater history there. I'm also continuing to work on a children's discovery room for the Florida Museum of Natural History and of course, continued work on Muzeiko, a children's museum in Bulgaria. They are all at different stages of development, so it definitely keeps me on my toes!

I'm also continuing to work on bringing movement to spaces infused with meaning - I just taught at a Zen monastery, and will be leading another retreat there in July. The movements are based on Zen philosophies and the life of the Buddha, and I'm working with an amazing co-teacher Kristen Mangione.



If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be? Ha, this changes every day for me! Recently, though, I've been thinking a lot about "the walking man" - a concept that Bill T. Jones used in exploring his last piece "A Rite."  Walking is so mundane, yet we rarely think about it. I'm sure there is some amazing research about culture, body language and walking . . . .

Thanks, Christina for sharing your thoughts and insights!  You can find out more about Christina Ferwerda and her work moving minds and bodies via her website or Twitter feed (@rationallunatic).



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Newport News: Impressions of the 2013 NEMA Conference

The 95th Annual NEMA (New England Museum Association) Conference just finished up in Newport, Rhode Island.  Having never been to Newport before, I couldn't help thinking of something Mark Twain said in his autobiography:

"Newport, Rhode Island, that breeding place, that stud farm, so to speak, of aristocracy; aristocracy of the American type."

And since the first night's evening event was a fabulous party held at The Breakers, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt's "summer cottage," it was hard not to see the point of Twain's quote.  

But despite being surrounded by many incredible historic mansions, the 2013 NEMA Conference itself was quite accessible and filled with lots of practical information.  The conference theme (which was crowd-sourced last year) was "Who Cares? Why Museums Are Needed Now More Than Ever."
  
This year, NEMA offered a conference app, and many session handouts were made available via a download section of the NEMA website. 

Obviously I couldn't attend every session and event at the Conference, but here are some impressions of the things I did see and participate in:

Is Your Museum Ethical?  Hats off to Session Chair Rebecca Smith for being willing to raise a set of tricky issues that come up in the museum business.  The session was well-attended with good opportunities for session attendees to participate in resolving hypothetical ethical dilemmas.  Julie Hart, from the American Alliance of Museums, also spoke about resources available from AAM in this regard.  Check out the PDF handouts from the session on the NEMA website.


Telling a Better Story Outside the Walls of Your Museum  Session leaders gave some great tips on "setting the stage" for indoors experiences with outdoor installations.  Among many pieces of common sense advice that stuck with me were exhortations that "little impressions add up" so maintenance and repair, especially of outdoor exhibits and signage are important, and that it is important to test outdoor components, especially those involving digital technology or electronics, to ensure they work as intended.


Creating Experiences for Visitors to "Think with Their Hands"  Of course I'm biased since I was a presenter at this session with colleagues from Art, History, and Children's museums, but this deliberately "hands-on " session gave participants many different ways to think about how content could be translated into meaningful gallery activities and/or exhibits by letting visitors (and staff!) "think with their hands."  One resource mentioned during this session was the Great Big Exhibit Resource List, a constantly evolving list of exhibit materials and suppliers.

 

Gaming in Museums: From Low-Tech to High-Tech  This active session gave us opportunities to play with and evaluate actual museum game concepts.  We also discussed the broad concept of "barriers to entry" and ways to make games and museum game installations most broadly accessible. You can check out a session handout here. 


Valuing Neurodiversity: Interns with Asperger's Syndrome in a Museum Gallery Guide Program  Of course museums and museum people constantly strive for accessibility in our programs and institutions, but it is often difficult to think about the practical steps needed to accomplish those goals.  This session provided great background information, as well as practical tips and case studies, on how to provide access and opportunities for people on the autism spectrum.  Two takeaways here were to break tasks into small chunks, and to look for ways to minimize "surprises" or unexpected situations for people along the spectrum (whether visitors, staff, or interns.) Great handouts available via the NEMA website. 

Perfecting Your Elevator Speech  The title is pretty self explanatory, but Dan Yaeger, the Executive Director of NEMA gave a funny and engaging presentation on a topic that we could all probably benefit from thinking about a little more.  Excellent handouts here.

The two last things I'll speak about are: 

1) The "Demonstration Stations" (short demos on focused topics that took place in the Exhibit Hall) which seemed from all reports to be a resounding success.  I think this idea could be replicated at other museum conferences as well.

2) The PAG (for Professional Affinity Groups) Lunch Sessions were another great way to network and gather with colleagues from like-minded  groups (like Exhibits folks, or Museum Directors).  The Exhibitions PAG described several interesting exhibits collaborations, including the "Curiouser" exhibitions that took place at the Museum of Natural History and Planetarium at Roger Williams Park.

Of course it wasn't all work!  I got a mini-lesson on how to balance on the "spinning globe" ball from circus and vaudeville master Reg Bacon (pictured below) during Friday's coffee break!

All in all, I found this year's NEMA Conference to be extremely well-organized --- filled with many opportunities to learn, as well as many chances to network with peers.  Major, major kudos to the NEMA staff and this year's conference organizers for a job well done!  I hope to meet more ExhibiTricks readers in Cambridge, MA at the 2014 NEMA Conference.


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Visitor Voices: Cacophony or Chorus? Thoughts on NEMA 2012

I just breezed out of beautiful Burlington, Vermont as the 2012 NEMA (New England Museum Association) wrapped up for another year.

My big takeaway centered on all the session (and hallway!) chatter involving the issues and challenges regarding the increasingly greater inclusion of visitor input into museum exhibits and programs.

Certainly fostering cultural organizations that are more responsive to, and inclusive of, the many different communities that interact with each museum is important, but I was struck by an odd little nuance during many of the conversations in Burlington.

So many NEMA folks seemed hesitant (or downright ashamed) of sorting/curating/editing the vast piles (physical and/or digital) of visitor-generated content they were gathering.  Somehow it seemed that unless many square feet of inane sticky note comments weren't allowed to remain posted at "Talk Back" boards across New England's museums, we were inherently insulting (or censoring?) visitors by sorting and organizing more meaningful comments for display.

The "signal to noise" ratio at most of these comment boards really makes me question if this technique is becoming a painfully overused cliche akin to mini grocery store exhibits inside Children's Museums.  Crafting careful "prompts" or thoughtful questions that elicit more than repetitive and banal responses from visitors can be tough.  But why bother to even waste the sticky notes if you're only going to ask such overly open-ended questions as: "Tell us about your favorite memory about (insert exhibition theme here)?"

If you do come up with good questions for visitors to answer, have you provided a comfortable environment where they can focus a bit to produce a thoughtful answer?  Or did you just slap up a board on a wall right in the middle of a bustling exhibition gallery?  Again, why waste the sticky notes if you've set up the situation to realistically produce only the most cursory, dashed-off comments?

But let's say you've come up with great questions, and really crafted an environment that encourages the careful expression of thoughts as well as an opportunity to review and ponder what others have shared.  Do you really want to present everything in an undifferentiated mass like an intellectual "town dump"?  (It's great to keep past comments accessible, but what's your mechanism for allowing visitors to easily search through older contributions?)

Two analogies that I heard in Burlington really helped me think about the role of museum staff in this process:

The first compared visitor comments and community contributions to a museum's physical collections.  Curators care for physical collection objects and keep them, but museums only put their most interesting, most significant (perhaps even most upsetting) things on display, not everything!  Shouldn't we treat visitor and community contributions in similar ways?

The second analogy compared the role of museum staff to that of a conductor with an orchestra or choir.  You keep things a bit organized, and let individual contributions shine through, but you also help prevent everything from completely going off the rails.  It's important for community members to feel that their contribution "counted" but you can do that in many different ways.

I thought the analogies neatly balanced both sides of the visitor contribution "coin." One focused on careful curation and sorting, the other allowed for the recognition a broader collective effort.  I'm glad that the opportunity to interact with colleagues from around the region during the NEMA Conference got me to think more deeply about this topic.

What do you think?  What techniques have you used to "orchestrate" thoughtful visitor and community input?  Let us know in the "Comments Section" below.


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Hobnobbing with the Historians (NEMA 2011 Wrap-Up)

Different types of museums seem to foster different "tribes" (or affinity groups) of both staff and visitors.  So I was happy to get outside of my science center/children's museum/interactive exhibits comfort zone to attend the decidedly history-oriented NEMA (New England Museum Association) Conference that just recently concluded in Hartford, Connecticut.

To be sure, not everyone at the Conference was in the History racket, but the majority were.  So this is a group that takes the twin foci of the museum business, "Stories" and "Stuff" very seriously.  (Of course that's a tricky task when you have such artifacts range from whaling ships to original Silly Putty packaging.)

You might expect such a conference to be overly concerned with "When" and "What" type questions, but I was pleased to find that this year's NEMA conference kept bubbling with "Who" (as in who are we as museums, and who will our visitors be?) and "How" (as in the process of creating engaging, community-centered, and community co-created, offerings) type questions.

What follows are a few highlights from the conference sessions and activities:

Tuesday night, before the official Wednesday morning start, began with a nice social opportunity by offering a "Pecha Kucha" evening event.  I've written about Pecha Kucha before, but briefly it is a presentation format that limits each presenter to a session of 20 slides of 20 seconds each (for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds.)  The format is great for getting presenters to focus and sharpen their ideas.  The NEMA crew delivered with presentations ranging from "The Pickle Project" to reflections on Route 66.  I think every museum conference should start this way!

In keeping with the "Who" and "How" focus, the Wednesday morning Keynote Presentation was actually a panel presentation on "Reflecting Relevance in a Diverse Society."  The speakers eloquently and forcefully emphasized the disconnect between the past, and for the most part current, offerings of museums and cultural institutions in the U.S. and the changing demographics of our potential visitors.  Basically, museums that attract older and whiter audiences can't expect to keep doing more of the same programming and expect to interest and attract audiences that do not have a museum-going tradition.

Another nice aspect of NEMA's programming format is that they allow individuals (even those running a business or independent museum professionals) to present for an entire 90 minute session by themselves. In my experience,  this worked really well and allowed in-depth consideration of such topics as developing apps for your museum (by Rob Pyles of TourSphere),  building a strong social media presence (by Caitlyn Thayer of Barefoot Media), and exhibit project management (by Todd Harris of 42 | Design Fab Studio.)   The presenters were all thorough and thoughtful and absolutely did NOT turn their sessions into sales "pitches."  Bigger conferences like AAM, ASTC, and ACM should take note, and loosen their session formats a bit!

Of course not all the important conversation happens during sessions, and I was happy to reconnect with some old friends and meet some new folks as well.  I even went to a Tweet-Up!  If you find yourself in Hartford, you could do worse than eating at Trumbull Kitchen or Black-eyed Sally's!

The only false note in the conference evening festivities was the trip to the Connecticut Science Center.  Both the event itself, and also the entire museum, were lacking.  It's amazing to think of all the money and political capital (not to mention a "starchitect") that went into producing such a fizzle of a place  --- a true museum NOT worth a special trip.  (But I'll save the specifics for a future post ...)

Luckily, I was invited to present during two sessions.  I gave a short talk and helped moderate an activity during the Exhibits PAG (Professional Affinity Group) Lunch on the topic of "Green Exhibits" where I referenced the "Green Exhibits Checklist."

I also was on the panel of "critiquers" for a session that reviewed the "Making Connecticut" exhibition at the Connecticut Historical Society.  (Which despite being a history exhibition, had some nice interactive opportunities for visitors, like the spindle component pictured below.)  I applaud the staff and designers for putting their work up for review in a public forum before their peers.  This, to me, is how we grow as practitioners and share ideas on how to create better exhibitions.

Kudos to the NEMA staff and museum hosts for doing such a great job with the 2011 Conference!  Their hard work is a big reason why NEMA continues to be one of the strongest regional museum associations in the U.S.



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