Museum/Exhibit/Design Inspiration: The American Visionary Art Museum's Seven Education Goals

What inspires you?  What pushes you to think about your work in new and different ways?

Given that my previous post about Hayao Miyazaki's Museum Manifesto seemed to resonate with and inspire so many ExhibiTricks readers, I thought I would share a similar "manifesto" of sorts, courtesy of the American Vision Art Museum (AVAM) --- one of my very favorite places to visit!

If you have yet to become familiar with AVAM, it is an art museum located near the Inner Harbor of Baltimore.  The buildings and exhibits pulse with energy and excitement that is infectious and the majority of the pieces on display were made not by formally trained artists but rather by an eclectic group of very creative people. To quote from the AVAM website:

"Visionary art as defined for the purposes of the American Visionary Art Museum refers to art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself." 

But what I'm interested in sharing today are the Seven Education Goals that guide AVAM.  They strike me as admirable goals for any museum or any creative person (which really means everybody, doesn't it?)

AVAM's Seven Education Goals

• Expand the definition of a worthwhile life.

• Engender respect for and delight in the gifts of others.

• Increase awareness of the wide variety of choices available in life for all ... particularly students.

• Encourage each individual to build upon his or her own special knowledge and inner strengths.

• Promote the use of innate intelligence, intuition, self-exploration, and creative self-reliance.

• Confirm the great hunger for finding out just what each of us can do best, in our own voice, at any age.

• Empower the individual to choose to do that something really, really well.

I hope you continue this month choosing to do something really, really, well!

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Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

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Is "Inspiration" Hazardous to Exhibit Design?

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”  ~ Jack London

As I was touring through a new exhibition at a very large museum recently, a person from the Exhibits Department complained to me that they didn't have enough time or money to prototype their interactive exhibits. 

 

"So, how do you work out which ideas to put into your exhibitions?" I asked.  The exhibits person admitted that they spent a large amount of time gathering exhibit notions together that the designers felt "inspired by" and produced those things to create the final exhibition --- generally leaving no time or money for remediation if technical or content aspects fell flat.

I immediately thought of the Jack London quote at the top of this post and considered how slippery the notion of inspiration is. And how the best exhibit components often come about from spending time with visitors and ideas and materials -- figuring out what works (and what doesn't) and stumbling onto serendipitous avenues that would never have been found in mind-numbing development meetings or the reveries of creating slick computer renderings to show potential donors.

I wonder if the oft-repeated plaint of "no time or no money" for prototyping and testing components/concepts/whatever (or for fixing things after an exhibition opens) is just a convenient excuse to cover the fear of the unknown.  Is waiting for the clouds to open and inspiration to strike just a similar sort of excuse?

 

New ideas are fragile things, especially ideas centered around approaches that have never been tried before.  Doubts start to creep in: What if your ideas fall flat before your peers during a presentation meeting?  What if visitors don't like the ideas?  Many museums speed through, or try to short-change, the often messy and plain hard work of really trying ideas out, even though the final exhibition is often better for these early uncertainties.  These museums want the inspiration, but they aren't willing to go after it with a club.

So here's an idea for your current (or next) exhibit project: take one exhibit idea, even if it's not fully formed and truly "inspiring," and just try it out for at least 20 minutes with visitors inside your museum.  You can test or show your idea with paper, tape, and a pen (stuff you already have near your workspace) Ask your visitors questions. Let them make suggestions.  You do have time (20 minutes) and money (near zero) to do this!  

 

Who knows?  You might even get inspired. 

 

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case."   ~ Chuck Close

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"

What's Your Favorite Museum Work Poem or Quote? (Plus a HOLIDAY GIVEAWAY!)

Do you have a poem or quote that you keep coming back to that inspires or resonates with your museum work?

I do.  It's a poem called "The Real Work" by Wendell Berry.

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

It seems that so much of our museum work often brings us to places and ideas that we don't quite understand yet.  And I guess that's part of the reason that "The Real Work" resonates with me, and why I keep Berry's poem on my phone so I can share it with my creative partners.

And now the HOLIDAY GIVEAWAY!

In the spirit of quotes and poems, I'm going to give away three of Harry White's "Exhibit Aphorism" card decks to some lucky ExhibiTricks readers!  

For your chance at one of those three decks, just email me your favorite quote or poem that drives and inspires your museum work before December 11, 2023.  And tell me a little about what the words mean to you and your work.  I'll choose three winners from all the responses submitted.

Depending on the number of responses, I'll put together a future ExhibiTricks post sharing some of the inspirational poems and quotes.

GOOD LUCK!

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"

Is Inspiration Hazardous to Exhibit Development?

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”  ~ Jack London

As I was touring through a new exhibition at a very large museum recently, a person from the Exhibits Department complained to me that they didn't have enough time or money to prototype their interactive exhibits. 

 

"So how do you work out which ideas to put into your exhibitions?" I asked.  The Exhibits person admitted that they spent a large amount of time gathering exhibit notions together that the designers felt "inspired by" and produced those things to create the final exhibition --- generally leaving no time or money for remediation, if technical or content aspects fell flat.

I immediately thought of the Jack London quote at the top of this post and considered how slippery the notion of "inspiration" is. And how the best exhibit components often come about from spending time with visitors and ideas and materials figuring out what works (and what doesn't) and stumbling onto serendipitous avenues that would never have been found in mind-numbing exhibit development meetings or the reveries of creating slick computer renderings to show potential donors.

I wonder if the oft-repeated complaint of "no time or no money" for prototyping and testing components/concepts/whatever (or for fixing things after an exhibition opens) is just a convenient excuse to cover the fear of the unknown.  Is waiting for the clouds to open and inspiration to strike just a similar sort of excuse?

 

New ideas are fragile things, especially ideas centered around approaches that have never been tried before.  Doubts start to creep in: What if your ideas fall flat before your peers during a presentation meeting?  What if visitors don't like the ideas?  Many museums speed through, or try to short-change, the often messy and plain hard work of really trying ideas out even though the final exhibition is often better for these early uncertainties.  These museums want the inspiration, but they aren't willing to go after it with a club.

So here's an idea for your current (or next) exhibition project:  take one exhibit idea, even if it's not fully formed and truly "inspiring" and just try it out for at least 30 minutes with visitors inside your museum.  You can test or show your idea with paper, tape, and a pen (stuff you already have near your workspace) Ask your visitors questions. Let them make suggestions.  You do have time (30 minutes) and money (near zero) to do this!  

 

Who knows?  You might even get inspired!

 

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case."   ~ Chuck Close

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"

Design Inspiration: Building with Light and Color

Throughout time, artists, architects, and even exhibit designers have created opportunities for people to play with light and color.

A beautiful example of this is Sainte-Chapelle, the royal chapel completed in the year 1248 in Paris.

It is amazing to step inside the chapel surrounded by multi-story stained-glass windows.  The light and color shifts and changes as you move around inside the space.  In some ways, it feels like you are actually inside a stained-glass window!

A more modern take on employing light and color in architecture is artist Olafur Eliasson's installation called Your rainbow panorama.

Situated on top of the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum art museum in Aarhus, Denmark, Your rainbow panorama invites you to experience the familiar (a city skyline) in unfamiliar ways. Olafur Eliasson's creation consists of a 150-meter-long and three meter-wide circular walkway in glass in all the colors of the spectrum. Your rainbow panorama is mounted on slender columns 3.5 meters above the roof of ARoS with a diameter of 52 meters.

Here's a quote from Eliasson about this work:

“Your rainbow panorama establishes a dialogue with the existing architecture and reinforces what was already there, that is to say the view across the city. I have created a space that can almost be said to erase the boundary between inside and outside – a place where you become a little uncertain as to whether you have stepped into a work of art or into part of the museum. This uncertainty is important to me, as it encourages people to think and sense beyond the limits within which they are accustomed to function.” 


Architect Keiichiro Sako takes the playful aspects of light and color into the design of this kindergarten building in China.

The lucky students are completely surrounded by rainbow colors -- on the stairs, in windows, and inside their classroom spaces!

Of course, the most fun is building and playing with light and color yourself. For that purpose, I'd suggest getting some colorful, translucent Magna-Tiles  (You can get them here at Amazon, or at other online stores.) I hope your days ahead are filled with light and color!

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"

Quick Inspiration: String Art

Check out this string art created with ultraviolet light or video projection.

For more images and information, click over to the artist's Facebook page or website.

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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