Give Your Exhibition Development Process A Summer Vacation!

I think charettes can be a great way to break out of your normal exhibition development process and give yourself a mental/procedural "summer vacation" of sorts, so I thought now would an apropos time for an "encore" post on the topic.
 

Working with other people can be tricky.  Group dynamics often degenerate into a pat way of thinking about other people (Oh, there's crazy George talking about visitor numbers again ...) or other departments (Those marketing folks don't have any idea of what it takes to put an exhibit together ...)

Unfortunately, in a constantly shifting marketplace that practically demands that museums are continually innovating and evolving, falling into boring operational patterns or getting locked into interpersonal cul-de-sacs is not great for business.  It also makes working with other people a lot less fun.

So how can you break the mold of past practice (or even get past the goofy term "best practice") and shake your museum working groups up in a fun and positive way?

I'd offer one suggestion:  The Charette.

A little history first from Wikipedia: The term "charette" was thought to originate from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 19th century, the word charrette is from the French for "cart" or "chariot." It was not unusual for student architects to continue working furiously in teams at the end of the allotted term, up until a deadline, when a charrette would be wheeled among the students to pick up their work for review while they, each working furiously to apply the finishing touches, were said to be working en charrette, in the cart. Émile Zola depicted such a scene of feverish activity in L'Œuvre (serialized 1885, published 1886), his fictionalized account of his friendship with Paul Cézanne. Hence, the term metamorphosed into the current design-related usage in conjunction with working right up to a deadline.)

Bringing together a small group of folks, including some from outside your organization, to bash around ideas for a fixed chunk of time, can bring incredible results.  The best charettes are not just  random brainstorming sessions, but rather concentrated bursts of activity surrounding a fixed topic (or topics) leading toward some conclusions about a particular aspect of a project by the time you're finished.

These past few months I've been whizzing around the country, helping to organize, or be part of, exhibit charettes.  I am always heartened and gratified by the large amount of high-quality thinking that can come out of a charette process that puts people into a room without the normal work-day distractions of phone calls, emails, and memos.  The charette process really compels people to bring their "A Game" to the table and contribute their best thoughts and ideas.

We so often complain about the lack of time in the museum business, so it's great to find a process that has a goal of producing tangible, actionable results in a short time.

So pick two or three specific thorny problems your organization has been struggling with, block out a day, and bring in some outsiders to shake things up a bit.  Who knows what sorts of ideas you can fill your "chariot" with?


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Revealing Process to Relieve Museum Visitor Boredom?

Museums are great at showing off end-products, but the process(es) that created those products --- not so much.

Every time I'm in an art museum and hear someone nearby mutter "my kid could do a better job than that ..." I think that if only the disgruntled visitor could get a better sense of HOW the artist created the artwork in question, that they might feel differently.

But in many museums (especially art and history museums) visitors are faced with thousands of items plainly presented with the assumption that any "thoughtful" person will simply be amazed/inspired/transported by what's on display.  And what many visitors often find "boring" about museums is this endless parade of encased or hung objects without any context.

So what's to be done?  I'd say it's no accident that two of the current trends in museums relate directly to this context/process challenge in museum exhibition design:

• The rise of co-curated or community-curated exhibitions deliberately busts the normally opaque process open, and gives people a sense of the messiness involved in creating what often is seen as a tidy end result.  Of equal importance, creative/community partners take tremendous pride and ownership in the end results.

• Maker spaces or design education spaces inside museums (including non-science museums like the Denver Art Museum) give visitors an opportunity to directly participate in activities that interest them and that "pull back the curtain" on many, many aspects of the processes involved in creating products.


Of course large, traditional collection-based institutions may find it hard to pivot toward more process-oriented exhibition experiences.  However, even straightforward approaches in exhibition design can address this. 

Take for example the "Hopper Drawing" exhibition currently on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art.  The basic premise is simple: display classic paintings by Edward Hopper alongside preparatory drawings of those same paintings to give visitors a better sense of the artist's evolving and changing process.

Perhaps if more museums could become as involved in revealing process as well as product, fewer visitors would think of museums as "boring."

Have you visited a museum or exhibition recently that adeptly revealed process?  Then give a shout out in the "Comments" Section below!


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P.S. If you receive ExhibiTricks via email (or Facebook or LinkedIn) you will need to click HERE to go to the main ExhibiTricks page to make comments or view multimedia features (like videos!)