Museum Exhibit Design: The "New" Detroit Institute of Arts

As a followup to my recent posting about interactive experiences (or lack thereof) in art museums, I thought I'd share two different points of view about the "reinvention" of The Detroit Institute of Arts (or the DIA as it's known to locals.) For context, the DIA has reopened last year after completely reconfiguring its galleries and its institutional approach toward the visitor experience.

The first (immediately below) is a report from the radio show Studio 360 that details an interactive "virtual dining" experience that serves to highlight some of the DIA's decorative arts collection.


Personally, as someone who was born and raised in Detroit --- I count the DIA as one of my favorite museums --- I can't wait to get back to Detroit to see the "new" DIA. The dining interactive sounds like a wonderful way to engage visitors in a difficult, but interesting, area of the collection.

Clearly not everyone feels the same way. Enter art historian Christina Hill, who wrote this opinion piece for one of Detroit's alternative newspapers, The Metro Times.

Ms. Hill comes off as a bit of an art snob, in my opinion. As an art historian she may well have the education and experience to take away "volumes" of information from every encounter with a work of art, but I doubt that every visitor (or potential visitor) to an art museum has the same capacity. I'm at a loss to see the downside of thoughtfully integrated interactives in an art museum.

What do you think? Should art museums remain purely temples to art? Are interactives in an art museum condescending to the primary audince? Are interactives just a "cheap trick" or do they "dumb down" the primary experience? Add your own thoughts in the "Comments" section below.

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Exhibit Aphorisms Deck Contest Winners

We have our two winners of the Exhibit Aphorisms Deck Contest:

• Sona wins the first deck for her quote: "The display should catch the eye, the content should catch the mind."

• And randomly selected from the new ExhibiTricks email subscribers, Tim C. takes home the other deck.

Congratulations to both Tim and Sona, and thanks to everyone who entered a quote and/or subscribed during the contest.

Because of the positive response, we'll be having another ExhibiTricks contest with exhibit-related prizes coming up soon, so stay tuned!

MagPie Time

A new show called MagPie Time is coming out to show kids (and their adult friends) how to make crafty projects using recycled and reused materials. Their plan is to show step-by-step instructions for every project featured. MagPie Time will be a great resource for museum folks looking for project ideas.

MagPie Time looks like a cross between Pee Wee's Playhouse and MAKE magazine. In fact, some of MagPie's team were involved with the original Pee Wee show. Check out the talking ball of yarn!

For more info, click to view the MagPie Time website as well as the teaser video above.

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Green Design Resource: Earth911.com

One aspect of the emphasis on "green design" that is often overlooked is how to properly recycle scrap or waste exhibit materials that cannot be reused.

For example, many museums are switching to more energy-efficient lighting like Compact Fluorscent Lights (CFLs). However, even CFLs burn out eventually, and each bulb contains a small amount of mercury, so CFLs shouldn't just be pitched into the dumpster.

Similarly, even the empty cans from low VOC (Volatile Organic Componds) finishes need to be properly recycled.

The problem is that it's not easy to know where to properly recycle every type of product or container.

That's where a site like Earth911.com comes in! Besides being packed with lots of great tips about living and working greener, there is a handy form at the top of the homepage that lets you enter the type of stuff you'd like to recycle and your location to find the nearest recycling facility that accepts your particular leftover materials or scrap.

(By the way, most Home Depot locations now accept used CFLs for recycling, even if you didn't buy them there originally.)

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Why Can't Art Museums Have More Interactive Exhibits?

And why can't Science Museums and Children's Museums (the traditionally "hands-on museums) have more "hands-off" (minds-on?) artworks on display?

I started thinking some more about this since I recently opened an exhibition entitled "The Animated Artwork of Laura Vaccaro Seeger" at The Nassau County Museum of Art here on Long Island. (It's up until January 4th, 2009, so if you're in the area, come take a look!)

The exhibition includes interactive exhibits and installations that naturally dovetail with themes like light and color, metamorphosis, and negative space that show up in the award-winning children's books that Laura writes and illustrates. This would definitely NOT be a big deal if I was designing this sort of show at a "hands-on" museum, but this was the first time that NCMA had put on a show with so many deliberately interactive exhibit pieces. Initially the museum staff were even a little freaked out by having loose books in the gallery (in a show by an author!)
so we compromised by mounting the books on "reading shelves" attached to the walls.

Shows like the art museum show, "Take Your Time" by Olafur Eliasson, incorporate stunning pieces that, with a little tweaking, could make equally amazing science museum exhibits. But since Eliasson's pieces are "art" they are not meant to be touched, or interacted with physically, at least inside of an art museum.

At issue seems to be the context that people (with or without young children in tow) approach different types of museums. The atmosphere in most art museums is on the level of a library --- hushed tones, silent contemplation, and guards occasionally telling people to settle down. One of the complaints from guards (but not visitors!) in the Laura Vaccaro Seeger show is that some of the interactive pieces make noise, or cause the visitors to make noise!

Of course most science centers and children's museums often seem like a cross between a fun house and a race track --- frenetic busy activity, and experiences that seem to invite chaos more than contemplation. So is it possible to introduce contemplative experiences into such active spaces?

I remember speaking with Bernie Zubrowski about a piece that he developed and displayed at The Exploratorium, entitled "The Ghost of Amelia Earhart". The piece incorporated a silky piece of fabric (Amelia's scarf?) immersed in a tank of water being gently swirled by currents. There are interesting moire patterns caused when the fabric overlaps, as well as mysterious shadows formed by the lighting inside the tank.

When I saw Bernie's piece at The Exploratorium, I loved it. Unfortunately, I was one of the very few visitors to take the time to pay attention to its subtle pleasures. Despite being a treasure trove of art and science exhibits, The Exploratorium wasn't really conducive to a piece like Bernie's which required quiet concentration from the viewer. However, "The Ghost of Amelia Earhart" would have been very well received in an art museum or gallery show.

So how can we get art museums to "loosen up" on their approach to exhibits and visitor interactions, or should we?

What about more getting "interactive museums" to provide more contemplative spaces and opportunities?

Or are all types of museums trapped by the genre classifications that they have worked so hard to foster and create?

UPDATE: Here's an interesting article on the subject concerning the "Act/React: Interactive Installation Art" exhibition that will open in Milwaukee in January 2009.

What do you think? Should we just let art museums be art museums, and hands-on museums be hands-on museums, or have you seen exhibits or exhibitions that help blur the lines? Put your thoughts into the "Comments Section" below!

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Our First Contest!

In our recent interview with Harry White ("Science Centre Consultant" at TechniQuest Science Center in Cardiff, Wales) we discussed his card deck of Exhibit Aphorisms.

Harry started collecting these quotations, jokes, and provocations about exhibits and exhibit development to use in a university course in Science Communication based in a Science Centre.

Here are two random examples:

"If they had to read the label the exhibit designer blew it."

"Bad exhibit ideas get more complex, good exhibit ideas get simpler."

I found out at the recent ASTC Conference in Philadelphia that Harry has officially "published" a full deck of 54 cards (52 + 2 Jokers) each with a pithy insight into the exhibit development process on the face.

And now two lucky ExhibiTricks readers will each win one of these limited "first edition" decks. (See picture above.)

Here's how to win: between now and the end of October, simply enter into the "Comments Section" below your favorite quote (either "original" or "borrowed") about the exhibit development process OR become an email subscriber to the ExhibiTricks blog (just use the handy box along the right side of the blog to sign up.) We'll choose one person from the commenters, and one from the new email subscribers, and we'll notify the two winners in the first week of November.

Get started, have fun, and good luck!

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to subscribe right now via email (or your favorite news reader) with the tools on the right side of the blog.