A Repertoire of Experiences: An Interview with Maria Mortati

Maria Mortati is a Museum Exhibit Developer and Project Planner. She lives and works in the Bay Area on a variety of projects that span the temporary to long term, and are often experimental in nature.

Maria was kind enough to answer a few questions for this ExhibiTricks interview:


What’s your educational background?
I have a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Colorado in Boulder and an MFA in Design from Stanford University. I also spent some time in between those two degrees studying graphic design. I learned User Interface design on the job in the 90’s and taught in HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and basic mechanical engineering design classes at grad school.  



What got you interested in Museums?
I was always interested in art, drawing, and design from a young age. My parents took us to museums, as did my school, sometimes unrelentingly. They let us know this was important in some way, even if I wanted to (and did) kick my brother.

Museums and galleries became my go to place as a young person.  As a teenager, contemporary art museums especially resonated. Modern art at that time was still “modern”.  I used to haunt the galleries in Greenwich Village and go home at night with my friends and draw. Nerds, I know.

After the inevitable post-BFA pay-the-rent-jobs, I worked in visual and user interface design for about a decade. It was fun, I learned a lot about engagement, identity, and teamwork.

After a while I wanted to do more conceptual work and work on larger ideas and environments than the Internet offered, so I went to get my MFA. During those 3 years I did an installation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and a series of thesis projects that could be best summarized by “is it exhibit or is it art?” They were physical, highly interactive and often social in nature.

From there, the melding of my new creative skills and the museum world seemed a natural next step.



Given your varied background, is your approach to exhibition development different in the context of different museum types?
Do you mean I take a different approach based on the project? Not really, there is always the essential getting to know you, and development phases that help structure the work. Given that these are often large projects, good fences make good neighbors.



What is the San Francisco Mobile Museum project?
The San Francisco Mobile Museum (SFMM) is a “pop-up” project I developed in 2009. I’ve had two exhibitions and it has shown in a number of locations, primarily outdoors in the Bay Area. The SFMM is a platform that can be broken down to fit in my car. Past exhibits have been participatory with the public responding to a theme or prompt by making something. The next exhibition will be moving away from that model, and will focus more on onsite engagement. It will be called “Observatorium” and I’ll be posting about its progress on our blog.

(If you want to learn more about the San Francisco Mobile Museum project, there is an article on it coming out in Spring 2012 issue of Exhibitionist.)



Tell us a little bit about how your mobile projects inform your exhibit design work?
They help give me some grounding in reality. My work projects tend to span years into the future and don’t offer much room for experimentation. However, there is often a lot on the line. Having the SFMM there to test things out gives me some solid experience (if even on a tiny scale) with an idea or an approach. It’s not that I’m exactly testing out an idea for a specific project, but if I want to be a part of the conversation, then I need to be participating in the conversation.

A project I did in 2010 with Machine Project at the Hammer Museum (The Giant Hand) was also very important in terms of how it shaped my professional perspective and gave me insights. I had a chance to be both artist and designer, so I stumbled into some unique issues and challenges that museums face and got to be creative while doing it.



What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about exhibition development?
The report recently released by Machine Project on the above-mentioned residency at the Hammer Museum. And not just because I’m in it! It’s a great resource for exploring the potential of a museum.

Exhibit developers come in all types- that's’ good because museums do too. So there is no one compendium I turn to, but I do visit a lot of museums, take pictures, and write about it when possible. It’s good to always be developing a repertoire of experiences.



What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in bringing aspects of storytelling into their exhibitions?
Storytelling or narrative is a tool or technique that is quite powerful- when dealing with human stories (as we often are). They are the glue that can give a visitor a point of access into a world of ideas.

With the SFMM, we let the visitors “tell” their own stories about their objects, but we provided the framework. Another project that did this very well was the Denver Community Museum, who we collaborated with on our inaugural exhibit. It’s a good and simple mechanism to draw participants out and the public in.

Storytelling isn’t the only approach. For example, Olafur Elliasson’s work: would it be more impactful if it had a storyline?

Each work, exhibit, or installation has its own set of options. The bigger question that helps sort out which way to go is what is your ultimate goal for this exhibit? There is a logic that flows from there to help drive which techniques to play with.

I tend to approach exhibits with the question: what can I do that would be fun or innovative to explore this idea? For the visitor, the institution, and of course, myself.

For smaller museums, determining the best impact you can have with your resources at hand is the central challenge and their greatest source of strength. It is their key differentiator. Edit down to a few powerful ideas and then save the others for another exhibition. Then find the most impactful technique to bring that choice to life.

What do you think is the “next frontier” for museums?

I think museums need to excel at creating and joining ideas in ever-freer ways, and less focused on traditional notions of silo-ed curation and exhibition. I’m not alone in this idea and I’m also not saying throw our expertise out the door though. Keep it.

We have established dominance in framing and synthesizing concepts, now lets get serious about “engagement”. We are uniquely poised to claim this space, but it’s been slow going due to our institutional make-up and value systems. I'm talking about a paradigm shift from collect and preserve to select and engage.

If a museum could focus on one area it would be to foster an outlook that they are a place of creative production. One way to get there is by having a sense of flexibility with their content. Then having some staff that can design, develop, and produce. Be open to being sites of creation by others such as artists, scientists, thinkers and doers.

This takes a sense of experimentation that is often hard to make room for, but what else are we going to do if not be the best?

What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?

Oh wow that’s hard. There are so many that I see and they are incredibly diverse. For nostalgia the MoMA, for local I like the diversity at the de Young, for wonder the Exploratorium of course, and for power of story on a visit, the Bird Museum in Iceland.

Can you talk a little about some of your current projects?

At the moment I’m working with the Center for Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art on a new exhibition plan. They have been doing innovative work engaging the public with art, and they want to push the envelope further.

I’m also working on the next iteration of the San Francisco Mobile Museum.

If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?

I’d turn my garage and the apartment in our house into a collaborative exhibition residency with ongoing talks, exhibits, and studios. It would be a blast.



Thanks again to Maria for sharing her insights with us!  To find out more about Maria Mortati and her work, check out her website and blog.



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Rhythm in Exhibitions

Why is there such a desire to touch things in an art museum?  Does all that concentrated looking create a pent up demand to use our other senses?  Or do we long to get a better sense of how an artist created something, and the materials they used?  Can a museum experience be "interactive" if you don't touch anything?

I was thinking about these things after a recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with a group of my graduate students from Bank Street's Museum Education program.  (Yes, that's us touching sculptures in the picture above.)


Not in any way to pick on MoMA (since it's one of my favorite museums) but the galleries there (and in many other museums) often seem to lose track of the intellectual and design values of rhythm.

Rhythm in the sense of changing up and varying the sensory stimuli and patterns for visitors.  In the case of MoMA, a visitor is faced with the classic "pure white box" style gallery repeated over and over.  And within each pure white space, artworks are arranged linearly or in grid patterns on the walls or floors.  Couldn't an occasional gallery wall be painted red or blue? 

I'd contend that one reason for the amazing success of recent shows by Tim Burton and Olafur Eliasson at MoMA was (aside from the great art) that each installation deliberately broke away from the white/grid aesthetic.

And lack of rhythm in exhibitions isn't just an Art Museum issue.  My kids once remarked on a History Museum exhibition as a "bunch of old brown things" because the furniture, textiles, and documents on display were all old and brown!  The visual rhythm of "brown" and "old" became a sort of unvarying metronome that overwhelmed the ultimate content goals of the designers.  Each object in every glass case was set on sepia or earth-toned backgrounds as well.

Have some museum genres become like particular radio stations for both exhibition designers and visitors?  Tune into pristine white spaces on the Art Museum channel, and dimly lit galleries full of "old brown stuff" on the History Museum station?

Are the typical design "rhythms" of many science centers filled with bright colors, neon, and wildly varying architectural forms really conducive to thinking deeply about tricky scientific content?

How can we as exhibition creators find our "design rhythm" to help create more interesting museum spaces and content-driven experiences for our visitors?

Please share your own experiences or examples of rhythm in exhibitions (good or bad) in the "Comments" section below!


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Hidden Tech and Stealth Evaluation?

I'm hoping ExhibiTricks readers might provide some good examples of two interesting types of exhibit/design challenges:


• "Hidden" Tech: by which I mean exhibit components that make clever use of technology by making it integral to the design and essentially invisible to the user.  The exact opposite of the "shiny new toy" syndrome where touch screens (or tablets, or iPads, or projection surfaces) are so out front that it looks like a Best Buy store.


• "Stealth" Evaluation: moving away from people with clipboards (or the digital equivalents) to looking for exhibit design aspects that provide both quantitative and qualitative data about visitor experiences and content acquisition.  An example (pictured above) is the "Would you go to Mars?" digital counter gates. A matching set of gates is placed at both the entrance and exit of the Ontario Science Centre's Facing Mars traveling exhibition. Visitors (and museum staff) can see how opinions might be different before (and after) finding out more details about potential space missions to Mars inside the exhibition.

What are some of your favorite examples of hidden tech and stealth evaluation?  Post your examples (with links to websites and/or images if possible) in the "Comments" section below, or send me an email with more info.


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Thanks Dad!

Today would have been my father Orlando Orselli's 78th birthday.

My dad worked most of his adult life for The Ford Motor Company, first at the Rouge Plant, and then at the World Headquarters building (The "Glass House") in Dearborn, Michigan.  He was a Stationary Steam Engineer, which basically means he worked with BIG boiler systems.

Even though he didn't go to college, my dad instilled a love for books and learning, and the importance of education, upon myself and my two younger brothers while we were growing up in Detroit.

Because he worked the midnight shift, he made time to go on school (or scout or Boys Club) field trips during the day and then take a nap before he would drive to work later that night. He thought it was important that my brothers and I helped him fix things around the house and knew the names and uses of the tools in his basement "workshop".

When people ask me how I got into the museum business, I am sure memories of the day when my father took me when I was little (by myself, without my mom and brothers, for some reason) to Detroit's "Cultural Center" to visit the Historical Museum (the streets of "Old Detroit"!) and the Children's Museum (things I could touch!) and the Institute of Arts (Mummies!) all in one long afternoon have something to do with it.  Many, many family trips involved museums, or zoos, or nature centers.

Even though my career choice might have puzzled my father a little bit, he always told me, and other people, how proud he was of the work I was doing.

Please never underestimate how important museums can be to people, especially kids and the adults they will become.

Thanks Dad!

Another Visit With The Exhibit Doctor: Don't Touch The Walls!

In our continuing "Exhibit Doctor" feature, here's a common problem that ExhibiTricks reader Mary Anna Murphy raised:

This isn't a very knotty problem, but I've run across it again and again in installing 2d works in a non-traditional gallery setting such as a mall, an office that worships its walls, or even the Russell Senate Office building rotunda.  None of those places have walls that want nails or hangers.  I'd be interested in seeing how other folks have managed to make their displays.  Oh, and it always has to be low budget.


Ian Simmons from the Centre for Life in the UK puts in a vote for Velcro:

We have the same problem as Mary Anne in some of the places where I need to hang 2D stuff, and I swear by industrial grade Velcro, which avoids having to make holes for anything. This can keep up an amazing weight of stuff pretty securely, depending on how much you use, but it does need the venue to be relatively sanguine about any paintwork as it will take paint with it when peeled sometimes, but if they are cool about having someone just come round to do a touch up it works really well. It has to be proper Velcro brand Velcro though, none of the knock-offs are anywhere near as good.
 
Thanks, Ian!  (You can find "industrial strength" Velcro at Amazon, amongst other suppliers.)



For a different approach,  Dana and Kathy Dawes from ExhibitShop shared some of their work from the Palouse Discovery Science Center (PDSC) in Pullman, Washington (pictured below.)

While we haven’t come up with anything particularly elegant, we’ve come up with two solutions to hanging 2D displays in the parts of our local science center that has concrete walls.  One is to use GridWall panels connected into three-sided prisms, “X” or “H” shapes, or zigzag walls.  We’ve been able to get these from industrial/commercial liquidation sales for very reasonable prices.  We like them in our space because they are not visually intrusive; the downside is that some people don’t care for the industrial look.  

The other solution is to use door slabs connected together to create temporary walls.  We can get hollow-core, primed hardboard door slabs made up in sizes from 1-6 x 6-0 to 4-0 x 8-0 and the prices are very reasonable.  Our favorite way to assemble them is with bed-rail hangers mortised into the edges of the doors.  If necessary, we’ve finished the exposed edges with tee-molding or stained/varnished wood.  To make them easier to assemble, we have routed slots in the bottoms as well and use a t-shaped wall brace to align the bottoms of the panels. 

Nice work! Thanks for sharing Dana and Kathy.

Hopefully those ideas will help Mary Anna (and other museum/exhibit/design folks) break through some institutional "walls" (at least design-wise!)


Have some of your own "off the wall" design ideas to share on this topic?  Let us know in the "Comments" section below.  Also feel free to pose your own question or design challenge to The Exhibit Doctor below as well.  Lastly, don't forget to check out previous Exhibit Doctor posts.


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 Automatic ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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!)

Designer's Toolkit: Gear Ties

Gear Ties are one of those forehead-slapping inventions that makes you wonder "why didn't I think of that?"  Basically, Gear Ties are reusable rubber twist ties that come in a variety of lengths, thicknesses, and colors.  While one of the primary purposes of Gear Ties is to wrap around things like computer or electrical cords, you can also make simple hooks or hangers from them, or temporarily bind things together as well.

The body of each Gear Tie is striated with parallel incised ridges, so they stay in place.

While all these attributes are great to keep any museum workshop or designer's space in order, I couldn't help playing around with the Gear Ties as toys and seeing the possibilities to use them as exhibit pieces (either for building or creative spaces) or to use during the exhibit prototyping process by holding pieces together or for changing configurations rapidly.

You can see the range of Gear Ties yourself over at Amazon.  Let me know how you end up using them!

(A special tip of the ExhibiTricks hat to Peggy Monahan for showing me Gear Ties in the first place.)

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 Automatic ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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!)