Four Qualities of Great Creative Partners

I've just returned from Blagoevgrad, a large city in Bulgaria, where I helped lead a week-long series of professional development workshops (called MUSE Academy) for Bulgarian colleagues working in museums and allied cultural organizations from across the country.

One of the things I've been thinking about after this most recent trip to Bulgaria is how to recognize the four qualities that make for great Creative Partners.

For me, the best Creative Partners are the ones that 1) Have Fun; 2) Think Big;  3) Work Flexibly; and 4) Get Stuff Done.  Below are some of the ways that the MUSE Academy fostered Creative Partners, and the four qualities below are important indicators to keep in mind when working with partners on any creative and challenging project.

1) Have Fun

My memories of working with my two MUSE Academy co-instructors, Christina Ferwerda and Jamie Lawyer, are filled with laughter.  We all really believe in working hard during our trips to Bulgaria, with extensive planning ahead of time. And yet, our work is enjoyable because we have fun together.

2) Think Big 

Our creative partners at the America for Bulgaria Foundation sponsor the MUSE Academy, and we are so lucky to have Nadia Zaharieva and Yuliana Decheva as the point people from the Foundation driving everything forward.  Nadia and Yuliana push for us to "think bigger" and to create more opportunities for the MUSE Academy participants and, in turn, build even greater capacity in the Bulgarian museum and cultural sectors.

3) Work Flexibly

In every project I've ever worked on, unexpected events occur. Our time in Blagoevgrad was no exception, as a few "Bulgarian surprises" came up during our week there. Despite this, I was sure that my Creative Partners would be flexible and figure out ways to overcome any challenges rather than complaining or pointing fingers.

4) Get Stuff Done 

Можело is a Bulgarian word meaning roughly, "This can be done!"  We strive for a spirit of Можело during our week together with MUSE Academy participants -- to push against the notion of "This is not possible" and to accomplish a lot together and challenge ourselves creatively.

Here's hoping you can find wonderful Creative Partners that meet all four of these criteria when you put together your next project!

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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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Back to Bulgaria for MUSE Academy!

I'm excited to be heading back to Bulgaria in a few days to kick off the second edition of the MUSE Academy program sponsored by the America for Bulgaria Foundation (ABF).

The MUSE Academy will equip Bulgarian professionals from museums and other cultural organizations with the tools to create compelling exhibits and tell powerful stories that will keep visitors returning for more.

I am doubly excited to share the MUSE Academy teaching stage with colleagues Jamie Lawyer and Christina Ferwerda!

Check out this recent article from the ABF website that shares more information about my work and the new MUSE Academy.  Also, follow me on Twitter (X), Facebook, and Instagram as I post live updates from Bulgaria!

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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 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

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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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Don't Demolish the Ontario Science Centre!

In April 2023, the Ontario provincial government announced that it plans to demolish the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto and construct housing on the museum site. The plan includes moving the "contents" (like amazing site-specific exhibits!) from the Ontario Science Centre to the "redeveloped" Ontario Place project. This controversial declaration of demolition without public consultation is opposed by heritage, housing, and environmental advocates alike, including the National Trust for Canada.  (You can read more about the situation in this article from the National Trust.) 

From the outside, the whole plan seems like some fishy political deal.  Many, many of my Canadian museum colleagues have spoken out about this action.  

I'd also like to speak out about this plan, but for a more personal reason.

Around 1971, my family took a trip to Toronto.  Just a few years before, in 1969, the Ontario Science Centre (OSC) opened up and immediately started changing ideas about what an interactive science museum could be.  (In one of those zeitgeist-y moments in history, the Exploratorium in San Francisco opened in 1969 also.)

I'm not even sure how my parents found out about OSC and knew to take my two younger brothers and me there, but from the moment we rode the escalators "through the trees" to enter the exhibit halls we were all excited and showing each other new things we had found.  In addition to the interactive components, I know I was especially fascinated by the live demonstrations --- somebody just blew a hole through a brick with a gigantic laser!

After we returned home to Detroit, I wrote a "fan letter" to the scientists at Ontario Science Centre and asked them if they could send me science experiments that I could do at home.  To my delight, a week or two later, I received a kind reply on official OSC letterhead with a little booklet of cool chemistry demonstrations. WOW!

One of the experiments explained how to create a "carbon snake" with sulfuric acid(!) and sugar.  I showed my grade school science teachers the letter and chemistry experiments and asked if they had any sulfuric acid I could borrow.  They did! So I took the big brown glass bottle with the faded label home as fast as my purple Sears bike with the banana seat would carry me.

I didn't have any beakers, but my mom thought an empty Mason jar would do the trick.  So I went into the basement laundry room with my supplies and started pouring sulfuric acid into the jar that had some sugar in the bottom.  Once the acid hit the sugar, bubbling and smoking commenced, and an evil-looking black cylinder snaked up and out of the mouth of the jar accompanied by the strong smell of burning sugar.  "Look! look!" I said to my family as I showed them the "carbon snake."  I tried other variations of the experiment with different amounts of sugar and acid to see how I could change the resulting "snake."  Everything was going great until I had the bright idea of quickly pouring some of the sulfuric acid into the jar with sugar in it and then screwing the lid on to see what would happen.

BOOOOOM!

Thank goodness the laundry sink was deep and made of sturdy metal since I hadn't been wearing any gloves or goggles.  After the smoke cleared, I cleaned up all the broken glass that the deep sink had captured after the jar exploded (and after my mom was done freaking out!) I learned a valuable (and memorable!) lesson about the effects of containing a strong exothermic reaction in a closed jar.

Somewhere along the line, that letter and booklet of chemistry experiments have gone missing, although I had kept them for a long time.  I often wonder if any museum would be foolish enough to send some kid experiments using sulfuric acid anymore. Probably not.

I also think of all those letters I sent to museums (in pre-email and Web days!) asking for a job when I was about to graduate from college.  And how much the letters that offered even a small bit of encouragement or an idea or suggestion meant to me, especially compared to the obvious form letter rejections --- or no response at all.

Those messages that we as museum workers send, intentionally or unintentionally, can have a big impact on our visitors, and our potential future colleagues.

Electronic communication and the worldwide reach of the Web means that I often get messages from people asking for advice or for jobs, and I really try to give a thoughtful answer to each one of those folks who took the time to write me --- because I still remember how much receiving that letter from the Ontario Science Center meant, and I suppose still means, to me.

Thanks, Ontario Science Centre for putting me on a path to a career in the museum business!  

I hope you get to stay right where you are now for another 50+ years.

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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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Are (Some) Art Museums Becoming More Playful?

I recently read with great interest some articles excitedly announcing the opening of the "81st Street Studio" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As the avalanche of press coverage makes clear, the 81st Street Studio is a fun and playful space for children and their adults that deals with many science-focused experiences.  An exhibition space geared towards Play, Fun, and Science in (gasp!) an Art Museum?

For Heidi Holder, chair of education at the Met, much of the business of this prestigious Art Museum is Science, especially in the Research and Conservation departments. Holder wanted the new exhibition space to allow young visitors to do what they normally can’t do in the Met’s existing family programs: drop in unscheduled, and touch what they see.

Of course, all this sounds very much like the sort of thing that both Children's Museums and Science Centers have been doing successfully for many years with much lower budgets and much less breathless press coverage.  (Note to the New York Times -- there are other types of museums in addition to Art Museums!)

One of the articles also mentioned that Cas Holman, an artist well-known for creating playful toys and spaces, will be bringing new play-focused exhibition experiences to the Queens Museum in 2024 (Check out this previous ExhibiTricks post about Holman's work on the "Wobbly World" exhibition at the Liberty Science Center.)

It may be that all this news of "play" and "touching" in Art Museum spaces will have some purists clutching their pearls and decrying the "dumbing down" of the museum-going experience. 

Nevertheless, it seems like Art Museums are catching on to the value of creating some playful, active spaces for children and their adult caregivers (and other young-at-heart visitors!) as an additional way to enjoy the artful content inside -- without preventing curmudgeons their opportunities to gaze pensively at 19th-century oil paintings inside the hushed galleries elsewhere.

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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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Conversations with Museum Pros on the POW! YouTube Channel

Over the past few years, I've been fortunate to chat with museum professionals from all over the world on my POW! YouTube channel.

Click on over to YouTube to find videos about such topics as "The Definition of Done" with Christian Greer, and "Using Language as an Interpretive Tool" with Amparo Leyman Pino.

There is a growing library of over 100 videos to choose from, so why not browse the POW! YouTube channel and discover what interests you?  And if you have recommendations for people that I can bring to my YouTube channel (maybe even yourself?) please let me know!

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"