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"

Our Real Work

I keep this poem on my phone because it helps me reflect on my museum/exhibit/design work.

“Our Real Work” by Wendell Berry

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.

What helps you reflect on your own work?  Let us know in the "Comments" section below.

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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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Halls or Malls?

What kind of exhibition spaces (and, by extension, museum experiences) do you want to create for your visitors -- Halls or Malls?

HALLS

Many large museums (like the Louvre or the American Museum of Natural History) can feel like an endless procession of hallways. You sense that the gallery themes and spaces are changing around you as you walk along, but the experience feels a bit like one long, continuous march.  It can also be difficult for first-time visitors to gauge the length of their visit and how to break their time into manageable chunks. You will often pass weary-looking tourists who seem determined to walk through every square foot of gallery space because "who knows when they will come back to this museum again?"

MALLS

Other museums, even though they might be quite large -- like the Indianapolis Children's Museum, for example -- break up their exhibition spaces into discrete areas akin to the way malls are divided into different shops. It becomes easier for visitors to orient themselves and "dip into" a gallery and decide how much time to spend there before moving to the next space. These differentiated spaces also build up a physical and conceptual rhythm as part of the museum experience.

So maybe instead of overwhelming our visitors with exhibition halls, we might be better served just trying to "whelm" them with exhibit malls.

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"