Museopunks

As former Museopunk Jeffrey Inscho leaves the museum world, we take a moment reflect on the factors that influence a decision to leave or join the museum profession. We also examine what outside organizations can gain from hiring museum professionals–and what museums can gain from those who have grown up professionally in complementary industries. Plus, we preview a soon-to-air podcast that focuses on the wildly circuitous ways through which people come to, and leave, museums.

This episode is cohosted by Jason Alderman and Chad Weinard, and features interviews with Jeffrey Inscho and Ros Lawler.

Museopunks is presented by the American Alliance of Museums.

Website: Museopunks.org

Twitter: @museopunks

Increasingly, it feels like progressive museum practice is also political museum practice. So what does it mean for a museum to take a stand, and put social just at the heart of its work? In this episode, Suse talks with David Fleming, Director of National Museums Liverpool (NML) and President of the UK Museums Association, about the social impact of museum work, advocacy as a strategic objective, and what it means for a museum service to be openly political.

Plus, news about some big changes to the podcast! And quiet snorts from a new baby softly echoing throughout the interview.

Museopunks is presented by the American Alliance of Museums.

Website: Museopunks.org

Twitter: @museopunks

Did you know that several studies in recent years have shown that when women enter a specific field in large numbers, the pay for that field declines overall, even for the same jobs that men were doing? This is one of many implications of gendered professions, which are at the core of this month’s episode of Museopunks. The Punks dig into the implications of the gendered museum, and its impact on pay and the sector more broadly with Anne W. Ackerson and Joan H. Baldwin, whose new book Women in the Museum explores the professional lives of the sector’s female workforce today and examines the challenges they face working in what was, until recently, a male-dominated field. The Punks are then joined by nikhil trivedi for a conversation about the impact of gender and masculinity on technology work, inside museums and beyond.

Please note: nikhil’s interview includes discussion of specific actions men can take to dismantle gender oppression and create more supportive institutions for people of all genders. He has kindly created a supportive document with more information for those who wish to dig deeper, which we’ve included in the show notes at http://museopunks.org

Museopunks is presented by the American Alliance of Museums.

Website: Museopunks.org

Twitter: @museopunks

Museums that want to impact their visitors are often concerned with changing their behaviors. However, before any kind of change can take place, it's important to understand visitors, and the behaviors that they bring into the museum with them. In this episode, the ‘Punks ask how museums can better understand and align their work around existing visitor behaviors. We talk to the first Neuroscience Researcher in an art museum to learn more about how the human brain understands the physical world, and how that connects to our emotions, and then connect with an experience designer whose work has focussed on social media use in the cultural sector.

We also want to know: are you a museum geek who is also a fan of professional wrestling?! Reach out to us on Twitter and let us know.

GUESTS:

Dr. Tedi Asher is Neuroscience Researcher at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. The position — which marks a first for an art museum — supports PEM’s neuroscience initiative and is made possible through a generous grant from the Barr Foundation. Dr. Asher earned her Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School’s Biological and Biomedical Sciences program and has spent the last 12 years gaining experience in a wide range of fields, including neuroscience and psychology. At PEM, she will synthesize neuroscience research findings and make recommendations on how museums can enhance and enrich the visitor experience.

Alli Burness is currently an experience designer with ThinkPlace, a global strategic design consultancy that applies human centred design and complex systems thinking to create public value. On the side, she is a freelance digital producer, designing digital presences for artists, small arts organisations and not-for-profits. She also researches, publishes, tutors and speaks about the value of creative digital expression and social media use in the cultural sector. She previously worked in museums and galleries as a digital producer and collection manager for around 10 years. She has created content for institutions such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Wellcome Collection in the UK and the Powerhouse Museum and Museums and Galleries NSW in Australia. She is currently based in Sydney.

PRESENTING SPONSOR:

Museopunks is presented by the American Alliance of Museums.

Website: museopunks.org

Twitter: @museopunks

Since the 1960s, artists have been critically examining the practices of museums, at times critiquing the idea of what a museum is and how it presents its stories. One of the most influential exhibitions of Institutional Critique was Mining the Museum–an installation by artist Fred Wilson at the Maryland Historical Society, in collaboration with The Contemporary.

In this episode–made 25 years after Mining the Museum–the Punks explore the role outsiders such as artists and external consultants play in driving creative change and innovation within museum practice. What can outsiders do within the institution that permanent staff cannot? What are the limitations they face? And how does a reliance on external talent impact the sustainability of progress in the museums they work with?

GUESTS:

George Ciscle has mounted groundbreaking exhibitions, created community arts programs, and taught fine arts and humanities courses for close to 50 years. He trained as a sculptor, studying with Isamu Noguchi. For 15 years he developed high school interdisciplinary curriculum and work-study programs for the emotionally disadvantaged. In 1985, he opened the George Ciscle Gallery where he promoted the careers of young and emerging artists.

From 1989-1996 Ciscle was the founder and director of The Contemporary, an “un-museum,” which challenges existing conventions for exhibiting art in non-traditional sites focusing its exhibitions and outreach on connecting artists’ works with people’s everyday lives. From 1997-2017, as Curator-in-Residence at Maryland Institute College of Art, he continued to develop new models for connecting art, artists, and audiences by creating the Exhibition Development Seminar, Curatorial Studies Concentration and the MFA in Curatorial Practice.

Jen Brown is the Founder and Artistic Director of The Engaging Educator. Through EE, her pedagogical approach of Improv as Continuing Education has reached over 25,000 people – all non-actors!

Since 2012, Jen has given three TEDx Talks on the power of Improv, grown EE to three locations in NYC, Winston-Salem, NC and LA, and recently began The Engaging Educator Foundation, a 501(c)(3) which offers free and low-cost Improv workshops for educators, at-risk adults, teens and students on the Autism Spectrum. Jen holds degrees and accreditation from Marquette University, City College of New York, St. Joseph’s University and Second City.

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Museopunks is presented by the American Alliance of Museums.

Website: Museopunks.org

Twitter: @museopunks

Progressive museum work, particularly when focussed around community engagement, is often a form of emotion work that demands emotional labor. Museum professionals who are deeply engaged with the challenges of changing their institutions, negotiating a volatile political climate, or facilitating community work, can experience compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, and burnout. So how can museum professionals look after themselves, in order to better care for their communities and colleagues?

In this episode, the Punks investigate the role of self-care in museum practice. Although the concept is often co-opted by marketing professionals as a kind of balm against open-ended anxiety, self-care first came to prominence alongside the rise of the women’s movement and the civil rights movement as radical, political act; a reclaiming of the body against a system that suggested it lacked value. Today, these ideas continue to resonate. Actively practicing self-care can help you be more resilient, effective, and empathetic. We explore how.

Guests: Seema Rao, Beck Tench

Show Notes: http://museopunks.org

We’d love to hear from you! How do you refocus and recenter when emotionally or physically exhausted? Hit us up on Twitter (@Museopunks) and share your best solutions with us.

Don’t call this a comeback! After an almost three-year hiatus, Museopunks returns to explore progressive museum practice. How much has changed since the ‘Punks last hit the airwaves? Does Jeffrey have any new tattoos? Has Suse lost her Australian accent?

In this first episode of season two, the ‘Punks unpack the trials and tribulations of trust with Dr. fari nzinga and Adriel Luis. Report after report indicates that public trust in institutions is plummeting. The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, which surveys more than 33,000 people across 28 countries, showed the largest-ever drop in trust across the institutions of government, business, media and NGOs. Meanwhile, the Economist’s Intelligence Unit downgraded the US to a “flawed democracy” in its 2016 Democracy Index, due to erosion of trust in government and elected officials.

Museums have traditionally appeared to be cushioned against drops in trust. The American Alliance of Museum reports that museums are considered the most trustworthy source of information in America. Yet a 2013 UK study on public trust in museums showed that although museums are highly trusted, there was “a strong sense that if they started “telling people what to think” or became spaces for controversial debate, this might damage their integrity.” What does this mean for our institutions at a time when there is increasing pressure on public institutions to promote social justice, and intervene in political and social discourse? Join us to unpack these questions and more.

Show notes: http://museopunks.org

What happens when technical difficulties get in the way of regularly scheduled programming? The Punks make do, of course. In this episode, Suse and Jeffrey chat about inspiration, show dynamics, and their upcoming ‘Live’ shows at the Museum Computer Network conference in Montreal.

On August 27 this year, the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in NYC announced that it had acquired Planetary, an iPad app, which was also the Museum’s first acquisition of code. But how can such an acquisition be conserved for the future? What does it mean to acquire these kinds of highly-networked, ‘living’ objects? As Seb Chan and Aaron Cope of the Cooper-Hewitt wrote in their blog post on the acquisition:

"Museums like ours are used to collecting exemplary achievements made manifest in physical form; or at least things whose decay we believe we can combat and slow. To that end we employ highly trained conservators who have learned their craft often over decades of training, to preserve what would often be forgotten and more quickly turn to dust. But preserving large, complex and interdependent systems whose component pieces are often simply flirting with each other rather than holding hands is uncharted territory. Trying to preserve large, complex and interdependent systems whose only manifestation is conceptual – interaction design say or service design – is harder still."

In response to these questions, the Cooper-Hewitt made the decision to open-source the source code for Planetary, uploading it to GitHub. In this episode, the Punks dig into some of the questions that these kinds of acquisitions and conservation processes could mean for the museum, and for how we think about objects in general. We ask how digital technologies are changing the practice of conservation? In this episode, the Punks dig into this question with the Cooper-Hewitt’s Seb Chan (Director of Digital & Emerging Media) and Aaron Cope (Senior Engineer), and Dale Kronkright (Head of Conservation at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum).

Fair warning: it’s a long episode, but a super interesting one.

Over the course of MCN2013, we’ll hear a lot about great #musetech projects and issues facing the sector. But in this session, the Punks want to learn about the muses and inspirations outside of the sector that help fuel and inform some of most creative work from some of the most interesting #musetech practitioners.

What music, literature or extra-curricular activities inspire us? And how do those inspirations relate to our professional approach?

Guests:

Don Undeen, Manager of Media Lab, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Micah Walter, Webmaster, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

Koven Smith, Principal, Kinetic Museums

This episode was recorded live at MCN2013 on November 22, 2013. Thank you to the Museum Computer Network for inviting us to be a part of the conference.