Claudine K. Brown is the assistant secretary for education and access for the Smithsonian Institution.

Good morning. As I listened to the keynote this morning I realized that age has its privileges and having been in this field for many many years I have had the privilege of witnessing change over time. Nancy asked me to talk about access and inclusivity in museums. I think it would be helpful for me to talk a little bit about my very early career in museums because I have had the benefit of witnessing a great deal of that change. I started my career at the Brooklyn museum, and if any of you know its history it started out as a library, a research library for young men. It was located originally in Brooklyn heights. It contained books and historical and scientific specimens. Originally it was a natural history museum and an art museum and the great whale that was in its halls is at the American Museum of natural History in New York City. As was the case with many museums of its type, it evolved from a library for young men to an institution that began to look at class issues. Early museums believed that if indeed the general populous had access to great works of art and wonderful artifacts they would be enlightened and transformed. Its next way of looking at itself was as an institution that would change and transform the general populous. I entered the museum profession as a result of the CETA program. CETA was a program like the WPA that offered jobs to people often in cultural institutions which wasn’t its original intent but a number of people in the arts world fought for artists to be included. Many of us got jobs in cultural institutions. If you were a CETA employee you had to make ten percent less than regular employees, so my first job working in a museum paid me 9,800 dollars a year – just to let you know how fabulous the salaries were then and are now.

So the Brooklyn museum when I started working there had this motto the Brooklyn museum is for everyone. My group of people who came in with me and I would say to you we kind of looked like the mod squad. We were black and Hispanic and Irish and Italian and we were learning from each other about our cultures as well as about our expertise in the world of art. We really believed that the Brooklyn museum was for everyone. I’m not sure everyone else did. We felt duty bound to respond to people’s request. It turned out that the museum is located and still is today across the street from a school for the deaf. When we were asked to do classes for those students we said yes we believed in that motto. One of the things we learned right away is that deaf kids are noisy. Our security guards thought that that was disruptive behavior so often they would come up to us and say you have to discipline this class and make them stop making all of that noise. We actually learned from the educators from that school and from the kids and from the administrators about how to teach our best classes with those audiences and as a result of those classes in particular we began to train our guards so that their expectations were more realistic. We also found that there are some times when you do programming for one purpose and it proves to be effective for another. We did many many film programs and we did foreign films because we were attempting to attract immigrant audiences. We found that the deaf community came out in large number to see these films with these subtitles. We were open to learning from whoever was available to teach us. We received a proposal from a woman who worked at the school of visual arts a women named Rose Cancel Keble who said to us you guys need to be teaching art to blind audiences. There were skeptics on our staff but because we believed that the Brooklyn museum was for everyone what would it hurt to try. She was engaged in the partnership with the Jewish guild for the blind and had come up with lots of different ways of teaching blind people how to make art. It was one of our most successful programs. I say this to you because I think that we make limitations that are not real, whoever our audiences are. We have this anticipation that we cannot meet needs but we don’t try. I once went to lobby in Albany and a member of the legislature said to me there’s someone outside who wants to take his community to the museums in New York and he’s never been able to get them in and you figure out how to do that and I will figure out how to get you money. The person with whom I spoke is someone who had received a bus from Denmark that allowed him to transport patients in hospital beds to museums. He wanted to get them in. Most of the museums in the city said that was a disruptive act and they could not come in. We agreed to open the museum at 8:30 several days a week and they were able to wheel these people in their hospital beds. It didn’t cost us anything – the guards were already there. I say this to you to say that a lot of what we do is about negotiation. It’s about assessing the needs of our publics, identifying what our assets and skills are and figuring out where we meet in the middle.

The other wonderful thing about being at the Brooklyn museum when I was there is that this was a museum that was attempting to address audiences that museums had neglected, so during my tenure they did the exhibition, Two centuries of Black American art, they did a Hispanic arts exhibition and they did an exhibition called Of women Artists and they did their first showing of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party. All of those exhibits happened with a little bit of excitement. In the case of the Dinner Party, there were male maintenance people who refused to dust the plates. When we did the Of Women Artists exhibition the invitation said it was a fairly formal event and it was black tie optional. Tons of women showed up in tuxedos. Again it was a moment when I think the public was teaching us about what they wanted. They were helping us reshape our expectations. They were letting us know what they were willing to do in order to get what they wanted. They were letting us know that they were not cliches. Museums have functioned like silos. We have these anticipation you know that African‑Americans aren’t going to come out for the Picasso show and that the Hispanics are not going to come to Mary Cassatt show. We lump people according to their ethnicity and don’t understand that they have broad interests. Our audiences were beginning to teach us they had diverse interests. We could not just address their needs in a very singular way. When I was asked to do public programming for the Jacob Lawrence exhibition I decided that the African‑American community that cared about Jacob Lawrence was going to show up. I decided to work with New York City unions because Jacob Lawrence had relationships with the workers and instead of doing a wine and cheese opening we did a beer and pretzel opening and every single poster sold at that opening. And Jacob Lawrence signed every single poster. And one of the things that he said to me was these are my people. This is why I do my work. The other thing that he did that I thought was pretty phenomenal is that he agreed to do a children’s program. Within minutes of the printed brochure going out I started getting these phone calls from people saying I understand the program is full my child has to be in this program what size donation do I have to make to get my kid in this program? I was like what the heck is going on? Finally, one caller said to me there are not many great American artists who would do a program for kids. We want our kids to have that experience. Jacob Lawrence agreed to do a second program and we again did not make it available to patrons and high donors we had a list of people and we did it on a first come first serve basis. That programming taught us that people value living artists. They want to engage with them, they want to know them. They want to interact with them. Having a chance to be in a room with them to hear them talk and talk about their process is a very meaningful thing for the lay public.

So that brings me to the Smithsonian. I worked at the Brooklyn museum for 15 years and then I worked at the Smithsonian for five years and then I worked at the Nathan Cummings foundation for 15 years and now I’m back at the Smithsonian. What has happened during all of that time? Let’s get back to the original mottto of the Brooklyn museum. The museum is for everyone. The image they had for that was a Hicks Peaceable Kingdom painting. I think of that often because there are definitely lions and lambs in this place. So how are things different and how are they the same and what is the role of the educators in making institutions accessible and making sure that we are acknowledging and inviting in all of the people who could or would want to be a part of our community. We have entered the digital age and we have the ability to meet learners where they are and in their homes and classrooms and in their communities and museums are interesting places because we are places of informal learning. We don’t have the same people day after day after day. We don’t give grades. We can’t have the same expectations, but we do need to find out whether or not we are effective and there are ways we are beginning to do that. What we do know is that people come because they care. Unlike school there is is not a command that you come and there’s no truancy law that says someone is going to visit the house if you didn’t show up at the museum. And for those of us who work at museums we are committed to the content. We are committed to these places. We love them. People who work in museums tend to work in them for a really long time. Some of us are really committed to our communities. I worked in the Brooklyn museum long enough to meet kids when they started at five and helped them write their college admissions letters.

What can we do that schools don’t do and what can we do for both people and formal and informal learning environments? The first piece is exposure. We can show them things that they may have never seen before. Objects they have read about, images they have read in books or seen in movies but not seen before in person. We can motivate them to learn more. Many years ago the Hirshorn Museum did an exhibition called Comparisons which I thought was a great exhibition where they would hang two paintings by the same painter side by side and allow you to compare the two. I think that people who went through that exhibition learned a lot about their own powers of observation and they learned that no two objects even if they were prints and a limited edition are the same. They were able to look at objects in ways they never had before.

Many people who come to our institutions take action. And they take classes, they come to lectures. They avail themselves of additional information. When I first came back here I went to the Oceans Exhibition at the Natural History Museum and just saw tons of people taking pictures of every thing. They were taking pictures of the objects. They were posing beside them to show scale. They were taking movies of the movies and photographs of labels. I decided to ask three people why and what are you going to do with this. One kid said my parents make me do educational stuff in the summer and I keep it to add to homework to look like I know something. The second person said I blog and everybody cares about everything I do. And the third person said to me I keep a journal and this is how I keep my journal it helps me to remember my experiences. I immediately went to art museums because that’s my world and my experience and I’m like what happens in art museum where you can’t take photographs. How are people documenting their memories and how are they blogging and sharing. I did a little bit of research. One of the things I found out is that really savvy people actually will go to a museum site and see what artists are showing and then they will go to other sites to see the artists work. If they don’t like it they won’t come. So they are doing a lot of pre-research on‑line. They also go to You Tube to see if the artist has done a talk. If they are interested that will inspire them to come. If they think the artist is not speaking English and is a jerk even if they like the work sometimes they will not come. The web is educating our public in ways they have never been educated before and helping them determine the kinds of experiences that they want to have.

So the other thing that our institutions do is that they model and demonstrate these discipline based methodologies. I want to say something about curating because everybody thinks they are doing it. I have heard 12 year olds talk about curating an experience. When I was a funder one of my grantees who worked in the performing arts described something that happened to him. His organization sent out a flier and they were doing spoken word in performances. They sent it out to literally thousands of people. Those people who receive it had flier redesigned it and they sent it out to their friends. When they redesigned it if a person was the last person on the bill or in the middle of the program, but it was their favorite person they made them the head line act. Then they would rank order who they thought it was important for people to hear and see. And this organization actually collected a lot of those redesigned e‑mails so that they could see who was drawing people in. And actually people would show up and they would have printed out sometimes the announcement they got and it would be very different from the announcements that the organization had created. People see themselves as creating experiences even if you are the person paying for the talent they will curate their own experience. It is language used all the time. People who recommend five books to read call themselves curators. People who recommend plays, people who will recommend works of art that they love call themselves curators. Now do we get upset because people in our profession go to school for a long time and are astute and know about art history? Or do we give them better curatorial skills so that they do a better job of it? I would say this egg has already been scrambled. It cannot be unscrambled and put back in the shell. We need to embrace them and help them do better especially if they are making recommendations that effect what we do.

One of the things that we have to think about in the digital age is why people come to museums in the first place, what we do really really well and how we do it for actual visitors and how we can do something similar for virtual visitors. So we know that our audiences want authentic encounters. They want to see the real thing. When people talk to me about the Smithsonian they also talk about immersive experiences. They don’t happen as much in art museums but they do happen in science and natural history museums. You can actually go to a cart and interact with a tarantula in our Natural History Museum. In our American history museum there are tons of carts some of which do science experiences. One of the best immersive experiences that I have had in an art museum was at the education center for the Bauhaus show at MoMA. They offered you Bauhaus assignments and you could sit at tables and do the assignments you could do a drawing where you just had straight lines or curved lines or do a collage that had particular kinds of textures. People stayed there all day. There were people who came every day and did the assignments. When you went upstairs to see the show you understood it fundamentally in a very different way. It wasn’t a high‑tech high maintenance interpretive experience. It was very low tech. It opened people’s eyes to what they were seeing in the galleries.

Our institutions place objects in the historic context or art historic context. It’s good to see how work has evolved over time and how an artist in particular has changed his work over time and most of our museums can show you that. In some instances our institutions make the abstract concrete. People are looking for that as well. A trend in museums very recently is something called the constructivist approach to learning which George Hein writes about. And what he suggests is that no one comes into our institutions as an empty vessel. They come with experiences and they don’t want a docent or curator or educator to tell them about what’s on the wall. They want to reveal why they have come and what their experience is. They want an interaction and an exchange and in doing that you let them own what they see, they make it personal for themselves. I will give you a quick example of that. Many years ago since I am so old I was part of a Getty focus group experience. There was an African‑American male in the focus group. He was coming regularly to the Brooklyn museum because he loved dutch paintings. So the group of observers made all kinds of conclusions or jumped to conclusions. They said maybe he was in the military and you know like maybe that’s why he likes these paintings he’s seen them before we don’t get why this African‑American laborer loves these paintings. And finally someone asked him. He said it’s the light. When I was a little boy in Alabama and the sun came through the windows when I woke up it’s that light. These are the only paintings that make me see that light again and have resonance for me. That’s how we let our audiences own what they see and how we let them teach us. Education right now is a two way street. We’re not just telling people what they should be seeing. They are letting us know what they see, how it resonates for them and why? The Smithsonian does really well. In our museums we have 30 million visitors we have 7.9 million visitors who do our education programs and at any given moment we have about 52 traveling exhibitions that are all over the country. They are in almost 700 venues in all 50 states. We do virtual conferences and we have been able to reach about 20, 000 people and we hope to do better at our virtual conferences. We also have membership museums there are about 170 of those. And lifelong learners people of all ages from very young campers to older adults attend more than 750 programs a year in this general area. So we are doing well. We are doing better than many museums but we have a responsibility to do better. One of the things that I realize as soon as I came back to this place last year this time was that we are the nation’s museum. We have to ask the question what does that mean? And we know that there are many people who come here once in a lifetime and there are many people who never get here. So what’s our responsibility to the people who will never come? How do we function as the nation’s museum for people who will never come to our institution. The other thing we have to ask if we really believe in immersive education and if we want people to have authentic experiences that are different from the experiences they have in schools what does it take to make that happen. Can we replicate what we do really really well with digital technology. How are we going to do that?

One of the things I think about all the time what’s the difference between being in a museum and being someplace else. I used to train docents. I had a group of docents that would go to senior citizen centers and they would go to hospitals to do classes and they did slide shows. I would say to them how will your talk at the senior citizen center be different from the talk in the museum. Many of them had not given this any thought. So are you going to show the object in the round. Will we see the bottom of it will we see parts of it that we can never see in the gallery. If we have a book in the case we can’t turn the pages will you show us more than one page in your slides? How are you thinking about this medium and how to use it differently? The same question applies to this new technology that we are looking at. It’s not that it offers us better opportunities it’s that it offers us different opportunities and we need the figure out what they are and we need to use them effectively. That is one of the big challenges that we are facing at this moment. We know that in the way that we think about teaching we think about active learning. We want students to learn thinking skills we don’t want them to learn facts and be able to regurgitate them. We want them to be problem solvers. We want them to test the validity of a solution they come up with. We want them to be smart enough to use the same skills in a different situation. We are really clear about the fact that young people learn by teaching and for those of you who may have stumbled with the new technology how many of you just raise your hands go to a younger person to help you out? This is the moment more than ever before to let the young lead us. They have skills that we do not have. They are eager and anxious to show us that they have those skills and to help us do what we need to do in a more effective way. That is an important part of active learning an inquiry base learning. How does that happen? One of the things is that in terms of accessibility our institutions have to be more participatory. We know that by using the technology there’s lots of different things our publics can do. They can vote. Very recently the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum announced they are doing an exhibition on the art of video games. They listed about sixty video games and let the public vote on which had the best art. More than four million people voted. We can comment on what we see. There are a number of museums that history museums do this in particular they show photographs and people in the community will comment on the photographs they will tell them what year they think the photograph was taken if there are people in it and they will identify them. The public is beginning to help us contextualize our collections. They are helping us augment knowledge, they are helping us with interpretation. They are helping us to solve problems and they are sharing their creative product. One of the things we have experienced recently which for me is wonderful is that we are participating on an educational social network where teachers down load our lesson plans but they are also uploading the end results, so we did a class on botanical illustration and a teacher did a power point of her students taking a walk, a nature walk and collecting samples coming back to the classroom and drawing the samples and describing them in writing. We have the evidence of what it looks like. Before we were guessing. We were hoping that people were doing a good job. We now have the possibility of finding out for sure.

So we live in the digital age where we no longer are having a one way conversation. It is two way. We live in a digital age where we have the ability to customize what we do. We live in an age where people talk about anywhere, any time learning. I don’t know about you when I was a younger person if a kid was hospital ridden somebody was schlepping books to them and they were not part of a learning community. That is no longer a necessity. We have children who are home schooled who can be a part of our community not just in terms of getting access to content but we also do some distance learning here. So that possibility is available to them as well. We have young people who speak other languages and through some of our social networks we are able to get some of our content translated so that kids who are not native English speakers can also use our content in our materials. I think the possibilities for accessibility and education are great and have barely been explored. We are open to those explorations. We believe we can reach millions of people in powerful and impactful ways. We also believe that we have a responsibility to do research so we can improve what we do and do it better each time we step out of the gate and try something new. We think we can’t do it without help. Here is my charge to you if you have good ideas, if you’ve seen good models and if you know of projects that are promising we do partnerships and we are looking at learning together because the crisis in education in this nation in particular is so great no institution can solve the problems alone. We are eager to work with others with good ideas, great resources to make a change in how education is done and we want to be a viable partner and get our content out to many people as possible in viable ways. I thank you.

Respondents Kate Haley-Goldman and Catherine McNally

>> I’m Kate Haley- Goldman from the National Center of Interactive Learning. I am Catharine McNally we do for people with disabilities.

>> Great. Thank you.

>> So one of the things that is just a couple of words in terms of wrapping together the different presentations we have seen so far today in having the diversity of the different types of institution that are involved from the art institutions to the wealth of institutions you deal with. I see some of the same relationships ‑‑ we don’t have the same pieces in art about the creator and the curator and the visitor we do in science institutions which I primarily work with. We do have the discoverer and the passive recipient and the history of science is very enviewed with the power structure that is you talk about so much in art. I think you see all of these pieces all the way through in the work that I do and what I do is stem education primarily, science, technology, engineers an math education. We see the dynamics play out in a couple of our main concerns in terms of pipeline and general scientific literacy. I say this as background one of the things you struck me with is about these audiences and expectations for THEP and who matters an who doesn’t matter and how do we accommodate those. One of the projects I am currently working on is a face book game on origin space science. We have had a number of different discoveries in term OFS that is I was struck by how technology perpetuates power struggles that we have been struggling with for so long in cultural institutions about who matters. One is why would you go to face book and one was why would you choose older women audiences as your target for this particular game because it’s young people who matter in terms of moving forward science literacy, and the gaming does ‑BT necessarily make sense but unexpected audiences, female gamers older female gamers meaning women over 30 are the most prevalent gamers within our society that they gained more than our children and they game more than college men ‑P if you include casual game anything these pieces and there’s assumptions about who these audiences are. We go to face book that’s where people who aren’t necessarily bought into our agenda. They are not there for science. They are not preaching to chior piece. What struck me in this various audience. We were very boldly asked why does women matter why is teaching women over 30 about the scientific issues that face our society matter when we could reach other individuals. It’s seen some of the same type of pieces in the accessible projects I work with why does reaching these individuals matter despite that the fact in one in five Americans have disabilities. We often reach with our projects audiences we didn’t know were there within those pieces and so the project I’m working on focuses on how do we change staff attitudes and how do we change staff responses to reaching out and what my long winded way of asking is how are you dealing with this in an organization such as a Smithsonian from an internal practice point of view rather than from an exclusivity view or inclusiveness of your visitors?

CLAUDINE >> It’s such a long question. I am going to take a piece of it. It’s interesting because you know as a person who comes from the art museum world when I came to the Smithsonian all people talked was science, technology engineering and math. And the date of birth of women in sciences. In my conversations with funders they say we don’t want to see any more male scientists we want to see female scientists so they can be role models for young women. We recently did an interactive role‑playing game called van PHEURB that was a game about the sciences and we partnered with MIT. It was a role‑playing game that had a mystery and we filmed women scientists talking about their work. We found them talking about the fact that science is, it’s in many ways it’s not unlike the creative process we learn from our mistakes. It’s not about perfection and getting it right. People make mistakes and learn from their mistakes having conversations with some of the scientists here one of them who goes to middle schools a lot these are the two big questions that I’m asked most often. The first is can you be a scientist and be a mother? The second is can you be a scientist and be a Christian? That gives you an idea of how women’s careers are being framed. There are all these kids that think if they want to be mothers then they can’t be a scientist. This notion of who has an authoritative voice the museums had authoritative voices our institutions are considered to be reliable resources, so if women are not seeing in the introductory videos for exhibitions if they are not the people who do the lectures, if they are not the people who do the demonstrations then often there is an assumption that they are not in the mix. We have to figure out how to raise them up an honor them for the work they do. The other challenge for me and I think that the Smithsonian in all of it’s disciplines is an institution that represents many of the jobs in the future. The kids who I meet and there’s lots of statistics about kids who drop out of school don’t know anything about those jobs. So I think a part of the challenge is helping them to imagine you know, I did a talk to my colleagues at NASA and they said does the office of manage and budget know you are talking about imagination that you think your job is about imagination? I think that a lot of young people are not pursuing interesting compelling work due to lack of imagination. If you have in one in your community or in your realm of being who is doing a particular kind of work then it dozen exist for you. It is a void. So women WH* are doing powerful interesting, exciting work need to be profiled. We need to know who they are. Teachers need to know where they get those clips an they need to be featured in classrooms. There’s a series called art 21 that a lot of teachers are using and teachers have said to me I use today fund that project when I worked with them I think Cummings foundation. I show this film clip of the women artist and the girls in my class they write letters to them. They didn’t know the people existed. They didn’t know it was something you could do for a living. The messages are so powerful for young women.

CATHERINE >> I just wanted to follow up on observations from the Brooklyn museum about you had intended to show foreign film to the immigrant audiences. The turn out for the deaf audiences. About six years ago I went to a museum with my family and they wanted to take an audio tour and me being deaf I thought what am I going to do? I went to the front desk I said hey I’m deaf I want to participate with my family do you have anything to offer me. They handed me a 50 page transcript. So I carried this book through the museum. You know everybody in the gallery had an I pod. I looked at the I pods I wish I as a deaf person had the use of I pod. I won’t today fit in like that. It dawned on me that I could take the transcript and create A VIDEO and put it on I pod and have an I pod that works for me. I went to the apple store and I bought an I pod and I went home and tried to record A VIDEO tour with captions and put it on my I pod and walked through the museum the next day and I had an independent experience that was really exciting for me because I fit in whereas before the accommodation made me stand out. It didn’t make me feel like I was part of the museum experience or we forgot about you well here’s a 50 page transcript. So we ran a pilot with about two hundred deaf and hard of hearing people from Gallaudet. They all loved it. We expected that but what ‑‑ was a greater number of non-deaf people were coming up to us and say I want to take that I don’t want to follow that around or listen to this audio like no offense to those things they wanted something independent. It kind of shifted my thinking. The mass community wanted something that’s accessible to me in a technology perspective. What do you think the opportunities within the Smithsonian from a technology perspective that the whole community loves that can also be used as an accessibility purpose for a person with disability?

>> I think we have a lot to learn from you. I think the theories around universal design say that great design works for everyone and it doesn’t isolate a segment of the audience and says this is just for you, but it say that is we have come up with this good solution that works for many people on many levels, so I would love to hear more about what you are doing and I think we would be willing to explore it.

CATHERINE >> I think what I have noticed in the past in my experiences is I really use social media, the community I connect with are on‑line. My deaf friends are on‑line and that’s how I communicate. I’m really shy. I am self conscious walking up to someone in the gallery and say what do you think of this painting. What are they thinking something is wrong with me or wrong with my speech. I would like to communicate on twitter and face book and have those face books. What bothers me about the museum experience that using the technology might be frowned upon because I’m not paying attention. Is there an opportunity to shift that technology can be good and participatory?

>> I was part of a panel with museum professionals from China recently and one of the questions is there too too much technology and are we tired of all the noise and should some of it go away. I think we need to be smart about how we use it. I think that I have been in galleries where there’s so many videos blasting at one time that you can’t hear any of them. A part of what will allow us to do what we do better is to talk to our constituent SEUs to find out what is working and have some time to test things out with lots of different kinds of people so we are better informed about the products we make.

>> Do we have time?

>> I am getting caught up on in the conversation. Take three or four minutes.

KATE>> Building on my comments and thoughts from you. For me one of the things in the most recent proposal I am working on with the museum in Boston on creating multi media for everyone. We find that so much of the barrier is not the devices available and the roots are not available but there are some of the things holding us back and partly it’s that we don’t know about what to do and partly when we query museum professionals the barrier is internal. So years ago, two years ago when I was judging for museums on the web we made a VOW that we wouldn’t accept any website that was not accessible. We had to step aside from that we didn’t have any submitted we only had one or two. It exists right? It’s out there we could make it accessible and yet we do not. In preparing for this proposal we looked at what are the barriers. They were internal. They were people would say on the surface that they were committed to making things accessible but they felt it was too expensive, too time consuming and too this and we are not working in partnership with groups to make things truly accessible. One of the things I am interested in is do you struggle with this from an internal perspective, from a staff perspective of how do we change our own vision of the world to make our projects more accessible. In the end it’s not time or money that keeps us back, it’s our world view on that.

CLAUDINE >> I think we have to share more. You know one we good models out there. If people don’t see good models they don’t know what’s possible. What we need to share are budgets and consultants that help us, so that people who think they have these impediments can go to specialists who will help them solve the problems and if we don’t put the models up and if we don’t put them up in detail then people continue to create barriers for themselves that need not exist.

CATHERINE >> Your comment about creating limitations really stood out to me. I think museums think oh my gosh accessibilities will cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars when in reality it doesn’t. There’s a lot out there that we can retro-fit to work for accessibility purposes which is really what everybody wants.

CLAUDINE >> Just like you created an opportunity for yourself we certainly could open ourselves up to have people submit solutions that will work for themselves an others.

CATHERINE >> I think offering that range of options is really valuable. I don’t know American sign language so when you think we have American sign language we are done. That’s not serving me or an aging baby boomer with a hearing loss. I think there’s other things to consider.

KATE>> Thank you for all of your work.

Websites Documenting Feminist Related Exhibitions (2011)

http://www.moca.org/wack/

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/global_feminisms/

http://www.centrepompidou.fr/Pompidou/Manifs.nsf/0/44638F832F0AFABFC12575290030CF0D?OpenDocument&sessionM=&L=1&form=

http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/feministpainting

“Feminist Curation and Exhibition Online”, 23 Sept, 2011

First of all I would like to thank Nancy for putting together such a stimulating program an for inviting me to speak in this forum. I also want to thank laura for putting together the feminist curating network and who has offered to pitch in and deliver this paper if in fact my voice gives out. I have had laryngitis for the past three weeks. I hope you can hear me and I’m delighted as well that you can read along with me because this is something quite unexpected. By way of introduction I’m an AR art history. ‑‑ since the 1990’s, but it was really only with the invitation from the Montreal network that I began to look at websites in relation to feminist inspired exhibitions and perhaps more importantly to consider the implications of their various manifestations.

My basic premise is that unless feminist oriented exhibitions and exhibitions of women artists are fully present on‑line we risk th erase sure or disappearance from women in the new field os women in global art histories to quote GRISALDA archives matter. ‑‑ shapes forever what we think we were an enhance what we might become. Those who desire a more inclusive art world and museum that is foster alternatives to the status quo cannot ignore the potential of the web to shift collective consciousness. In fact there is an URGENCY to intervening as much as possible as soon as possible as strategically as possible. Even though the field of exhibition history is only a few decades old traditional patterns have already been inscribed. Feminists related exhibitions an exhibitions of women artists an by women curators have been excluded from most spots on the subject. There’s new publications will rectify the situation, any such efforts will be retrospective and partial without truly altering the framing premises of what exhibition history could be.

Why my insistence on the web for transforming an transformative histories of exhibitions? The web offer it is possibilities of attaining what communications psychological HROR LORNA Roth calls cognitive equity. A state where stereo types, however unconscious, have been eliminate TPR‑D the moment of inscription, the result is they are no longer repeated. Put another way if you build a history of exhibition’s differently it will be different. Initially that difference maybe merely additive, TPWU web offers the possibility of substantive changes in how histories can be constructed and transmitted. An example of which patrick just mentioned. In the unstraight museum. Now many properties of the web parallel feminist values. I want to look at these in relationship to exhibition histories.

For example the digitized nature of the web and it’s multi media capabilities permit a fuller hierarchal ‑‑ exhibitions involve other TRA tradition art media or evolve during the run. The web is inherently more democratic as it makes more exhibition material an more forms more available to more people than print material. The available of once less accessible material raise it is bar for what various publics want and expect from galleries an museums in RAE HREUGS to exhibitions. The accessibility of a wide range of documents mean that is researchers can make a typical connections and pose new questions. The web also allows us to conceive of exhibitions differently, materially relate today the before an after life of exhibitions an where exhibitions travel breaks down the notion of an exhibition as a singular event by expanding it’s temporal an spatial dimensions. The web fosters linking after making connections as such it offers the possibility of considering exhibitions as more than unique masterpiece or block buster or a vanguard events an related phenomenon networks with context, and does the full name of the worldwide web indicates it offers unprecedented access to what is and has happened locally an globally so more trends enter intraculture work can be done an alternatives to predominant culture models explore more easily.

The web also allows interactivity that on a pragmatic level means knowledge is easier to expand. Interactivity demonstrate that is knowledge is not finite it’s a process that belongs in the commons an benefits from the collaboration. The web can also be used as a tool for transparency that result ins greater understanding of the functioning of institutions and the place of exhibitions within them. Perhaps most important for consideration is the promoting, sorry for promoting on‑line rather than print material is that today the web is usually the first and lasting encounter with an exhibition to quote nancy museums report up to ten times the number of visitors to their websites but they get to their buildings. As Claudine Brown put it this morning there’s previsit research. We access on‑line reviews to obtain information before an exhibition, before even visiting the exhibition and sometimes our special on‑line exhibitions designed to accompany those on site as well as educational material. Also, after exhibitions end information can still be found on‑line where to functions as historical documentation.

A strong web presence at minimum draws attention to the existence of feministic related exhibitions. At the time of the first large scale feminist inspired exhibitions the web did not exist as a tool or was too new for most museums. What I want to do is to look at websites developed in conjunction with four major early 21 century exhibitions that took advantage of the fact that museums are now expected to have sophisticated websites and also provide funds for special projects and in conjunction with large scale exhibitions. All of the websites go beyond merely documenting the exhibition and despite limitations each website make as substantial contribution to feminist scholarship. WACK let’s just see if this is going to happen.

So art in the feminist revolution was curated by Connie Butler for Los Angeles in 2007. It was the first museum feminist exhibition to create a stand alone specially named website. The state and purpose of the website was enrich visitor understanding of the exhibition and it’s many components. The exhibition itself was the first comprehensive historical examination of the international foundations an legacy of feminist art. It combined the display of 120 artists an extensive programming. The website was conceived as an integral components of the exhibition designed to incorporate multi media and interactivity.

The stand alone format in short sites visibility and after life as it is not buried in the museums on‑line exhibition archive. So simply by typing WACK into a Google search the WACK site will come up rather than having to go into the on‑line archive an figure out what year it was an find it that way. Now, in contrast to the controversial cover design, sorry I should get this up a bit more. Of the WACK catalog which featured part of Martha’s Ross HRER’s 1962 to ’72 of Playboy photos of nude women the aesthetic of the home page are muted, variated flesh tones used for the background and a design that echos an open book linked the print and on‑line publications. The left page features a black and white still image from the film night cleaners by the street film collective showing a feminist political rally with as you saw before a description of the exhibition and information on the catalog and discussion of the controversy of the image on the catalog an audio tours, information on performances gallery talks, walks through revolution which were tours in the gallery itself.

The videos of artists who gave tours of the exhibition Sylvia being one. Manufacture audio tours. Information on performances and on the public plus artist project by Suzanne lacy stories of work and survival. I am going to scroll up. I am purposely doing this because it mimics what you would be doing yourself if you were at home using the website. Now, is there any way to get that a bit that’s what I want. So the right hand side of the page is about a quarter of the size of the left and it repackages the material and adds to it and divides it into separate categories about the exhibition an about the WACK site AUD you tour and lectures and events the public and Arteus reject. Reviews and press and the Wack catalog. There’s also about a single color installation photograph with an indication that there are 42 more images. I am just waiting for those to come up I hope they will. It’s trying to connect. Well, okay they will come up. There’s a no longer active Wack events calendar. And an intriguing list of exhibitions on at the same time as Wack, and a hyper linked list of resources that’s what I have been waiting for.

Now, the website is exemplary in it’s inclusion of so much material ton exhibition. The color of photographs itself is note worthy as is the varied configurations in which they can be found there is this dedicated area for them, but most unusually they also occur accompanying audio tours. Now usually with down loaded audio tours you don’t have images so off site you can also get a sense of what the on site exhibition looked like while you are listening to the audio tour. Material is repeated so that it is both hard to miss and read in different context. Authors are identify and entire lectures an presentations are included GRISELDA you are there. The website issues of race an sexuality by placing that material early on in various sections. Another laudable feature of the site is the aggregation of printed reviews and press coverage. Making it very easy to track reception of the exhibition especially what happened with the wack catalog. Now what emerges from the sense of this website is a sense that wack is a integrated scholarly politicized multi faceted contemporary phenomenon non. By contrast the Wack catalog by a valuable resource, I am having troubles here. I apologize. The Wack call log was a much more scholarly entity here with detailed information about the artist an art works an various aspects of feminism it reveals much less about the physicality of the exhibition itself and the experience of going through it. On the other hand the catalog was truer to the international character of the exhibition. It was less Los Angeles and U.S. centric focused in its presentation of the material. The other point about the local wack site that I want to make in terms of limitation it does not record the exhibition tour. Wack traveled to Vancouver, Washington, and New York throughout 2008 and ‘9. And each institution developed its own very simple website for it none of them linked to the MOCA website and nor did the MOCA website as I said actually indicate the tour so what does this mean for an understanding of exhibition history. It means it’s very hard to assess the effect of the exhibition in various locals and a key components of the exhibition the fact that it traveled is missing from the on‑line history. It’s often also excluded I might add from the new form of book catalog where the exhibition tours are not there.

Now, global feminisms knew direction in contemporary art which open the same year was a very different exhibition. It was organized to commemorate the founding of the Elizabeth A Sackler center for feminist art at the Brooklyn museum. It was co‑curated by the director of ‑‑ and art historian Linda. It featured 88 artists from 50 countries represented with photography work and video from 1980 to the present. The design of the website for global feminism is basic. Black text on white ground with still photographs, despite featuring images from Bulgarian artist ‑‑ 1999 video celebrating the twinkling. Information about the exhibition consists of a very short introductory text, a wore word annotation. A PDF partially checklist. Multi media section that contains a down loadable cell phone tour with an on‑line introduction. There’s a spent section as well. The major part of the web space is devote today 44 videos of artists talks, ranging from ten to 30 minute ins length. The videos identified by artists name only were also posted to you tube and can be down load TPR‑D I tunes you. Clearly the curators chose to privilege the voices of artist in the exhibition and on the website N. doing so they break with traditional exhibition power structures where curators an academics speak for artists even living ones. The videos provide an extensive archival record of artists speaking about their work and document what has become a standard feature of exhibition programming, the artists talk. The websites provided minimal hard to find information on how the exhibition was structured and what it looked like. Thanks to Robert to Smith New York times review we know it began with art work positioned in space around the installation that gave rise to the Sackler center. Judy 1974 to 1979 iconic and controversial dinner party. The exhibition then advanced through an adjacent wing of galleries. The photographs that lead this review only shows Chicago’s work and the accompany slides show of 11 works in the exhibition are not installation shots.

What are the implications of the absence of any mention of the Chicago work? Installation photographs or even a floor plan on the website. The discrepancy and how the curator K‑S conceive the exhibition and the representations of the exhibition on‑line are misleading if not intellectually dishonest. Ignoring the mass of presence of Chicago’s dinner party does not make it disappear. Abandoning the opportunity to address different forms of feminisms at different times an in different places GRiSALDAs’ image of the landscape is power. ‑‑ alongside different works for a temporary exhibition was not at issue in two later exhibitions ‑‑ women artists in the collection of POMPIDOU and painting an TKPEPL TPHEUFPL in Jewish Newseum. Both use it had occasion of the exhibition to engage in detailed and extensive research and to make that research available on‑line. Now ELLE was the largest and, it was the largest an most dramatic exhibition of women artists to date in Europe. According to museum statistics over two million people visited the exhibition for 20 months, the permanent collection gallery ons the entire fourth floor an eight rooms on the fifth floor were emptied of their usual fair to show five hundred works by two hundred women artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. Curator KA mill ‑‑ use it had occasion to produce an stand alone website. Like MOCA it has a long witch history in conjunction with temporary exhibitions. While the feminist topic may have been precedent setting the institutional climate for extensive stand alone sites was receptive. The L site functions as a document of the exhibition and on‑line catalog and a history of women’s art and a history of feminism particularly in France. I am trying to get this to fill the screen. Let’s try this. Sorry. It’s organization is multi partied almost like a web with overlap and interweavings that encourage exploration of individual art works an the 7 exhibition themes. The BUSY aesthetics of the site, background colors of sage, mustard gray or black and black white rand yellow text echo the variety of the content. Unlike other websites devote today exhibitions of women’s art an unlike other POPIDE U websites. In many way this is feature follows standard French publicity conventions, notably it begins with soft mood music, punctuated by breath think sexy female sighs. The sound?

> Okay. I will just stop it there. You can just imagine a North American museum having such a feature on the home page of a website. The seemingly cliche sexist framing images and sounds maybe aTPHOEUG in the context of a feminist exhibition, but I want to insist on the fact that they are ironic. The size call it had mind the heave ‑‑ 1975 art must be beautiful artist must be beautiful immediately after their first appearance indicates a mocking awareness of having to sell exhibitions by and about women. The other sections of the website are more scholarly and politicized differently. There is extensive information on individual art works ‑‑ sorry I want out of here. Which so on individual pages you will have especially extracts from TR from the video you will have links to the placement of the work in the thematics of the exhibition and here body slogan is the section. It was in room 11. Also links to other works in that section and an extensive ‑‑ on the core slogan or the body slogan section on the the other thing is there there is an interactive plan which shows the work in various places through tout museum. Again, allows you to access information on the thematic areas an then to click in layer in to get more information on individual works. Basically what is happening here is a multi LINKing model, models the need to consider art work in multiple contexts and not rely on standard or singular categorization models. There is as well a broad chronological time line interactive as well. Which situate it is art work in relation to political events, legislation, French writers, and French film. Also what happens to women in institutions. I am in the in the year that I want to be so I can’t find what I really want. Gallery owners in other words a much broader presentation of women’s history both in the arts and outside of it.

So essentially the Centre Pompidue site is filled with material. The navigation of the site is often unclear and makes for sometimes extra ordinarily frustrating rep SEUGS and too often art is presented as factoids. Now, by contrast the website that was developed for shifting the gaze, painting an feminism at the Jewish museum is much more focused in its presentation an much easier to navigate. It is focused primarily on the history of the institution. It include as wealth of information on the exhibition, an interview on‑line with the curator, an essay by the curator, a checklist of works in the exhibition down loadable. An exhibition plan and an on‑line gallery which shows the works and commentary on the work and a link to the different themes of the exhibition in which the work has been grouped. The feature that I want to point out to you about this website that I find quite amazing is an on‑line essay by Anna Marie with a dynamic graph here we go that shows the women artists and the number of art works by women on a year to year basis in the museum. ‑‑ document this is history. There’s a sortable index that lists alphabetically the artist that is were shown in the museum and when the work is collected by the museum there is a hyper link to the link. This is a list of over five hundred 50 women artists from renaissance Italian weavers to come temporary artists an is meant to show that over time the museum has made an increased commitment to showing women artists an art work by women of all kinds. Now surprisingly neither ELLE or shifting the gaze privileges or photographs despite it’s common practice to extensively document exhibitions with photographs that record the placement of art works in relation to each other the manner in which work is installed in the space in which it’s exhibited. Both museums have a policy available to the press but not to the public. This is the economy of images that nancy has written about on the WIKI. Sometimes these official documents can be found ton web and are supplemented by visitor generated installation photographs authorized or No. it may seem by KEU to focus on such a small matters when the websites in question are rich in material but the absence of installation photographs can and does determine what questions about exhibition practices are raised?

Now I want to conclude with statement about websites in themselves not results in feminist inspired art worlds or exhibition histories, but when the basic historical work is done ever present and accessible on‑line we can move onto other things to that end I will make some suggestions that website budget allocations be built into all exhibition proposals. That these websites be stand alone and that there is full exhibition documentation including installation photographs that the websites are extensively tagged, hyper linked that there is a search function on them and that greater use of social media and acceptance of user generated content is very much part of the design. Another aspect to this is the development of building open source on‑line resources. And the WIKI that Nancy started is a valuable place to building a hyper link international of feminist related exhibitions an their websites. Lastly I want to urge training for art historians and curators and students in web design in analysis. Three weeks ago I met a young colleague who just recently completed a master thesis. That thesis the historicization of Wack and ELLE I have gone blank and what was the third big one up there and global feminisms and I asked her did you include the websites? And this women who had been talking to me about augmented reality and increased digitization of museum resources and you know what her response was. It was no. Thank you.

Respondents Katherine Ott and Beth Ziebarth discuss “Feminist Curation and Exhibitions Online”

And so we have had joining us respondents here Katherine who is a curator at the museum at the Smithsonian.

>> Thank you it’s very exciting and thank you for inviting historian of history and medicine to participate, very risky but none the less. When you were first told I was in ‑‑ put these three topics together. I was shockedly admit. The first thing that went through my mind there is still feminist around that are not in textbooks or somewhere else. I think of it in the air that we breath that’s invisible to us, but it’s none the less there so it was, it took me awhile to get my mind around putting those three topics together. Great, thank you. I prepared something because if I don’t have something written in front of me I will go in many directions, so I have a couple written things. What Beth and I have in common is that we both work in disability. I as a curator and I also work in the history of sexuality an the history of the body and Beth does disability from a more functional aspect, but we collude and collaborate a lot on content. My comments I want to draw attention or I want to draw upon feminist ethics in relation to access an inclusion. I am thinking of access specifically in relation to people with disabilities and I prepared this with no idea about what R E E S A was going to say. It actually turned out to be a relatively ‑‑

>> Separates them with other groups with inclusion around race whatever that is or racial list thinking and sexuality and gender. It’s not enough to legislation late about the right to vote or equal pay or to get married or to live where you want to live to exercise those rights you have to be able to get into the classroom and access the knowledge that’s being conveyed. You need to access the PARBGT place and the transactions that take place there. You need museums that are prepared to meet your mind and your body with their content. Use of technology for communication activities of daily living an mobile and other kinds of assistance is essential for autonomy, inclusion an rights. So next I have just briefly two issues specifically of importance from museums as most of the presenters have noted there is the undeniable fact of sexism and usually hetero sexism that restricts and binds as well as greases nearly everything in the world in some way. For museums sectionism in the form of objectification ‑‑ (laughter) is of major important or maybe I should do it like this. (laughter). Objectification of people in general an the museum effect of holding something up for analysis and discussion you can not help but create distancing of a certain amount in a museum setting. Objectification is further intensified when the content relates to women and girls and for disability objectification because it is never interrogated. Disabled people in western culture are universally treated as things as objects, stereo typed, essentiallized their impairment. Prodded with well meaning insults an seldom understood as persons.

This is true from the first surgeries an diagnosis in a medical setting on the street in the produce aisle of the super market and in office cubicle. It is the gays in all of it’s OLYPIAN power. Making disability content very complicated to present and nearly impossible to pull the disability content in imagery and objects out because visitors just won’t get it. They are so unuse today seeing it. So many of the image that is were shown today had disability content, but even, but largely invisible and hard to talk about. In a media saturated world when it comes to disintent bodies whether female or disabled it is impossible to avoid objectification of all parties by each other. You can’t get around it but you have to bring it to the surface. An age old problem with museum display and one that continues on with new media is the way we exclude nonspecialists. Those not lit rate in the subject or the language used in the display and the inexperience those who haven’t read the books by the famous people who don’t know the theory, a fairly high level of literacy is needed to access information with much new media. Not only financial resources to purchase an maintain and upgrade devices to have a fast server or to be connected to the internet, but basic programs an apps and such exclusion is very easy an often invisible.

The old boys network and the privileges that come with it among other thing S‑S an expression of the insular nature of information privilege. When we become the experts or specialists as feminists we need to exercise our responsibility to take others with us. We cannot save our information or our resources for a select few which is what you were talking about. We need to produce what we know in ways that aa range of people can access it. We need to speak simply an clearly and explain slowly because that is howdy versety happens, that’s how difference thrives an thousand happiness increases. New media must not become another version of the old boys club. Lastly, the material in sensory aspects of the museum experience or of particular significance to the learning styles of many kinds of people including people with disabilities in this regard new media can be misleading or out right exclusionary. It’s the difference between viewing an eight and a half by 11 photograph or on the web an image on the corset and seeing one worn or a tactile learner or someone who has to touch something in three dimensions or talk to someone to be able to understand it. To some extent this dismin nichement of the reflects and it foregrounds the false sensuality of the marketplace. We are unindated of sites an sounds and we are deprived of actual physical pleasure unnourishing food an entertainment and products and appeal to the imagination but not to the sensory body is left out. That’s what museums an a gallery experience can put back into the mix. New media can overwhelm us with information experiences an the excitement of that ‑‑ substitutes often for physical contact which is critical for many people in their learning process. So those are by prepared remarks. Now, for a question which doesn’t really have to do with my prepared remarks. My question is about when you were talking about the benefits of the web one of the things you mentioned was that it’s, it’s beneficial because it’s circumvents the singular nature of the exhibition. Is the singularity antifeminist or something that you need to circumvent why is that a value on the web?

>> Okay. I will begin answering that by saying that nothing substitutes for the singularity of the experience of an exhibition on site. It’s the materiality, the pleasure that you were speaking about and the pleasure is not just sense ‑RBL pleasure it’s also intellectual pleasure. I was very much remined of that yesterday when I had a couple of hours an I went to the national gallery here and looked at the work and how it was displayed and also some of the special exhibitions. That was to me a completely in a sense separate kind of experience from exhibitions on‑line and the way I use that material as documents, historical documents. And what concerns me is this notion of that’s often apply today art works as singular masterpieces. It gets shifted over to exhibitions as landmark exhibitions or singular exhibitions and as such it excludes the nonsingular landmark events. That’s my concern that there’s a history and a context that gets excluded and with the web, with hyper links you are encouraged to see what that context is. When I go to an exhibition in a museum in a sense it’s removed from a context unless I have that expertise in advanced or it’s written in the wall text labels. When I am learning about exhibitions as exhibitions I think it’s really important that they be seen in a historical context because then you could ask all kinds of questions about them. And perhaps one of the ways I would answer your question and I have been thinking about some of the things I did insert, and that is TR’s not enough use of the web in the documentation of exhibitions and particularly feminist inspired exhibitions to use the interrogative. To actually ask questions. Either questions about how this exhibition relates to the history of exhibition or relates to other exhibitions. In other words what your question stimulates in me is an awareness although I am advocating stand alone websites that can feed into the singular exhibition unless there’s methods within the website itself to create broad spread connections. I am not sure that’s an answer to your question.

>> Okay. Beth’s turn.

>> Well, my question is very similar I think to what we were just talking about, and with disability you most often do not have physical exhibition to go along with the topic. And is there a different value to seeing objects relate today disability only in photos on a website rather than a real object on display in a museum. I think you talked about that already. Can there be a transformative encounter via website?

>> I think there can be transformative on‑line or on site or insitU there ice actually exhibition outside on artists with disabilities. I was absolutely struck with it as an exhibition in a national museum context. I had never encountered that before? Would I have encountered that on‑line I’m not sure? I doubt it unlesson line material is funneled an channeled differently. And this is something that nancy has written about the need for more distributive museum that uses social media rather than master slave in publicity rather the push pull theories. Sorry push material out to people or you find ways of pulling them in. If on one of my list serves I have received a notification preferably about an exhibition about people with disables or the topic of disability in exhibitions I probably would have clicked on the hyper link. Would I have found it on my own not necessarily. So I think it transformative moments can occur both ways. I think both media if you will the museum and the web can be used to expand our consciousness.

>> I have another one. Thinking about it I really have never thought about having images of installations on the website that goes with the exhibition we don’t do that really, once if awhile but not usually. So how say it’s 15 years from now and you are accessing the or like with wack which is ‑‑ you look at the gallery review and the galleries have completely changed. How much forward looking or backward looking interpretation do you do to explain what a gallery is and why things are hung the way they are or placed the way they are. What kind of obligation for interpretation or explanation do you have do you just put the picture up an let people figure it out?

>> You ask a very good question. I think it’s also very much related to the fact that the field of exhibition histories is relatively new. The knowledge of this history is in the process of being developed so that’s number one. The second part of that is essentially you are asking us to ask a different kind of question than has been asked before. The first was you know why don’t you put installation photographs on the web? So once you do that you can start to ask other kinds of questions. Now GRISELDA mentioned to me last night that she had seen wack in all of it’s four exhibition sites. She commented on how the art looked differently in each of those sites. I believe you mentioned Washington as being optimal for the work on display because most of the work was two dimensional and still and relatively small scale and it worked very well in the rooms there. Whereas in the LA MOCA site which I showed you the actual site of the website it was more of a contemporary garage exhibition space which has a certain unfinished raw quality to it. If there had been if you will a meta category for the documentation of the wack exhibition that showed all of the four sites an the way the exhibition looked differently I suspect your question would probably come up and hopefully someone would include a hyper link to a minihistory of various forms of the way work is displayed and the implications of cytoart work in terms of interpretation and response.

>> In an ideal world of course. (laughter)

>> Beth: I guess my last question would be how do you envision using mobile generated content for visitors in the exhibition histories?

>> Give me an example of what you would call mobile generated content?

>> I’m thinking of crowd sourced material from an exhibition so visitors are allowed to record their observations or descriptions of an object and how you would take that material and make it part of, would that be something you would want as part of the record for exhibition history.

>> Most of the websites actually have within each section a place for comments. Now, that’s not quite the same thing that you are talking about. So idealy there would be a place for exhibition on the websites. It does occur in terms as we know in flicker. If you do an image search for a lot of exhibitions you will get that information. You will also get the blog information, so it’s out there if you do a search. I think what you are talking about is how do you bring that material together and how do you work with it?

>> Right.

>> I would leave that for museum people to figure out because I think it is important, it addresses the issue of assumption that was raised this morning. We assume all kinds of things about visitors an their responses which are not true as we know if we get those responses back. Also, there’s the whole issue of the knowledge that people have and ‑‑ and the different perspectives, finding a way to incorporate crowd source information and knowledge I think is key to truly expanding notions of difference and accessibility in a museum and on museum websites.

>> Very good.

>> Thank you

> Applause.

Peter Samis is Associate Curator of Interpretative Media at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). In the early 1990s, he served as art historian/content expert for the first CD-ROM on modern art, and then spearheaded development of multimedia programs for SFMOMA’s new building. Since that time, he has participated in each new wave of interactive publishing, from broadband websites to podcasts, from video interviews to mobile apps. He is currently embarked on a research project focused on best practices in museum interpretation (including analog, digital, pluri-vocal, participatory, and social).

Samis holds a BA in Religion from Columbia College in New York, and an MA in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley.

A Nota Bene from Nancy Proctor:  Peter was presented with the “Golden Banana” award by the Gorilla Girls for “Voices & Images of California Art” as it was the first publication on contemporary California artists that featured more women than male artists. He is widely known and loved among museum technologists by the adage, “Peter Samis is to museums as James Brown is to soul.”

A recent dream (with apologies to David Hockney!):

Working at the museum, being fully engaged, and then seeing two more names—David Hockney and another white male—hit the schedule three years out in one of those rarissime slots to which we devote hundreds of thousands in cash, not to mention all our collective labor, time and materials.

I am sickened, enraged, embittered, and cannot hide my disappointment from the two assistant curators in the room. What a waste: heaping more laurels on those already crowned! All my resistance to this enterprise in its self-perpetuating, self-congratulatory mode surfaces yet again.

Not Shirin Neshat, but David Hockney. Even both would be all right, but the conspicuous absence of women, of non Euro-Americans, of contestataires, roils me deep inside—and makes me want to flee again.

I wake up with the thought: cf. the importance of Nancy’s conference!

My talk will deal with the dominant narratives—determined by major exhibitions in the galleries—and new media as a space to propose narratives, born of opportunities offered by exceptions in the collection.

“New Media as Counter-Narrative and Corrective”, 23 Sept 2011

> It’s a pleasure to be here can everyone see that okay? This is the museum I happen to work in. The San Francisco Museum of Modern art. This is the second building inhabited in 1995 the museums 60’s anniversary everybody had been all the curators had been working long an hard in ULT installation crews to install the galleries to create a whole brand new museum that was on the scale two to three time it is size of the older building we had been in. No one had any band with whatsoever to pay any attention to me off on the sidelines off budgets doing this kind of quiet pilot project known as interactive educational technologies. We didn’t even know what to name it at the time. As a result I was basically left on my own and they said sink or swim and do what you have been talking about this thing for years. This opportunity to use multi media to try APBG late the space in which people can under stand the works an the collection. I am about 20 volunteers we did this crazy Bing that brought three multi media programs to fruition in 7 months when the museum opened.

Basically the freedom I had was to operate on the margins of the institution and under the radar and as basically as I saw fit having already been a curator across department’s ‑FPT when we opened in 1995 we graduated like our museum was like so many others. We had commenced. We commenced into the full fledged world class modern art museum in a way that we couldn’t have been in our old facility. That had everything to do with our ability to have permanent ongoing collection galleries an a ‑‑ told a story of modern art history this is not even the building is the monoyou mental new presence on the landscape an the cover of the yellow page an all of those things the new cultural institution and the Bona Fides they were entertaining. Some of the ‑‑ in the back and the greet on the left we’re not yet a ‑‑ the fountain. We are not yet in the collection. These came later as the discrepancy between the world class building and the gaps in our ability to tell the coknock ‑L story became flagrant. One of our trustees wonderful and very inspired older women ‑‑ donor said well what do we need to fill the gaps. Tell that story if that’s what this ‑‑ galleries is going to do let’s do it. There we have a ‑‑ for instance. So these were the this was in a sense these were the milestones ton I tin rare of the path of the galleries. Right? And there was one conspicuous exception we did have an early FRIDA self portrait with DIEGO which had been painted in san Fransisco. And in other, other works by women artists obviously there were not the ones trumpet it had most as we portrayed ourselves to the outside world.

In solo exhibitions it was unfortunately the same story all of the artists on the left an right on that matter artists we devoted monographic exhibitions those special exhibitions we are talking about and the major monographic exhibitions we have done of women artists were I SR‑P done a complete systematic audit but these are the three that come to mind as I look over the past 15 years. So where was the space in which women could live actually in their own terms? And it was usually off in the margins in small Newark projects. This quote from ‑‑ the central figure of art historical discourse is the artist, who is presented as an inEF fable ideal which complements the B O*RBGURGEOIS myths of a universal class less man. A narrative that was made in our galleries not always but often.

So how to represent women artists in a world where the physicality of the museum is so heavily weighted in the direction of the male market stars, right? Well I did tell you a little bit in 1995 when we were off in this marginal space an no one was paying attention everyone was obsessed on how the gallery was going to get installed. It gave us a ‑‑ that would be a bad connotation. Certainly it gave us room to breathe and room to think in our own terms, one of the ways we did that was through this early program which became a CD ROM. Anybody remember CD ROM’s? Called voices of images of California art. In which partly on purpose but really also by chance we ended up having more women artist than men artist. And the only litmus test was the artist in our collection? It didn’t matter if they were dominant or prominant in the galleries. Whether it was someone who was going to be view at some point? As a matter of fact that CD ROM is still in print. You can’t play it on a Mac any more because we know longer have that operating system. That’s what happens when new media gets old. It was remade for the web though years later when we saw when we realize id it had a limited shelf life. It’s on our website and I am going to go into a couple different moments of it. It was really the opportunity was to open up a space of discovery that wasn’t that wasn’t the doctrine TPHAEUR story. It was especially about living art. I must plug in sound one second. Where’s the sound. Here we go right here. Okay let’s go back.Er

> So the idea was rather than cod fying the particular narrative we were going to open up the space to the users of this site could actually make their own determinations we are going into the archive and we were going through a rich ore of material including at the archives of American art about many of the these artists then we pick out the thing that is we thought showed light. The golden nuggets that would favor an understanding more readily than others. This is an early self portrait. Here are some of her pictorial list neo ‑‑ including the man who was going to be her husband and father of her children. ‑‑ we are move ing into the F 64 sharp focus world. Here 23 she’s also SUR realism has already comed up already and we are looking at mirrors an her twins an then going into and you can see how she an ever are sharing concerns of formal and then sculptural qualities of in her case flowers an plants. And nudes. And then portraits and even elders like that. Or Gertrude Stein passing through on her book tour. And her father at 90 and so on. So then we also had in each one a photo album which was photos of artists to make them into a person or a presence and an embodied being of their own right moving through their life and that continuum as well.

This is a photo by ‑‑ of imaging. With W‑RBGOEGEE I love that one. Then with her PWRAOUD. With an sell Adams or the title of honorary of west coast photographer in western beech in caramel an so on. You begin to see the person and there’s also a scrapbook and they’re letters by the artist an correspondence between her an Georgia oh KAOEF and correspondence about the western ‑‑ I’m not going to go into detail on these, each of these by the way I can go in far enough that you can see that you can zoom in and handle the document and you can I will show you a transcript of it. Then the scrapbook has something that I think is worth bringing to the attention of this group today. There was an article by Cunningham called photography as a profession to women from her sorority journal of January 1913. I think it was here we go we will move in on it and these are all readable. I am going to the second paragraph. Fortunately we have the long pause ‑‑ this is the first waive of feminism we are talking about here in the 1880 and 1920. Fortunately we have long past the stage when there’s any disgrace attach today work. If a women wishes to work she’s not regard today eccentric. If she’s obliged to it’s not a misfortune. Women have all fields of endeavor opting to them ‑‑ stand point of suitability or for the individual or the sex there’s questions to be asked. Why women for so many centuries so you have been supposed to be fitted into the arts or industry of the home are hard to understand that they have done the simple duties well an shown by the thousands of wonnerful embroideries an textiles of ‑‑ which men they have merely done with patience the task assigned. Even this has been a training and who shall say that women are making every year in their professions they are unfitted for them they should be brought up with the only 3 K’s and ‑‑ it’s hardly probable that men if they have been deprived of personality an limited in opportunity as women we are making greater success in the arts and professions.

And then I think I want to go ahead to another page and I need to see ‑‑ here we go. Women are not trying to out do the men by entering the professions they are simply trying to do something for themselves. Anyway there’s plenty more in here and they are photographs an so on. So each of the artist ins this program has this range of material ranging from a mini overview retrospective of their art work to photographs of them to documentary about something salient in their lives. I am going to go one moment in ‑‑ we are going to by pass the video which I also like. I am not going there. We are going to go to her relating to her subjects. First I am going to say this was audio this is an old days of oral history when oral history was only made to get a transcript. Often they then erased the tape. It’s just by chance that this interview from 1964 the last year of her life survived and wasn’t erased to be taped over. Someone asked her the interviewer asked her how she established such a repore with her subjects. There’s probably like a wall an the reel in a middle of a table and so there’s noise all over the place and you can barely make it out and we did some treatment of it to try to improve the sound but you will hear lots of Doppler effects an all kinds of things we decided it was more important to have the voice in there than to not do it. Here’s dorothea on how she established the repore with her subjects. It’s that spirit of generosity that we can all strive to em you late.

I was reading another GRISELA’s essay of in the early 1900’s he was saying that the advent of the public museum TKUGS a disservice because hit strips away the content. My argument is many of our museums do the same thing. It is doubtful you transfer the net W‑RBG of ideas an relations that made the works alive with interest. Their essential merit depended ton brief beliefs to created them. On the ideas that which they were tied to the circumstances that explained the community of thought that is gave them their unity. We find ourselves once again in a situation in modern an contemporary art museums where this is the case. I would say the gallery completely mimics that. Modern art as we know as anyone who is an art historian or someone involved in museum practice has physical aspects and it has a process of making it. It has relationships to it’s original maker to the ideas to that maker and the time to other works by that maker an by that maker’s peers, to document journals ‑RBG letters after sketches that an art historian might devil into an archaeological way to unearth what the concerned were when that art was made an per happens to the media that was created around that artist if that artist is a 20th century artist or to at least or 21st century artist, to a whole concept of methods of approach and understanding.

All of these things are help, are how we situate and create and evoke the narratives an the potentials an the meanings of a given art work. If you think about the gallery we strip away the process of it’s making because that’s not visible in any form unless you know something about it and relationships to it’s maker and it’s time are only really evident in a monographic survey of a single artist exhibition or to the extent that a collection has rich representation of other art or art works from the same period or same context. It can contextualize that per happen that is can become clear. It’s even if you put a ‑‑ next to a ‑‑ next to a they are each so different in their approach to image making that they really don’t provide a context for each other unless you come in there understanding what abstract expressionism was an what was motivating these artists. Documents are obviously invisible in the gallery and media are with held for the most part, and even methods of approach and understanding are usually reduced to if you are lucky two to three sentence or one paragraph or two paragraph label. Often tombstone label artist media and do nor date. We are left with physical aspects as in this context that our visitors are confronted with you know with what David calls sometimes wall obstructions an what we call works of art. So there are there’s a continuum between experts an novices the differences is an expert brings with him or herself that world of that con STAlations of ‑‑ and the novice doesn’t have it. And somewhere along the line we have to move in there and restore some context not in an exhaustive or patronizing or over determining way and say this is what this means. It can mean like an open way like in the voices an images. Here’s some images an here’s some letters an archive and make the sense of a person.

The other way we have done is it has been in the program of making sense of modern art. What I often wanted to call making sense of modern art not so much to kill it. The operative idea was to make it multi vocal. Instead of having the single label having three different ways of approaching an art work to show to imply that by extension if there are three ways there might be five or six or ten or 20. We are not going to go into the program if depth. I am going to show you a few screen from it. This is a screen about the sculpture the nest. There are three did I have friend questions you can clip on the image and the center an go into the zoom of the art work so you can bring it up close and personal incase you are accessing it from off site this relates to some of the conversations we had about websites an how you can have perhaps some kind of aer PEUF any experience and that also to use the idea of interrogate to use the interOGtive I think ‑‑ something we definitely used why a spider why would they be interest ed in a spider as a form? Is PW‑RBG O*RBGURGEOIS a feminist? Different perspectives on that. We were talking about that last night. On the one hand she’s clearly a feminist on the other hand she’s classify herself as a feminist and she talks in disparaging ways about women who don’t cook they, and I don’t know how you say ‑‑ in English I’m not sure and so on.

We go into depth by artists where we go into reproducing in‑depth books that are in our library and collages and montages. And we do have Judy Chicago because her dinner party was shown for the first time at S F M MoMA on the bet. I think the director WEBT to her studio and saw the activity in LA and said if you ever finish it we will show it at SF MoMA and Judy Chicago called him on that and said it’s done. We interviewed her when she was coming in to san Fransisco she talked about that. She talked about the rejection an we have her talking about that. Whit any Chad wick talking about women in SUR realism. Then we have and the other thing that we do is we actually do not restrict ourselves as art historians we welcome art historians we welcome outsiders an poets an musicians an guest tapes an pod casts an reflect OPBG the art work with their own creative responses and then we also when ever we have a practice of when ever possible if an artist is in our collection and they come to town we sit down and we interview them. Here is Doris installation that shows it’s very hard to see installation view because what you see is these little niche ins a white wall an behind those niches are shoes but we are going to learn more about that in a minute. We are going to have her an then we have questions around this whose shoes are these? What kind of memorial is this? We are trying to keep this open ended but we do want to give the artist an opportunity to speak.

>> Waiting for more of these to come that was a miscaptioning there. So similarly we have been able to one second ‑‑ interview other artists like Ann Hamilton an her inspiration inTKEU go blue. ‑‑ significance was not their object hood but their capacity to incite meaning and activate thought. Very much with the case with the installations with Ann Hamilton and the process of laboring and ‑‑ a person actively sitting in the galler erasing pages out of a book all day long while the visitors go by in front of this pyramid of blue ‑‑ bring the voice of museum to the archiving of incidents and actions subversive of the museums own paradigm. An artist in our collection who’s work has TPOT been shown at the time of the museum. It’s acquired, it’s in storage HELENA she was in san FRANCISCO. She’s in the collection. We interviewed her and we were able to create and insert her narratives including on when we had an art cast on virgin American airlines we did wall drawings and Richard Sarah splash pieces and Matthew bar any an carry james marshall and I’m going to show you the video of the HELENE breaking here’s speaking about it in the conservation studio. Let me click on that and I will end with that.

>> I felt that there were millions of artists who were making their marks and I sort of felt that the after tract expressionist said it all with abstract art in a way. I felt it didn’t matter if the yellow was put in the one corner or top corner or bottom corner. I didn’t think it mattered that much. I liked a lot of artists. A lot of it seemed ‑‑ to me. I wanted to see what would happen if I was the artist who did not let me make my Mark. I let them tell me something I did not know. I pour it had oil in a straight line. I made these rules for myself. It must be one an a half gallons of oil for each six foot by eight foot piece. They are on the floor I must try to do it in a straight line. I wanted to see who would happen with each one and so in this one there it is it’s all very centered and it broke in the center and you can see how it’s falling down how it’s sort of dripping down. There was like a square of wood, open square put ton floor and then this big paper attached to flex S*EU glass was put on top and that weight of the oil made the oil more ‑‑ in one spot. When it was lifted up by four people after many months it would be lifted up because the skin on the outer layer was dry but underneath there was more oil in the center so if you lifted it up all the wet oil would be cascading down until it got contained in it’s oil sack and it could be like an am knee yachtic sack. It was extremely messy. It was at the time of conceptual art. This very very messy kind of oil would gush out. I would invite people to the breakings almost like the birthing where they came to see it. It was extremely female. I felt like my work was feminist in a very subtle way. It was a matter of not being the master of making the masterpiece or the mistress making the mistress piece. It was a matter of letting something else an giving up control. I felt it was a feminist act actually. I was just invite people to come to a breaking to midwife the image. And I use those words which perhaps caused some people to shudder owe my god and some people say I want a midwife in an image. I tried to ‑‑ sometimes it would break all of a sudden and they would be disaPOEUPed of course they would remark about that. Other times it lingered and they would wait and be out of breath owe my god when is it going to break and they would hope it would linger it was very sensual I must say.

>> So I look forward to the time when we actually will show her breakings at the museum. Thank you.

Respondents Nicky Bird and Nancy Proctor

>> We want to thank Michael who is going to make it possible to stay in here later so we can have a final conversation about peters presentation. I am going to be joined by ‑‑

>> Well, so I am just sitting there thinking about both of you have been involved with ‑‑ representation of born digital art and we worked on an early piece of her called head herrings which was in part it was a photographic installation an also ‑‑ how many ways when I think about those early websites that we built the early interactives how innovative the interfaces were and there were no rules yet and there was no best practice an we tried all sorts of stuff and NIKKI AO*ERBGS site had no navigation bars you had the figure the thing out. It was a game and it was you had to figure out what questions to ask and you explored and you found things by surprise. And I was just thinking you know I’m not sure we were work anything 14 K dial up modems then. We have gone beyond that and have regressed a little bit as the rule haves been put in place. I am curious to hear both of you reflect on that and again kind of with your feminist intervention NIST perspective on what is that mean? Going back to Catharine’s the new media not yet an old boys club.

>> What does that mean?

>> Yes?

>> I don’t know I thought that to end this day with you has been it’s been a fantastic day an fantastic set of journeys an questions about judgments an having made those judgments and REESA say wag other question K‑S we ask the technology that’s available. And I was when you were doing this demonstrations of the called the interactive educational type of things thinking about what kind of conversations happened after this content ‑FPT it was in the artist voice coming out this way and finding it with an artist voice on you tube who has been collected by major institutions that is not available to the public to end on that quandary. I am going back to ‑‑ we see strange use of new media now. You realize when you talk about something that’s new media we are already battling. You were talking about having to consider now those are ‑‑ CD ROM’s thinking about that god yes no one is going to access those in a few years time as it becomes another kind of dilemma about what that work is when it’s in technologies and they move on and go forth. The questions that obsolescence in how access to information an access to kind of intervention and can be shut off by technology in tear own decisions of not gettings and all of those things. It’s also that kind of thing about play and experimentation and it not being a kind of heavily regulated or interested field at certain point which was what you were talking about. You got get buildings to get on with and then in the meantime looking at these other ways of how do we get this information across where it’s not just dependent on with a you enter in on the gallery wall.

>> In fact it’s not just the women artists missing it’s the information that’s the content that’s the worlds from which all of these art works originated. Beit male or female for the experience that don’t carry that with them. To go back to your question a little bit nancy I think that the one place where that kind of innovation and in experimentation with the interTPAEUGS continues in France in R E E S A ‑‑ exhibition when site you see how the American websites are more blogged based. There’s the counter to that when you get INNOVATIVE like that then often they are not accessible. That the blog based sites are far more accessible and so there’s a trade off there and also there’s also a longevity factor the more long the ‑‑ the more likely they are pain TAEUPBed over time. The exhibition an the archive of the exhibition will be able to be consulted 15 years from now an it won’t be locked out like CD ROM’s have been. There’s a total trade off there. I mean I too miss the you know the graphical innovation and artistry of so many of those early CD ROM’s where you were kind of create ago new KOZ PHO for each one or the website that is are more experimental before things are cod fied. I also see the trade off with the greater accessibility what’s ironic is of course that your story of how when the museums in the web you tried the make it a criteria for the best of the web category that they be accessible an inspite of the lack of the imagination and only two websites qualified. It’s not like we are actually getting the benefit of that gain. The idea of moving in a direction where more voices can be accommodated an where a user ‑‑ the installation shop that is REESA raised the installation views. Websites in the past we are finished just the way the exhibition was finished the day you turn the lights on and open it to the public ‑PL obviously the installation views happened after the exhibition opened. One can imagine for installations to be added in time even potentially after the exhibition goes down. I mean it dozen even have to be up, there might be people still afraid as ‑‑ they are if they see it all on‑line they aren’t going to see the show. Obviously that’s an argument that’s been flogged for many years now. We have proven that’s not the case it creates curiosity. If people have a problem with it with can observe the moment of posting until after the show is over and still build that into the site architecture for later on. I think we would all benefit from that.

>> On the subject of exhibition installation and about REESA is talking about this is history and certain practice a very practical note is that thing where when you are in conversations of artists an emerging artists how is this object displayed? How is it displayed so you can see a good documentation of the art work. You are not always again, that kind of missing context about what is the view the bodily relationship with this piece of work in a particular space that’s why it’s fascinating that thing about the exhibitions shifting the gays an having that different experience from venue to venue. The decision that is were made, but also for artist that is came out how were these works displayed because that’s also generated some of those kinds of debates, the debate that is have had with the audience which obviously you don’t, you won’t get that fully with and not to replace the websites to replace those things. It seems that that’s another kind of Marker are saying this is how the audience experiences this work and series of works an how the shapes the kind of meaning as well.

>> The installation defines the gallery. As you give views of installation especially if you can give views of it. Look at the limitations you can’t see a thing in that installation without doing zoom views. ‑‑ you can get a sense of like what it’s in that gallery. It’s just confined to it’s frame or that spot you don’t know how it was installed and what it’s next too and what the relationships were and the constellations an meanings that were installed alongside it in terms of any, there’s the web is a different space. It’s a different thing.

>> I am wondering what you both think the role of voice is in that space in a more literal audio sense. You know I love the way that really thanks to your efforts peter SF MoMA has built up this amazings video archive now in high DEF of artist interviews. If your museum is not out there video every TKAG gone artist walking through the door you are make ago mistake. I am wondering what you are thinking the role of sound is going to be like as we move forward in these digital spaces on‑line and you know as soon as I say that I also think about I supposed the back of my mind the questions peter about creating experiences, spaces for experiences in communities and if audio voice has some role in that what options or have you seen any strategies or good models for parallelling that for people who won’t be able to physically hear that voice?

>> Well, classically what we have done with our video clips is close captioned them and that’s what we did with the DOROTHE audio clips we put closed captions in. It’s not the case with the you tube clip we saw. I think at this point I think we are back onto that track. In terms of audio I mean when you talk about the audio voice and spaces of experience an audio experience I think in particularly in the galleries I think on‑line in the galleries video is no longer a preferred medium because you want people to be able to look at the art and not be looking at their screen. So the augmented reality most ‑‑ can they be something other than purely TKEU TKABGT tick. Can they be something on the one hand there’s something to be said for providing guidance to looking at content. You want to be able to complicate that also and open it up in more expressive ways perhaps by other artistic creative intervention that is come in an angle an reflect an art work in added dimensions to it that’s not, not to look at everything for a formal list lens or historical lens and say these are the only ways in which these objects mean something. Of course this is where you should be talking about ‑‑ and space and how do you create space effective where by other visitors can be primed to add a voice that actually augments rather than dilutes. The experience that you are having in the moment in the presence of an art work.

>> That’s really interesting thank you for bringing that up. You are right it’s an example and just for those of you who might not be familiar with it. There’s an app in I tunes called SKAEUPs. In fact we have been working with him recently. He just started a Smithsonian fellowship here. He worked with us to reskin that application for our Smithsonian museums on main streets traveling exhibition programs. These are exhibition that is go all around the U.S. to small towns to taking the Smithsonian to where ever people are. They want today collect oral histories from the people who live in these small towns for what it’s like to life there. His platform is open source and he helped us reskin it ander it’s being featured if I tune this is week.

>> That means someone will actually find it and down load it. I hope you will be among those.

>> End of commercial. It’s called stories from main street. And that use was actually inspired by Beth who came to me asking about ‑‑ museum and objects through the Smithsonian on‑line and making them available in other ways and what was the best way to approach that. The Smithsonian has something around that’s hard to count and it’s hard to know how you count. So we worn going to be able to hire a team ‑‑ ‑‑ through his installation how you could create a scaffolded experience with questions beautifully question that inspired people meaningful generated content. So what I love about that whole story is that it started with an artist and it was inspired by this accessibility need and where we have arrived at is something that serves everybody because I think everyone’s going to find it fascinating to hear how other visitors to the Smithsonian are experiencing an seeing the objects here. Although the new media world is visually heavily that the audio components is still incredibly important. That’s kind of why I was asking about that role of the audio per SE in digital experiences from your points of view.

> What this makes me want to do is actually invite an artist so go through our collection and all the place that is we have a mobile multi media tour stop or other places as well have them formulate questions about art works in the collection. You know the way they put out poetic questions in a way in a ‑‑ so it’s not us asking you know what do you think’s going on here or this or that or the other. Some silly education type question.