Selling Museum Collections to Save Cities Part II

I listen to NPR every day on my way to work, and heard two stories that really got me thinking about what it means to de-accession and sell items from a museum collection.  It's topic I thought about a lot in 2008-2009 when the going got tough for the Field Museum, which we discussed yesterday.  but yesterday we talked about a museum saving itself through de-accessioning and selling items.  Today we're moving on to how a museum could help its community.

The story more of you might be familiar with is this piece from Morning Edition talking about the possibility of selling off the original Howdy Doody puppet to help pay for Detroit's debt.  The second piece aired last week and discussed how the town of Harrisburg, PA was in the process of selling off a warehouse full of items originally intended to be the founding collection of museum that never opened.

The Harrisburg case is much more black-and-white to my mind, but there are a lot of facets. A previous mayor spent something like $8 million purchase artifacts with which to build a Wild West museum. On the East Coast. When the mayor was voted out of office all the artifacts were packed into a warehouse on the edge of town and just left there.  With the city of Harrisburg facing some $300 million in debt, the new city leadership decided to auction off the items to pay off as much of that as they could. In the end, the auction raised somewhere between $2.5 and $4 million dollars (estimates seem to vary from source to source) which will cover about 0.7% of the city's debt.

photo (c) Paul Chaplin, Pennlive.com

There are a few different angles from which to look at this, but let's start at the beginning: why the items were purchased in the first place.  According to MSN, the former mayor wanted to open 5 museums in Harrisburg to draw tourists in: a firefighter's museum, a Civil War museum, an African American museum, the Wild West museum, and another that isn't mentioned.  In theory, I support this. I think museums tend to be a good investment for a community, and have a longer legacy than shopping centers and residential development. BUT, and this is a big BUT, there needs to be a demonstrated audience for that museum before you start collecting objects.  There also needs to be a plan for preservation, storage, and display.  It doesn't sound like Harrisburg had any of those things.  So when the administration in the city changed, the unused Wild West artifacts were stacked "in messy piles inside a public works building with a leaky ceiling and no climate control, where they sat for years" according to the NPR piece.

So in this case, there are artifacts that aren't being preserved, with no facilities or staff to care for them, basically not doing anyone any good.  I have exactly zero problems with this collection being auctioned off.  Since having the artifacts wasn't helping Harrisburg (and since it sounds like the original museum plan was a unilateral decision by the former mayor and not a citywide initiative), they might as well sell them and use the money to cover a small portion of the town's debt.  To me this is like re-homing an abandoned pet - the old situation was so bad that pretty much any other option will be a better one.

Detroit's story is a totally different one: in that case, authorities are investigating the possibility of selling off the collections of an existing museum to cover the city's debts.  And that, to me is a totally different situation.  Instead of "rescuing" unseen items from a damp warehouse you're talking about taking art that had been publicly accessible and selling it into private collections.  To my mind, that act would culturally impoverish a city that's already seen its share of losses.  But...would it be better to have Howdy Doody on display, or police that can get to your house less than 58 minutes after you call 911?  That context can certainly diminish the importance of an art collection, and we'll discuss how to balance those differing priorities tomorrow.

Selling museum collections to save cities - Part I

I heard two interesting news pieces on selling museum collections this week that have gotten me thinking about de-accessioning and a museum's responsibility to its community again.  And after writing this all out, I think it's clear that it needs a multi-day discussion and not just a giant brain dump, so we're starting with some background and getting on to Detroit and Harrisburg tomorrow.

So.  Selling museum objects: yes, or no?

It's a topic that I spent a lot of time thinking about and discussing (at length, and frequently over drinks) with my colleagues back when I worked at the Field Museum in Chicago.  I left in 2011, before the most recent restructuring, but I was there throughout 2008 and 2009, when we went through some tight times and lost a lot of staff to attrition, early retirement, and layoffs.  It was a tough time for everyone at the Field, and one topic that came up frequently - sometimes jokingly and sometimes deadly serious - was the sale of artifacts to save jobs.  Why keep a statue in storage unseen by the public, but fire the people who care for those collections?  Are the objects more important than the staff who cares for them?  (No seriously.  Think about that question, because it's at the heart of all of this.)  We joked about a giant yard sale on the lakefront and wondered about how many jobs such a sale might save, even as we argued about the ethics of ever selling anything out of a collection at all.

The Field sold several major paintings in 2004, declaring that the works weren't central to the museum's mission and that the money from the sale would go towards collections care and new objects.  There was a huge controversy, which may be why the Field has been very wary of discussing such a sale again.  A recent article by the Chicago Tribune claims that the Museum was investigating the sale of collections as far back as 2010, but they never breathed a word of that to the staff.  The article discusses one of the major difficulties of selling collection items: what to do with the money.  Many people feel that if you're selling an object you should purchase other objects.  Staffing is transitory and non-tangible, and I'm sure it's hard for a Board to say, "We're selling this painting so we can pay for our curators."  I would hope that they also consider that firing the curators (and preparators and registrars and housekeeping staff and security and ticketing staff and scientists etc...) to keep the artifacts is a similar problem.  It's like The Gift of the Magi, but with museums instead of hair and watches.

So it's a difficult choice.  Do you preserve the collections for future generations and hope that they won't be too damaged by the inadequate staffing, or do you sell items to maintain a staff that can preserve the items that remain?  Is a museum's duty to its objects and future, or its staff and the present?   I love a compromise, so I'd try to choose the middle ground - sell a few items that are no longer central to the institution's mission and use that money to maintain the remaining collection, but that's not a perfect solution either, as the Field Museum learned in 2004.

And what happens to this argument when you're not selling objects to benefit the institution, but to benefit the larger community? That discussion starts tomorrow.

Oh, and by the way...

...I haven't forgotten about that long list of practical "front-facing" museum issues that I wanted to dive into a few weeks back.  I'm still pondering a lot of those ideas, but I got caught up a bit  in the theoretical side of museums (again!) and I'm going to ride this wave out before switching back to the practical side of things.

Aaaaand we're back!

Okay, I'm done fighting with the internets, and a million apologies for the more-intermittent-than-usual posting these last few weeks.  Let's pick up where we left off last week.

So after reading this article the question I have is whether a capital investment in exhibits is the right choice for small museums that are struggling, and as usual, I don't have any real answers.  I certainly agree that interactive and immersive exhibits are more appealing and educational for the general public, and it's time for many of the older static diorama-type exhibits to be retired.  They were brilliant in their day, introducing museum-goers to lands and ideas they couldn't imagine, but that era has been blown away by the age of internet.  People today need more than manikin soldiers in French-Indian War uniforms to be engaged in the history of a region, and the folks at Fort William Henry are definitely on the right track with that concept.

What I'm less certain about is whether those improvements are the right choice all of the time.  And I'm working through this in my head as I type, so forgive any incoherence, but part of me really wonders if updated digital exhibits is really going to bring visitors in the door of those tiny out-of-the-way museums.  I'm at war with myself on this, because I want people to go and enjoy those tucked away historical  sites, I really do.  But knowing how hard it is to get visitors into shiny new high-profile museums I worry that there's very little that will induce them to go into the older museums that have less excitement surrounding them.  The pessimist in me thinks that visitors will look at updated exhibits in an older smaller museum as a lipstick-on-a-pig solution; touchscreens and new recordings might not be enough to convince people who visited in the past that it's worth checking out again.  We've talked about what it takes to get people in the door in the past, and the Debbie Downer part of me worries a lot at updated exhibits just aren't enough.

But when I step back, reread the article, and think about what other solutions there might be, I have to admit that I think updating exhibits is probably the most important thing a smaller and older museum can do.  You can have an amazing ad campaign, brilliant membership offerings, and the most dedicated team out there--but getting people in the door won't matter if they never want to come back again.  New exhibits are not a silver bullet--they aren't going to magically bring in new visitors--but they are an incredibly important step in the revitalization of a museum.  I still firmly believe that museums need the whole package of history, innovation, and community, but the more I think about it, the more I think that exciting and updated exhibits are the first link in that chain.

SO. JEALOUS.

I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but now that he's built up a decent blog of his own I don't have any excuses:

Image probably (c) MSI Chicago at www.msichicago.com

This is Kevin.  [As full disclosure he's a friend of a friend, but we've never met.]  Kevin is the lucky son of a gun who won the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago's Month at the Museum competition, and he's spending a month living every day in the walls of MSI.  This is the second year the Museum of Science and Industry has held this contest, and I LOVE it.  I love it more that I can really say, because it does exactly what I think all museums should strive for: it makes adults look at museum collections with renewed wonder.

To enter the contest, people have to submit essays and videos, meet with staff and go to demonstrations at the museum, all with the point of  convincing the decisions-makers that they would be the best possible ambassador for MSI.  (And we all remember how I feel about museum ambassadors, no?)  So basically a bunch of grown-ups spend the contest trying to prove how awesome learning is and how much they love museums and want to share that love with other people.  The sharing is a BIG component--Kevin's home base is a plexiglass cube in the middle of the main hall and he spends his days interacting with visitors.  He chronicles his adventures in his blog, facebook, and twitter feeds, and is basically a giant PR windfall for MSI.  Kevin gets to spend his days doing awesome and unusual things, getting excited, and then telling everyone about it.  His adventures take a place that everyone in Chicago thought they knew and turn it into something new and exciting that they want to go see again.  THAT is what every museum needs to be doing. 

Inviting a houseguest (museumguest?) to spend a month in your building is certainly not the right answer for every institution, but MSI has really tapped into something with this project.  The response they've gotten has been huge, and that gives me hope--there are lot of people out there leading grown up lives and secretly dreaming of blowing things up, sleeping on submarines, and getting to share that excitement with everyone  they meet.  They just don't realize it until they have the chance.

Museum Review: South Florida Museum

Last week I drove down to Bradenton to visit the South Florida Museum--which also houses the Parker Manatee Aquarium and the Bishop Planetarium.  I was excited about the visit, which I'd been meaning to do for a long time, but I was also super-excited because I made it there in time for Snooty's 1pm feeding, and I am a huge sucker for manatees.  [ed note: do not mock!  They are most closely related to elephants, they feel like a wet football when you touch them, they have no natural predators, and they can eat a head of romaine lettuce in one gulp.  Pretty much the best sea mammal out there.]

While I was there for the manatee aquarium, I was also excited to see the rest of the museum's collections, which are pretty eclectic.  So I paid my admission and walked into the main hall, where I was excited to see a huge replica mastodon skeleton dominating the room, with a nice diorama of hunters and bison in the background.  It was a really nice first impression of the museum, but it didn't last all the way through.  I really loved the feel of that first hall, but my impression of the rest of the museum isn't quite as favorable.

Okay, dioramas are cool, and giant shark jaws are cool, but they just don't quite go together...

I think my issue with the the South Florida Museum was not its collections, nor the way they were displayed.  I think what was lacking was a sense of cohesion.  As you stepped from one hall to the next, there didn't seem to be a rhyme or reason as to what came next, and there was no obvious path through the exhibits that would allow a visitor to see everything easily.  Okay, to be fair, the map they handed me with my ticket has a suggested route, but I don't think it was very intuitive.  At one point you walk past the gallery of first peoples' artifact through a door that looks like an exit in a courtyard that was, at the time of my visit, completely deserted.  The courtyard is the home of Snooty's underwater viewing tank, though, so I had a good few minutes watching the manatees--and then realized I was late for the feeding and ran upstairs to catch the remainder of the manatee talk.  This left me upstairs in a kind of mishmash of galleries--a river diorama, drawers of random portions of the collections (cleverly labeled "Visible Storage," which I quite liked), and then through an interesting series of galleries with old medical equipment.  I completely missed the 1500s Spanish House and Chapel, largely because I thought they were storage spaces when I saw them outside in the abandoned courtyard.  I wish there had been some clearer signage alerting visitors what was through those doors.

And you know, this visit made me realize how totally subjective museums are.  Because the South Florida Museum isn't really doing anything wrong.  Their collections are a mishmash because they're a relatively small facility and had most of their exhibits donated.  So while giant shark jaws and old ether bottles don't really go together, no museum is going to say "No" to a donation of either one.  And you know, if I'd followed the map they gave me instead of shoving it in my camera bag I would have seen more of the exhibits--but I would have missed learning that Snooty's favorite treat is apples, so there would have been a trade-off.  I love the idea of putting a rotating display of random items from collections on display to the public, and I think that exhibit could have been really successful if there had been a bit more signage and a couple fewer artifacts--it was sort of overwhelming to look at everything in that big case and I found myself glossing over lots of it.  it wasn't until I looked over my museum map to write this post that I even realized what the intent of that case was.  But the idea of that case is ingenious, and with some clearer labels it could really be the type of display that visitors get involved with.

In the end, I enjoyed myself at the South Florida Museum, for all that there were somethings that I would do differently.  It was an interesting exercise to visit another small local museum of which I had no prior knowledge.  There's not a lot they could do to change their collections or displays, and as a result the South Florida Museum is a good illustration of a lot of the challenges smaller museums face.  (Perhaps more museums should house awesomely personable manatees?  Just a thought...)

For me, this visit brings two issues into focus for me.  The first is how museums can better communicate to their guests.  This means communicating how best to see the collections, what to expect, and what events are going on that day.  The second issue is labeling and text panels.  I am a HUGE proponent of interpretive text that informs the visitor without talking down to them.  Had there been a clear sign by the Visible Storage case explaining the purpose, and labels for each of the items, I would have spent my whole day there.  It will be an interesting exercise to look at how these same issues play out in my own museum, and try to look at our displays from the perspective of a visitor who doesn't know what she's walking into.

What's the main goal of a museum?

This seems like a simple enough question, but it has hidden layers.  For some museums (Banana Club Museum, I'm lookin' at you...) the aim is simple: collect items around a central theme and display them.  They are not on the cutting edge of banana research, they are not preserving important banana artifacts that would otherwise be destroyed, they're not making the public aware of the long cultural traditions of the banana.  They're just collecting banana stuff, putting it on display, and inviting people to come take a look.  It's not a bad thing by any stretch--those little museums can be a lot of fun.  But it allows them to skirt some of the deeper, more existential issues other museums can get caught up in.

For example: is a museum's primary purpose to preserve artifacts, or to educate the public?  Should they focus on conservation, or exhibitions?  Is it better to teach the visitors something new, or to make sure that they enjoy the time they spend at the museum?  Should new research take priority over increased publicity and marketing?

It's a chicken-or-egg conundrum that goes back to some of my earlier questions.  You can't maintain collections without a source of revenue, and you can't bring in enough revenue without appealing to paying visitors (or getting substantial private or government funding).  So how should a museum prioritize all of those important facets?

Personally, I'm torn.  As I mentioned last week, I owe my career and love of museums to a program that many institutions might see as superfluous.  I'm sure if you asked the curator in charge of the hall where I fell asleep in my green sleeping bag after a night of exploration, he would rather have more money for the preservation of the artifacts I was entranced by rather than education programs that allow 6-year-olds to scare themselves silly in mock Egyptian tombs.  But coming (as I do) from a retail and visitor-oriented background, I can't help but seeing the interaction the public has with a museum's collection as equally vital to an institution.  ...Well, maybe not equally vital.  If I was told that an artifact would deteriorate beyond repair if it was put on display, but could be used for research and study if kept in storage, I could accept that.  What I think I couldn't accept would be not making an effort to serve both purposes.

What do you think, small, but apparently loyal readership?  What facets of a museum are the most important?  When tough times hit, what gets cut and what gets saved?  It's only a partially rhetorical question--many institutions face this exact choice right now.

Hello, your Excellencies.

So here's a question that's been on my mind while thinking about museum marketing: what does it take to get people in the door?  You all are probably not the best audience for this question, as I suspect people who read an amateur museum blog voluntarily are not folks who need a lot of convincing to visit an institution of learning.  But think about your less-erudite friends, or family members who perhaps prefer March Madness to mummies (not that you can't enjoy both, I know).  What have you said to them to get them in the doors to an exhibit you're dying to see?

From my own past experience I can claim success with the 'limited time' argument: and exhibit will only be here a finite amount of time, this is my/our only chance to see it, so we're going.  ("End of discussion," as my mother would say.)  Another tactic goes hand in hand with the unrelated exhibits post from earlier--bringing in a different type of exhibit brings in a different type of patron.  For example, I'm willing to bet that a number of people showed up for the Harry Potter exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago a few years back who have never ridden on the coal mine.  (I don't have hard data to back me up, just a pretty strong hunch.)

Anyway, beyond my general ponderings about museums and marketing and awesome ad campaigns, thinking about this made me realize something kind of important:  You and I and all the museum lovers out there are ambassadors.  

We all have people in our lives who would never walk into a history center or art exhibit on their own, and part of loving museums is introducing others to them.  YOU know that learning about the history or the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes in central Florida is a totally awesome way to spend an afternoon, and I know that learning about the history of the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes in central Florida is an awesome way to spend an afternoon, but too many people out there don't.  And it's time they did, right?

So for the next four weeks I'm proposing a personal cultural exchange program.  I'm going to make an effort to get at least one person, be it friend, family, or stranger, to walk through a museum or exhibit they would not have chosen to see on their own.  In return I am more than willing to sit through baseball games and poker tournaments, because fair is fair, but I am going to make it a personal goal of mine to get more people in my immediate circle into museums to see what they're missing.  Will keep you posted on progress!

Relocating

After a long drive through the rain, we've finally made it to the Sunshine State.  (And we've figured out our internet connection, which was pretty dicey for a while.)

As big a project as moving felt for us, it's a drop in the bucket compared to what happens when an institution needs to pull up stakes, which happens more frequently than I'd realized.  The Field Museum in Chicago moved five miles north in 1921, from its original location at the site of the 1893 World's Fair to its current home in the South Loop.  The Dali Museum, now in St Petersburg, Florida has moved three times--from its original location in Cleveland in 1982, and to an updated facility in St Pete earlier this year.

Thinking about all of that, I'm pondering the ties between museums and the communities they serve after reading this article in the AAM archives.  It covers a number of different scenarios, but the majority of the article talks about museums dealing with the decision to (and the ramifications of) changing their location and moving out of their original communities.  In some cases, like the Berkely Art Museum, the choice is obvious and the impact fairly minimal.  The original building wasn't seismically sound in a region of the country known for earthquakes and the museum is staying on the U of C campus...nothing is lost.  In other cases, like the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum or the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania, moving the physical location of the museum will have a lasting effect on the communities they leave behind.  The town of Mt Horeb apparently depended on the Mustard Museum for tourism dollars (that's one of those sentences that just looks odd when you take the time to re-read it, no?), but the location was making it hard for the museum to survive.  The Mustard Museum chose its own survival, and no one can blame them for that, but it had a large impact on the town that it left.  Their survival was linked, but not balanced--the museum had to leave to survive and the town needed the revenue that came with the museum staying.

So what does a museum owe to its community?  If the collection brings visitors to an out-of-the way place, there's an intangible sense of obligation, but it isn't necessarily fair to ask an attraction to go down with the ship, so to speak, when a location ceases to be viable for its collection.  Having just packed up and hit the road on myself I'm a a little biased--as much as I value loyalty, there's no use in staying put if it means your collections and displays would go unseen.  Which brings us right back to the Chernobyl Question again...there's no escaping the dichotomy of collections and visitorship around here.