Name: 【TEDx】Opening up the Museum: Nina Simon @ TEDxSantaCruz
Uploaded: 2017-12-11T10:54:32.000Z
Duration: 15 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Kaoru Suzuki Reviewer: Denise RQ

To-infinitive

I want to be real up-front about the fact that I am an activist about this stuff.

I want to share with you today the passion of my professional work

turning them into places that are not just places where people come to visit

but where you can actively participate, where you can connect with culture,

and hopefully, through these experiences connect more deeply with each other.

The problem is that for most people, museums are not seen as open spaces.

that serve an increasingly small and limited subset of our population.

So when most people go looking for a cultural experience,

We live in an incredibly fertile creative time.

all of the wonderful artists and cultural enthusiasts in our community.

You don't have to be a professional to be excited about culture today.

People are getting together in bars to knit.

People are renting space and starting businesses

so they can do science experiments together.

throughout our country, people are more culturally engaged than ever,

but they are choosing to have those experiences

outside of traditional cultural institutions.

That means you're way more likely today to pick up a paint brush

people are doing their own genealogical research.

As a museum director, I look at this, and I say,

"We have to get in on this game! These are people who care about culture.

They're passionate about the things that we protect,

and yet, weren't staying at arm's length."

When I talk with museum professionals about this,

I hear some interest, but I also hear some real concern.

This is a quote from a friend of mine who works for the Smithsonian.

She said, "I know a lot of people who work in art museums

who would recoil in horror at the idea of being inundated by Sunday painters."

I'm sorry, but if people who paint on Sundays

aren't the core audience for an art museum, I don't know who is.

Here in Santa Cruz at our museum, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History,

we've decided we're going to open up to participatory culture.

So, yes, we invite people to paint with us on Sundays.

We encourage them to share their own creative skills with each other,

Sometimes, that involves tools that are a lot more extreme than paint brushes.

What I want to share with you today are just two of the ways

both our organization and hopefully, our community.

The first side of this is about active participation.

We don't just invite you in to come visit.

We expect every person who walks in our museum

to contribute something to make our museum better.

That means from the instant you walk in the door,

you will be asked to give us a suggestion of how we can improve the museum.

We've invited visitors to write poems about objects in our history gallery.

And now, if you come in on the first floor,

and put it on display for other visitors to see.

Over the last year, thousands of visitors have contributed content to our museum

and it's beautiful, it's powerful, and it's meaningful

that we've had experiences with participatory public comment

In museums, you can see comment books like this

I think we're all really familiar with this kind of experience online.

who made these YouTube comments are dumb people.

What I see here is a lack of a designed opportunity

to really invite them to give something meaningful to this situation.

I believe that everyone of us in this room

has something really powerful and creative to add.

I believe that everyone of us has a story to share,

has something amazing to share from this stage today.

But I also know that everyone of us can be banal.

And to me, as somebody who works on inviting participation,

the difference is in how we design the invitation to participate.

Good design can elevate us to share our the best selves

This is from an exhibition I worked on in Seattle a few years ago.

These were just two ways in the exhibition

On the left, people could put up a question with a post-it,

People were very well-meaning and trying to help each other out here.

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【TEDx】Opening up the Museum: Nina Simon @ TEDxSantaCruz

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