Earlier this week, Ian announced some big changes to the Createquity site, including our first-ever fundraising campaign to help us transform our work. As an all-volunteer effort to date, Createquity has never asked for your financial support before, and now we’re hoping readers like you will donate to help us raise $10,000 – a big challenge for us. So, what will your (tax-deductible!) donation pay for?

• The design and implementation of our new, mobile-friendly website. Our current site was last updated in 2009 and needs a facelift to take advantage of contemporary technologies, including easy access via phones and tablets where more and more of our readership is migrating. We’ll also need to rework the way content is organized on Createquity to support our new editorial direction.
• Our upcoming in-person planning retreat in July. Our team has already been working hard over digital communications (so many video conference calls!) to prepare for the launch, but there is no substitute for spending a full day together. We’ll use the time to make some of our most important and far-reaching decisions about where we’re going to prioritize our research efforts over the next 12 months and beyond.
• A cash reserve. In contemplating these changes, we’ve often found ourselves saying that it was time for Createquity to “go big or go home.” For us, going big means not just streamlining the editorial process to make more effective change, but professionalizing Createquity on the operational side. In addition to paying our people for the first time, this transition will involve various startup expenses like filing fees, software purchases, etc., and as any arts manager knows, it’s important to ensure smooth operations in the face of unpredictable (i.e., totally new!) revenue streams. Any funds we raise over and above our budget for the above two priorities will go towards ensuring Createquity’s sustainability.

In addition to my time, I’ve personally donated some of my own hard-earned, nonprofit-salary cash to the Createquity campaign because I deeply believe in the value of this project. I’ve been consistently impressed by the integrity of Ian and the Createquity team in publishing only the the highest-quality prose and most trustworthy analysis, something I imagine most of you value, too. More than most, Createquity is essentially prestige-blind: it has given young thinkers like me a chance at a public audience through the Createquity Fellowship, and served as a forum for insightful dialogue on both established and emerging ideas.

The next iteration of Createquity is going to be even more exciting, as we bring all of the site’s intellectual and cultural resources to bear on the thorniest problems facing the arts. This is an incredibly ambitious project, with the goal of transforming the field from the inside out through persistent truth-seeking. And instead of relegating that process to an anonymous conference room, we’re going to share as much of our thinking on Createquity as possible so that we can learn, debate, and experiment together as we move forward. It’s an investment that benefits us all. Won’t you donate to help make it happen?

• In Models and Trends in International Arts Exchange, Alicia tackled the complicated history and motives underlying international arts exchange and catalogued a number of ways in which it takes place. I particularly appreciate that she tracked down the history of US State Department funding for this purpose since 2001!
• Dispatches from the East: Museumscapes of Asia recounts Alicia’s personal experiences having traveled the globe’s largest continent for much of the past decade, and the surprising insights about museums that resulted.
• Nationalism and government support of the arts is an ambitious look at the way that four countries, China, South Korea, Brazil, and Cambodia, conceptualize national and cultural identity in relationship to the United States and the rest of the developed world.
• Alicia’s Arts Policy Library analysis of Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum expresses admiration for the book’s applicability even to Alicia’s remote museum in Laos, and explores some of the thornier questions around what “fully participatory” means both for an individual museum and the entire field. The abridged version is here.

Alicia’s back in the United States now and planning out her next steps, so get in touch with her if you like what you see! In the meantime, please join me in thanking Alicia for these great additions to our collection.

Summary

Published in 2011, The Participatory Museum presents Nina Simon’s social web-inspired approach to museum exhibits and partnerships and serves as a handbook for museum professionals for engaging in participatory projects. The Participatory Museum looks at how audiences participate in online platforms such as YouTube and Flickr and extends those principles to visitor participation in a museum. The first section of the book presents the theoretical framework for participatory design, and the second lays out practical tips for designing participatory exhibits and programs including types of projects, evaluation tips, and advice on how to build institutional capacity for participatory projects.

Four main ideas make up the theoretical part of the book:

Scaffolding places clear parameters through design into an exhibit that help frame the visitor experience and the range and nature of responses generated. Scaffolding guides visitors and keeps requests for participation from being too open-ended.

Me to We Design, a recasting of Simon’s earlier hierarchy of social participation, guides visitors through personal entry points to make connections with content, and ultimately to other individuals. Those connections take many forms.

Social technographics are a concept borrowed from Forrester Research’s 2008 “social technographics” tool, which categorizes audience profiles in social media engagement, audience profiles are based on types of activity and include creators, spectators, critics, joiners, collectors, and inactives. Good design considers how the actions of each audience type can enhance the experience of others.

Social objects function as a conduit for participation allowing visitors to “focus their attention on a third thing rather than on each other, making interpersonal engagement more comfortable.” Giving objects a social dimension can involve making design tweaks, physically altering objects, or reworking interpretive tools to make objects more personal, relational, active, and provocative.

In the second section, one chapter each is devoted to four types of participatory projects—contributory, collaborative, co-creative, hosted—three of which come from the Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) project of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE). Simon added a fourth type, “hosted,” to accommodate projects that are done by outside groups within the museum. The participatory models range from less to more control on the part of the participants but needn’t be attempted in any particular order. She even demystifies choosing among models through a handy chart.

Analysis

At first, I was skeptical of the book’s wide applicability. Would it work well in the field regardless of museum type, location, or resources? As I read, however, Simon seemed to anticipate my objections, and The Participatory Museum succeeded in allaying most of my questions.

• The Participatory Museum is dense in practical information. Tips are peppered throughout the book. Simon reinforces her points with numerous case studies that illustrate both successful and unsuccessful attempts at encouraging participation.
• The examples are diverse, featuring organizations from several countries, of many kinds and sizes, and at different points on the participation spectrum
• Between the examples in the text, and anecdotal evidence from colleagues, it was clear that participation, as a tool, is useful in building engagement across a wide spectrum of audiences.

The theories underlying The Participatory Museum appear to be sound even if not originating in or having been formally tested in a museum environment at the time of publication. Simon translates what assessment does exist into practical advice, and even lays out a blueprint for what good evaluation could look like. The Participatory Museum gives every indication of being directionally correct, and an excellent guide to incorporating participatory design into an institution.

Implications

Simon’s book has had an undeniable impact on the museum field, reigniting debate over how to breathe life into decaying institutions. In the four years since its publication there has been a shift—or at least public perception of a shift— toward more participation. And even within the field, participation and the principles laid out in the book have become the focus of conferences, institution-wide training sessions, and professional development workshops. Though participation does seem to be where the field is headed, the principles have met with some resistance from proponents of the more traditional museum experience and design and the absolute control and authority of the institution.

At the end of the day, are audiences more engaged and are institutions meeting their missions more effectively through participatory design techniques? The Particpatory Museum’s usefulness ultimately rests on the answers to those questions. We will need closer study of participatory work to fully understand the implications of the broader trends the book catalogues and appears to be ushering forward. What do we gain from participatory exhibits or institutional cultures of participation? What do we lose? The good news is that the success of The Participatory Museum and the speed at which its recommendations have been adopted should provide a wealth of material for researchers to begin answering these questions with more specificity in the years ahead.

(For a briefer edition of this analysis, check out the abridged version.)

“This may sound messy,” Nina Simon, engineer turned experience designer, writes of participatory projects. “It may [also] sound tremendously exciting.”

Summary

Written in 2010 as a handbook for museum professionals who want to engage audiences in deeper forms of participation, The Participatory Museum presents Nina Simon’s social, web-inspired approach to exhibits and partnerships. At the time of writing, Simon was a highly sought-after experience designer whose philosophy was made popular through her blog, Museum 2.0. Part argument for participation and part toolbox, The Participatory Museum aims to inspire readers’ enthusiasm about participatory design and prepare them to launch their own successful projects.

The book itself is the product of a participatory project. Simon used an online wiki format to allow readers to submit relevant case studies and assist with writing and eventually editing. The online version of the book features linked footnotes for the examples used throughout the text.

Taking cues from social websites like YouTube, Netflix, LibraryThing, and Flickr, The Participatory Museum explores how brick-and-mortar institutions can learn from virtual participatory experiences. Simon defines a participatory cultural institution as one in which “visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content.” Participation encourages multidirectional content experiences: a museum, rather than limiting itself to sending information in the direction of visitors, can encourage those visitors to contribute information to the institution and even share among themselves. Participation also encourages more equitable relationships among all stakeholders, making objects and entire institutions more accessible.

All of this requires an adjustment in thinking about authority, the role of the visitor, and the flow of information between individual and institution. In participatory projects, museum staff members used to holding absolute authority in the interpretation of objects must cede some of that power to visitors. Simon asserts that the very process that makes participatory projects rewarding for museum audiences is often a source of apprehension for museum staff. Done right, according to Simon, “participatory projects create new value for the institution, participants, and non-participating audience members.”

Drawing by Jennifer Rae Atkins

Using the example of how interactivity has transformed entire organizations such as the Boston Children’s Museum, Simon imagines a future where some institutions are “wholly participatory.” The Participatory Museum advocates for the power of participatory design to fulfill idealistic mission statements about engagement, connection, and inspiring action. Nevertheless, Simon is careful to include the caveat that this new method of design isn’t meant to supplant traditional techniques but to augment them, and argues that the two can peacefully coexist.

Structure and scope

The book is organized into two sections. The first, more theoretical part lays out several participatory design principles, and the second details how four different models of participation can work in practice.

Participation in theory

For Simon, the first and perhaps most important point that undergirds all successful design is a clear connection between the institution’s mission and the benefits to be gained from a participatory project by the institution, participants, or audience. No one will be engaged – or fooled – if a museum halfheartedly invites participation because it has become trendy. To reap the rewards of participation, staff and leadership must understand how the project will advance the museum’s core purposes. This grounding in mission and clarity of benefits makes everything else possible.

The Participatory Museum identifies “two counter-intuitive design principles at the heart of successful participatory projects” that reappear throughout the book. The first is scaffolding, the guidance and constraints given to visitors to help frame the range and nature of responses generated. Scaffolding is necessary to set up a safe environment where audience members feel comfortable sharing and interacting with each other. Simon juxtaposes the completely open-ended request for participation with the thoughtfully narrow one.

Compare, for example, the open-ended dialogue program of British artist Jeremy Deller, It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq,with the Human Library, an event first held for youth at the Denmark Roskilde Festival in 2000. It Is What It Is attempted to encourage visitors to ask questions of people who had served in Iraq by creating a large gallery with provocative images from the country and installing living-room-style seating. At points throughout the exhibition, soldiers, translators, and others were on hand to answer questions from visitors. Simon argues that It Is What It Is lacked “sufficient scaffolding to robustly and consistently support dialogue”: the two times she saw it at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, there were just two guests sitting on couches next to a powerful object.

The Human Library explores similar terrain: it is intended for “anybody who is ready to talk with his or her own prejudice and stereotype and wants to spend an hour of time on this experience.” Participants select a “book” from a catalogue of stereotypes, such as a black Muslim, a cop, a Goth, or a quadriplegic; once at the “checkout counter,” they encounter a person embodying their chosen stereotype for a discussion lasting anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours. The experience was more carefully crafted, and it was a success at generating the kinds of provocative discussions the designers hoped for. The framing of the event as a library eased some of the expected reluctance in confronting visitors’ own prejudices, allowing participants to choose their own book provided a personal entry point into the activity, and even restricting the time helped set people’s expectations. Simon reasons that limitations make people more likely to participate and that better-defined parameters lead to higher-quality and more relevant participation.

Good scaffolding alone doesn’t automatically result in amazing social participation. Truly social interaction, Simon says, has to start with the individual, who begins to climb a participatory ladder from a personal entry point, her second design principle. “Me-to-We” design, a recasting of her own earlier hierarchy of social participation, guides visitors through those entry points to connections with content, and ultimately to other individuals.

Not everyone will always want to engage with others socially, even if an exhibit is designed to allow it. To categorize the different styles of participation, Simon looks to statistics on American adults from Forrester Research’s 2008 “social technographics” tool, which categorizes audience profiles in social media engagement.

Forrester Research’s social technographics participation ladder.

In this framework, audience profiles are based on types of activity. Creators make up a small part of the participation pie, whereas critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives represent the majority in social platforms – and all but the last two (not just creators) count as truly participatory. Good design acknowledges the mixed composition of audiences and provides an outlet for each role to be involved, enabling the actions of each audience type to enhance the experience of others.

Simon devotes considerable attention to two other elements of design: technologies for social experiences and social objects. Each of these concepts is meant to aid in moving toward the “we” end of design. Simon asserts that mediating technologies can make people “more comfortable socializing with strangers” within the physical space of the museum. For example, Internet Arm Wrestling, an exhibit set up concurrently in several science centers around the U.S., enabled long-distance personal interactions. Visitors at one institution sat behind a metal arm and a computer screen and arm wrestled someone elsewhere at the same center or hundreds of miles away at another. The exhibit succeeded in engaging audiences in types of behavior they would not normally try within a museum or, probably, anywhere.

Simon doesn’t neglect the role of objects themselves in prompting social interaction. Simon argues that “social objects,” a concept taken from engineer and sociologist Jyri Engestrom, perform a similar role as mediating technologies, allowing visitors to “focus their attention on a third thing rather than on each other, making interpersonal engagement more comfortable.” Social objects differ from regular ones in that they tend to spark interactions among audience members who see them. Simon uses the non-museum example of her dog, who serves as a focal point for social exchanges with passersby when she is out for a walk. Harnessing social potential is as much about good design choices as good object choices, and giving objects a social dimension is an art. It can involve making design tweaks, physically altering objects, or reworking interpretive tools such as panels and labels to make objects more personal, relational, active, and provocative..

Participation in practice

Shifting to the practical considerations for participation in the second part of the book, Simon borrows three categories of participation from the Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) project of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) and supplies a fourth of her own. One chapter is dedicated to each of the participatory models:

• Contributory
• Collaborative
• Co-creative
• Hosted

Simon describes contributory projects as “casual flings between participants and institutions,” with the most common form being the comment box or feedback wall. As the name suggests, these projects solicit contributions from visitors, which can take the form of opinions, stories, or personal objects such as photographs. Of the four participatory models, contributory projects are the simplest to execute and can involve the most people. Even though these projects are relatively casual, scaffolding still helps institutions ask for and receive meaningful contributions through thoughtful questioning and modeling desired behavior. The London Science Museum incorporated visitor-donated toys into the exhibit Playing with Science, and visitors reported feeling a sense of ownership and pride in seeing their toys on display.

In collaborative projects, institutions still take the leading role in project development, but they work side by side with community members to create new exhibits, programs, and services. These projects usually require a higher level of commitment from participants than those in the contributory category. The National Building Museum in DC runs an annual program that collaborates with local youth to create an exhibit based on the photography and creative writing of community members. Participants take part in twelve classes and have the opportunity to “partially self-direct” an exhibit at the museum. To Simon, though, the exhibit is just the beginning. She asserts that the real measure of success for these projects is what happens after they end – specifically, whether participants remain involved with the institution beyond the project. Simon suggests establishing four non-overlapping roles for the management of collaborative projects: project director, community manager, instructors, and client representatives. Each of these roles balances different levels of authority and intimacy with participants, so keeping them distinct, Simon argues, is important to project success and staff sanity.

Co-creative projects may be undertaken at the initiative of outside participants. On the surface, these projects may look very similar to collaborative projects, but the key difference lies in the share of power between the institution and participants. Co-creative projects are demand-driven and “require institutional goals to take a backseat to community goals.” The special sauce that makes these projects successful is a mixture of non-specialists equipped to accomplish both community and institutional goals, and institutions genuinely desiring community input and leadership. Seattle’s Wing Luke Asian Museum uses the co-creative model exclusively in developing their exhibits. Wing Luke staff members facilitate the development of the themes, content, and form of the exhibits by a team of advisors from the community.

In hosted projects, outside participants have almost complete power. One of the most common of these is a late night social event or reception sponsored by an external organization, although some museums may turn over a set of rooms for exhibitions controlled entirely by someone else. In all of these projects, the outside partner carries out their own project within the museum’s space. Despite the near-total abdication of power in these projects, creative constraints are still useful in ensuring a degree of consistency between community-led projects and those led by professional staff.

While the participatory models range from less to more control on the part of the participants, Simon believes that they needn’t be attempted in any particular order and shouldn’t be seen as a progression. She has even demystified choosing among models through a chart that walks through assessing your commitment to community engagement, desired control over the project, preferred level of leadership, availability of staff, skills gained by participants and benefits to nonparticipants.

Toward the end of the book, Simon devotes chapters to evaluating and sustaining participation. Evaluating participatory projects can be especially tricky because it must focus not just on results for the multiple beneficiaries but also on the process itself. And even the best design can crumble with inadequate institutional support and management structures. Simon suggests a few methods to get staff comfortable with taking on more challenging participatory projects, such as encouraging them to “spend time on the front lines with visitors” or conduct audience research. She also offers several strategies for keeping momentum going with newly started participatory projects, including hiring a community manager and cultivating a participatory culture from the very top.

Analysis

After reading The Participatory Museum, museums and their staff, regardless of their size or resources or content, should be able to begin their journey to reinvigorating themselves, right? What’s good for the web must be good for the galleries? I have to admit that at first I had my doubts.

Specifically, I was skeptical that the book’s techniques would work in a museum like mine, the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre in Laos: tiny, few staff, little money, no technology, almost no repeat visitors, and in a developing country. Forrester Research’s social technographics data draws on audiences in North America, Europe, Australia, Metro China, Japan and Korea – all relatively developed places. If any setting could test the limits of this model, it would be here. As I read, however, Simon seemed to anticipate my objections, and The Participatory Museum succeeded in allaying most of my questions about its applicability.

Many books meant as guides meander through abstractions and skimp on specifics, but The Participatory Museum is as dense in practical information as in theory. Tips (“Generally, a platform that has one-fourth to one-half of the space open provides a feeling of welcome and encourages visitors to share”) are peppered throughout the book. Simon reinforces her points with numerous case studies that illustrate both successful and unsuccessful attempts at encouraging participation. For example, in the section on collaboration, she shares her involvement with The Tech Virtual Test Zone, a 2007 project of the San Jose Tech Museum that did not turn out as expected. Simon’s own personal example of participatory failure was a poignant reminder that even seasoned designers don’t get things right all the time.

The examples are also diverse, featuring organizations from several countries, of many kinds and sizes, and at different points on the participation spectrum—some, even, from organizations similar to mine. To cite just a few cases, Simon presents an advice booth set up in the University of Washington-Seattle Student Center, a community photo-documentation project at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (VME), and a participatory book-tagging experiment in the Netherlands.

I also saw the applicability of Simon’s approach to the developing world firsthand recently, when my museum undertook a community-based participatory project similar to the VME’s. This work brought a flood of enthusiasm among community members previously untapped through traditional design methods. And a colleague in Indonesia recently quoted the book in justifying decisions she made within her museum. Between the examples in the text, and anecdotal evidence from colleagues, it’s clear that participation, as a tool, is useful in building engagement across a wide spectrum of audiences.

But can we trust the theories underlying The Participatory Museum’s recommendations for practice? While an exhaustive review of primary sources upon which the book draws is outside of the scope of this article, Simon certainly seems to have done her homework: her central typology of participatory projects (contributory, collaborative, co-creative, and hosted) is taken from the literature on public participation in scientific research. She deftly adapts it to the somewhat different context of museums, and added the final category (hosted) herself to account for the use of a museum’s space by an outside organization, where she argues persuasively that the principles of successful participation still apply.

That said, readers should be aware that most of the theory underlying The Participatory Museum had not been formally tested in a museum environment at the time the book was published. Simon speaks forcefully about the need for more and better evaluation of participatory projects; she calls the lack of it “probably the greatest contributing factor to their slow acceptance and use in the museum field.” The Participatory Museum seemingly does a good job of enlisting what assessment does exist and translating it into practical advice, and even lays out a blueprint for what good evaluation could look like, but the evidence presented in most cases is anecdotal. (There are exceptions, such as a 2002 impact study of Glasgow’s Open Museum, which lent objects to visitors in the community.) Purely on the basis of what was known in 2010, it is hard to be sure what tradeoffs would be involved in manifesting Simon’s ultimate vision of a new, wholly participatory kind of museum, or exactly how best to do it. Even so, The Participatory Museum gives every indication of being directionally correct, and an excellent guide to starting that process at an institution.

Implications

Whether you love or hate it, the impact of Simon’s book on the museum field is undeniable. With over 250 citations in books and journal articles, and required reading status in graduate museum studies programs, The Participatory Museum is widely touted as a must-read for museum professionals. The book has inspired conferences, institution-wide discussion sessions, and professional workshops around the country, and reignited debate over how to breathe life into decaying institutions. Simon continues to experiment with these principles at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, where she has been executive director since 2011.

It’s hard to know how much credit The Participatory Museum can claim for this, but there has been a shift—or at least public perception of a shift— toward more participation in the four years since its publication. The Economist recently noted that museums were almost completely unrecognizable, having changed from being places “where people look on in awe” to being places “where they learn and argue.”

But is participation for everyone? There is a tension in The Participatory Museum between Simon’s utopian vision of wholly participatory institutions and her call for balance between traditional and participatory design. Writing about her divergent experiences during a visit to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in Wyoming in 2008, she admitted:

I am an elitist when it comes to national parks. I like my parks hard to access, sparsely populated, and minimal in services…I believe in lowering barriers to access and creating opportunities for visitors to use museums in diverse ways. On this trip, for the first time, I truly understood the position of people who disagree with me, those who feel that eating and boisterous talking in museums is not only undesirable but violating and painful.

If participatory design is not the only worthwhile kind of design, where is the proper balance? How do institutions and staff know when they’ve hit the participatory sweet spot and when they’ve gone too far?

Indeed, the principles Simon advocates in her book have met with resistance from some quarters. While many institutions have begun transforming themselves into the new kind of museum that Simon envisions, others hold to their support of quiet contemplation and traditional design and seem to believe that they can meet their missions effectively and satisfy their audiences without these design techniques. Bruce Bratton, a Santa Cruz resident, and Judith Dobrzynski, a New York Times writer, are the most recent standard-bearers of the camp that is critical not so much of The Participatory Museum as of the concept of participatory design itself. Dobrzynski believes that the participatory trend, or as she calls it, “the quest for experience,” has led to a field-wide identity crisis in which entertainment has taken over the previously quiet and contemplative environment for which museums were known. Bratton’s more personal attack took aim at Simon’s own museum, calling it a “hobby circus” and claiming that the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History had devolved into a community center under her leadership.

The Participatory Museum does acknowledge these concerns about audience members who don’t want to take part themselves or feel that others’ participatory experiences are intrusive. Early on in the book, Simon argues that the segment of the audience seeking a more traditional experience should not be left out of the process of “mapping out audiences of interest and brainstorming the experiences, information, and strategies that will resonate most with them” that is foundational to audience-centric design. The research profiling participant types notes that “passive” participants outnumber creators anyway, and through strategic design they can still benefit from others’ contributions. But at the end of the day, are audiences more engaged and are institutions meeting their missions more effectively through participatory design techniques?

For all the accolades and buzz it’s received, The Participatory Museum’s usefulness ultimately rests on the answers to those questions. We will need closer study of participatory work to fully understand the implications of the broader trends the book catalogues and appears to be ushering forward. What do we gain from participatory exhibits or institutional cultures of participation? What do we lose? Are there gaps between perception and reality on this front? (For example, the book presents little evidence that participatory design can make museum audiences less white.) Finally, how can we most effectively take Simon’s advice to put the audience first in any design, given the varied desires and priorities of individual members of that audience? The good news is that the success of The Participatory Museum and the speed at which its recommendations have been adopted should provide a wealth of material for researchers to begin answering these questions with more specificity in the years ahead.

Further reading:

• Nina Simon’s blog, Museum 2.0
• Jessica Shoemaker, A review of The Participatory Museum
• Sarah Jesse, What Would the Internet Do?
• University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center, Participatory Museum workshop
• Collections Link, Participation Portal
• Archaeology, Museums, & Outreach; Moving from Me to We
• Mike Murawski, Developing Questions for Visitor Participation
• Interviews with Nina Simon about the book:
  • Huffington Post, Nina Simon and the Participatory Museum Model
  • National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, Five Question Q&A
  • Smithsonian Magazine, Nina Simon, Museum Visionary
  • Information and Design, The Participatory Museum

National Museum of Cambodia. Photo by kfcatles.

A heat map of museum activity in Asia would show the whole region aglow. At first glance, if you’ve been getting your story from mainstream American media, you might think Asian institutions are becoming just like us, or beating us at our own game: the National Museum of Cambodia recently put its collection online thanks to a grant from an American foundation, and the Mumbai airport recently unveiled the largest airport gallery in the world. Other stories might give the opposite impression: a museum in China was shuttered after nearly its entire collection of 40,000 artifacts was found to be fake; in some public museums in Southeast Asia, staff are government employees who have been demoted to what is seen as an undesirable role.

So what’s really happening? I have spent the last two years as Programs Director at a private ethnology museum in Laos, but I’ve been following these developments for much longer. During the three years I lived in China after college, I became interested in museums as a platform to share my growing appreciation of Asia with a wider audience. My interest deepened back in the U.S., as I researched China’s recent cultural policy changes and their impact on museums for a master’s degree in China Studies and then wrote more broadly about museum issues in Asia for a museum studies certificate. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the story is as complex as the continent, a medley of unique political systems, museum governance structures, geographies, human resource policies, levels of development, and education systems.

I can’t tell that whole story in a single post, but I do want to share some of what I have seen unfolding in museums across developing Asia.

The boom

Over the past several years, prominent news sources have reported the growth of museums in Asia: The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, The Economist. The focus is often on China. In 2011, at the People’s Consultative Congress, former President Hu Jintao announced China’s plans to become a world leader in the arts and to make cultural industries a pillar industry by 2015. To make good on its plans, Beijing earmarked more money for the construction of new museums and to make public museums free. But the government alone isn’t driving the growth. Affluent businessmen are opening their own museums to house the private collections they’ve amassed at auctions. All over China, even in sparsely populated regions, new museums go up at the astounding rate of about 100 a year.

But other places are beginning to share some of the spotlight. Further south in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country and fourth largest by population in the world, similar conditions for art museum growth exist: economic prosperity and strong competitiveness in the international art market, with Indonesian artists beginning to break local price records. Indonesia also has one thing to credit for the creation of new museums in general that China doesn’t: rapid political decentralization. Each province in the country must have a museum, and new provinces come into existence at a surprisingly frequent rate.

Thailand’s strong national interest in archeology and the sheer volume of artifacts being discovered motivate the building of new museums, although fewer than in China and Indonesia. Alongside these more traditional (albeit brand-new) institutions, a robust network of grassroots, community-based museums adopting unconventional practices has sprung up as the result of local training opportunities.

Though India has also seen a relatively modest increase in the number of museums, it has a growing network of international partnerships. Recent agreements signed with the Tate and the Metropolitan Museum may go further in raising the level of museum practice in the country through the loan of objects that will help keep exhibits fresh, research collaborations, and joint learning programs for staff and fellowships.

In Asia as elsewhere, museums come into being for a variety of reasons and through a variety of actors. Burgeoning economic prosperity is often the impetus for museum growth. Yet slower economic development does not preclude it. Because many national governments, occupied with meeting other development benchmarks, have been slow to invest in arts and culture for purposes outside of economic growth, other parties have stepped in. Organizations owned in whole or in part by foreigners, or grassroots artist cooperatives such as San Art in Vietnam or the Cemeti Art House in Indonesia, may fill the art-for-art’s-sake gap. Their unaffiliated status translates to more flexibility in hiring, fundraising, interpreting their collections, and setting their own budget and agenda. Private museums are still much less common in Asia than public ones, but they, too, are part of the boom.

Audience, outreach, and local impact

Tourism and the local audience

Tourism contributes significantly to the economies of Asian countries. This can be helpful in keeping up foot traffic for museums – but whose feet, and at what cost? Many Asian museums have geared themselves toward foreign visitors, for at least two reasons: money and education.

It’s not uncommon for museums to offer free entry for locals. These patrons’ lack of financial contribution, however, may lead to their neglect. In a country like Laos, in which tourists make up a large part of museum visitation, locals may be put off by the fact that the majority of guests are not like them – a familiar refrain for American museums struggling to reach out to underrepresented groups. When tourism drives the local economy, the tourist is king, and the quality of service provided to locals may receive little attention, if any at all, in programming and promotion.

In addition to having more money, tourists also tend to be better educated. One of the biggest shifts in my own thinking about exhibit design after moving to Laos was about assumed literacy and comfort with self-guided discovery. The same Asia that is home to economies such as Singapore, Korea, and Shanghai, envied for their top-ranking academic performance, also suffers from development-stunting education systems. Literacy statistics for Asia—especially South and Southeast Asia, which is most of the continent in terms of both population and landmass—look deceptively high when the reality is that they only measure basic, not functional, literacy. As museums in Asia have added less familiar objects to their collections and adopted the Western model of explaining them with labels, some have risked losing connection with their local audience. What good are labels and panels if your audience can’t read well enough to understand the signage?

Going local

But the story may yet have a happy ending. I have noticed several hopeful signs that Asian museums may be paying more attention to local communities. Last November, I met Sabyasachi Mukherjee, the director of the encyclopedic Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) in Mumbai, India, at a conference. I was impressed with the recent push in India for museums to appeal to all segments of society. Mukherjee was clearly interested in this topic: he questioned speakers at the end of every session, challenging museum directors from the West to rethink their audience.

It turns out Mukherjee’s commitment to orienting museums towards their communities is working for him back home. At the CSMVS, local participation increased by almost 50% over a three-year period, thanks to a mix of dynamic exhibits and unconventional programming. In the United States, we take for granted that a museum will display objects from other countries. By contrast, typical museum collections in Asia consist primarily of artwork or objects from that country’s own heritage and history, given their focus on preservation and guardianship of national heritage. India stands out in Asia for its ability to host blockbuster exhibits of artwork and artifacts from around the world. Both the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert have brought shows to the CSMVS, and other notable exhibits have featured paintings of Rubens and Van Dyck.

Mukherjee has also experimented with museum buses, which carry objects from the collection to neighborhoods throughout Mumbai and offer free access to locals. The program began as outreach to schoolchildren, but has since expanded its focus to reach suburbanites. The CSMVS has also begun to partner with NGOs to do programs with marginalized communities, such as sex workers and HIV patients.

The push in India for accessible art goes beyond the CSMVS, and it includes public art. Leading that initiative is Rajeev Sethi, the designer behind the T2 terminal at the Mumbai airport I mentioned at the start of this post. Though the idea of art in airports is not unique, the initiative is much broader. Sethi envisions the whole country as a museum and advocates bringing art dug up from museum basements “back to lived spaces—railway stations, bus stops, public parks, hospitals” – to serve a richer pool of stakeholders than he believes the Western view of museums supports.

Faced with a rapidly growing consumer class, museums in Indonesia are also trying to adapt their approach to their public. Until a few years ago, Indonesian museums were run by the Ministry of Tourism, where they enjoyed relatively high levels of financial support and attention. Their main audience under this ministry was foreigners or traveling Indonesians, which meant that exhibits changed infrequently — it matters less if your information is static if you have few repeat visitors. Museums were seen mostly as places of leisure, and money was poured into them to attract tourists.

In 2010, control switched to the Ministry of Education and Culture, which has a budget predominately allocated to education, and funding levels dropped. But this move also prompted museums to begin to think of themselves as serving the people of Indonesia and having an important role in informal education. A series of locally focused initiatives began then that included a Museum Visit Year campaign and revitalization projects. Most recently, in 2013, thirteen museums in Jakarta took their collections to that most public and popular of institutions, the mall. They hosted a museum week cosponsored by the Jakarta Post and the Ministry that featured an expo-style layout of booths with exhibits. Visitors were able to see exhibits and objects they might otherwise not have seen. The organizers hope to make this an annual event, and there is optimism that over time the event will bring more visitors to the museums in their own cities.

Human Resources

The Role of the Curator

Staffing has traditionally been a challenge for private and public museums alike in Asia, limiting the vitality and even sustainability of these institutions. With a glut of museums opening quickly and then having virtually no visitors, or even closing, China‘s example has shown that the success of new museums often depends on having the right people running and staffing them.

Museum professionals in the West take for granted that decisions about the collection and interpretation of objects—a principal function of a museum—will be made by a curator, someone with specialized content knowledge and appointed for that specific purpose. In China, curation has only emerged as a distinct role over the past ten years. In that time, though, it has taken off: it’s not uncommon for established museums to have hundreds of exhibits a year. Flexing its new muscles in this area, the National Art Museum in China sponsored its first international Asian Art Curator Forum last September, which gathered eighty curators from thirty countries.

However, less developed countries in the region still have a long way to go. In the most extreme cases, such as some government museums, curators may actually be seen as unnecessary, since exhibits may only change every five years. More often, where turnover is somewhat higher, curation may be outsourced to independent consultants.

It’s not just curators, either. Several roles in Western museums, such as marketing, fundraising, digital media, and visitor services, simply do not have counterparts in Southeast Asia, where job categories reflect an institutional focus on preservation or research on new archaeological finds.

Training

Perhaps unsurprisingly, museum workers in parts of developing Asia come to the museum with very different training than what might be typical for young museum staff in America.  For example, those in parts of Southeast Asia may have studied history, art history, biology, anthropology or archaeology only up to the university level – and in some cases, maybe only at the high-school level. It’s highly unlikely that they have specialized museum education or experience interning or volunteering at a museum, so training happens on the job. For example, in Cambodia and Myanmar, the respective National Museums are charged with the professional development of the entire country’s museum staff after they are hired. What’s more, government museum staff may lack not only expertise but even interest. Because civil service positions are often coveted for their benefits rather than actual job responsibilities, motivating public museum workers can be especially challenging and those who are motivated may find themselves isolated.

This, too, is beginning to change. Thailand has taken a leading role in providing professional development in Southeast Asia through its involvement in regional networks such as the SEAMEO SPAFA Centre for Archaeology and Fine Arts and with the support of members of the royal family through the Princess Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre and Museum Field School. Students from throughout Southeast Asia attend these programs, where instructors include regional experts and museum professionals from the U.S., Australia, and Europe. Add that to its relatively strong economic performance within mainland Southeast Asia and open government, and Thailand offers a possible vision of the future for museums in the region.

Leapfrogging into the 21^st Century

We sometimes think of museums in the West as in search of their second life, a return to some – perhaps nonexistent – point in the past when they enjoyed widespread popularity. For the majority of museums in Asia, the second life they are building is really a first life: until recently, many of them were essentially public storage facilities and archives.

Development economists talk about technology leapfrogging, in which emerging economies bypass earlier stages of technology use. For example, rural villages may skip entirely over having landlines in their homes to use smart phones, or skip over dial-up Internet and start with wireless. With increased opportunities to collaborate on shared challenges, leapfrogging may catapult Asian museums directly into the future, perhaps with Western museums along for the ride. Institutions around the world can benefit from grappling together on issues such as cultivating first generation audiences, stretching limited institutional resources, enriching visitor experience, representing underrepresented or misrepresented groups, motivating reluctant staff to rethink the role of museums in society, promoting social inclusion and diversity, and creatively seeking funding.

Some organizations already facilitate this dialogue. Through the Asia-Europe Foundation, an international nonprofit based in Singapore with nearly forty member countries, the Asia-Europe Museum Network ASEMUS collaborates on the mapping of Asian collections, supports staff exchange, and hosts a biannual conference. Though no formal US-Asia museum-specific organization exists, the American Alliance of Museums, which has been involved in supporting international programs for over twenty-five years, is expanding its international museum work and now includes a US-China Exhibition Exchange. And a number of individual programs have been building valuable bridges. The Asia Society has hosted several events bringing together museum leaders from the West and Asia, such as the 2012 US-China Museum Directors Forum and last November’s Arts + Museum Summit in Hong Kong. The Asia Foundation sponsors the Asian Art Museum Fellowship in Asian Art, and the Asian Cultural Council supports artistic exchange between artists and arts professionals in the US and Asia.

How could we embrace even more collaboration? One possibility would be to create an international non-Western certificate track in graduate museology programs designed for American students who would ultimately either work in Asia or specialize in Asian art at museums in the West. In addition to general courses in museum studies, the track would involve coursework in cross-cultural leadership, non-Western heritage practices, and language study. Through partnerships with museums in Asia, students would have summer internships in the region; after graduation, some would have the opportunity to go back to work for the host institution as a visiting specialist. Local staff would then have the opportunity to receive training from the visiting specialists in their own countries from individuals with knowledge of the local context. American universities that already have satellite campuses in Asia might be a good place to start.

Another idea might be to set up an organization similar to PUM Netherlands Senior Experts, a nonprofit that provides consulting services to small and medium-sized enterprises in emerging markets. PUM’s 3,200 volunteer specialists are matched with assistance requests and deployed abroad for up to several weeks to work on discrete projects; host organizations just pay for local accommodation and food. The advantage of this model over a traditional museum consultancy firm taking on international work would be its affordability, allowing even financially-strapped museums to participate, and focus on overall self-sufficiency.

As attention focuses on the museum landscape in Asia, it’s important to realize that the changes taking place there are as diverse as the region itself. In some places, evolution is rapid; in others, measured. But across the continent, I have been impressed by the sparks of life that characterize many new museum projects and programs. Asia is home to some of the most remarkable economic growth stories of modern history, including Singapore, South Korea, China, and India. As momentum builds across the region, I look forward to the changes it will bring to the museum and cultural heritage landscapes here.

Alicia Akins works at the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre (TAEC), a private ethnology museum in Luang Prabang, Laos. As Programs Director, Alicia manages the museum’s school outreach, adult education, and advocacy programs. Since her arrival in 2012, Alicia has been actively involved in the regional culture and heritage sector. This past November, she was selected as the sole delegate from Laos to the World Culture Forum in Bali and attended the inaugural Asia Society Arts + Museum Summit in Hong Kong. Alicia’s interest in ethnic diversity first took her to China between 2005 and 2008. Alicia holds an M.A.I.S. in China Studies at the University of Washington – Seattle and a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers. She was a violist in the Rutgers Symphony Orchestra, and since college she has also studied Punjabi folk dance, West African dance, lindy hop and the guzheng (a Chinese zither). Although she has studied eight languages, she has reached at least conversational proficiency in just five: Chinese (near native fluency), Japanese, Korean, Lao (professional working proficiency), and Thai. (This note about reaching conversational proficiency in “just” five languages is my second-favorite part of Alicia’s bio. My favorite part is that she listed “street battles” among her personal interests.)

Christy Fisher is proud to have had a career that stretches across three continents.  After graduating summa cum laude from the University of Georgia, Christy taught English in Japan for two years before returning to the U.S. to attend the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Shortly thereafter, Christy accepted a position with the U.S. Mission to the U.N. in Geneva, Switzerland, where she helped represent U.S. interests before the World Health Organization. She subsequently earned her J.D. at Georgetown University Law Center, where she was recognized as a Global Law Scholar, and served as Court Counsel to the Supreme Court of the Republic of Palau. Christy currently serves as a career law clerk to Judge John Eldridge of the Maryland Court of Appeals. She is a member of the Maryland, DC, and Palau Bar Associations and serves on the steering committee for the Maryland Chapter of the American Constitution Society. Despite her ostensibly non-arts background, Christy tells us that she has an undying love for musical theater and is proud to have played a Congressional aide in the Netflix series House of Cards.

Lindsey Cosgrove added a second perspective on arts education to complement that of associate editor Talia Gibas, and brought a penchant for examining new initiatives or trends for Createquity.

• Lindsey took a new resource for arts marketers through its paces with CultureHive: A New Home for Busy Arts Marketing Bees. Released just prior to the National Arts Marketing Project Conference in Portland, OR, this was the most-read post of the term.
• Lindsey followed up that piece in short order with No Strings Attached, a revamped edition of the blog post she wrote as part of her Fellowship application. The post examines the story of GiveDirectly, a new charity whose no-nonsense approach to helping the poor is favored by effective altruists, and considers the parallel to the nonprofit sector’s thirst for general operating support.
• Lindsey has the distinction of publishing her Arts Policy Library piece earlier than anyone else in the program’s history, a full week and a half before the end of the term! Arts Policy Library: How Art Works praises the common-sense approach taken in National Endowment for the Arts’s research agenda and system map, but wonders why so much of the effort was spent reinventing the wheel. How Art Works: the I’m-late-to-work version gives the highlights.
• Grantmakers in the Arts Goes to Washington chronicles GIA’s arts education advocacy partnership with DC lobbyists the Penn Hill Group, and the progress the two organizations have made in the nearly two years since the engagement began.
• Lindsey wrapped up her term with Portfolios: The Next Wave of Student Assessment? The piece considers the rise in using portfolios, a key instrument of arts education, as a means of evaluating students in non-arts subjects as part of a growing trend called performance assessment.

Much of Jena Lee‘s work this fall focused on the intersection between economics and the arts, and visual arts in particular.

• Jena’s application piece, Detroit Institute of Arts: What’s a museum to do?, gave a great summary of the confusing situation surrounding the DIA in the midst of Detroit’s bankruptcy, and pointed out that the inflamed rhetoric around deaccessioning could be limiting the institution’s options in unintended ways.
• Artists not alone in steep climb to the top, Jena’s most popular piece to date, draws parallels between the “winner-take-all” structure of the individual artist economy and that of two unexpected professions: fashion models and lawyers.
• In Value vs. Value: An inside look at appraising artworks in museums, Jena gives draws upon her background as an art appraiser to give context to how the art market works and makes an impassioned defense of capitalism in the process.
• Arts Policy Library: Studio Thinking examines the seminal research of Project Zero researchers Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner into the “real” benefits of visual arts education. Studio Thinking: the condensed version reviews the major points in a quarter of the time.
• Jena closed out 2013 in style with For Public Artists, a Very Public Removal, a sympathetic look at the long-term maintenance issues and shifts in public opinion that can threaten public art and artists.

Some of Jena’s and Lindsey’s better work was swallowed up by the holidays, so I encourage you to check it out if you missed it – particularly the two Arts Policy Library pieces and Value vs. Value. In the meantime, please join me in toasting our two graduates!

Graffiti mecca 5Pointz was whitewashed in November by the property owner in preparation of the building’s demolition. Photo credit: Dan Nguyen

For two decades the warehouse in Long Island City, Queens, known as 5Pointz stood as an unofficial museum of graffiti art. Jerry Wolkoff, the building’s owner, was considered an ally of graffiti artists for offering it up as a free canvas in the ‘90s – but that ended in 2010, when an artist was injured on site and the city fined Wolkoff for several building violations. No legal protections had ever been secured for the artwork, and despite an attempt to win landmark status and a last-minute call to “Save 5Pointz” by street art superstar Banksy, a judge ruled on November 12 that Wolkoff had the right to tear the complex down. Two residential high-rises will be built in its place. 

With the rise in Percent for Art programs around the country, questions of ownership, responsibility, and control over public art remain critical. Increasingly, commissioners of public art attempt to pre-empt these problems by hiring public arts advisors and engaging communities in the selection process, even inviting them into the creative conversation with the artist. But public art is a complicated and varied medium that includes a broad spectrum of artistic styles and approaches – from the most familiar bronze figural monuments to massive mid-century abstract sculptures, site-specific installations, and new media forms.

The challenges to long-term success—and the trickiness of defining that—are formidable, even for site owners and artists who go in with a clear-eyed, thoughtful process. Though art consultants and community dialogue help in the conscientious placement and positive reception of public work, they do not always guarantee the art will remain undisturbed. This post explores some of the ways public art can go awry – and how artists can try to protect their work.

Threatening Signs

A variety of factors can lead to the removal and scrapping of public art, including neighborhood development, changes in building ownership, dilapidation due to poor maintenance, and shifts in demographics or public sentiment. In the case of 5Pointz, the matter involved real estate development and a changing community. The area of Queens where the warehouse resides has seen major increases in property values resulting from gentrification. The building owner wanted to capitalize on the property, which has sat empty—with the exception of its use by graffiti artists—since the incident in 2010. Paradoxically, the popularity of 5Pointz as an open-air museum likely contributed to the development of the neighborhood that led to the decision to demolish it, which points to the special need for forward-thinking legal protection of arts initiatives in public areas off the beaten path.

Sometimes when a building or site is sold, the artwork that adorns it no longer fits in with the taste or interests of the new owner. Lumenscape (2009), a City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art piece created by artist Rob Ley, lost its site-specific home above the Wilshire and Western Metro station when the newly constructed Solair building was sold shortly after opening. The new owners, Starwood Capital Group, decided to remove the piece, but thoughtfully gave Ley the option to take it back rather than simply disposing of it. Ley has since sought a more permanent location for the work. Planning for possibilities like the sale of the underlying site is wise, and to protect their interests artists should think like lawyers or engage others to do it for them.

Maintenance—or the lack thereof—is another major issue when it comes to the longevity of a public work. While freestanding art in bronze, marble, or metal needs occasional cleaning and restoration, site-specific installations and new media work can require a lot more attention. In the case of Athena Tacha’s installation Green Acres, created for the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in Trenton, NJ, the DEP asserted that it needed to replace the work because the ground tiles, which had settled unevenly over the years, were a safety hazard in the case of emergency evacuations. Tacha claimed that the problem was caused by poor maintenance and the DEP’s decision to add trees to the planter boxes without consulting her – the roots eventually grew beneath the tiles and disrupted them.

Athena Tacha’s Green Acres was threatened to be removed for reasons related to public safety and maintenance. Photo credit: Athena Tacha, 1987 (The Cultural Landscape Foundation)

The rise in new media and digital art has resulted in a whole new set of maintenance issues. If an artwork isn’t properly installed or funds are not set aside for routine repairs and updates, a once visually stunning piece can become a public art fail. Once described as a “floating television garden,” video art pioneer Nam June Paik’s Video Arbor (1990) is composed of cage-like columns supporting multiple TVs surrounded by wisteria. Although the foliage is regularly trimmed back, visitors report that the televisions are rarely on, and the site’s management has blamed faulty wiring and an outdated LaserDisc system for the AV problems. Preservationists have started a conversation with the Nam June Paik Foundation in the hope of procuring financial support for the repair and upkeep of Video Arbor. However, if the managers of the site where an artwork resides don’t have the resources to fix these kinds of technical and equipment failures, the easiest solution may be to take the work down. Specifying the maintenance that will be required—and who is accountable for performing it—in the early phases of a project’s development can go a long way toward preserving it as long as possible.

Perhaps the most difficult issue to avoid is shifts in social attitudes and values. At the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, a bronze statue called “Silent Sam” was erected in 1913 to commemorate the 321 alumni who died fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. A hundred years later, members of the student body, which now includes many African Americans, consider the 20-foot Confederate soldier to be racially offensive and a thinly disguised tribute to the legacy of slavery. Despite the school’s attempt to quell criticism by erecting another monument, Unsung Founders Memorial by Do-Ho Suh, celebrating the unknown slaves who help build the university, detractors continue to call for the older bronze to be removed. At the same time, there are those who would rather see the piece contextualized with a plaque speaking to the history of racial discrimination associated with it. Of course, art is sometimes designed to be provocative; in this case, though, public attitudes have changed over time, creating new controversies that were not anticipated by the artist or the owners of the site. To stave off more immediate backlashes, however, public arts commissioners and artists can include local communities in the creative process to ensure their values and interests are reflected as accurately as possible in the final work.

Rights and Responsibilities

Regardless of why it happens, the decision to remove public art is almost never the artist’s. While abrupt disposal may feel to the artist—and devotees, as in the case of 5Pointz—as though a painting she labored over has publicly had a hole punched through it, the actual outcome for the work may not be outright demolition. It could be indefinite storage, sale on the secondary market (usually for the owner’s benefit) or, in the case of Ley, a return to the artist. In an effort to avoid these events, every artist should think carefully in advance about how to preserve her vision.

So what can artists do to ensure their work is protected in the long run? States differ slightly in their public arts policies and the rights they allot to artists. The Art Law Blog points to guidelines established by Americans for the Arts to help commissioning agencies and artists sidestep potential snafus. The national Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) of 1990 also states that artists have “the right—(B) to prevent any destruction of a work of recognized stature, and any intentional or grossly negligent destruction of that work is a violation of that right.” VARA has helped numerous artists prevent destruction or removal of their works over the years, but it is not a panacea. VARA only covers works produced after 1990 – and public art contracts often include waivers of this right. In the case of 5Pointz, the judges considering the case ruled the building was not a “work of visual art” and therefore not of “recognized stature” under the act.

With the popularity of public art programs growing around the country, debates over what should be done when an artwork is no longer welcome at its site will continue. One solution to the controversy may be to establish a decommissioning standard wherein work that was once considered permanent can be formally and more respectfully retired from its original location if another home or collector is found for it. Another interesting model is temporary arts commissions like those made by the NYC Public Art Fund. In these instances, the public art has a limited exhibition life, the opportunity to change venues, and the potential for purchase and permanent display. Regardless of whether these options are embraced as industry standards, artists must be vigilant about negotiating on their own behalf to avoid VARA waivers, ensure proper funds are available for installation and long-term maintenance, and at the very least procure a right of first refusal should their artwork ever be displaced.

The ubiquitous multiple choice answer sheet. Photo by COCOEN.

Pretty much no one likes standardized tests. The concept is nothing new, of course – the New York State Regent Exam dates back to Civil War times. A century and a half later, the implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) hinged all of the federal government’s reward and punishment on a school’s “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP), a now-infamous composite measure of school performance primarily based on test scores. In the decade since, test-bashing has become something akin to a national pastime, and folks are acting out.

Earlier this year teachers in Seattle flat out refused to administer mandated state exams, claiming that the tests were a misuse of precious school resources, unfairly used as part of teacher evaluations, and an inaccurate indication of student learning. And Seattle isn’t alone. The organization United Opt Out National has assembled a state-by-state guide for opting your kids out of testing, claiming, “high-stakes testing is destructive to ALL children, educators, communities…and the democratic principles which underlie the purposes of public education.”

Let’s say they’re right and standardized tests have got to go. What would be a scalable alternative? One possible solution percolating amongst education reformers may surprise you: portfolios. The practice of assessing learning with portfolios has deep roots in the arts world, visual arts and creative writing especially. Could portfolios save our public school students from a life of drill-and-kill?

The Mechanics

A portfolio is a collection of individual work samples (some of which may have been graded previously), assessed as a whole. It’s a way of combining disparate items into one aggregate assessment demonstrating the application of skills and concepts learned in a classroom setting. Portfolios can be either summative or formative in structure. A summative portfolio focuses on the product or end result of the student’s learning such as, for example, a digital recording of a final performance, a scientific lab report, or a final series of photographs. A formative assessment takes into account the student’s process of learning and can include works-in-progress or evidence of the effort leading to the final product. This type of portfolio might include an actor’s annotated script, the shape and light charcoal studies for a still life painting, or math problem demonstrating the steps in between question and answer.

There are three key elements of assessing learning with portfolios:

• Clearly defined skills and/or knowledge to be assessed,
• Work samples, determined either by the student or the teacher or both, and
• A rubric with which to score collection of work with clear descriptors for each level of success, usually using a point system, and ideally made available to students before portfolios are submitted. (Examples can be found here.)

Sometimes the items included are accompanied by written reflection on the process of creating the final product or the intention behind the work. To demonstrate content knowledge, more traditional academic writing may be included as well.

Part of a Larger Movement

Portfolios are one assessment tool under the larger umbrella of an emerging mode of student evaluation called performance assessment. According to Beyond Basic Skills: The Role of Performance Assessment in Achieving 21st Century Standards of Learning by Linda Darling-Hammond and Frank Adamson:

For many people, performance assessment is most easily defined by what it is not: specifically, it is not multiple choice testing. In a performance assessment, rather than choosing among pre-determined options, students must construct an answer, produce a product, or perform an activity.

Using performance assessment, a student might be asked to write a letter to the editor about a historical event from a specific point of view, draw a series of electrical circuits explaining how changes in configurations would affect the flow of electricity, or demonstrate the ability to use a map by actually navigating.

Performance assessment is rising in popularity as the Common Core State Standards inch closer to full implementation. These new learning standards, adopted by 45 states, four U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia, require “a greater focus on critical thinking, synthesis and analysis, problem solving, communication, media and technology.” States including Maine, New Hampshire, New York, and Ohio are starting to adopt performance assessment systems—which reveal students’ ability to apply information, not just to remember and regurgitate it—to meet the new standards.

Not all performance assessment techniques include portfolios. But portfolios (whether arts-specific or not) are an important piece of the performance assessment puzzle, and learning from the arts’ experience with portfolios could be useful as performance assessment reform initiatives move forward in schools and districts across the country.

Portfolio Assessment in Practice

Some schools and districts are already making use of portfolio assessment. The Beacon School, a public high school in New York City, has been celebrated as a national model of portfolio assessment since it opened in 1993. From the beginning, Beacon leaders wanted to assess their students using methods similar to those employed in graduate schools. Students assembled a portfolio of long-term projects and representative samples from all of their classes – science, history, English, foreign languages – and defended their work to a faculty panel.

By the end of its first decade, Beacon’s plans for portfolio assessment had been somewhat derailed. In the late 1990s New York State began to require students to pass the state’s Regents Exam to graduate. This new requirement meant time was diverted from labs and projects to test preparation. In his 2004 reporting on the Beacon School, writer Jay Matthews explained, “even the most ardent advocates [of portfolios] have acknowledged that samples of student work cannot compete with the ability of standardized testing to quickly and cheaply determine the overall performance of a school district.”

The school still maintains as much of its original assessment strategy as possible. Its website stresses the dual priorities of the school and the state: “Beacon offers a dynamic, inquiry-based curriculum for all students that exceeds standards set by the New York State Regents. Technology and arts are infused throughout the college preparatory curriculum. Each year students must present performance-based projects to panels of teachers, and pass New State Regents tests and community service to graduate.”

School districts in Tennessee are using portfolio assessment for a different purpose that harkens back to its arts-based roots and combines student evaluation with teacher evaluation. In Tennessee’s teacher evaluation system, 35% of a teacher’s employment review is based on test scores. This is a problem for the 70% of teachers in most schools who do not teach a state-tested subject, but portfolios may offer the solution. As reported back in 2012 in The Commercial Appeal newspaper, “[The head of Memphis City Schools arts education, Dru Davison,] and 40 Memphis art teachers wrote a four-page rubric for what peer reviewers should see in the student work for each of 40 art disciplines, from marching band to jazz band.” Each teacher chooses samples of his or her students’ work to form the teacher’s review portfolio, which is then assessed by a blind peer group based on the pre-determined rubrics. The Tennessee Fine Arts Growth Measures System, as it’s called, is in the pilot phase in Memphis City Schools and is starting to garner some national attention. Participation is voluntary for Tennessee school districts. More than ten are participating this school year, up from three last year.

Laura D. Goe, a research scientist at the Educational Testing Service, told EdWeek about the initiative, “Tennessee has the right idea in promoting this effort to achieve some rigor and comparability in a set of content that is difficult to measure…To me, it is a model for where we want to ultimately go [with teacher evaluation], and where I think we will go in most subjects.”

Challenges

The case studies in Tennessee and the Beacon School are intriguing and reflect well on portfolios as a school-wide, district-wide, and maybe even statewide option for evaluating students and even teachers. Could portfolio assessment become a core mechanism for measuring student learning, on the scale of standardized tests?

Statewide and national testing systems depend on reliable, valid results. Reporting on The Beacon School, Jay Matthews wrote, “the argument between advocates of standardized tests and advocates of portfolios usually ends with each side saying it cannot trust the results produced by the other.” For portfolio assessment, it is often the problem of subjectivity that causes concern among test supporters.

Standardized tests, with so-called selected response questions such as multiple choice or true/false, don’t need to be graded by humans. Such questions can arguably be biased, and there is the possibility of human error in the setting of the machines and the handling of the scoring sheets, but the grading is never subjective thanks to grading machines, which also make the process comparatively faster and less expensive. By contrast, portfolios must be graded by humans and grading between raters or even the same raters at different times can be inconsistent. A good rubric and rigorous training can eliminate some personal bias, but not all (see page 22 of Beyond Basic Skills for more information). This problem is a big one if portfolios are to be adopted on a large scale. The ability to reliably compare standardized tests makes it possible to identify outliers among schools, districts, and states, to learn from overachievers, and support underachievers. If the assessment itself and the grading method are not the same for all students, the evaluation won’t be useful for these purposes.

Fortunately, there are large-scale testing systems that already deal with this problem. The Advanced Placement exams taken by high school students in advanced classes in subjects like history and English, for example, are composed of a series of essay questions of various lengths. Students take the exams and then their teachers ship their answer booklets off to be graded by trained “readers.” The writing portion of the SAT is another example. The volume of exams to be graded by each trained reader means that for a handful of SAT essays, factual errors may be overlooked as readers are rewarded for speed. In such cases, students end up demonstrating their knowledge of the grading system rather than their writing ability. While there may be issues with the quality of grading vs. quantity of exams, the fact that the SAT has been accepted for years as a satisfactory (if far from perfect) method of judging students’ college readiness should mean that the subjectivity challenge of grading portfolios is nothing new or prohibitive.

In education, it all comes down to implementation. If a student’s portfolio is filled with work samples that aren’t authentic demonstrations of knowledge and skills learned, it is no better an indicator of learning than a long chain of multiple-choice questions with memorized answers. For portfolio assessment to succeed as a nationwide option for student evaluation, appropriate learning goals must be set with rigorous and specific rubrics. Teachers must also be well trained in administering and scoring assessments, and students well prepared. It’s a novel concept to some, but if portfolios continue to spread as a viable, scalable assessment method, we might emerge from the era of crushing accountability into a new age – one in which testing has a positive effect on learning. 

The lobby of the Willard Hotel is rumored to be the birthplace of the term “lobbying.”
Photo by Ellen Meiselman

In March of 2012, Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) launched the Arts Education Funders Coalition. The goal of the Coalition is “to research and identify federal policy opportunities that promote equitable access to arts education in all public schools.” It consists of about 135 individuals from 115 organizations within GIA’s membership and is led by a small advisory committee of prominent voices in arts advocacy, education, and philanthropy.

This is new territory for GIA. The organization’s president and CEO, Janet Brown, acknowledged in a recent conversation that public policy can be uncomfortable, risky, and “very difficult to get funders to invest in.” Successes are few, far between, and at the mercy of our volatile political process. But when a critical mass of arts education funders felt funding nonprofit programs was no longer a sufficient strategy to achieve their aspirations to further arts education in public schools, they decided to attempt to affect policy directly, and GIA took on the challenge.

Setting the stage

When attempting to influence public policy, an organization must first decide where and how to target its efforts. Will the focus be on the federal, state, or local level? Should a law be enacted, tweaked, or repealed? With the Arts Education Funders Coalition, GIA decided to focus on the federal level and work toward adding pro-arts language to existing education legislation.

In announcing the formation of the Coalition, Janet Brown explained:

Why is GIA involving itself in federal policy, you might ask. It’s because that’s where decisions are made in education in America. Although we’d love to believe that education policies are determined locally, the reality is federal policy drives the actions made by state departments of education and local superintendents and school boards. Our obsession with testing to determine learning is evidence of this. Equity issues are best dealt with at the federal level where the governmental “carrot” is meant to level the playing field.

Despite its national aspirations, the Funders Coalition hasn’t garnered much attention to date from the arts sector. According to Janet Brown, “[The Arts Education Funders Coalition is] not a very visible project because it’s a different kind of advocacy than American for the Arts (AFTA).” AFTA, the lead advocacy organization for our sector, mobilizes email campaigns and organizes Arts Advocacy Day, which brings hundreds of people to Washington each year in an overt attempt to draw the attention of policymakers to issues concerning the arts community, among other advocacy efforts. (The organizations are talking to each other: AFTA’s Vice President of Government Affairs and Arts Education, Narric Rome, is on the advisory committee of the GIA Arts Education Funders Coalition.) GIA is taking a quieter approach, banking in part on the assumption that a pro-arts education agenda would have more clout coming from a group of people who have skin in the public education game:

As a group of funders who have contributed millions of dollars to the public education system or to the nonprofit arts sector to compensate for lack of arts education in public schools, Coalition members and other funders have a stake in developing effective policy that will secure the place of arts education in twenty-first century education.

To lead the effort, GIA hired a Washington, DC firm specializing in education policy, the Penn Hill Group, to help develop an agenda and do the on-the-ground lobbying. Executive vice president Alex Nock has been presenting the Funders Coalition’s progress as part of GIA’s web conference series.

The Funders Coalition’s agenda takes on many aspects of federal education policy, including juvenile justice, research, Head Start, teacher evaluation, and the cornerstone of federal education legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, formerly known as No Child Left Behind). It describes the arts-positive change the Funders Coalition would like to see in each area, including:

• “that any school improvement structure adopted in ESEA reauthorization… include arts education as a strategy in the overall plan to turn around a low-performing school,”
• “that arts education be integrated into the Head Start standards and partnerships be encouraged between Head Start providers and community arts organizations,” and
• “that the [Investing in Innovation] program adopt an absolute priority for arts education that requires the Department of Education to fund quality applications with an arts education focus.”

The agenda is multifaceted, but GIA’s focus is on language. According to Janet Brown, the Coalition faced a choice at its outset. It could propose new, stand-alone legislation to advance arts education, or lobby to change existing laws. After considering the contentious political climate, relatively low priority of education policy on the congressional to-do list, and extreme amount of time and effort brand new legislation would require, GIA and the Penn Hill Group deemed the latter option more realistic.

The story so far

We’re just weeks away from the Coalition’s second birthday. What progress has it made?

On November 18,2013, GIA sent an email to members of the Funders Coalition with good news: “Through work with Members of Congress and their staff, [we were] able to ensure that arts education would play a prominent role in the preschool programs funded under [a proposed] bill should it pass Congress over the next year.” Time will tell how “prominent” that role actually is, but the announcement suggests an encouraging victory for what is a relatively new effort.

Pre-K may have been low-hanging fruit for the Funders Coalition. Without standardized testing and other competitors for the class time that older students face, Pre-K curricula naturally have more room for the arts. But according to Brown, the inclusion of arts-friendly language in the bill was not inevitable. “If we had not been there the language would not have been included,” Brown said. “Bills are written based on the knowledge of the staff who are writing them.” If that’s the case, it’s a good thing the Penn Hill Group and GIA are there to educate them.

The Coalition has also succeeded in getting more specific language included in Senator Tom Harkin’s bill to reauthorize ESEA, which will hopefully be brought to the Senate floor for consideration in March or June. ESEA has been waiting for reauthorization since 2007, and Alyson Klein for EdWeek accurately called its chances back in June: “Everyone knows that the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is ultimately headed absolutely nowhere [in 2013], thanks to partisan divisions.” The language included in Senator Harkin’s bill is a win for the Funders Coalition, but the success of the bill is difficult to forecast given Congress’s recent track record of inaction when it comes to ESEA.

The next act

The Funders Coalition’s effort raises familiar but tricky questions about arts education advocacy:

• Is legislative language without designated funding enough to make real change? New York City’s arts education legislation is a great example of the folly of language that isn’t backed by specific, dedicated funding. In 2007, $67.5 million previously earmarked for arts education was released to the discretion of school principals. Accountability measures were put in place to theoretically ensure that students received the arts education prescribed by law, but many arts advocates would argue that the state of arts education in New York City schools has declined as a result of the change. The conventional wisdom is that if decision makers don’t have to spend money on a non-tested subject, they likely won’t, focusing resources instead on subjects in which the school is held accountable for its performance. To ensure the delivery of arts education in schools, policy needs to mandate what is to be provided to students, allocate dedicated funding, and establish a mechanism to ensure compliance. How much will be budgeted, for example, for the arts if they are to play a prominent role in preschool programs across the country? Will the appropriated funding be enough for full-time arts teachers in every school or simply materials with which general classroom teachers can incorporate arts projects? Language will help, but it’s not everything. Funding is a very important piece of the puzzle. Which begs the question…

• Does it make more sense to work at the federal or state/local level? Federal policies set priorities which states are encouraged to adopt via competitive funding programs and other means of reward and punishment. All states receiving Race to the Top grants, for example, must develop comprehensive teacher evaluation systems as a condition of funding. Nevertheless, education is constitutionally assigned as a state concern and the bulk of education funding – over 90% – comes from state and local sources. Therefore, state and local officials have the most control over how education funds are spent. If you grant the premise that money is a key, if not the key, ingredient in successful reform, the states could be the best place to advocate for arts education.

For now, it’s too early to tell what answers we might glean from GIA’s experience, and whether its quieter strategy will pay off. It could be that potential victories for the Funders Coalition really do influence state priorities and lead to expanded arts education opportunities in schools. At the very least, as the Funders Coalition continues its work we should know more about the potential for funders to be advocates. There are many valuable lessons to be learned as this effort continues.