Personal, Portable, Pop-up Exhibits

I once imagined fixing up a simple outbuilding, no bigger than 15’x15’, where I could bring together small, personal exhibits simply for the enjoyment of gathering and organizing lovely, unusual, treasured, or found objects. I could sense the pleasure of being absorbed in finding ideas from objects collected on walks over years and years, bringing out old fabric buried in family trunks, revisiting my childhood rock collection, or showcasing friends’ artwork.

In my mind’s eye, I could picture exhibits I put together, ones co-curated with my sisters or my book group, or something friends guest curated. Exhibits might be inspired by beach glass from Lake Michigan beaches, pottery from the coast of Wales, or polished marble chips from the Cinque Terra; 25 years of books read by our book group; or the Vergeront sisters’ childhood. Collections sitting on shelves and in cupboards might inspire exhibits: hand-carved horses, miniature tops, boxes, buttons, marbles, keys, snow globes, tiny books, or old Valentines and the rubber stamps that made them. All of these could find their way into an exhibit for an admittedly small audience of family, neighbors, friends, friends-of-friends, or new friends walking through the alley or driving a country road.  

It doesn’t matter that that I never found the outbuilding and never will create these imagined exhibits. The homes and studios I enjoy the most are made more interesting with imaginative exhibit-like arrangements. Family members have arranged collected teacups, dolls, stamps, license plates, buttons, antique tools, and photos according to their worldview and very likely change it to reflect a new outlook. In her hillside house, a textile artist has created small shrines everywhere among the towers of stacked books. The amateur naturalist has combined her most cherished finds from city walks and lake paths in a delicate altar-like arrangement on a shelf where it catches the first light. A friend told me that on every family vacation, each member selected a significant object from the family’s time together. Year after year, vacation after vacation, objects were collected in a large, lovely box. These objects invited the family to revisit, reflect, and remember together. Domestic versions of cabinets of curiosities enjoy pride of place on shelves, walls, windowsills, and in corners of our homes, reminding us of interests, travels, places, loved ones, and times past.

Evolving Cabinets of Curiosity

The penchant like the one that inspired my dream of a simple space for presenting exhibits is not so different from Cabinets of Curiosity of the past, museums of the present, and hundreds of museum and exhibit experiments in between. Fueled by shared human and individual curiosity as well as a tendency to collect, these inclinations are carried forward by memory, a dialogue with objects, an interest in engaging and delighting others, and the possibility of discovering something ourselves.

Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History Pop-up Museum

Removing objects and exhibits from the large-scale, familiar, and more formal museum context enables new perspectives and opportunities for exhibits (and museums). A dance of personal and public engagement is possible; expectations of what might happen shift; new energy is released. The Pop-up Museum concept described by Michelle DelCarlo on her blog and carried further by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History and other museums plays with possibilities of community engagement, conversation, development of ideas, format, and sense of place. A mobile museum may be a strategy for a start-up museum without walls, for outreach to underserved audiences and locations, or for a temporary set-up during a museum renovation. Speakers at the recent ASTC 2014 Pecha Kucha responded to, “What if There Wasn’t a Building?” exploring the challenges, assets, and limitations of museum buildings in serving new communities, welcoming diverse audiences, creating experiences, experimenting with exhibit formats, and increasing participation.

Experimental Zibits

Small, portable, temporary exhibits–zibits–encountered in unlikely places are an intriguing variation in the range of exhibits. Neither mobile versions of museums nor temporary art installations, they lean towards the personal. Whether these objects or collections are truly rare, valuable, or historically significant matters less. Their meaning or personal value, however, does matter. A zibit installation might be powered by a playful, inventive, offbeat, or random idea; an enduring question; a fragment of a story; or an obsessive devotion.

As such they tend to be a somewhat of personal experiment carried out on a small scale with a hint of intimacy. The person fashioning a small exhibit extends a personal invitation to others, drawing them in to create moments of engagement. At the same time it is intimate, a small exhibit becomes a larger gesture intended to enliven a public space, spark conversations, or forge connections among strangers. On the street; at the farmers’ market, the beach, or park; in a school, garage, bike shop, or cargo container, a small exhibit is an unlikely encounter with objects that dislodges an everyday moment from the routine. Out-of-context, expectations shift and senses go on high alert. Idiosyncratic, rich in local color, and often spontaneous, this just-for now, fleeting experience presented in a compressed time frame for enjoyment rejiggers daily routines whether it is getting to the library, making the walk light, or completing a transaction.

Exhibits On the Street

Personal, portable, pop-up exhibits in unexpected places are likely to offer something idiosyncratic in an Airstream Tradewind trailer; a mural on the wall at the State Fair; or in repurposed street furniture such as a street kiosk or fire hose box. Often both charming and provocative, small exhibits like those below hint at  possibilities for local color, audience participation, and an experimental twist on engagement for "proper" museum exhibits. 
• In downtown San Francisco a pair of vacant newspaper kiosks were repurposed as miniature street museums. Recognizable as permanent fixtures on the sidewalk, the kiosks can be flexibly programmed hosting exhibits on relevant topics with a twist. "A World View of Puppets" highlights puppets as natural street performers. With built-in lights and corresponding QR codes, the kiosks function as 24-hour museums.

• Visitors to Barnington in County Durham (UK) will find 

the smallest World War I museum in a converted green British Telecom phone box. A retired villager was inspired to create the compact exhibit to honor his grandfather and the 15 men from the small village who fought and died in World War I. Renamed the Listening Post, the villager and his wife collected and installed historic items, newspaper articles, maps, and replicas.

• The Mobile Museum of Material Culture pulled by a tandem bicycle took to the streets of Madison (WI). Inspired by medicine men, street performers and traveling peddlers of the past, the collaborative project offered passersby the chance to experience objects rich in history and laced with mystery. They were invited to explore activities developed with repurposed vintage finds including an old medical instrument kit, small wooden drawers with now-unknown objects and mysterious written clues that prompted questions and fired conversations among friends and strangers. 

 • Puppet Bike has been a familiar sight in Chicago including in Andersonville, an old Swedish neighborhood, where I saw it. A gallery and a show mounted on a bike-puppet stage construction, it may push the concept of exhibit somewhat but is definitely idiosyncratic and animates the street corners throughout Chicago.  
• A Mile in Our Shoes: Stories About Transportation and Equity, is a participatory installation in a storefront window to encourage passersby to consider the experiences of others in their neighborhood. Works Progress, an artist-led Minneapolis collaborative, invited people who live and work near the Lake Street - Chicago Avenue intersection to contribute a pair of shoes and their story of what it is like to walk in those shoes. Pairs of shoes and excerpts from the stories were displayed in a window at Robert's Shoe Store.

• In the town of Tavira, Portugal, an old water tower has been converted into a Camara Obscura with a 100-year old lens and a rotating mirror. The Torre de Tavira projects a 360º "tour" of Tavira onto a large horizontal screen. On a clear day the "camera" can see up to 30 miles away for a full tour of the town and surrounding area.

• A mini-exhibition in a vintage fire hose box is scheduled to open in early 2015 at University and Raymond Avenues in. St Paul (MN). Undoubtedly the Smallest Museum in St. Paul, the 3’ x 2-1/2’ box is on an outside wall of the WORKHORSE COFFEE BAR. Intended to engage the commuting pubic along a new light rail line, the WORKHORSE plans to curate monthly mini-exhibitions using suggestions by artists, architects, historians and others from the neighborhood.

• Sometimes what begins as a small, personal collection finds its way into a museum. Michael Horvich began collecting as a young child, collecting miniatures, trinkets, artifacts, toys, jewelry, dollhouse furniture and more. For a time his collections were housed on shelves in the guest room in his house. Now his collection of 105 Curious Collections of Tiny Treasures is part of a permanent exhibit at Chicago Children’s Museum inspiring children to collect, curate, and share their discoveries of the world.

Making Makers

Years ago in Minnesota Children’s Museum exhibits department, we found ourselves hiring fabricators who had grown up on farms. They could weld, wire, and work with wood. They could take things a part and put them back together in the same, or different, ways. They found that interesting and engaging. They might have also had an MFA or mechanical engineering degree and sometimes they were a furniture maker or had picked up graphic design skills along the way. At heart, however, they were farm kids and makers and that’s what we cared about. 

There was a time, when many people were makers. They did hand work and crafts with their hands. Dads and older brothers fixed their own cars, built go-karts and ham radios, and wired the house. Women knitted, sewed, did needle work, baked bread, pickled and canned. Children built forts, made doll furniture, fashioned small weapons like slingshots, and watched their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and neighbors make things.

If our inclination to be makers is activated by our parents, it is to my mother I owe my making predilections. My mother has always loved working with her hands and figuring things out. She sewed, laid sod, hung wallpaper, and laid floors. For 50 years she took woodworking classes and made furniture. She only quit when she figured her woodworking teachers were born after she’d started taking classes. Over the decades she has built a tree house, a half-dozen doll beds, several trellises, a picnic table, 5 chests of drawers for 5 of her grandchildren, and a new fireplace mantle from her own designs, often with my father’s congenial assistance. At 89 years she laid a brick sidewalk and at 90 she allowed my brother and sister help her build a fence. With our mother as an example, it’s not surprising that all seven of us children would be considered makers. And the best of them went off to work on a ranch; he would have made a very fine fabricator.

Becoming Makers Again

Now, it seems, we are hoping to become makers again. My copy of a fresh look at making just arrived. Making Makers is by AnnMarie Thomas, a maker herself as well as an engineer, educator, and parent. An engineering professor at St. Thomas University in St Paul (MN), Thomas brings an important, but often-overlooked, perspective on how to encourage active, creative life-long learners, in this case, makers. Interviewing 39 adults accomplished in many areas about what they were like as children, it is clear they were all makers as children.

The makers she interviewed are writers, technologists, artists, designers, engineers, inventors, professors, and researchers. Leaders, founders, and entrepreneurs, they work in business, academia, community programs, restaurants, arts, and museums. Their creativity and making is expressed as clothing, robots, pipe organs, furniture, and medical devices. Many, if not most, straddle interdisciplinary areas and multiple contexts. All are introduced in the book.

Childhood as a formative time for makers threads throughout the book. The interviewees remember learning from books, magazines, and catalogues as children. They had access to real and varied materials, working tools, and projects of their choosing. They were intent on doing, making, and figuring things out: building, programming, repurposing, or drawing. Few dreams were too big for these children who worked to build a submarine, an airplane from a fallen log, a rocket, or a miniature golf course. We know these makers from photos of them as children, just as we know their childhood creations­: a plane, map, diorama, and home-made Tesla coil from photos, descriptions, and memories. They testify undeniably to the formative and durable nature of childhood in making makers, thinkers, and problem solvers.

Maker Mindset

We are often careful to balance the importance of a finished hands-on product with the value of the process. Less often, however, do we consider the traits and dispositions that support engagement with both process and product. Thomas does this, in fact, focusing on these traits in children. She distills and expands on a set of eight maker-relevant attributes that recur throughout the interviews.

Organizing anecdotes from childhood, Thomas connects the youthful spirit and enthusiasm that powered early maker projects with life-long dispositions and interests. No small coincidence, her list maps onto the non-cognitive skills critical to success in school, work, and life. Equally significant, several qualities–curiosity and playfulness, risk and persistence–are synonymous with children’s joyful, active engagement with their world.

The message is clear: To give children the best chance to be innovative thinkers, playful doers, persistent dreamers, responsible collaborators, make it easy for them to pursue their maker predilections.

• Curiosity. All children are curious but they are not all curious about the same things. Particular curiosities and interests fuel children’s desire to know, to try, to question, to find out, and to follow possibilities.

• Playfulness. Freely following their interests and ideas, children delight in manipulating sound, numbers, circuits, stories, clothing, and expressing possibilities that they joyfully pursue in many directions.

• Risk. Trusted with tools, free to set their own challenges, learning their limits from small injuries and unexpected results, children gain new skills and competencies from near misses, respect danger, and learn safety procedures.

• Responsibility. Entrusted to take on a meaningful role in making something bigger happen, helping others accomplish their goals, and accepting consequences build confidence, a sense of accomplishment, and pride.

• Persistence. Guided by a belief that they can figure out how to make just about anything, maker children keep trying in the face of setbacks, use multiple approaches to work around challenges, and iterate to get it right.

• Resourcefulness. Inspired by bits and bobs, undaunted by scarcity, improvising with what’s available, and developing a fluency with materials and tools children recognize and access the potential in what–and who–is available to move ideas forward.

• Generosity. Excited to try something new or hard, children often need and enjoy help from a more, older, or differently experienced maker. Exchange and connection, however, often go in many directions with children proudly sharing their skills, knowledge, tools, plans, and time.

• Optimism. Through making children leave a visible mark on the world, their mark. This act of making represents a delight in the possibility of change, a belief in making a difference, and concern for what comes next. 


 

Raising Makers

Children may be natural-born makers, but the adults in their lives are key partners in encouraging, supporting, extending, and inspiring children to become life-long makers, learners, tinkerers, and thinkers. Thomas provides a brief set of suggestions for adults who want to raise children who are makers. Parents, friends, teachers, neighbors, museum developers, designers, and educators need to be around and supportive, but don’t need to do the work of maker children. Sometimes adults may need to remove an obstacle a child could not; for instance, let Luc keep a 50-gallon oil drum in his bedroom. But, generally, adult support is indirect through:

• Sharing their passions

• Letting children follow their own interests

• Stepping back

• Teaching the importance of safety and responsibility

• Letting children get messy

• Not knowing all the answers

• Making something

Making Makers carries several messages. The one I find strong, clear, and compelling is that the maker experience for children is the stuff of childhood. It is the raw material for building life-long skills and the source of the directory for future makers, doers, thinkers, and problem solvers.

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Making and Tinkering: The Missing Piece

• Raising Citizens

• Managing Materials for Making and Tinkering 

•  Dialogue with Materials

• Children at the Center  

• Playing With Loose Parts

Childhood Autobiographies: Community

For a long time I have been fascinated by the responses and insights when people reflect on places they remember playing as children. In environmental autobiographies, people, typically adults, think of a place they spent time when they were young that they liked or went to frequently. Calling this place to mind and walking through it mentally, they revisit it unearthing memories and sensations about places they loved to play as children. Cherished friends, forgotten, are now remembered. Memories of smells of dry wood, damp dirt, and crushed leaves return. Stripes on a shirt, patterns on a quilt, details on a leaf are suddenly clear again.  

I shouldn’t be surprised that something comparably remarkable happens upon asking people to reflect on other experiences from their childhood: a friendship, feeling welcome and safe, an important adult, helping someone, taking a risk.

I have come to think of these as childhood autobiographies. Guided exercises, they are able to surface long ago moments and meaningful childhood memories in ways that delight adults remembering childhood and awaken them to the children they know, work with, and care for today.

Seeing Everyday Places

A childhood autobiography about community was a productive starting place for a recent half-day workshop, “Seeing Everyday Places: Connecting Children and their Communities” sponsored by the Reggio-inspired Network of Minnesota.  A group of 36 early childhood teachers, museum educators, school administrators, and university early childhood specialists gathered to review and reflect on the documentation of 4 projects facilitated by parent and teacher researchers who explored community settings with their children. The research project, “Seeing Everyday Places” is a collaboration between the Network and Minnesota Children’s Museum related to the Museum’s extensive renovation of its galleries.

Launched in January 2014, the project invited teachers and parents and their children to visit everyday community settings such as the post office, fire department, market, or hardware store to explore children's ideas about community. The Museum intends to incorporate children’s ideas and insights about community and places in its redesigned Our World gallery. These explorations of community began with questions about how people, places, work, and play interconnect and support neighborhoods, towns, and communities. Each group followed the interests and questions of the children about a setting, capturing their words and images to bring greater visibility to their thinking and understanding of community.

We Were All Children Once

Childhood autobiographies work because we were all children once. A very personal connection with children prepares us in thinking about and following children’s explorations. When we ask ourselves what we remember about community from when we were children, we are softening that barrier between our very adult perspective of today and a perspective that connects with children’s experiences, questions and ideas.

The 20-30 minute exercise invites each person to reenter their childhood, thinking back to ages 4, 5, or 6 years old. Relaxing, eyes closed, participants are invited to revisit childhood and scan memories and images from those years that connect somehow with community. Community may be related to a place, a building, or a natural area. It may connect with a person or group of people; or be associated with an event, image, words, or a feeling. Connections may be positive–or not–but they should be strong and worth unpacking.

When participants find something that resonates with from their childhood, they are invited to sit with it, turn it around, and re-familiarize themselves with it. They might consider some questions such as: What did you think your community was? What was important about it? What did it look or feel like? What fascinated you about it? Why? What did you wonder about? What or who encouraged you to wonder more about community?

If more than one moment or experience floats by, following both is helpful. Not only is community a rich, complex idea, but sometimes one recollection leads to another or adds meaning. Equally important, considering more than one perspective on community can open up listening to children’s varied ideas of community. Participants are invited to capture or record their thoughts by taking notes, creating and labeling a simple drawing, or writing a brief narrative. After about 5-10 minutes of reflecting, participants are asked to share recollections on one or two childhood experiences with someone sitting near them.

Recollections of Community from Childhood

Revisiting childhood experiences pulls distant moments forward into the present, making them accessible for further exploration. Returning to memories can place a person in the situation. Emotions, images, and sometimes sounds and smells float by to be examined and appreciated. Some people are inclined to visit longer than others. Yet, as members of the group begin to share reflections, everyone is drawn in. Heads around the room nod; people find and share connections.

Seven threads seemed to run through the childhood recollections about community within this group with some recollections pulling on more than one thread. An initial sort, these threads could be revised or refined with the addition of more childhood autobiographies.  

Community: places and people connected by relationships

• The neighborhood was the people I grew up with

• We were in the woods, in our own world. We had the freedom of space and time. That clearing in the woods, I can visit it today

• The first time I was making real connections to other people outside of my family.

• Children with children

Multiple and overlapping communities   

• My parents were divorced so I had three neighborhoods. My mom’s neighborhood in Minneapolis; my dad’s in St. Paul; and my grandmother’s neighborhood, for childcare

• There was my immediate neighborhood and the “mercantile” neighborhood within walking distance

• I didn’t think about my community as a child, but I was in a community. I was in a couple of communities. My main community was 28 square blocks. I knew people in all those places.

Children figure out community rules

• My community was where I felt welcome and safe. Would I be welcome? Were people glad to see me at the corner store? Would they share resources? Safe was risks and hazards, expectations, and social rules. What are the expectations and social rules in this neighborhood store or that neighborhood store? What were the resources that were available to me? At an early age, resource was the freedom to get something wonderful...touch something wonderful and have access to public restroom and water. And a grown up that could rescue you if something horrible happened.

Community connections change with age

• Playing sports was the first time of making real connections to other people outside my family

• Freedom to go explore community neighborhood space encouraged more independence to go out and explore

Children as agents in creating community

• We lived in a rural area where all the houses were summer homes except ours and one other family with 4 kids. We created our own community, made library cards...checked out books from our library. Isolated, we sought community around ourselves

Life lessons in everyday moments around the community

• We were just dragged around and included in things. Mom said, I gotta do this and I gotta be here...gotta mail a package...let's go

• You were just included; it wasn’t a huge intentional lesson, you were a part of things...that's just how it went

• Freedom to go explore community neighborhood space

Full of possibilities

• Children with children gave us a sense of empowerment. We were on our own, running from house to house, in our own world and creating it on our own

• Boundless possibilities

• Secret space

Following the Thread of Community

Childhood autobiographies prepare adults, whether they are parents, teachers, museum educators, exhibit developers or designers, to follow children’s questions and interests on a concept or an idea. Recollecting a community place and person from childhood or recalling a moment of understanding a feeling of connection personalizes our perspective and attunes our sensibilities to what children might find meaningful. New–or renewed–insights open doors to possible ways we might build on children's interests and extend their explorations of their community through exhibits, programs, and projects.  

Thinking back to your childhood, What did you think your community was? What was important about it? What did it look or feel like?

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Environmental Autobiographies:Remembering Childhood Places

• Documentation: From Reggio Schools to US Museums