Way To Grow, Minnesota Children’s Museum

Photo credit: Minnesota Children's Museum

In reviewing a big museum project, we tend to review the building, a new wing and the exhibitions. At the top of the review is the project cost, facility square footage, the number of new galleries, new acquisitions, major donors, and sponsors. Depending on the project, the design team, architects and exhibit designers are mentioned.

On June 7^th, Minnesota Children’s Museum cut the ribbon and opened its doors to a major renovation and expansion. Its $30 million campaign, Room To Play, launched in 2011 helped grow the building from 65,000 to 74,000 square feet. The makeover represents 35% more space for visitors. The Museum is, as billboards, bus sides, its website, and Facebook page announce, Bigger, Better, Bolder.

Imaginopolis is created and recreated countless times each day.

The obvious, and exciting changes are more experiences and added amenities. The ten exhibits offer a wider range of experiences and interesting spaces that are more open-ended. A maker space; a four-story climber with a super speedy spiral slide; Sprouts a larger early childhood space; a second outdoor area; Forces at Play, Imaginopolis, and Super Awesome Adventures with a Laser Maze have been added to a new Our World, and TipTop Terrace. 

There added amenities, from a skyway-level entrance, café and coffee bar; more bathrooms; more seating, and a kitchenette in Sprouts. An easier entry experience through the parking-connected skyway and another elevator improve circulation. On my two visits prior to opening and at the ribbon cutting ceremony, I noticed crowds move easily through the spaces, bigger kids as part of family groups, natural light filling more areas of the Museum, and a beautiful space that someone described as a part art museum and part place for play.

Deeper, Less Visible Growth

While all new exhibits, and expanded footprint, and more amenities attest to Bigger, Better, Bolder, MCM has accomplished more than that. The deeper, less visible ways MCM has grown count in the long run.

From the start, it was clear that a major expansion of the building was going to be challenging. In 1995 I was head of exhibits and education at MCM when the Museum re-located to a new building in downtown St. Paul. The site was small with limited space for physical growth, but the new 65,000 s.f. building easily accommodated the 350,000 visitors who came the first year–doubling previous attendance.

Over the years, attendance climbed to regularly surpassing 450,000 visitors annually at the downtown St Paul location. It became apparent that something needed to be done to ease the crowding. Opportunities for expansion had been designed into the original building: adding a floor, building into the small side yard and filling in the street-front setback, and filling in a mezzanine level. But the building was virtually landlocked.

Moving through new spaces, an adventure and better circulation

Aldo Leopold might not readily come to mind in thinking about museum expansions. In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold observed that, “To build a road is so much simpler than to think about what the county really needs.” To build a new building or wing, some museum leaders and writers suggest, is simpler than addressing long-term visitation problems. (here and here).

While every major project is an opportunity to grow institutional value and physical presence, physical growth, a new building or wing, usually wins out–and not necessarily with the best results. Growing value involves going to the core, remembering and reconnecting with what is fundamental, staying true to the audience. Growing value relies absolutely on paying attention to what is necessary but invisible.

Even as the Museum conducted a capital campaign and worked with its architects MSR Design and exhibit planners, Gyroscope, Inc. (on whose team I served), it directed resources thoughtfully and from the beginning to institutional growth.

Throughout the process, MCM invested where its visitors would benefit directly from the expansion and renovation: 35% more space for visitors and more amenities. To go deeper into the structure of its value, the Museum also studied itself, its audience, and its stakeholders. By the grand re-opening, MCM's extensive platform around the power of play had brought on friends, leaders, and the community as its partners. 

My folder with the studies MCM conducted to guide expansion is thick and interesting to look at in retrospect. “Inspiring Future Growth” summarizes the results of a questionnaire to over 900 parents of children in the age range. A “clicker” study analyzed traffic, space usage, tickets, and attendance in 2011 and compared it to a 2004 study. A white paper summarized research on play and learning. The Museum also conducted a survey on play with its members. A focus area assessment explored perceptions of the Museum’s learning value. A brand study, stakeholder engagement audit, and technology scan round out the set of studies. The Museum has generously shared some of these studies on their website.

The Museum diligently used its planning time to plumb its foundational thinking and, in the process, I believe, internalized its core purpose to a significant new degree. 

Play to the 7th power

Sparking children’s learning through play, the Museum’s mission, could have been a catchy slogan with a new look for the reopening. Instead, the Museum engaged in a sustained investigation around play.  Drawing on research on the value of play, the Museum connected why play matters with skills that are crucial to children’s learning, well-being, social interactions, and creativity. Dubbed the Seven Powers of Play, opportunities to practice skills such as creative thinking, collaboration, and communication were deliberately incorporated into design, activities, and material selection, and messages. The 7 Powers of Play are posted through out the galleries.

An  intentional approach also brought parents and caregivers to the forefront. Parental adults have a key role in encouraging children’s play and exploration. Their interests and comfort must be provided for whether through seating, restrooms, or anticipating their reactions to play’s mess or a lack of structured experiences. While the novelty and ambiguity of spaces, materials, and structures may invite playful exploration, they also can create uncertainty and hesitation for adults and for children about how to get started. Full-scale prototypes of Creativity Jam in 2013 and 2015 and Forces at Play in 2016 took on some of these challenges, testing engagement strategies for adults, messaging, and staff prepared to facilitate free-choice, open-ended play experiences.

The Museum’s comprehensive view of play and its value has been adapted to messages for multiple audiences and across platforms using a friendly, engaging tone. #PlayMoreMN invites members and visitors to post their stories and photos of powerful play that it has defined as captivating and fun, active and challenging; self-directed and open-ended. Tips on Let’s Play helps parents and caregivers enhance the learning that occurs through children’s play.  Successful People Play videos profile how leaders, friends, educators, artists, and chefs in Minnesota play. Since opening the Museum has also launched Stand Up for Play, a community campaign to make play a priority.

While the Museum has been for and about play since its founding more than 35 years ago, over the last seven years it has become an advocate and a leader for play. And it shows. MCM President and CEO, Dianne Krizan, encouraged creativity by letting children play in her recent Commentary in the Star Tribune. A joyous spirit of play also shows throughout the Museum as children paint their faces, spiral down the slide, transform a light-filled landscape, set off a chain reaction, wash a vehicle with bubbles, and build forts, and discover the possibilities of play.   

Way to go, Dianne, Barbara, Jess, Jennifer, Mary, Kirstin, Joe, Blake, Michelle, Bob, and so many more! 

Forces At Play

Photo Credit: Richard Tsong-Taatarii

Museums use the word engaged in describing visitors wholeheartedly involved with activities. They are engaged when they try different features of a component, repeat actions and add variations, show others what to do, talk about what they are doing, or stick with an activity for a long time. Engaged is what museums hope for in creating exhibits and programs, in connecting people with one another and with the museum, and in having an impact.

In Forces at Play at Minnesota Children’s Museum, children and adults are ENGAGED. They are engaged with water, air, and bubbles; with hoses, cranks, and valves; pipes and pumps; sprayers and suds; blowers, brushes, and balls; with children and adults, with people they know well and with friends they just met.  

Opening on August 31, Forces at Play is the first new permanent gallery of the Museum’s $30 million expansion and renovation to be completed in April 2017. This IMLS-funded project makes what children (and adults) find fascinating–air and water–intriguing, accessible, and joyful.  

Designed for a primary audience of children 4 through 10 years and their caregivers, the gallery’s secondary audience is children 3 years and under and their caregivers. An overarching focus is on actively engaging visitors’ critical thinking through open-ended, self-directed play and materials exploration, and reinforced with an engineering layer. Along with creating a compelling water experience, the Museum wanted to add air as another medium for investigation. With this combination, the Museum also hoped to move the upper end of the age range closer to 10 years.

The exhibit’s design, activities, real materials, and abundant loose parts wholeheartedly invite everyone to try something, to fit pipes together, twist tubes apart, press levers, aim a hose, or pull on a gate valve. The promise that doing something will make something interesting happen is met. Ping pong balls hover in the air; feathers fly; suds climb through tubes; dots of light appear by pressing a wet finger. The words “wash me” appear seemingly from nowhere as warm water spills across a surface.

From Air Play to Water Play

Two main areas, air play and water play, both with designated tot spots for very young children are connected by a ramp. Giant hanging dryer tubes line the ramp; they are both functional–for drying off–and for investigation–making the overhead Mylar strips dance. In air play, visitors connect tubes, aim blowers, and adjust valves to launch ping pong balls at the Blower Build Stations. They start a chain reaction by pumping air into tubes at various air sources and trigger spinners and propellers. And they use prediction and timing in launching ping pong balls into traffic cone targets.      

In the water play area visitors crank the giant blue carwash brush to make it spin; draw images with water on a panel of LED lights; fill a series of basins with water to start a cascade; and transform trays of bubble solution with dichroic gels. Undoubtedly, the main attraction of the entire gallery is the Car Wash Bonanza. Parked in the car wash is a fantastic vehicle constructed from parts of 13 different vehicles. If pretending to drive a car is fun, then driving one with the hood of a VW bug, the door of a police car, the back of a city bus, and wheels of 4 different sizes (including a giant tractor wheel), is a dream beyond belief.  

The vehicle’s varied contours, surfaces, and colors beg to be washed, rinsed, and polished. When the car wash cycle begins, the wash, rinse, dry lights light up in succession dispensing suds, a clean rinse, and puffs of air. At the 4-cylinder bubble engine, children crank and pump bubbles delivered through 4 different tubes. Nearby, dozens of brushes that do work of every sort, hang ready for scrubbing and buffing. There’s a job, a brush, or a hose for everyone.

The SteamPunk Side of Seuss

Forces at Play is designed by Gyroscope, Inc. (Oakland CA) and built by Kidzibits (Minneapolis, MN) and the Museum’s in-house fabricators.

The design brief expressed the gallery’s look-and-feel as the SteamPunk Side of Seuss. More than a clever trope, this image inspired a deconstructed design aesthetic that is spare, inventive, functional, whacky, beautiful, and occasionally surprising. Conceptually, it served to strip away layers from how we often experience the forces of air and water in museum settings and everyday situations. Right at the entry, four powerful air blowers stripped of casings are visible through a glass window and help make obvious how air is delivered to the floor blowers that lift balls and float feathers.

Decisions in lay out, materials, and surfaces contribute to the transparency. Open sight lines keep the large, 3,400 square foot space visually simple, mechanisms visible, and freedom of movement easy. Stripped to essentials, the car wash and vehicle are simple frameworks with intriguing elements and quirky twists: the rearview mirror of a Mack Truck, the hood ornament of a Minneapolis Moline tractor, old license plates, or suds oozing from a hose like soft-serve ice cream.

A consistent use of stainless steel panels throughout brings order to abundant brushes, raincoats, and visitor comments. Against neutral gray walls, the orange traffic cones and yellow fans pop. Beauty is in the details of the copper pipe Water Contraption, the shallow pools of the Ripple Effect, and the bubbles spilling through the Water Graffiti.  

Wet and Whacky

Although Forces at Play is still new, the Museum is dealing successfully with operational issues many museums face in less ambitious exhibits: water, loose parts, text, and adult engagement.

With multiple water hoses around the care wash, Forces at Play is definitely wet, especially under the vehicle. Floor contouring, drain, and water-proof non-porous surfacing result in surprisingly little standing water. Raincoats with hoods in all sizes and distributed in several areas are handy. Drying off is easy, engaging, and accessible: at a bank of hand dryers, at the dryer tubes on the ramp, or from a rub down at the big carwash brush. Children will get wet, a little or a lot, but so far no one seems to mind. That may change when an Alberta Clipper passes through Minnesota in January.

The Museum does not just tolerate water and loose parts–tubes, ping pong balls, brushes–but embraces them. Essential to materials exploration, brushes, dichroic gel, suds, feathers, tubing, ping pong balls, water, and air are plentiful. Brushes are intended to travel from the tool bin to the Car Wash to Water Graffiti. Loose materials, says the exhibit’s developer, Mary Weiland, are meant to live on the ground where they are visible, accessible, and suggest possibilities.

Signs are scarce and, when present, are short. One says, “Directions. (There aren’t any.) And that’s on Purpose.”  The absence of signs telling what to do or why it is important makes a point. If play is a strategy for learning then big play provides big learning opportunities. In Forces At Play, concepts like flow and pressure can be experienced directly. Understanding them well may be in the future, but the joy of investigating them, working with others, and making things happen with water or air–are decidedly in the present where it matters.

On my two visits to the gallery, I saw everyone get into the act, from wobbly walkers to 10 and 11 year olds, to parents, grandparents, and staff. In contrast to so many exhibits where adults hang back, look on, or tap their phones, here they were as active as the children. The exhibit makes it easy to connect over a ping pong ball flying by or a water hose misfiring. One parent slipped away from the family at the Feather Blaster to tweak the chain reaction one more time.     

Conversation flows. A father explains what windshield wipers do; a mother suggests her son increase the water pressure; a grandmother asks, “what if we…?” Often, and with adults in the lead, silliness and group fun erupts. Families blow their hair into crazy styles, shoot ping pong balls at each other, strike silly poses with squeegees, and give each other rubdowns with the giant blue brush. Staff gets into the act too. Jordan put on a soapy mit and polished the vehicle’s red truck door, directed the air hose at the Mylar strips, and danced with the air dancers.

Off Kilter and On Target

Before Forces At Play was a wet and whacky car wash temporarily called Scrub Hub, it was a STEM gallery with more structured water, air, and light experiences. The design was strong and the exhibit was accomplishing its broad goals. Following an advisors’ meeting during Schematic Design, the Museum team seriously considered the advisors’ input and rethought the exhibit approach. The result was a much deconstructed exhibit, with a car wash that hit harder on critical thinking, play, and materials exploration. In my role as a project advisor, I was initially hesitant about changing direction at that point in the process and where a car wash exhibit might lead. The team’s instincts were on the mark.

I applaud the Museum’s courage to look critically at its work and create a wet, windy, and whacky experience. At many points in the planning process, the museum could have backed up and, conceptually, mopped up the experience. Very likely, the exhibit would have been engaging. Instead, MCM chose to venture where museums often talk of going, but seldom do: creating open-ended exploration around what is fascinating to children (and adults) and involves abundant loose parts and a play-rich mess as a way to explore STE(A)M.

This is play as we seldom see it in museums. Unlike the structured play that exhibits tend to provide, here is a glimpse of play among children of different ages directing their play, following their ideas, and transforming objects. This is play that flows, folds an interruption into a planned scenario, expands to include more children, even children who don’t know each other.

The promise that anyone can make something happen in this gallery is ever present. I watched a 3-year old girl carefully load 3 ping pong balls into a clear tube laying on its side near, but unconnected to, a blower. She focused intently, as if expecting the balls to move. When nothing happened, she placed 2 more balls in the tube and waited. When still nothing happened she looked into the end of the tube; she then shifted the tube one way and then the other. She continued making small adjustment after small adjustment. When she accidently passed her hand across the blower, the ball she held flew up and hovered in mid air. The delight on her face predicted a new round of investigation.

To the forces at play with water and air in this gallery, I would have to add the forces of curiosity, persistence, thinking, and delight that are at play and make this a success.

Between Planning and Chance

Chance favors the prepared mind.

Attributed to Louis Pasteur

You plan and you plan and then you just have to acknowledge that some things will be left to chance.

This plannerism is one I keep in mind especially when deeply involved in a planning project that is winding down and moving towards implementation. What comes after planning? Opening a museum, launching a strategic plan, activating a learning framework, or unveiling an exhibition is much like the moment of taking off the training wheels and riding. What happens next?

This moment of transition from planning to action characterizes many aspects of museum work as well as teaching, planning a trip, finding a job, or, for that matter, life. For conferences, board retreats, organizational budgets, visitor panels, exhibition planning, or a strategic partnership, we can get the right people together, gather the needed information, meet with stakeholders, check-off the steps, develop a critical path, and have the right people in place. 

I suspect that, even when we have planned well, what we really want is an extraordinary version of our plan to play out, delivered by remarkable opportunities and chance.

We may be poised for opportunities, but we never know until the very moment whether we will recognize them or be able to act on them. Chance is not necessarily the unexpected popular guest arriving with impeccable timing. Sometimes chance shows up as back-to back blizzards, illness, or road construction. While we don't know just what chance will deliver or when, chance will play a role. 

Even with a firm a belief in the value of planning and the preparation it provides, how can we leave room for chance? Will we be ready when the ideal site is available long before we planned to start a site search? Can we take advantage of a special granting opportunity when we don’t have all the right people in place? We cannot predict, schedule or invoke opportunity or a lucky break. But we can find ways to make space for chance in planning and in living the plan.

Intentionality and Thinking in Time

From a strategic agenda to a conference agenda, from facility design to exhibition design, planning is being deliberate about accomplishing something significant for a museum, its visitors, and community. We identify the steps along the way and the means for accomplishing them–time, space, prepared staff, funds, and partners. As well as knowing what we want to achieve and encourage, we must also know what we are not after; we need to be alert to signals and precursors of opportunity and wrong turns that might lie on our path.

The larger a planning intention is, the more comprehensive planning will be. Yet, planning is not having everything figured out and tied with a bow. Rather than a script for the future, planning, at its best, develops a shared clarity about what is important and what we hope will happen. Because the future is necessarily uncertain, planning is as much a way of thinking and preparing for possible opportunities as having a detailed plan. Both strategic thinking and design thinking activate a static plan document or rendered exhibition design by the everyday thinking that continues long after the plan is officially complete.

When staff continues to focus on a plan's or project's purpose and intent, they are able to generate relevant insights that allow the museum to be nimble in a dynamic context. Thinking in time and making an integrated set of choices help optimize opportunities and navigate challenges whether the project is opening a satellite facility, launching a professional development center, creating a nature area, adding a maker space, or incorporating dialogue into interactions with visitors. This is living the plan.

Near and Far Horizons

Fast forward. A plan has been launched. A strategy team is meeting for the first time. The exhibit has opened and visitors are streaming through the gallery doors. The creativity framework is being shared across museum departments.

On the heels of completing a plan a critical but subtle shift occurs: merging day-to-day choices with overarching purpose. Living the letter of a plan is, on the one hand, artificial and rigid. Plans, frameworks, and exhibit designs are, necessarily, idealized versions of what we think should happen. In contrast, implementation is immersion in immediate, practical circumstances constantly in flux. Focusing completely on the everyday at the exclusion of the big picture can lead down rabbit holes and obscure opportunities and new possibilities.

Living in both the plan’s far and near time frames is vital. Active dialogue between them and alertness to approaching opportunities is facilitated by frequent discussions that easily shift between; they link the big picture with current choices. As decision points approach, we revisit past decisions in light of current information. We adjust our view to look at the big picture with a broader or narrower perspective. Reassessing the situation sometimes requires letting go and starting a new path. Challenging assumptions, noticing information that doesn’t fit, and being wary of confirmation bias help trefocus or bring developing conditions into focus.

J. P. Morgan noted, in planning as in life, we go as far as we can see. When we get there, we can see farther. What was invisible or out of view earlier is now visible and apparent.

Awake and Alert to the Moment

A plan isn’t going to send up flares to announce an approaching opportunity. Being alert and awake to the moment is the only remedy; it is, however, not as simple as it seems. An unlikely combination of concentration and responsiveness, it requires keeping a steady focus on what is to be accomplished, a openness to alternatives, and readiness for an adaptive response.

Difficult to put into in words, it is equally challenging to pull off in the moment. The image of a dowser holding a divining rod lightly in order to sense the tug of water far below suggests a readiness for the unexpected

In the municipal infant-toddler centers and preschools in Reggio Emilia (IT), one expression of planning is a well-developed structure and thoughtful organization that support teachers in guiding children’s explorations. A clear, but broad, agenda and preparation inform teachers’ choices as children pursue interests and follow bigger ideas. Extensive explorations, often spreading over weeks and even months, emerge from a focus on a well-planned activity, reflection on what’s occurring, and a responsiveness to children’s interests and questions.

While in a classroom, not a museum and in a pedagogical rather than a strategic frame, teachers concerned with larger goals are also attuned to what is happening as children express fascination and ask questions. Teachers are alert to what is happening, what might happen, and are ready to capitalize on an unanticipated twist or happy accident when chance comes to the classroom.

Reflection and Action

Along with intentionality and thinking in time, embracing near and far time horizons, and being alert and awake in the moment, reflection and action inhabit the time and space between planning and chance.

Practiced individually or as a group, reflection introduces important qualities not readily available and decidedly different from what task-driven action and decision-making pressures yield. In stepping away from the everyday, even if briefly, reflection creates a space for paying critical attention, making sense of what has occurred, and consolidating learning. Through reflection we may backtrack through choices, ask new questions, re-sort information, and reassess progress. We may integrate intention with actual experience, synthesize opposing ideas, and connect knowledge from prior experience to current options and choices. A new continuity emerges from hundreds of separate steps and actions.  

Reflection generates new ways of seeing. By reprocessing information, we may understand differently what has or hasn’t happened–or what could have happened. We may see something that wasn’t apparent before or see it in a new light. Bringing a new viewpoint to a situation can re-frame a problem, discover an ally, find a fertile a crack between two obstacles, or reveal ways to restructure work and move forward.

Insights from reflection often offer a glimpse of the possible, an imagination of what might happen. It might put us on a path to deliberate action that we couldn’t have appreciated before; open a door we didn’t know was there. We may recognize an opening for action.

Even if the space between planning and chance is different from what we sometimes wish it were, it is, nevertheless, roomy, rich, and often unexplored territory. Sometimes it delivers the results of hard work rather than a free sample. Sometimes it produces a generous shift rather than an ordered gift. But under a few right conditions, the space between planning and chance delivers.

 “… something incredibly wonderful happens.”

Frank Oppenheimer

Engaging with Matisse

Purple Robe and Anemones (1937)

There was no missing that a major Matisse exhibition was in the Twin Cities recently. For more than 3 months, every walk, bus ride, or freeway trip was in some way in view of a poster of Purple Robe and Anemones. Matisse, Masterworks from the Baltimore Museum of Art was at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts from February 23 to May 18, 2014.

Organized and circulated by the Baltimore Museum of Art, the exhibition spans 6 decades of Matisse’s career. It features 50 works of painting and sculpture, 30 prints, and the artist’s book, Jazz.  Most of the artworks came from the Cone Collection. Two Baltimore sisters–Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone–acquired an exceptional collection of 3,000 modern works (displayed in their apartments) including 500 works by Matisse.

With the exhibition’s announcement in April 2013 and its review on February 22, 2014 in the Star Tribune, visiting Matisse was on everyone’s A-list, especially this cold bleak Twin Cities winter stretching into April. The exhibition was high on my list as well. I have long loved Matisse’s vibrant patterns, broad blocks of color in unusual combinations, and emphatically flat compositions.

Drawing with scissors activity

Due to a busy couple of months for most of the exhibition’s run, I only made it to Matisse on a rainy Sunday afternoon in late April. When I did finally visit and with only 3 weeks before closing, I kept finding successive ways of engaging with Matisse and his work. Altogether, I toured the exhibition twice, listened in on a docent’s tour, eavesdropped on my husband’s audio guide, heard friends’ impressions, took photos, talked with a guard, observed families drawing with scissors, browsed in the museum shop, and visited a companion exhibit, Chasing Matisse, one floor up. This group of multiple experiences differs significantly from my typical pattern of a single visit to an exhibition as it does for most people, I think. While some of my encounters were serendipitous, I nevertheless enjoyed them and valued the intense and extensive engagement they all provided and they added up to.

Now, three weeks later, impressions of the exhibition are strong and surface pleasantly in both substantive and fleeting ways. I continue to make connections and solidify understandings grounded in Matisse. I'm following connections between comments and text, find a question, and recall a fragment from a painting. I am aware of feeling greater interest in the artist's smaller paintings than in his larger paintings, prints or sculptures and to some paintings like Interior, Flowers and Parakeets (1924) especially. At certain moments, I can conjure up the feeling of being back in the exhibition space and enjoying the sensation of a portrait dissolving into pure pattern.

Still Life, Compote, Apples, and Oranges (1899)

An image of the awkward hands folded gracelessly in the lap of The Yellow Dress (1929-1931) persists as well. This detail of the painting troubles me, insisting I explore the reason: its unfinished quality? its clumsiness? something else? I also hear a voice expressing how Matisse feels upon completing a composition, “Each picture, as I finish it, seems like the best thing I have ever done…and yet, after a while, I am not so sure.” It captures perfectly the highs and lows of finishing an exhibition, a master plan, a garden bed, or blog post.

In a daily way, patterns and colors of fabrics surrounding me vibrate more. I want to buy oranges because I remember their rich color in Still Life, Compote, Apples, and Oranges (1899). 

Durable Experiences

Through multiple exposures to an exhibition and its elements, we gather more pieces of information, draw on others’ perspectives, and anchor ideas in other knowledge we hold. The deeper, richer, possibly transformative experiences we hope exhibitions offer visitors rely on aligning a multitude of factors that are intended and serendipitous and that we can and can’t control.  But when exhibitions do manage this choreography of various entry points, complementary opportunities, and extended engagement, they create durable experiences that carry high personal value and lasting impact for visitors and resonate over time.

The character of durable experiences is sufficiently complex that it can't be collapsed into a quick list of criteria and folded into exhibition planning. However, identifying factors that might support durable experiences for visitors could help us understand how to increase the impact and value of experiences museums create. The four qualities below came through in my extended encounters with Matisse. Broadly speaking, they seem to support durability in ways that reflect the complexity of exhibition experiences and our growing understanding of learning in museums. 

• The Necessity of Time. Learning, making connections, or incubating ideas needs time. Even though I had an interest in and some familiarity with Matisse, I found I had little background for the focus of this exhibition. A second visit afforded me another opportunity to build up background knowledge. For instance, I needed to read some panels multiple times and on both visits to build the vocabulary for following the panels and consolidating ideas the exhibition covered. Also, it wasn’t until the end of my second visit that the interconnectedness of the artist’s work came into focus. His investigations of issues in sculpture informed his paintings; he drew models and then did paintings of them; in his prints Matisse explored formal concerns related to his sculpture.

• Conversation as Intensifier. Whether occurring within or outside an exhibit, conversation and dialogue serve as intensifiers, the way really is an intensifier that adds emotional context to a statement. Conversations introduce new perspectives, create openings, and activate possibilities for making connections and meaning in an exhibition. My friend told me Matisse’s creative process interested her most which I hadn’t thought about on my first visit. On my second visit, I looked for evidence of his creative process and glimpsed it in the 22 highlighted changes that Matisse made to Large Reclining Nude (1935). Nina’s interest alerted me to this propensity to return to and rework compositions, making his thinking about form, color, and line visible. Moreover, I saw this as documentation and how creative thinking might be made visible in an exhibition.

• Accumulated Experiences. Multiple, related, and complementary experiences sampled over the course of several weeks extended my engagement with Matisse to open up his remarkable body of work. When accessible, accumulated experiences can be sticky. It is as if each collected experience sets down another adhesive layer with the possibility of more, deeper, and lasting connections. An audio guide, a reading area, the MIA website’s Exhibition Preview, interactions with other visitors, text panels, and the artworks themselves are not unusual experiences for a museum to offer with an exhibition. Most visitors, however, typically accumulate only one or two of the many experiences available. A guard at the MIA told me about Chasing Matisse, the MIA’s companion exhibit one floor up. The reading area prominently located in a corner in the last gallery was well used on both visits. 

• Sustained Attention. Eric Siegel of the New York Hall of Science uses the term, sustained attention, in his recent interview with Museum2.0 blogger Nina Simon. Sustained attention, the several hours of attention we give a book or a movie, is one of the goals behind NYSCI’s experiment with a new medium for museums, an ebook. An ebook on the challenging subject of forensic science and the problem of false convictions and my extended engagement with Matisse are vastly different experiences. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, they help illustrate the importance of sustaining interest and attention in a topic, question, or issue to increase durability. Both point to the need for exhibitions–in fact for a substantial portion of museum work–to be compelling, have impact; and for the experience to leave the museum with the visitor, move into everyday lives, inform daily choices, and influence the future. 

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Experience Goals for Exhibitions

• Framing Experiences