Hello from California! This is just a note about some of the exciting work going on at the Oakland Museum of California. In the midst of renovating its public spaces and three galleries of art, history, and natural sciences, the museum is experimenting with different ways to incorporate community participation, prototype exhibit elements and galleries, and test the assumptions we all have about some of the "best practices" in the field.
While none of these experiments employs completely out-of-the-box techniques (such as the no-light environment of Dialogue in the Dark, or the water-filled gallery in Klima X), they do challenge long-held assumptions about curatorial and design authority, the exhibition development process, and the amount of money required to create exciting and compelling exhibitions.
This is about new approaches to history exhibition development and focuses on the current process of planning, designing, and installing the new Gallery of California History. The original gallery, which opened to the public in 1969, was conceived by Chief Curator L. Thomas Frye and designed by Gordon Ashby, who had worked with Charles and Ray Eames before setting up his own firm. The gallery installation became internationally known for its innovative new approach to the display of history materials: objects were taken out from under glass vitrines and displayed in aesthetic arrangements on beautifully constructed furniture, with a minimum of curatorial voice and didactic text.
The intention was that quotes and images, combined with an extraordinary density of objects, would encourage visitors to make their own meanings from the groupings of things on display. But the gallery had remained relatively unchanged for 40 years, with the exception of an addition in the 1980s of a section on contemporary California. Even though it still looked pretty good, and some visitors still loved it, it was getting a little worn around the edges. And the field had learned a lot about visitor needs and engagement since then. The museum was ready for a new gallery, one that hopefully built upon the successes of the past.
I joined the redesign project in the middle of design development. Staff had been working on the content program for at least five years. The design firm, selected and contracted through a rigorous RFP process, was at about 80% completion of design development. For many reasons, the exhibit design was leading the content development, and some staff were worried that the gallery would not "hold together" for visitors. I was brought in by Executive Director Lori Fogarty to develop a visitor experience narrative that would lead the design going forward.
Because the budget for the new gallery was modest—about $233 per square foot—the design firm was developing "the type of installation the museum could afford": primarily walls of text and graphics, some collection objects displayed in cases, and a modest use of media. The more we focused on the visitor experience—what visitors would actually do as well as see in the gallery, the more we realized that the proposed design afforded little more than looking and reading.
We decided to "start over" in a sense—to go back to the drawing board and experiment with ways to improve the visitor experience, incorporate more visitor interactivity and participation throughout, and provide more opportunities for visitors to contribute their own content and voices to the story of California. That was two and a half years ago. It is now nine months until opening, and we are totally immersed simultaneously in design, prototyping, fabrication, installation, and working with a variety of community groups and individuals to co-design elements of the new gallery (see photos below).
One of the first things we did was to rethink the Native Californian section at the beginning of the gallery. The proposed designs contained a section on "First Peoples," presenting the traditional anthropological approach to Native people: describing the ceremonies and tools of hunters and gatherers of a bygone era. When the visitor experience core team began meeting with the museum's Native Advisory Council, we had a number of epiphanies.
One advisor mentioned to me at a coffee break that "We are NOT the 'first people.' The first people were the rocks and the animals and the trees." Native people were, he told me, the second and third people. I asked the advisors what they called that pre-contact time period, and they replied, "before the other people came," which is now the name of that first section of the gallery. Soon afterwards, Native artists and videographers joined the exhibit team, and they are leading the development of content and imagery for that section.
Rather than trying to tell all the Native Californian stories at the beginning of the gallery, which is laid out chronologically, Native stories are incorporated throughout the gallery. "After all, we are still here," they remind us. Perhaps what is most significant, the stories are not all about artistic traditions and living in tune with nature. California history is rife with horrific stories of Native genocide and slavery, and the museum has not shied away from including these in the narrative of this place.
In another section of the gallery, currently called "Forces of Change" which deals with the period from 1960 to 1975, we are taking a slightly different approach to the notion of community co-design. Because this was a truly iconic and intense time in California, and because it contains so many different and powerful stories, early conceptual development was extremely difficult. What should we include and what should we leave out? We started by combining several sections from the previous exhibition plan, and realized there was no way we could jam all of the ideas we had identified into the available space. Dozens of design concepts ended in the recycling bin, as we struggled to distill the content.
We finally thought we had an elegant solution: one dramatically lit iconic object from each of over a dozen different identity movements and political groups. We drew it up and wrote it up and presented it to the museum's Latino, African American, Asian-Pacific, and Teacher's Advisory Councils for their review and comment. "Hmmmm . . ." they all said. "This is elegant and dramatic, but it doesn't accurately depict the chaotic and diverse spirit of the times." So it was back to the drawing board. Ultimately, the passion and eloquence of Advisory Council members, many of whom had lived through those times themselves, helped us realize that this was the perfect opportunity to experiment with another community co-design element.
I would like to thank Oakland Museum of California Executive Director Lori Fogarty, and Chief Curator of History Louise Pubols for their assistance in writing this article.
Next week, Kathy's post will describe the prototyping, decision, and development process she and the Oakland Museum staff are using in their design process.
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