Report from the Field: Oakland Museum of California

Kathleen McLean, the consulting Creative Director on the Oakland Museum of California History Gallery, will be a guest blogger for HPP for this week and next. She can be reached at www.ind-x.org.

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.

We identified 24 people from across California who lived through the 60s and early 70s, and invited them to design and create small niche displays depicting their personal experiences and memories of that time. They attended several workshops with us to explore potential design ideas and installation constraints. We're currently in the process of mocking up each niche with its creator, and experimenting with different ways to visually convey their stories. And we continue to struggle with trying to provide support and assistance without controlling their design process.

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.

Revisiting 1969, Part Two: The Year of Gay Liberation

1969: The Year of Gay Liberation on view at the New York Public Library between June 1, 2009 – June 30, 2009, Jason Baumann, Curator.

Exhibitions of contemporary history always risk becoming more celebratory than analytical and 1969: The Year of Gay Liberation was no exception. Documenting the year between the messy and misunderstood Stonewall Rebellion and the first New York Gay Pride March in 1970, this small exhibition unabashedly sympathized with its subject matter and screamed – “yeah, we finally fought back!”

And how could it not? Those of us who identify with or care about the struggle for basic civil rights in this culture cannot absorb or discuss this material dispassionately, even if it is now forty years old. The individual and organizational stories chronicled here are dramatic and compelling – drag queens who refused to be passively herded into police vans, scraggly members of the emerging and bold Gay Liberation Front, feminist lesbians proudly naming themselves The Lavender Menace, upending Betty Friedan’s famous disdain.

The objects preserved and presented here, all from the LGBT archives of the NYPL are gritty, scrappy, and fragile. They are mimeographed announcements, grainy photos, staple-pricked fliers, articles torn from magazines and newspapers. But this is potent ephemera, never coolly displayed or distantly interpreted. This is emotional territory, so emotional that many still don’t view it as legitimate history. Why have there been so few projects of LGBT history here in Philly?

Jason Baumann, exhibition curator and Coordinator of LGBT Collections at The New York Public Library claims “The year 1969 marks the first time homosexuals united, demanded, and were willing to fight for full inclusion within American society. As a result of the actions taken during this time gays and lesbians marked a paradigmatic shift not only in the ways that they saw themselves but also in how the world would see them.”

Maybe so. But I would argue that this exhibition is so celebratory that it forgets its context. Stonewall was in many ways a culmination of decades of civil rights work by homosexuals, rather than a catalyst. A rite of passage rather than a birth. On July 4, 1965, a group of gays and lesbians marched in front of Independence Hall at the first national march for homosexual rights (there’s a state historical marker in front of the Hall marking this event – really – go see it). And after World War II, many gay people chose to stay on the West Coast rather than return to their small towns. It was there, in California in the 1950s, that the first large-scale gay rights organizations in the U.S. formed, with hundreds of members (the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis).

This isn’t to deny the importance of documenting the story of Stonewall, or this exhibition and its presentation of these ordinary, extraordinary objects. The celebration is in many ways understandable. Jason Baumann’s appointment as a curator of LGBT collections is in itself a bold act worth celebrating. Pursing a truly inclusive practice of history remains an ongoing, complicated project. Those of us in the public history field know that the presentation of history is contentious, imperfect, fluid, and crucial. That’s why we go to work every day.

Bill Adair is the Director of Heritage Philadelphia Program.

It’s not Easy, Greening NYC…

…and the “Growing and Greening New York” exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York’s explains precisely why.  MCNY has developed an exhibit detailing the city’s environmental challenges and how PlaNYC intends to address them. 

The city’s admirable (if unpronounceable)PlaNYC  initiative strives to “improve the city while confronting climate change,” focusing specifically on the city’s land, water, air, transportation, energy, and climate change.  Mayor Bloomberg’s goal in creating PlaNYC is to enhance the quality of living and decrease the carbon footprint for today’s 8 million New Yorkers as well as the additional 1 million who will live there by 2030. 

As the website details, some of PlaNYC’s goals include planting 1 million trees by 2017, ensuring every resident is a 10-minute walk from a park, achieving the cleanest air quality of any big city in the US, and reducing global warming emissions by 30 percent. 

The exhibit walks the viewer through a day in the life of a typical New York resident, starting with the 7 a.m. shower, the 8 a.m. commute to work, 6 p.m. shopping, etc.  Each of the 7 portions of the day/exhibit does an in-depth study on one focus of PlaNYC’s.  For instance, the 7 a.m. shower section details how much water is used by New Yorkers daily, how it gets from the pipes underground to the residences and businesses above ground, how to save water with low flow shower heads, and so on. 

One of the exhibit’s pieces of new media is the ActivStudio by Promethean.  This interactive white board projects an image onto the screen and allows the user to further explore by touching the screen’s hot spots with the “magic pen.”  While in theory very cool, the resolution of the screen was such that I had to back up about 3 feet to read it, then walk back to the screen again to touch it and continue to the next section.  It would have been a wonderful medium for the content (the screen explained about the different species of trees in Central Park and their locations), but it was ineffective and disappointing. 

“Growing and Greening New York” also had an indigestible amount of content. While viewing the exhibit, I was nearly asphyxiated by the word smog (though I admittedly spent the rest of the weekend spouting random facts to anyone who would listen).  There was simply too much information to absorb.  In the food/shopping section, for example, practically the whole of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma was crammed into one 6-foot-long table.   If I wasn’t already naturally interested in the topic, I would have found it easy to breeze through the exhibit in 20 minutes (as many others did). 

With no artifacts in the exhibit, and only a few historical references (to the city’s 160-year-old pipes, for example), historians may question the appropriateness of this exhibit in a traditionally historical museum.  MCNY’s mission statement—“to explore the past, present, and future of New York City”—however, enables this museum to exhibit a wide variety of topics.  I found the focus on the future very appropriate, given PlaNYC's mission and the nature of climate crisis in general; and any more content (be it past, present, or future) may have sent viewers' heads spinning and lost the audience completely.

What do you think?  Does the focus on the future and lack of history diminish the historical authority of this museum?  Does it attract audiences or lose them?  Tell us what you think by clicking “comments” below!

“Growing and Greening New York” is at the Museum of the City of New York until April 12.

Mary Gen Davies, a recycling addict, is Program Associate at Heritage Philadelphia Program.