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 One: Woodstock

There are times when I really regret being born a Gen-Xer. Recounting all the incredible events that took place 40 years ago has convinced me that I’m really a hippie at heart who was born a few decades too late.

I may not have had any control over when I was born, but I’m grateful that I can to relive those experiences that I missed (as much as is possible without ingesting illegal substances). I recently decided to take my little hippie heart—clad in my modern-day Birkenstocks (i.e. Chacos) and driving a hybrid car—to the one-year-old museum established at the site of Woodstock.

Part of the fun is actually finding the place: winding around rural New York, through little towns, past expansive farms and grain silos, I came to truly appreciate the hundreds of thousands of people who found the site before the days of Mapquest.

The Museum at Bethel Woods is a museum dedicated to the 1960s in general and Woodstock specifically and is accompanied on the same site by the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts—a performance center where concerts are held regularly, keeping that musical heritage alive. Both are positioned directly on the site where the three-day music festival was held on Max Yasgur’s farm.

The museum’s permanent exhibit begins with a timeline of the 1960s (highlighting both political events from various years as well as songs that were released each year) which set the stage for Woodstock’s birth, 40 years ago this weekend. While I enjoyed progressing through the decade and learning the history of the concert, a few features in particular captured my interested.

Rounding one bend, I found myself face-to-face with a converted school bus with flower power and psychedelic décor all over the outside and bench seats (as expected) inside. Once seated, a short video about how the multitudes were transported to the concert was projected onto the inside of the window shield. I smiled at the 8-tracks stacked at the back of the bus and the copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring next to the driver’s seat; my imagination transported me to what it must have been like to be traveling on the bus en route with hundreds of thousands of others to this unparalleled event.

Following that was the video recreating the concert itself. Not only was it showing actual footage from the concert, but in order to transport the viewer to the concert as much as possible, the set-up around the screen was made to imitate a stage, complete with stage scaffolding, lights, and enormous speakers. When the video described the helicopters transporting the performers from the hotel to the stage (the only option since the roads were all clogged with concert-goers), the sound of a helicopter descending roared and lights, made to look like propellers, spun on the ground in front of us. Rain, which plagued the crowd throughout the weekend, was simulated with thunder booming and lights flashing as the sound of rain “poured down” on us. And for that moment, though comfortably dry, I was transported back to 1969.

If all one gauges a history museum on is how accurately it is able to help a viewer live or re-live an experience, The Bethel Woods Museum would receive high marks from me. I was placed directly in the middle of the 1960s and grew to understand the need for and significance of Woodstock. And, judging on others’ reactions in the recording booth in which people can share their experiences—those who attended Woodstock, those who wanted to attend but couldn’t, and those of us who would have attended had we been around—other viewers were successfully transplanted back 40 years as well.

And this hippie left experiencing her own little high.

Mary Gen Davies is the gardening, protesting, recycling, all-around green-lovin’ Program Associate at HPP.