Narrow Stairs

I read this post today on the Center for the Future of Museums blog and had to share.

Please take the stairs! The Philadelphia Museum of Art has plenty of stairs, even apart from the ones that Rocky conquered. Not only does taking the stairs have a health benefit but it also provides a view of the museums lobbies that the elevators simply do not provide. Even better, when you take the stairs from the ground floor to the first floor you get the best possible viewing of Marc Chagall's A Wheatfield on a Summer Afternoon. Whether you like Chagall or not (I, personally, do not, but I do love this particular painting) this size of this painting and the brightness of the colors will take your breath away.

So give the stairs a shot. You may be surprised by what you see.

Better Together, Part 2

Once again, I love that the various parts of my life sometimes intersect in amazing and helpful ways.

Last week I managed to take a long stroll through the American art galleries while at work. I am ashamed to admit how infrequently I am able to visit the gallery spaces in my own museum. Because I had not visited the American art wing for such a long time, I had forgotten just how many pieces of furniture the museum owns. Not only are the pieces beautiful in their own right, but they also helped me with the collections inventory work I mentioned in an earlier post. Based on what I saw, I was able to confirm some of the identifications and date ranges I had placed on the objects with which I was working. Receiving confirmation of one's suspicions about an object can be uplifting and I will admit that I enjoyed the boost to my self esteem.

I often wonder if other museum employees neglect to visit their own museum's gallery spaces. I find myself putting the visits of for tomorrow because the galleries aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Perhaps I will make it my goal for the second half of 2011 to spend more time inside the galleries. The stuff inside them is, after all, what made me want to work in museums in the first place.

The View from this Tower

I want to encourage everyone to do a something if at all possible: take a behind-the-scenes tour of your favorite museum.

I had the opportunity to take such a tour today at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As anyone who has been to the museum knows, the building is not only incredible, it is also historic. Parts of the building that were open to the public many years ago have now been converted to other uses and are hidden from the layman's eyes. These parts of the building are beautiful and it was fascinating to see them and to hear them talked about by someone who clearly loves the building and knows more about it than I could ever hope to.

The best part of the tour, however, was being on the roof.



To be honest, I had been to the PMA's subbasements before. I knew that they had as much beauty as the rest of the building. But to see the view from the roof was to understand the building in an entirely new way. The view from the top of the building impressed on me not only the sheer size of the building, but also its height.



In short, find a way to take a behind-the-scenes tour of your favorite museum. Having seen the storage areas and hidden nooks and crannies of several museums and historic sites I can assure you that the most interesting stuff is the stuff most people never get the chance to see. I would also like to encourage museum staff to try to find a way to allow more people to see their museum from this unique vantage point. Don't limit this experience to staff and those with sufficient disposable income to purchase high level memberships. After all, you never know who you may inspire.

*My apologies for the less-than-stellar quality of the photos; rather than using a real camera I used the only thing at hand, which happened to be my cell phone.

Quite Free

I want to praise the Philadelphia Museum of Art (my employer, in case you have forgotten) for providing a day last week free of charge. The museum waived the cost of general admission last Saturday in honor of the museum's late director Anne d'Harnoncourt. I love these kinds of days because they make museum collections accessible to large portions of the population who may not normally be able to afford a trip to a high-quality art museum. Days with free general admission help a museum to accomplish one of its most important goals: educating the public about its collection.

But nothing can be that simple.

Without fail, free admission days mean that museum staff will spend much of their time asking visitors not to eat or drink in the galleries, to turn off their camera flashes, and not to touch the art work. Children will run and scream. Parents will yell. Everyone will talk too loudly. Generally speaking, the people who come to museums on days with free admission spend very, very little time inside museums. The visitors lack knowledge about museum conduct.

Let me be quite clear: I do not fault these people for being unaware of proper museum protocol. Many people just do not know how to behave in museums. The reasons for this are complex and not easy to pin down. Many children attend a museum of some kind while in their elementary years, and should, in theory, learn how to act at museums on these trips. However, these trips are probably too infrequent and brief to make much of an impression. I would also argue that the dynamic of school trips is different than on a regular trip to the museum. The students often eat in a separate location and are provided with stimulating activities. This kind of stimulation is likely to occur on a weekend visit with their parents or older siblings.

Part of the problem may also be that museums tend to be minimalists when it comes to signage. They fail in many cases to make people aware of the rules upon entering the museum. In my mind, listing the rules on the back of the museum map in small print simply doesn't cut it.

I'm quite sure that I'm missing a host of other reasons for people's bad behavior, but I want to make some observations about potential fixes for this issue. The first is obvious: make museum attendance a more common theme in every child's formative years. Make sure that these trips extend beyond the elementary years and well into middle school and high school. I am not talking about more trips for kids whose parents are likely to take them to art museums anyway. I'm talking about the kids whose parents have probably never been to a museum since their own school years.

Museums should also not feel shy about posting the rules in a more obvious way on days when the building will be flooded with visitors coming more for free entertainment than for the museum itself. A couple of well-placed signs will certainly intrude less upon a person's experience at the museum than screaming children and irritable security guards. (For some great journalism about the importance and necessity of good signage, read this series of articles by Slate's Julia Turner.)

In the end, museum etiquette is no different than etiquette at the symphony, the opera, or a church service. The way people behave in any public situation comes down to knowledge. If people are not aware that a code of conduct exists, how can we expect them to follow it?

In the name of spreading the word, here are a couple of good references for proper museum behavior.

http://www.artagogo.com/reviews/learn1/learn5.htm

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/397360/museum_etiquette_how_to_behave_when.html?cat=2

All Those Expectations

I want to reflect on something that happened this week that has me completely baffled.

Having heard nothing but positive things about the Barnes Foundation since I moved to Philadelphia, I was ecstatic when I learned that a work-related trip to the museum was being planned, and that we would be visiting the Barnes before it moves just a stones throw away from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Franklin Institute on the Ben Franklin Parkway.

I was disappointed.

Before I complain, here are a couple of possible justifications for my displeasure.

1. I spent just over an hour in the museum. You simply cannot absorb the Barnes in that amount of time. I will make another trip to see the collection as soon as possible and will then reassess the my feelings about the museum.

2. My visit to the museum was with a large group of people. I am the kind of person who prefers to experience museums, particularly art museums, on my own or with very small groups. Its possible that the format of this trip predisposed me to disappointment.

3. The Barnes probably could not have ever lived up to the expectations I had for it. Because of all the things I had heard about the collection, I expected it to be life-changing, perhaps even earth-shattering. It wasn't.

All of that being said, here are my thoughts about the Barnes:

1. The guide my group had was amazing. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of the collection, the artists and the paintings. Because the Barnes has no interpretive signs, she gave the collection a context it might have otherwise lacked. Part of the problem with this, however, is that Dr. Barnes allegedly arranged his collection in such a way as to make interpretive signs and guides unnecessary.

2. Dr. Barnes' much-vaunted and celebrated method of arranging his collection of paintings and sculptures failed to move me. I found the ironwork on the walls distracting rather than helpful; I honestly would have rather had an interpretive sign. I do not get enjoyment out of a painting because I see that lines in the painting are echoed in the candlesticks placed strategically on a table in front of the painting. I enjoy great paintings because they are sometimes so beautiful, so breathtaking that it brings tears to my eyes.

3. A visit to the Barnes is hampered at this point by its impending move to the BF Parkway. Because I work for the PMA I won't even get into all of this, but it is supremely irritating that some galleries are closed and that one cannot visit without having to think about the upcoming move. (Go watch The Art of the Steal if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

What is my final assessment? Go see the Barnes. The collection is truly amazing. I would, however, caution you to be realistic in your expectations for the collection, the building and the museum's method of interpretation. Go see the paintings because they are masterpieces, not because they are hung in some supposedly revolutionary way. Go see the paintings because each one really could change your life.

Monkey Business

This article in the Times got me thinking about whether or not museums can do something similar with objects; that is, can museums create an "experience" like the one developed by the London Zoo in which visitors are immersed in an environment?

Art museums and historic house museums can create the same kind of environment as the London Zoo. Museums like the Philadelphia Museum of Art (my employer, for purposes of full disclosure) sometimes create "period rooms" that reproduce rooms from various locations and eras. These rooms display works of art in their original setting, providing the visitor with context and, ideally, a deeper understanding of the work.

For smaller museums, however, this kind of exhibit is difficult to create, as well as prohibitively expensive. Most museums simply don't have the resources, or for that matter, the space to design these kinds of displays. In the case of other museums, the "period room" model simply doesn't make sense. They cannot transport a room from Europe and recreate it in an American museum. Take, for example, the Philadelphia Doll Museum. The museum certainly cannot create an environment for each of the dolls, and placing them in their original context would be nearly impossible. Without allowing visitors to physically handle the dolls, how can the museum help visitors to experience them in the same way that visitors to the London Zoo get to encounter monkeys and rain forests?