Listen to the Music

As much as I do not want to spend the rest of my career in Visitor Services, I do often get to do really interesting things. Yesterday I accompanied a group of musicians called the Sixth Floor Trio through the museum while they performed "random acts of culture,." They set up in a gallery and then played a song.

The music had a definite impact on those who heard it. Empty galleries would soon become crowded when the music started. And when they played in the Great Stair Hall, people gathered along the balcony to listen. A few clapped when the music ended.

I love the idea of a roving band of musicians playing the galleries. They had the ability to choose galleries that fit songs in their repertoire. With any luck, the memory of the music will help to reinforce the visitor's memory of their experience at the museum. And, hopefully, the music improved their overall experience and they will soon return.

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.

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?