On this episode of Museum Chat Live!, we discuss the latest venture of the St. Catharines Museum – undertaking a new Interpretive Plan. We explore what an Interpretive Plan is, what it means for the Museum, and why it matters.
via Museum Chat Live! E402 – Museums, Innovation, and our New Interpretive Plan —
Massey Hall is undergoing 1 $139 million renovation and they are working to revitalize all the stained glass windows:
Read the article here:
Truly, this is the way to accomplish a renovation and revitalization of a historic property. The answer is clearly money.
Automatonophobia is the fear of mannequins.
I’m terrified. Absolutely terrified of mannequins. Mainly because they are really, real people who come alive. My fear of mannequins coming alive and my natural ‘jumpy’ state really results in a fear of getting tapped on the shoulder by a mannequin. Or attacked by one.
Wikipedia says I’m irrational.
And why am I so terrified? Because! Look! Watch the opening to ‘Today’s Special’. It. Actually. Happens.
In all seriousness, I have always openly questioned the purpose of full mannequins in museum displays. In every museum experience I’ve encountered, a full mannequin serves as distraction from the real and valuable interpretation.
In one display – a historic village / living history site – full mannequins were used to supplement immersive interpretation. Volunteers shared their interpretive duties with the mannequins, which helped to display period costume. The problem was the mannequins were so terribly made, and such a distraction, that the other folks visiting the display spent their visit poking fun at the mannequin rather than taking in the point of the exhibit.
In another display, I was leading a tour and I knew and expected the impending appearance of the next mannequin to kill my interpretive groove. The mannequin is so poorly made and poorly put together that the students weren’t only immediately distracted but I lost them completely and had to reframe to include the terrible mannequin as a part of the content to save the interpretive connections I had spent 20 minutes crafting.
My colleagues know that I do not like mannequins. It’s because they’re terrifying, and because there’s some trauma associated with their usage in workplace hazings. But aside from my personal misgivings about mannequins, I maintain that they have no place in modern museums and interpretation.
Dress forms, on the other hand. Very important.
I grew up in Ottawa and luckily had parents and grandparents that enjoyed museums. My favourite museum was the Civilization Museum (now Canadian Museum of History) located across the Ottawa River from Parliament.
Now, other Ottawa-grown millennials will probably give you fond stories of their hours spent in the Children’s Museum, a kid-focussed land of wonders. It is an awesome space and I have some great memories from a scout trip where we had the place to ourselves. No annoying unknown fellow ankle biters to get in the way of play.
But my absolute favourite and possibly the space that inspired me to go into museum and public history work was Canada Hall. Probably the best example of an immersive exhibit, it was filled with walk-through reproductions of French and British town-squares, logging and voyageur camps, and even a repro of the Gander Airport lounge.
So, when I heard that the museum was going to tear it all out, I was sad, and went to visit one last time.
Good, emotional set up for my review of the renovation.
This past Christmas, on my sort-of-annual trip home, I made the very familiar trip to the Museum. Having not lived in Ottawa for some time, it’s actually one of the few places I need GPS assistance to find.
I’ve got my ticket. I’ve got my map. I’ve already taken 3 or 4 photos of museum signage and some ideas for my own museum. I’m ready to tackle Canada Hall.
My immediate reaction to walking through the introductory hallway of backlit frosted glass portraiture was that the curators went to a lot of effort to not leave anyone out of the story, which only bothers me because there will always be someone left out. Better to be obviously selective and give explanation to justify selections. But as I reflected (get it? – the portraits are frosted glass work), I realized how emotional it was to see pinpointed moments and people of our history. I certainly had an emotional reaction and it went a long way making a whole bunch of random historical moments spread out across our vast nation that Canada felt whole.
From a fairly non-traditional and artistic introduction to the museum’s major permanent gallery, I moved into the main space and was pretty disappointed about how ordinary a museum space it was. Though, afterwards, I took a moment to examine my fellow visitors – most, if not all – were not speaking French or English. It led me to think that the gallery likely wasn’t created for me, but knowing their audience (key in museum work) the curators instead designed the galleries for new Canadians and visitors, going for an introduction to history, and the museum’s collection.
In the third gallery, I audibly gasped as I came around a corner and spotted this table, upon which the Queen signed the Constitution Act.
I definitely experienced collection-envy walking through the new galleries. That’s something that might not have happened in the old Canada Hall. Knowing quite well the items on display will likely be there for another 20 years, and thus unavailable for a loan, I realized that the purpose of these new galleries is a little less about an immersive and wholistic narrative experience – perhaps once ‘The Complete History of Canada’ – and more about sharing moments of history through nation-shaping objects. The gallery spaces are extremely well designed around the collection, displaying key items in important places in expensive, well-lit displays, with purposefully limited-word-count text panels.
I really liked the galleries. I thought the curators did a fantastic job with indigenous stories, mixing in these objects with personal accounts of settlers, and displaying key objects in emotional narrative points (the handcuffs that Louis Riel wore, were quite well timed in the narrative).
The handcuffs Riel wore during his last trial.
But I’m a museum person. I know how to ‘do’ a museum visit. In fact, I ‘walked the floor plan‘ before I began my journey, since I only had two hours and I had to move efficiently through the space.
It wasn’t until I moved on into the second gallery (French and British settlement history) that a young girl, about age 9-10, basically accompanied me all the way through the exhibit. At first I was pretty annoyed with her because she was obviously ahead/behind her parents, which seemed to give her license to press EVERY button available, let the audio/video/program run for 2 seconds, and press the button again to turn it off. On the third or fourth button, I decided not to try to shake her, but to try to keep up with her (in a non-creepy way!) and I learned A HECK OF A LOT about how kids use museum spaces designed for a collection-based, adult-oriented exhibit.
Instantly, I realized, as I looked around, that the exhibit actually felt like walking through an interpretive plan. It was so new, so sterile, and so academic, that I could feel the pages of the consultant-bred plan turning. Following the kid was great. Not only did she press all the buttons, she revealed what kept her attention. Even the interactive ‘stations’ mid-gallery (a game here, an interactive there, a computer-based station overthere) didn’t keep her attention. The artifacts didn’t keep her attention. The text didn’t keep her attention either. The only thing she was actually interested in was pressing the buttons.
Typical of museums: interactive learning merely accompanied major panels of text, rather than fostering learning and engagement through interactives that might be supported by text.
Maybe she had a thing for buttons, but I think it reveals something about the exhibit I might have missed if she wasn’t so annoying: not only did it feel like walking through an interpretive plan, the exhibit felt like walking through a text book. That is the exact opposite effect that museums are supposed to present. Any interpretive space should foster emotional connections to the objects and narratives surrounding the visitors – not solely present relative information, as a text book does. The exhibit is very pretty, was likely very expensive, and is incredibly well done to museum standards. My exception with the new Canada Hall is that it missed the point of a museum exhibit: to engage the senses (including sense of play and learning) in the formation of emotional reactions with the sources. In this, the most important function of museum spaces, it failed. And don’t take my word for it. At the end of the gallery, the ALG (Annoying Little Girl) found her parents and proudly proclaimed “I’m bored” (I’M NOT CREEPY).
From an immersive, emotional space, to one on the opposite end of the exhibition spectrum, the new Canada Hall is a very valuable walk through our shared history. It is well planned and really, a very sharp-looking display. Its failure, however, to connect with visitors in meaningful ways is one that the average museum goer and international visitors alike will feel at the end of their visit: “hmm. That was interesting. Let’s go do something fun.”
As stereotypes go, we museum folk are generally regarded as quiet, tame, gentle, history-loving, nerdy-types.
If you follow museum discussion threads on Twitter (yes, that’s a thing) you likely know that the stereotype is nowhere near the truth. Like many different workplaces and industries, museums are filled to the brim with smart, caring, hardworking people. And this week, we showed the country just what kind of treatment we expect from corporate giants like McDonalds.
Since the New Year McDonalds had begun running an ad in various markets across the country, including St. Catharines. I heard the ad a week or so ago and something didn’t sit right with me about it, but since I was in the car and likely had many things on my mind, it got filed away and I forgot about it. Cut to Tuesday morning and the CBC in BC ran an article featuring an interview with a museum curator who had heard the ad and actually had to pull over to the side of the road she was so upset.
So let’s get to the ad. Check out the CBC article and interview which has a copy of the ad:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/museums-vs-mcdonalds-1.4481290
McDonald’s has since apologized and pulled a radio ad that upset supporters of Canadian museums about a day after CBC ran the story.
The 15-second piece compared the value of spending $5 at McDonald’s to spending $5 on a museum tour. “You could get a museum tour for $5,” the male narrator says. A woman playing the role of a museum guide then cuts in. “There were dinosaurs and then there weren’t,” she says. “OK, then, exit through the gift shop!”
Let me break this down.
My instant, personal, non-professional/nor representative of my institution, gut reaction was that McDonalds was comparing a menu that is the very epitome of unhealthy eating with a cultural experience that is invaluable in various measurements of economy and society.
Not cool, McDonalds.
At the heart of it, that’s how the majority of the industry responded. Everyone sort of said “hold on, museums are worth more than a $5 burger at McDonalds.”
Then there’s the stereotype that the ad perpetuates: that Museum Docents are basically walking text panels with no ability to connect AND that gift shops are money grabs. Let the ranting begin. Twitter became alive, and so did the museum community with the Canadian Museum Association releasing this note regarding the ad:
OTTAWA, Ontario, January 11, 2018 – Effective immediately, McDonald’s Canada has pulled an offending national ad campaign.
The campaign suggested that a $5 hamburger was better value than the lifelong learning offered by Canada’s museums.
The Canadian Museums Association (CMA) learned of the offending ad last night and immediately contacted McDonald’s requesting the ad be removed. CMA also requested that McDonald’s consider beneficial ways to work with the museum sector.
The Senior Vice-President of Marketing for McDonald’s Canada called CMA’s John McAvity this morning to apologize to Canadian museums, and to confirm the ad has been cancelled.
From inside the museum-industry-bubble it was really hard to believe that people think that stereotype of the boring docent is true. But the ad is damaging because the people who wrote the ad and let’s be honest, the majority of the people listening to the ad, believe the stereotypes. Stereotypes are driven and fed by ignorance. Since so many people only visit a museum once in their life (usually between the ages of 7 and 12) opinions are formed early and last a lifetime. If only the people who wrote and produced the ad had actually bothered to visit a museum during adulthood they might have seen how museums have grown to become exciting and dynamic places with amazing staff and talented volunteers giving their time and energy to make every visit a memorable and exciting one. Don’t let your prejudices about museums keep you from fulfilling and emotional experiences.
Though, for a dressing-down of the expensive results of the renovation of the Canadian History Museum’s Canada Hall, check out my review of the new gallery.
The comment regarding gift shop as a money grab is actually rich. One of the biggest corporations in the country was shaming museums for a money grab? Talk about bullying. Museums clearly rely on a diverse round of sources of funds to operate. It’s not cheap to run a museum and maintain a collection, and in many cases, most museums are in non-stop fundraising-and-grant-writing mode. Gift shops are an important way for museums to earn revenue and since most don’t have investors with deep pockets, massive corporate support, and massive market presence, it’s just completely amusing that McDonalds would chirp a museum for trying to operate sustainably with a gift shop.
It just leaves such a dirty, big-mac-after-taste in my mouth.
It’s now all over, and us museum folk have gone back to rockin’ visitor experiences. I hope though, that you let this ad and our reaction to it change your behaviour as human adults.
I might normally encourage you to boycott McDonalds in response to the ad, but that doesn’t really do anything for us as museums and it’s definitely not the positive way forward.
Rather, why don’t you spend more time at your local museum? When you go on vacation, hit at least one museum. Why not engage in some culture? Unlike the mega-chain’s menu, culture tastes better, is better for you, and you feel pretty darn good afterwards.
Excerpt from “Walk A” in “St. Catharines A-Z” by Junius, originally published in the St. Catharines Journal on May 15th, 1856: “We hope to live to see the day, when every drop of surplus canal water will be used for manufacturing purposes. When 10, 000 spindles and shuttles will be set in motion; when the […]
Check out my series on the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada
Part 2 of a 4-Part Series
The person whom is most famously associated with the Underground Railroad is Harriet Tubman. She was colloquially known as the ‘Black Moses’ for her important role in helping fugitive slaves escape to free states and into Canada.
A statue of Harriet Tubman at the newly built Harriet Tubman Public School in downtown St. Catharines.
My favourite thing about Harriet Tubman is that she used St. Catharines as her ‘base of operations’ during her work in the 1850s.
Now, I’m not sure ‘base of operations’ is the best way to describe her activity here. She didn’t have a control centre with many computer screens and knobs and buttons. St. Catharines turned out to be a great spot for Tubman to rest and reset between trips because of a confluence of fortunate factors. Thanks to the Welland Canal, St. Catharines was/is the largest urban centre in…
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My notes and thoughts on our annual Guided Spirit Walks at Victoria Lawn Cemetery, as posted on our Museum blog.
The cast of the 2015 Guided Spirit Walks at Victoria Lawn Cemetery: ‘Our Canal, Our Community’ honouring the fallen workers of the Welland Ship Canal. Photo is property and courtesy of St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre.
5 Years of Guided Spirit Walks at Victoria Lawn Cemetery
For a good part of a year, probably close to six months, mostly all I talk about (and live and breathe) is our annual Guided Spirit Walks at Victoria Lawn Cemetery.
The tours through Victoria Lawn are certainly a labour of love. The work is a mash-up of theatre writer, director and stage manager jobs, with some military logistics and a whole bunch of historical research thrown into the mix. And it’s like that every year!
But this year is pretty special. It’s our 5th anniversary.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of attending one of our tours in the past, you…
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It’s that time of year again. I spend my days at the sewing machine, ‘cinderella-ing’ – as I call it – sewing costumes for our annual Guided Spirit Walks at Victoria Lawn Cemetery.
It depends on the year and what content we cover on the walks, but I’m not always at the sewing machine. When we cover the turn of the 20th century up to the First World War, ladies fashion (because men’s daily fashion basically doesn’t change between 1890 and 1920) becomes easier. The skirt lines are very straight so it’s pretty easy for me to put a skirt together.
I’ve posted a few pictures of my straight-lines and people are so impressed. It’s not because of the quality of sewing, that’s for sure. It’s because I’m a guy and I can sew.
But traditional gender roles isn’t what I wanted to tackle on this post. Maybe another time.
I do my sewing in the museum’s lunchroom, which is located off of a public space on the second floor of the building. Most of the time, it’s pretty quiet, and the air condition works really well in that part of the building, which keeps my hot blood cool.
And as I spend hours navigating skirt patterns and sewing on hooks and eye clasps and using a low-end sewing machine that regularly tests my patience, my mind drifts to thinking and reflecting on our current ‘etas de choses’ at the museum.
I’ve been pretty vocal, on this blog in particular, about the poor attendance we’ve had at some of our high-quality programs that took a lot of time to plan and execute. Unfortunately, it’s not contained to one particular style or type of program. And so we make edits and adjustments to make sure that things work properly the next time.
And I think about all the time I’d like to have to be able to do some of the cool programs that we’ve been talking about for years. And all the money it would take.
And I continue down this path of negative thinking, spiralling until I end up at the conclusion that our offerings and our programs are awful and no one will ever come to anything and we’ll be stuck in museum obscurity forever.
Then this 3 year old pokes his head in the door and says “are you the bad guy.” I think they were playing a game in the next room which I was just recruited to join in.
Am I dreaming? I shake my head a little, as if to refocus my brain and my eyes to see what ankle-biter is at the door. Ankle-biters invading our office and staff spaces is a pretty common occurrence so I wasn’t really shocked, but the kid blaming me for all the world’s negativity at that particular moment wasn’t lost on me.
It was a good time for a break so I get up from my sewing perch and ask my stiff legs to carry me to the door to say hello, hopefully to ankle-biter and parent.
On the other side of the door, I find a whole family of ankle-biters and a couple of parents, hanging out in the space, enjoying the air conditioning. Some of the kids have already found their way down a staff-only hallway, that usually is lit but today is dark. I offer to turn the lights on so we can all poke around in our programming materials together.
As the experience ends, and I make the same joke I’ve been making for years – “you can go back to the office when you’re older and you come work for us…” the patriarch of the group turns to me after poking his nose in my sewing ‘sweat shop’ and says: “wow, you even have an iron!” He said it as if people don’t have irons. As if they are a rarity among not only among families units but also museums in general. As if we are some well-off museum because we have an iron. It’s even funnier to me since the iron isn’t that great and I’ve been thinking about getting a new one.
I bet we have over 20 historic irons in the collection.
But isn’t that the point of an encounter like this? It was a shake-up. And the shake-up isn’t lost on me.
The man’s tone was really something. Like he was impressed that we have an iron and a sewing machine, and even better, staff who generally know how to operate those machines. He must have been thinking that, in comparison with some other museums, parks, art galleries, or heritage sites, our site was some place pretty special.
I spent my day dwelling, swimming, drowning in my own negativity when suddenly perspective is delivered to me like a punch in the gut. Some kid accusses me of being the ‘bad guy’ and his dad hands out my sentence of more positive and perspective-based thought.
Now to get out there and do something with it.
Ah, summer 2016. It is a summer to remember! The summer of hot, hot, hot, and no rain. And the summer of the new hit smartphone game: PokemonGo. You’re probably thinking: “goodness, not more PokemonGo! Just stop talking about it!” And there are some of you whom may have no idea what PokemonGo is. I’ve […]
via We Have Two PokemonGo Gyms, and other helpful PokemonGo/Museum tips. —
not so private history 