Stop Time to See

$30K W. Eugene Smith Grant Awarded to Darcy Padilla 

PDN October 21, 2010
by Conor Risch

American photographer Darcy Padilla received the 2010 W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for “The Julie Project,” which examines AIDS, poverty and drug addiction in America. Padilla’s essay focuses on the life of Julie Baird, a subject she met in San Francisco in 1993 and photographed for 18 years.

Padilla was honored during a reception at the Asia Society in New York City.

Ann Curry, a news anchor and contributor to NBC’s Today and Dateline gave a keynote address in which she remarked on the unique ability of still images to “stop time so [viewer’s] minds can fully take in what they are seeing,” which she contrasted with the speed that makes the moving image difficult for viewers to digest. Curry encouraged the audience of photojournalists and photography professionals saying that, “human empathy is growing” in the world as a result of the legacy of documentary image making.

In her remarks Padilla recalled that when she told Baird of the honor, her subject and friend of 18 years asked sarcastically, “What took so long?” Baird died just days after Padilla learned of the grant; she was 36. Padilla said she was “thankful that [Baird] was open to me.”

For more on the story, see PDN Online.com

Museum InReach

The Participatory Museum by Nina Simon is a practical guide to visitor participation. It's been described as "essential reading" by Elaine Heumann Gurian and Sebastian Chan, and Kathleen McLean calls it "an extraordinary resource" Why did I write this book? Over the past four years, there's been lots of discussion about the "why" of visitor participation, but in my opinion, we've been lacking a good resource on the "how." The Participatory Museum is an attempt at providing such a resource. I hope it opens up a broader conversation about the nuts and bolts of successful participatory projects.

The book is split into two parts, providing what Leslie Bedford calls "a convincing marriage of theory and practice." The first half focuses on principles of design for participation, drawing on examples from the Web, retail, and restaurants as well as cultural institutions for lessons on how to help visitors confidently and enthusiastically contribute in ways that help achieve institutional goals. The second half focuses on participation in practice, looking in detail at ways that institutions can involve visitors while staying true to their mission and staff culture.

For more on the Participatory Museum, see Museums 2.0 on Blogspot
Also, here's a link to the 2010 Horizon Report on emerging museum education technologies.

Museum of Tomorrow?

Sketching a Future for The Brooklyn Museum
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Article by Robin Pogrebin

Photos by Todd Heisler

Published: August 5, 2010

THOUGH it resides in a prime example of traditional museum architecture — a Beaux-Arts building designed in 1893 by McKim, Mead & White — there is little stale or stodgy about the Brooklyn Museum. For more than a century the museum has been one of the country’s most important cultural institutions, and for more than a decade it has also courted controversy.

And that is by design, part of a considered effort to address the challenges that it, along with many other museums, face: how to appeal to a new generation in a climate of persistent financial pressure and the ambition to grow, to do more, to expand its audience. By some measures it has succeeded. By others, including attendance goals articulated by the museum itself, it has not.
With a stagnant economy magnifying these challenges, The New York Times asked experts with various perspectives, including artists, business executives and museum directors, to take a look at a number of questions that now confront the Brooklyn Museum and others. Is attendance a good measure of museum success? How do institutions build financial support at a time when both donors and the government feel pinched? Should a museum do more to engage its local artists, who, in Brooklyn’s case, are an especially vibrant group? And how should the unorthodox approach of the last decade be assessed?

In 1999 the museum created a maelstrom by exhibiting a painting that depicted the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung, prompting the mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to threaten to cut city financing. In 2002 it hosted an exhibition featuring props, models, costumes and characters from the “Star Wars” films that struck some reviewers as particularly lowbrow. And five years ago it added an unapologetically brash, modern glass entrance to the Old World exterior of its building.
More recently it gave away its celebrated costume collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and did away with traditional curatorial departments — like Egyptian art, African art and European painting — in favor of “teams” for exhibitions and collections. It included a Louis Vuitton shop in its Takashi Murakami exhibition, including handbags and other items designed by that artist. And it agreed to devote an exhibition this month to the work of whichever unknown artist beats back the challengers on Bravo’s reality show “Work of Art.”

For many, the museum’s often populist efforts have been just the kind of inventive risks necessary to stay accessible to the kind of visitors it has recently shown an ability to attract. The museum’s audience, which numbered 340,000 people a year at last count, is now significantly younger and more diverse than it had been, with an average age of 35 and members of minority groups making up 40 percent of its visitors. Others grumble, though, that the institution’s approach has undermined its stature, undersold its world-class collections and done little to increase attendance, which museum officials had once hoped would triple. Attendance, in fact, has been flat, even after the museum several years ago introduced First Saturdays — free nights that include music, dancing, food, a cash bar, gallery talks and films — which account for nearly a quarter of its visitors. 

For the complete story, featuring opinions by PHILIPPE DE MONTEBELLO, KAREN BROOKS HOPKINS, WILLIAM POWHIDA, ROCHELLE SLOVIN, DANIEL SIMMONS JR., ANN PHILBIN, MAXWELL L. ANDERSON, MICHAEL M. KAISER, MARTY MARKOWITZ, GRAHAM W. J. BEAL, BILL IVEY, DAVID A. ROSS, STEPHEN A. SCHWARZMAN, WENDA GU, LAURIE BECKELMAN, KIKI SMITH, PETER C. MARZIO, and RICO GATSON, see The New York Times.com

Depart and Displace

The Rise of Hip Hop and the Black Flight

KCET - Departures 2010

By the end of the 1960's - and the Watts Uprising - African-Americans had abandoned the search for a racial Promise Land and had come to terms with the near impossible task of overcoming the physical, philosophical and economical barriers created by centuries of racism. For many African-Americans the West had become the last refuge of a journey towards freedom. Faced with literally picking up the pieces of a broken neighborhood, African-Americans in South Los Angeles, Compton and beyond began to lose hope. This sentiment was reflected in the urban decay, poverty and continued violence occurring in their neighborhoods. Although issues of urban renewal were of great interest to the President Lyndon Johnson, the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 dismantled virtually every effort to fight the "War on Poverty." Young African-Americans felt defeated and began to informally construct their own economic and social rules, replacing the missing institutional security that was once promised by the city governments. 

Check out the entire Series at KCET Departures.

Departures is KCET's hyper-local web documentary, community engagement tool and digital literacy program about the cultural history of Los Angeles' neighborhoods.

Revolution UnMediated

SMALL CHANGE

Why the revolution will not be tweeted.

by Malcolm Gladwell

The New Yorker

OCTOBER 4, 2010

ILLUSTRATION: SEYMOUR CHWAST

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied. The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. 

The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said. By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. 

author, Malcolm Gladwell

The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. 

“I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

Read the complete story on New Yorker.com