Part of it, of course, is that the people I work with are fascinating, fun, committed people, and in my job in particular I’m given a lot of scope to explore new ideas for programming and exhibits and the things that interest me in the world of arts and education.  But what makes the Art & Nature Center special *in particular,* I think, is the way it mixes love of art and love of the world around us with a ladle-full of wonder and a hearty dash of whimsy.

On its best days, working for the Art & Nature Center is like waking up inside a Mary Oliver poem.

Poem of the One world

by Mary Oliver

This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to

where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else

which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.

Session 1: Learning Together: Developing Multi User Interactives

• Multi user interactives are more than scaled-up single user kiosks: looking at other kinds of interactives like low-tech tabletops and games can be more useful for developing a digital multi user experience
• Evaluation from the Field Museum suggests people who work together on an interactive smile 50% of the time, and visitors on their own smile only 10% of the time.
• Next step in multi-user interactives probably includes motion sensing using elements like the Kinect, which might also help solve design problems like orienting text.

Session 2: Significant Objects

• Writers recruited to write fiction about yardsale finds, which were then sold on ebay and had a 2700% increase in financial value – what kinds of lessons about storytelling and the perceived value of objects does this hold for museums?  How can we create different entry points for people who might be craving the kinds of stories museums could tell but aren’t telling, or aren’t telling effectively?
•  Participatory design vs. design for participation — how do you balance it so that content creators enjoy the process and it’s open to a wide range of people, but still end up with a final product that has an appeal to people who weren’t part of its creation?
• how much can museums play with the truth?  How does this tie in with the conversation from earlier in the conference about real, fake, reproductions, and replicas?

Session 3: Magnificent Masters of Museum Mysteries, Narrative Games in Museum Contexts

• This panel was full of people I’d really like to spend more time talking to–sadly I had a conflict and couldn’t attend their continued discussion in the hotel bar afterwards, but I’ll be watching their next projects with interest.
• I’d heard about the Ghosts of a Chance game at the Smithsonian before, but it’s a pretty intimidating example, so hearing about their second attempt that didn’t go so well and their plans for a third was heartening, as was pairing this extreme example with two simpler examples from the Getty and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
• Getting to play a game during a session on games was a nice touch.

Session 4: Continuing the Conversation, Experimental Projects in Museums

• Lots of interesting projects going on with inviting community members, particularly creative professionals, into the museum to offer their own spin on programming.  Requires clear guidelines from the museum and a flexible hands-off policy to allow for individuality and fresh ideas.
• Interesting initiative from Living Arts Center in Mobile where they run a two month intro or ‘pulse’ mini-exhibit to collect community thoughts on the topics of the upcoming featured exhibit- a glorified (and formalized) type of prototyping mixed with marketing that’s really curious.
• Community involvement in exhibition planning seems to mean much shorter time spans than when working solely with museum professionals–is that an audience based constraint (short attention spans) or a museum one (resource and space commitments)?

Session 5: “Your Brain on Art” sponsored by Reach Advisors

• There was a fancier more academic title, but the scientists from Johns Hopkins suggested this title instead and it fit well.  It was a great conversation where each side wanted to find out more about what the others were doing–could have easily run for another hour!
• Fun to hear people outside the field debating the things that museum pros care so much about: is it all about education?  what do museums have that is  unique to that kind of experience?  what about reflection?  is wonder a jolt of quick there-and-gone energy to the brain, or an opportunity for a deeper connection?  what makes for a useful measurement of success at reaching your audience?
• Is it possible for parents who love museums to pass that love on to their children?  Some studies suggest that culture changes too fast and peers have too much influence, but yet parental modelling is still one of the best ways to convey values to children.  Museums are like food–if you go to museums the way you have family dinner around the kitchen table, make it a regular part of life, have conversations about it, share thoughts and favorites and encourage your kids to do the same, then  yes,  parents can definitely pass the culture of  museum love along.

  Evening enjoyment: The Owl Bar

• Incredibly cool and beautiful old bar from the days of Prohibition, with fun stories regarding the blinking owl signal lights over the bar (blinking means the cops aren’t around and it’s safe to order from the speak easy!) and quite tasty food.
• Worth the 2 mile trek up from the convention center and a fun adventure to a different section of the city.  The worst part about a really interesting conference is that there’s too little time for sightseeing.

Session 1: Stories Alive: The Power of Theater in Conservation Education

• I respect people who start professional conference sessions with puppets.  Seriously, way to grab attention when half the people in the room haven’t got their caffeine yet because the conference center Starbucks was overwhelmed.
• This was an interesting balance to yesterday’s session, because it included examples of different kinds of (mostly larger) theater programs, and also discussion of evaluation and figuring out lingering impact and message effectiveness.

Session 2: General Session – Education, Stories, Museums: Transforming Lives, Keynote Speaker Dr. Freeman Hrabowski of UMBC

• Instead of ‘what did you learn today,’ ask ‘did you ask a good question today?’  Encouraging curiosity leads to great thinkers.
• Experience in the arts, even if you are not excellent, makes you realize and appreciate what it takes to be excellent.
• The fundamental purpose of museum and of education is to help people dream.

Session 3: 3D Printing from the Smithsonian

• I feel like museums need to go talk to people at Pixar and Weta and some of the other fields where they’ve been doing more with 3D scans and imagery, like those laser scanned reproductions of various actors for their character busts and replicas.  Because there are cool ideas out there we could be using.
• I like the idea of reproduced models of archaeological digs and virtual dinosaur bones for study.
• The Smithsonian has a real advantage in testing out these new techniques given that they have 19 museums and 9 research centers to play around with a range of ideas.

Session 4: Maximizing the Nation’s Common Wealth: Museums and Parks in Partnership

• Sitting in the same room with the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the Deputy Director of the National Park Service is a little like attending a museum equivalent of a rock concert.
• The strategic plans (with an emphasis on education for each) are supposed to be available in the session notes on the AAM website.  They sound/look like an interesting read.
• For all that they have significant and impressive visitation figures, both institutions suffer from the same issues regarding diversity and relevance that almost all traditional museums are currently facing and attempting to change.  It will be interesting to see what works on such a large scale.

Session 5a: Museum Marketplace: Exhibit Labels competition

• Definitely a lot of labels that privilege descriptive writing over the purely didactic.  Makes for an interesting read that has either a conversational or reflective cadence.

Session 5b: Museum Marketplace: Education showcase

• Always nice to see what other folks in my field are up to!  Reading blogs is interesting, conversations are even better.
• Fun and interesting thoughts about Maker spaces and their uses with school programs.
• Cool cooperation happening between Smithsonian museums for interdisciplinary approaches to exhibits, especially art & science.  Always nice to see that happening.

Expo Showcase 6: Augmenting Dinosaurs – Augmented Reality Installations 

• I appreciated the opportunity to hear from museum staff, computer/media designers, and the paleontologist whose research led to the animations used in the augmented reality interactives.  The range of perspectives made it more useful and interesting than a vendor-only session would have been.
• T-Rex shook its prey like a crocodile does and Allosaurus did the dip and rip move that small raptors like kestrels do.  And they can tell that based on skeletons and the way the muscles would have had to attach to them.  Amazing.
• Augmented reality seems like a reasonable thing to explore for enlivening the natural history elements in the Art & Nature Center–but I wonder, what would make it compelling for the Art half of that equation?

After Hours Fun 7: Wonders of the Undersea World at the Baltimore National Aquarium

• Great staff, very personable and willing to answer questions on practically any topic.  Beautiful building,  not unlike Boston’s NEAq (and the central tank was apparently designed by the same person)
• They have dolphins–7 of them. I am very jealous.  
• I loved the rainforest exhibit, including the opportunity for visitors to hold a stick with live crickets over the archer fish tank and watch them spit water at the crickets to knock them into eating range.  That was highly entertaining, if unfortunate for the crickets.
• I will never understand aquarium catering being okay with serving seafood, no matter how tasty the crab dip.

The afternoon’s first session I attended was a showcase of museum theater programs hosted by the folks at IMTAL, with four different museums (2 science, 2 history) offering up snippets of their presentations.  All were family and student friendly, but wildly different in presentation style and a really interesting assortment to hold up against each other.  Most included audience participation, all included humor and an emphasis on finding a connection, emotional or experiential.

The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago presented “Taste Buddies,” with a lead character in a candy-striped vest who employed a lot of puns and a *lot* of energy, including audience volunteers who gamely ate unidentified jelly beans (you need to know me to understand just how brave that seemed to me, but it was definitely a Bertie Bott’s moment).  Fusion Science Theater worked up a bunch of excitement over the molecular structure of rubber, of all things, using a pair of apparently identical mystery bouncing balls in a pro-wrestling style show down to introduce scientific method and a lot of the related vocabulary.

The Missouri History Center presented “Dressing from the Inside Out” with a demonstration of changing women’s undergarments over several decades, and made a point of appealing to the audience by relating the garments involved to everything from Pride and Prejudice and the probable dress-damping tendencies of Caroline Bingley to the structure of sports bras–the presenter was clearly very in tune with what would appeal to her current audience.

And my very favorite was “Love on the Range,” a storytelling performance by an actor from the Smithsonian Museum of American History, that incorporated music, dramatic pauses, and a lot of great colorful language and description.  I like the Smithsonian’s theater program for a lot of reasons, and this was no exception.

The other session I went to this afternoon concerned the use of reproductions, replicas, and non-accessioned objects in museum situations. Titled “Is it Real? Who Cares?” it featured some of the best interactive discussion in a large-audience panel-format session I’ve ever seen, with lively debate happening about the spectrum of real to fake objects and whether or not those experiences worked.  There was a lot of muddy ground in the middle, of course, but some very fun examples of curious uses of reproductions, etc, from the Franklin Institute’s extremely popular walk-through heart to disagreements over reenactors to a very wacky sounding Australian version of Stonehenge.  If you are curious in turn, you can check out the panelists’ planning blog.

Crispin The Pig Who Had it All is officially a Christmas story wherein an overindulged pig is given an empty box for Christmas by Santa, but is a great story and amusingly illustrated for younger readers.

Not a Box is a in a much simpler style, with a much more indignant rabbit informing the off-page (and regrettably literal-minded likely-adult) that his/her apparent box is, in fact, not a box, but a…(you get the idea)
Not a Box printables for teachers at TeacherVision

Similarly, I ran across this beautiful video The Adventures of a Cardboard Box over on Vimeo:

And, of course, some people take their cardboard box visions to the extreme (and extremely cool):

Created by Christine at Pure Joy Events. Click for link to source

But for the rest of us looking for a little inspiration, here is ikatbag’s Guide to Working with Cardboard and 40 Cool Cardboard Projects, which is an excellent starting place for the corrugated-minded.

So tunnel in to a good idea (and then share it with me)!

Just a sample of this year’s family baking output, complete with awesomely geeky new Star Wars cookie cutters to complement the traditional holiday shapes.

The Christmas season is so very strongly associated with cookie dough for me that it seemed the perfect time to explore some of the very many cool options involving doughy substances in art and science.

There are a number of good blogs out there that offer round-ups of fun things to do with play dough, so rather than repeat them, I will first point you to a few of my favorite existing aggregates:

12 props to use with play dough
137 cool activities and ideas for play dough
39 Ways to Use Play Dough from the Artful Parent (one of my absolute favorites)

And in true interdisciplinary fashion, here is an assortment of my play dough examples from across subject areas:

Science:

Discussing Play Dough as a Way to introduce the scientific thought process

Wired: What’s inside Play-Doh

History:

History of the Invention of Play-Doh

Literacy and Storytelling:

Printable Play Dough Mats

Art and Politics:

Award winning political play dough by Ian Williams

Artist Ian Williams’ Obama, Romney Play-Doh Creations Win Award

And finally, a few recipes for inspiration:

Playdough for the Allergy- and Eco-Sensitive

• Gluten Free Dough (be sure to check the comments for variations on the recipe)
• Natural Herbal Dough
• Natural Dyes for Play Dough

Playdough to Delight the Senses

Recipes for Interesting Smells

• Chocolate play dough (requires cooking)
• Cranberry, vanilla, chocolate, marzipan, allspice scented doughs
• Eucalyptus play dough and cloud dough (great if you have a cold!)

Recipes for Interesting Consistencies

• Traditional Cloud Dough
• Drawing Dough (more liquid, so you can create designs via squirt bottle)
• Cornmeal Dough (sandier texture than flour-based recipes)

Recipes for Interesting Visuals

• Silver Glitter Snow Dough
• Black Sparkle Space Play Dough

Not enough?  Check out this extremely thorough play dough focused Pinterest board

It’s a lot of fun, it’s a lot of work, and it’s one of my favorite programs, so I thought I would share the books and art activities that I loved most from this year.

January: The Spiral Connection
Book: Blockhead, the Life of Fibonacci by Joseph D’Agnese
Exhibition Connection: Ripple Effect, the Art of H2O
Art Making: Wall hangings with Fibonacci prints – we used flowers (both silk and cut flowers will do, flatter ones like sunflowers and daisies are better), pinecones, and seashells with fabric paint on plain white bandanas (available at most craft stores), to make printed patterns that feature examples of the Fibonacci sequence in nature, and then added extra decorations with fabric markers, and hung the bandanas on dowels to create easy-to-hang fabric art for your wall.
January Story Trails handout-small

I love the ‘turning page’ look that our creative services team designed to differentiate Story Trails programming from other museum events.

February: Read the Stars
Book: How the Stars Fell into the Sky by Jerrie Oughton (retelling of a Navajo Coyote story, which is traditionally only told in the winter months)
Exhibition Connection: Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art
Art Making: Constellation Light Boxes – We talked about creation stories and specifically constellation stories, and then used awls and sharpened dowels to punch holes in shoe boxes to create our own (or recreate known) constellation patterns.  We then added a hole in whatever side of the box was opposite the constellation pattern to either a) hold up to our eye and then up to the light to see the stars ‘shine’ or b) put a bright flashlight into and project the star pattern into a darkened room.
February Story Trails handout

March: Cloud Factory and Guest Appearance by Illustrator Katy Bratun
Book:  Sector 7 by David Weisner
Exhibition Connection: the concept of storyboarding in art, as exemplified by a series of paintings of a battle in the Maritime Art collection
Art Making: Katy Bratun led a story-boarding workshop in which kids drew a series of 4-8 panels of a story on the theme of taking a journey, and bound them into a simple book using card stock and yarn.  This was a great literacy-skills support program and kids were very, very excited to share their stories with a real author/illustrator.
March Story Trails handout

April: Weslandia
Book: Weslandia by Paul Fleischman
Exhibition Connection: Earth Day, and an incredibly cool bit of textile art on view in Perfect Imbalance: Exploring Chinese Aesthetics that featured pumpkins, ears of corn, and tomatoes as exotic fruits
Art Making: Butterfly Seed Mats — We used burlap, white glue, and butterfly seed mix to create biodegradable bits of art that you could plant in a corner of your garden and grow wildflowers to attract butterflies.  Simple but incredibly effective.  This book happened to be requested in the previous year’s visitor survey, and happily was already on my list for potential programming.
April Story Trails handout copy

May: Sing a Song for Mothers and Family!
Book: Anna Hibiscus’ Song by Atinuke
Exhibition Connection: Mother’s Day, and inspired by both the African Art collection and PEM’s ceramics collection
Art Making: Good Cheer Jars – We mod-podged tissue paper and other bits of recycled paper onto glass jars to create good cheer jars.  A good cheer jar can work any of several ways: a) a semi-voluntary fine paid when one is in a bad mood, the proceeds from which are then used to do something cheery for the family like a trip out for ice cream, b) a collection of slips of paper on which you write things that make you happy and pull one out to read when you need cheering up, c) a mandatory fine for using the household’s forbidden words like ‘I’m bored.’
May Story Trails handout copy

My Sea-Monster sand painting, which is still on display over my desk.

June: Beneath the Deep Blue Sea
Book: The Serpent Came to Gloucester by M.T. Anderson
Exhibition Connection: Local history and the Maritime Art collection
Art Making: Sea-Monster Sand Paintings — Using pre-cut mattes, construction paper, white liquid glue, sand, pebbles, and small sea shells and bits of sea glass, we created maritime-inspired natural collages.  Some of them got very, very intricate, particularly those who decided to make mosaics of sea glass.  This was one of my personal favorite art activities, and many of the adults who were at the program participated with gusto.
June Story Trails handout

Illustration from The Day-Glo Brothers by Chris Barton

July: What a Bright Idea!
Book: The Day-Glo Brothers by Chris Barton
Exhibition Connection: Contemporary art in the Japanese Art collection
Art Making: Day-Glo (and Glow-in-the-Dark) Paintings — Using black construction paper, day-glo poster paint, and some very cool glow-in-the-dark paint, we created scenes that looked awesome in general and even better under the light of our interactive black light box.  We also had samples of varying materials that kids could test to see whether or not they would react with the black light and start to glow, including beads, assorted fabrics, gelatinous substances (in safe containers), and assorted paper products.  This was one of the year’s most popular programs.
July Story Trails handout copy

August: What Does the Clay Say?
Book: Dave the Potter, Artist, Poet, Slave by Bryan Collier and Laban Carrick Hill
Exhibition Connection: Ceramics in the American Art collection
Art Making: Experimenting with Clay – Though the idea was to start with pinch pots and some coil-building, clay programs always take on a life of their own.  Some people made pots, others branched out into sculpture and beyond.  Everyone had a fabulous time, including some adults who had missed the story and had no kids, but wanted to come work with clay anyway.
August Story Trails handout copy

September: Hats Off To You!
Book: Miss Hunnicutt’s Hat by Jeff Brumbeau
Exhibition Connection: Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones
Art Making: Decorate a hatbox – We used 12″ cake boxes from ULine, which fold into very decent sized hatboxes and are easy to decorate with colored pencil, stickers, collaged recycled material, and crayon.
Sept Story Trails handout copy

October: Canine Crusader
Book: Dex – The Heart of a Hero by Caralyn Buehner (alternate title Superdog)
Exhibition Connection: Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones and the Caps, Capes, and Characters weekend festival (organized by me)
Art Making: Superhero capes with interchangeable emblems – We used SmartFab and craft foam with adhesive velcro dots to create capes (I cut each cape to length to suit children individually), and discussed designing emblems that suited their personalities for their superhero alter egos.  The velcro made it possible to rearrange or replace emblems later.
Oct Story Trails handout copy

Detail from the Pastrana tapestries

November: Oh What a Knight!
Book: The Knight and the Dragon by Tomie dePaola and The Princess Knight by Cornelia Funke
Exhibition Connection: The Invention of Glory: Alfonso V and the Pastrana Tapestries and the Weaving Tales of Glory weekend festival (also organized by me)
Art Making: Tournament pennants — More SmartFab and back to fabric paint — we created jousting pennants inspired by the fabulous examples in the Pastrana Tapestries and the illustrations in both books.
Nov Story Trails handout copy

December: A Patient Brush
Book: Twenty Heartbeats by Dennis Haseley
Exhibition Connection: Perfect Imbalance: Exploring Chinese Aesthetics
Art Making: Chinese brush painting – We used rice paper (available at ACMoore or less expensively from Dick Blick), Chinese calligraphy brushes, and red and black watercolor paint, with examples from ‘how to’ books on traditional brush painting style.
Dec Story Trails handout copy

“Iron Woman” steampunk print by Karen Hallion

As a librarian’s daughter, an avid reader, and an English major, I am always attracted to wordy art projects, and I often find artworks made out of recycled print absolutely beautiful while simultaneously wincing over the fact that one must deface books to create them.  After all, books are meant to be read, and what are they when they are no longer readable?

Poe’s Short Stories, altered book art by Susan Hoerth

Paper roses made from book pages by Twigg Studios

For some artworks like the roses above, one could easily substitute with magazine pages or old maps (about which I feel decidedly less squeamish), and for others newspaper will also work.

However, I have finally lit upon a type of altered book artwork that bothers me less than others, because while it still alters the original intent, the book still gets ‘read’ in a new fashion.

Found Poetry in Altered Book Pages

As with the roses, this is an activity that can be done using other forms of the printed word (newspapers, magazines) and can also be done without altering the original text at all (words captured and written down in a new form from museum object labels, etc.)  However, it combines both poetry and the visual arts in a way that is perfect for the programming that we do at PEM for the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.  (Guess what’s going in this year’s program?)

The image I saw on Pinterest that started it all: A Batman poem out of some other detective/adventure story

How does Illustrated Found Poetry work?

• Pick a piece of text with a decent amount of wording to it.
• Read through it for the sounds of the words and not necessarily the narrative or the original author’s intent.
• Find a theme to the words that inspires you.  Use as many or as few as you like: cherry pick a word here, a phrase there, etc.
• The one limit to working on the original sheet is that you cannot rearrange the words to your own liking–the poem flows in the same direction as the original text did.
• Pencil boxes around the words you want.
• Pencil in any illustrations (doodles, sketches, details) that help to give your new poem mood, shape, or further depth.
• Use marker to darken the boxes around your poem and color in the details of your illustration.  You may want to use highlighter within the boxes for your poem to help pick it out of the illustration, depending on how much color there already is in your drawing.
• Use black marker to cross out any words left that are not part of your poem or are already obscured by your illustration.

“Leaving Town” by Meg Winikates, originally from a page of The Walk West by Peter and Barbara Jenkins, click to read in full-size

The plan is to have a bunch of genres of books available from which to select pages: sci-fi, mystery, classics, memoirs, maybe even some more technical books.  Hopefully this will show people that poetry can be found absolutely anywhere.  The 2013 festival will be held May 3-5 in numerous venues around Salem–I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes!

Links for images in this post: Karen Hallion’s Etsy Page
How to make Book Roses
Poe’s Castle Short Stories Altered Book
Batman Altered Book Poem Illustrated

Art making in the gallery, solution 1: interactive art cart with touchable materials, sketching, and ‘safe’ art-making alternatives like sumi-e water painting and scratch art

PEM is undergoing an exciting construction phase which means our art studios are currently out of commission, a grave sadness to those of us who are in love with messy art projects.  Many of the materials we’ve used in the past are on the “I seriously doubt it” list when talking about doing art activities in alternate spaces like galleries or the museum’s atrium.  Such materials include recycled make-up, a variety of paints (though the atrium space can take a few more of those than galleries obviously can), liquid glue, melted wax, silk screening, glitter anything, anything with sharp tools (for stamp cutting, some clay tools), and even most clay is on the iffy side.

So what to do?

Fortunately, I’ve been collecting fun ideas in preparation for this whimsical construction period, so here are a few I’m looking forward to trying out in the near future:

Multicolored translucent paper folding (click the inspiration image to go through to the artist’s site)

Kinetic Rubber Band Art (click the image to go to the directions)

Holepunch Art (click the image to go to the artist’s site)