Key to the City

Photo: Louis Armstrong House Museum

Key to the City is a clever project created by artist Paul Ramirez Jonas. To be part of the project members of the public are invited to go (with a friend) to a kiosk in Times Square. Here friends bestow keys on each other and the adventure begins. The key may be for a back door, front gate, community garden, graveyard or museum in all five New York buroughs. The keys open spaces usually not accessible to the general public.

Imagine all the interesting doors you could open in the Arts Centre?

Who Shot Rock 'n' Roll Pt 2

You may remember I recently sent through a post about Brooklyn Museum's new photographic exhibition, 'Who Shot Rock 'n' Roll'. This is a follow up post showing how they cleverly intergrated new media into their public programs. Although the exhibition is about rock 'n' roll, the focus of the show is photography so they sent out a call for people to come along and take their own rock shots at a live gig set up by the Museum. Punters were then encouraged to upload their images to the Museum's Flickr stream and legendary rock photographer Bob Gruen viewed the work and commented on his favourites both on Flickr and on the Museum's blog.

This sort of program may well be quite manageable for us as it had a very definate start and end date lasting just four weeks. The set up was not that different from our AC/DC Back in Black Friday gig. Next time we could advertise the 'call to arms' on the flyer, we already have a Flickr account (although we haven't actually started using it) and we know lots of great photographers who might have been interested in being involved. Maybe we could try something for 'Women in Rock' - what do you think?

Caz

Remember me?

Poster advertising rock band "Chain"at Berties nightclub, Melbourne, 1970s, Performing Arts Collection

Sorry about the lack of posts over recent weeks. Julian and I have been very busy trawling though the Collection to try and find the right material for our Australian Music, Circus and Creative Process packages. It has been a steep learning curve for both of us. I have had to look at the Collection from a very different perspective thinking about connections to curriculum and about how to make historical material engaging in a new medium.

We have started on the Australian music interactive timeline and have been looking at including some of the posters from Bertie's and Sebastian's. Coincidently, I received this blogpost from the Brooklyn Museum featuring some groovy psychadelic posters from their collection.

More soon

Caz

Exhibition inspiration

How would you feel about letting someone else do some of the curating? Here are a couple of different approaches to curating exhibitions that you might not have considered.

The first is Powerhouse's The Odditoreum which began life as an idea for a small school holiday program but resulted in a popular exhibition, book and limited edition print. The project had many constraints including a budget of only $7000 (excluding staff time) and was conceived as a 'low-tech' way of engaging visitors with the permanent collection.

The show was 'curated' by children's book author Shaun Tan. Tan chose 10 objects from a long list he was sent by the Public Programs Producer who had compiled and refined the list in consultation with curators, registrars and conservators. He then wrote fictitious labels of approx. 100 words for each object. Visitors were also invited to write their own labels. The 'real' label information was also included by only at the end of the exhibition.

The show was a hit and is a good reminder that you don't always have to spend a million bucks to pull off a good idea. It is also a good 'real-life' example of a the type of engagement people are also seeking online.

The other idea comes from the Brooklyn Museum and is called Click!: A Crowd Curated Exhibition. This exhibition was inspired by the notion of 'the wisdom of crowds' as espoused by business and financial columnist James Surowieki. Rather than try and explain it just click on the link for a short, sharp explanation.

Does anyone else know of any interesting exhibition concepts? Why not let us all know about them by leaving a comment below!

Caz