Museums for the New Millennium:Changing Public Expectations of Museums
Museums for the New Millennium:The following is an edited transcript of the proceedings of "Museums for the New Millennium." Do not quote or copy any of this without the written permission of the author.
MR. BRETOS: Good morning, my friends. You are an audience from far and wide. I welcome you to Washington in a hurricane morning. I am from Florida but I have nothing whatsoever to do with that. My name is Miguel Bretos and I'm Counselor to the Secretary for Latino Affairs here, for the 150-year-old Smithsonian. To my right are the speakers this morning, Harold Skramstad and Irene Hirano.
Like many museum colleagues in my generational bracket, I started life as something else. Truth be told, I'm a relative newcomer to the museum field and to the Smithsonian, being 10 years or so in the former, and a bit under three at the latter. One of the things that never fails to excite and sustain me in the museum field, certainly as compared to my former life as an academic historian, is the challenge of being immersed in the great paradox of the profession: the need to be simultaneously careful and deliberate, conservative in the appropriate way, bold and creative, sometimes downright quixotic and even, at times, prophetic.
It is little wonder that museum folks are optimistic to the core. They have to be. Look at us today. Here we are facing the millennium. This used to be a time for doom, foreboding and apocalypse and we are looking forward to doing the right thing, as Harold will talk to us about, unless of course, by the year 2000, when the two zeros come up, all the damn things are erased from your computers, then of course all the bets are off.
Our first presentation this morning is about the changing public expectations of museums. During the past half century, we read in Harold's precis, museums have made extraordinary gains in the museum enterprise. The result has been very positive in strengthening the overall efficiency of museums. Yet, as museums get better and better at doing things right, in terms of professionalism, the question of doing the right thing remains a central one in light of the sea of change in which we are immersed. New segments of society have brought into question many of the deeply-held values of museums and museum professionals. I suppose we face today, if I read that correctly, the dilemma of old Charlie the tuna. Remember him from the ad? Little Charlie was down there in the depths listening to Beethoven, hoping to be snatched up by Starkist. Then out comes the voiceover: "Now Charlie, Starkist doesn't want tunas with good taste, they want tunas that taste good."
We're going to have to make a bit of a change there as we face up to the new audiences that are hooking down into the depths of whatever it is museums have to offer.
I truly look forward to the presentation of Dr. Harold K. Skramstad, Jr. Harold has been long associated with the Smithsonian. During 1969-74, he served in several management capacities at the National Museum of American History. More recently, he served, as did Irene, as a member of the Commission on the Future of the Smithsonian Institution. He served as the Director of the Chicago Historical Society between 1974 and 1980 and as president of the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan between 1981 and 1996 where he is now a senior advisor to his successor. A Ph.D. in American civilization, his areas of special interest include American cultural history, education reform and public humanities programming. No wonder he is in tremendous demand from many boards and advisory committees. He served on the Advisory Council of Directors for the Museum Trustee Association, as the Founding Chairman, 1989-1991. He currently serves as a member of the Governmental Affairs Committee of the American Association of Museums and has held several positions in the association, including Vice President, between 1984 and 1988.
Harold is the author of articles, essays, and reviews in scholarly and professional journals and he has contributed his skills to the boards of numerous civic and culture organizations in Michigan, Illinois and Washington, D.C. We look forward to his contributing his skills and certainly his eloquence this morning. Harold, the floor is yours.
MR. SKRAMSTAD: Thank you and good morning. For me this is very special, being back at the Smithsonian, because the Smithsonian is where I got my start in the museum business and I've been certainly associated with this institution for a long time. In a way, it's kind of interesting lecturing in the "hole" this morning. I've been in the hole at the Smithsonian more than once, I should add, in a variety of other situations.
I was also very pleased to see Wilcomb Washburn in the audience. Witt has been one of the great mentors in my life and one that certainly not only introduced me to the museum business but also introduced me to the idea of questioning everything you do all the time. And Witt, I appreciate that. Mentorship is something that I think our field needs a lot more of and I was very privileged to benefit from a number of my colleagues in this area.
I'm going to speak not only from a U.S. perspective this morning but also from a practitioner perspective. One of the things that the museum field still lacks is a truly serious literature. We have, in Stephen Weil in the audience this morning, probably a good 50 percent of the serious literature about museums. I commend to you Steve's writing in this area as I really commend also the work of Neil Harris. Between the two of them, I think they have provided the kind of long-term provocative and systematic look at the museum enterprise that we need more of, because those of us who are practitioners have a kind of ever-changing world view that inevitably is going to be a result of our experience. I think we depend so much, though, on the collective experience of others that we get through that work.
In October of 1789, the leaders of the Episcopal church of the U.S. assembled in Philadelphia, adopted a new book of common prayer that would draw from the traditions of the church of England but also anticipate the quite different requirements of a new and far more secular American society. In rewriting their new guide to religious devotion, they were seeking, and here I quote, "to keep the happy mean between too much stiffness in refusing and too much easiness in admitting that variations in things once advisedly established."
As we approach the 21st century, those of us in the museum field must cope with the same dilemma. We want to keep what is advisedly established, but be not too stiff in refusing change. For the past half century, we have been engaged in a field that, at its roots, has had the elements of a religious calling. Based on this calling, we've created a theology as well as rights and rituals that have professionalized the field and provided certain rules of internal discipline and order that have given museums in America a new authority and museum workers new status. Overall it has been an amazing accomplishment.
If one compares the state of museums as recently as the early 1970s when the American Association of Museums began its accreditation program, the improvements in standards for museum activities has risen steadily and in some cases dramatically. To be sure, we had help in the process. Much of this has come from the dramatically increased funding of museum activities by the IMS, the NEH and the NEA. This support provided a tremendous booster effect to everything we did, from improving the storage, documentation and conservation of our collections, to the publication or exhibition or other outcomes of our work. The price to be paid for this support, outside peer review by academic scholars, was also a source of much-improved intellectual standards. I think we all too often forget that the scholarly-informed, contextual, interpretive programs that we all take for granted today in American museum productions are, to a large extent, the result of this 30-year experiment in massive Federal support for arts and humanities institutions.
What we are now beginning to recognize is that the same process of intense professionalization and internal standard raising in the museum community has had another effect: widening the disconnect between museums and the general public audiences that they purport to serve. Ironically the peer review process, essential to assure this massive Federal support, exacerbated this trend, imposing academic standards as the primary standard for museum public programs.
So while we were getting better and better at doing things, the question of what things we ought to do seemed not a big issue. In our relentless pursuit of improvement, we seldom questioned the most fundamental issue of how we provide our value to society. In recent years we have begun to hear more clearly and constantly from our publics. And these new voices increasingly are those whose presence and power must be reckoned with.
This new call for accountability, aptly referred to as the "great come-uppance" by a Canadian colleague, has taken many forms. For example, Native American groups began to scrutinize the stewardship and scholarship claims of museums and found them in deep contradiction to their own values. The result of this disagreement was a negotiated settlement but one that weakened the universalism of traditional museum claims.
Concurrently, other groups, often ethnic and racial minorities, began to look at museums to legitimize and validate their claims for inclusion and found to their dismay and often anger that there was either no record of their existence or the record we had was skewed or hopelessly fragmented. To be sure there were a whole range of legitimate and reasonable excuses for this, for those of us in the field, but for those outside, it was a source of frustration and anger.
This claim for recognition and legitmation was raised within the context of larger changes of the last several decades, which have profoundly expanded the power and influence of new groups to shape the social and political agenda of American communities. We have all seen this played out in the new pressures being brought against each of our individual museums. We have all followed the heavily publicized questioning of the intellectual authority of established museums who are under attack by groups with very diverse views and very different interests. In short, we are now in a period in which continuity has run out on us.
Our universalist claims of value and authority which gave us such a strong, almost religious sense of calling, and which have done so much to improve the quality and professionalism of everything we do, now seem to be a barrier in preparing us to address legitimate expectations of a more pluralistic society. In retrospect, it appears clear that we have based much of our appeal upon our belief that the appropriating, holding, and exhibiting of the material record of the human and the natural world is an intrinsic social good, understood and valued by all, rather than representing the particular view of the particular groups that have both governed and staffed our museums.
For a long time, this situation was masked by our increasing attendance. In retrospect it is clear that our claims of increased attendance were, for the most part, based on a relatively small number of people visiting many museums and visiting them repeatedly, rather than an overwhelming desire of everyone to visit or participate in the life of a museum.
Today we are where our church friends were in 1789 in Philadelphia: transplanted to a new and different country of the future and trying to craft new liturgy that keeps some of our most deeply held values and yet admits that profound change is required to recharge the spirit of the enterprise. To confidently and honestly confront the future, I think our first requirement is to admit fully to the diversity of museums and the lack of overarching rules for charting their individual destinies.
In 1993, I wrote in Museum News:
"The word museum has lost its power to adequately define a coherent body of institutions that have similar missions, goals and strategies. To define a major research-driven natural history museum, a regional science and technology center, an encyclopedic art museum or a local volunteer-run historical society as a museum is like describing General Motors, K Mart, a regional bank or a local convenience store as a business - accurate but not helpful.
In the world of the future, every institution, including a museum, must be judged on its distinctive ability to provide value to society in a way that builds on unique institutional strengths and serves unique community needs. The only rule that will apply to all museums is that there are not rules that apply to all museums. (With the exception of the most basic and technical rules for keeping track of money and collections.)
The high ground of object-centered transcendence, of a canon of authoritative knowledge, of codified professional standards to train and guide all museum operations has lost its power to shape and control."
Today, I feel even more emphatic about the correctness of that statement. It would be foolish to try to set out general rules for individual museums to follow in addressing the cacophony of apparently differing expectations from its various audiences. Conventional wisdom tells us that the new audiences we are trying to reach have radically different expectations than our more established, traditional audiences. While this may, on the surface, seem the case, I think the expectations of these new audiences are more similar to those of the old than we think.
For any organization, profit or nonprofit, to continue to exist, it must solve some problem in people's lives. Traditional museum audiences have been attracted to museums because they offer the kind of environment that is for them stimulating, engaging, participatory, and educational. These audiences are generally quite culturally secure and get pleasure and enjoyment from consuming cultures and experiences that are unfamiliar and often exotic. For them a museum experience is an enjoyable one and one that solves a problem in that it provides some unique value that cannot be as effectively provided by some other experience or some other organization. For them, museum experiences are a rewarding and enjoyable habit.
For others not steeped in the same value system, going to a mall, a movie or a theme park provides much the same kind of enjoyment. They do not generally enjoy the process of confronting and exploring the unfamiliar and learning from it since it does not solve a problem in their lives. Yet these audiences have the same expectations for their experiences as traditional ones: they want enjoyable, entertaining experience that they see as helpful to their lives. The dilemma faced by museums is not different than that faced by any provider of goods and services. Unless you provide a range of products and services that will provide value to each customer on his or her own terms, you will not stay in business.
In the recent past we have seen museums focus on outreach toward new audiences but, for the most part, with an unwillingness to consider any fundamental change in what they offer or how they offer it. This must change. While there is no one road map or prescription for this process that will work for every museum, I do think that there are a few common ways for each museum to set its gyroscope as it begins the journey.
I would like to briefly suggest just a few future expectations that any audience should be able to hold any museum responsible for. The first expectations is for specialness. For a museum, this means the experiences it provides its users are not redundant with those offered by others. Traditionally, we have argued that what makes us special are our collections. But many organizations and individuals have collections. Our response is: ""We use our objects to teach." Fine, but so do many others as well.
My point is to suggest that the mission statement of most museums, which goes "our mission is to collect, preserve and interpret fill-in-the-blank," will no longer do. Such mission statements do not answer the vital question of "so what? " Increasingly, the mission statement of a museum, its essential statement of value-added, is going to have to contain not only a concise and clear statement of what the museum does, but a description of the outcome of its actions and a sense of the value that this outcome has in the larger work of the community in which it serves. If there is nothing unique and special about its work and the value of this work in solving a problem in people's lives, then so what - what is the point?
A critical component of a museum's specialness will result from the experiences it provides. For those of us inside the field, we subdivide our activities into a series of functions: curatorial, education, ticketing, security, exhibitions, that meet our own institutional needs. For the museum user, however, it is one seamless experience that must compete for specialness with a whole series of other experiences. Hotels, casinos, resorts, and malls collect and display art. Museums offer food and retail and entertainment experiences; corporate exhibition centers offer virtual realities.
Increasingly, museums need to see the experiences they offer as part of an overall touristic experience that extends from the invitation to the welcome and the attendant hospitality issues, such as attentiveness, friendliness, and cleanliness that addresses a variety of social, asthetic, and recreational needs. The specialness of museums in the future will not so much be based on the uniqueness of their collections but on the focused, authenticity of the recreational experiences they can offer.
Another key element of specialness is the museum's claim to the expectation of authority. It is in this area where much of the present controversy over the role of museums has been centered. The museum, like most institutions in modern American life, has been, to use Neil Harris' term, deprivileged. Yet, if a museum has no special knowledge, no special perspective or other unique resource, then why is it special? Here museums have truly become the victims of their own success. Thirty years ago, most museums would not have claimed the authority to address many of the subjects and topics routinely covered today. Nor, for the most part, would the broad public have taken much notice of it if we had. Today, museums have an assumed authority that makes them vulnerable to attack in the way that any influential source of authority is. Our response to these attacks is too often retreat or arrogance. Properly managing and continuously renegotiating our authority will be a major and time-consuming responsibility of the future.
Included in the specialness expectation is importance. If a museum plays a special role in a particular community, it needs to be able to measure the value of what it does in a way that clearly demonstrates its value-added. If a museum says it is special in providing educational services, then how does it measure the importance of those services in a way that assures people that it is truly worthy of time, attention, and resources that could go to other educational institutions? If we say we are important to cultural tourism, then how do we show this in a concrete way? If a museum is a place that brings families together, then how do we measure it to other institutions that also do the same thing?
Another important element of the museum's specialness is its responsibility for novelty in its activities. We have in the museum field a bias against novelty because we see it as detracting from our more long-term claims of cultural importance. Yet all of us demand a large degree of novelty in our lives. This is what keeps the fashion and furniture industries alive, and it is why restaurants must constantly change their menus. To remain special and important, there must be a newness and immediacy of activities that demands a visit to check it out. It can be driven by new knowledge and new perspective or new interests. Whatever the reason, new products and new services offer a solution to the age-old problem of too much tired familiarity and outworn experiences.
A second fundamental expectation is connectedness. The successful museum of the next century must be connected to the community far more continuously and closely than we can imagine today. This means that the governing authority and the staff will have to look a lot more like the audience the museum serves. It also means that the museum must be a listener as well as a talker. Again, the mission becomes a critical element of connectivity. An externally oriented mission helps the museum to avoid answering questions that no one is asking or providing programs important to the professional interest of the museum but of little interest to the community it serves.
Key to the listening process is who do we listen to? What questions do we ask? And most importantly, what are we willing to do about changing as a result of the listening? The mission provides the framework for what questions we ask; the service area, plus mission, provides the answer to who we ask; and the mission sets the limits of the museum's ability to change itself in response to what it has heard.
To deliver on the promise of connectedness will require a lot of change on the part of museums. The professional standards of museum practice are still very much biased toward academic training and internal management efficiency. In the future, the bias will be stronger toward externally focused, people-oriented and community-engaged perspectives. If we look around us at those museums who are farthest along in their efforts to redesign themselves, it is those who are most connected to their communities.
Another important aspect of connectedness is the need for an electronic connectivity between the museum and its audience. This kind of connectedness is not only a value in transmitting information and insight but is also a potent listening device that allows the museum to get essential feedback that provides the basis for a stronger relationship between the museum and its users.
The last expectation I will suggest to you this morning is the most important and grows out of the others. This is the requirement of trustworthiness. Most people seek out and receive important and memorable information and insight from people and organizations they trust. An atmosphere of trust takes much time to establish and requires continuing investment and testing by all parties to the transaction. We see this happen every day, both in personal relationships and commercial transactions.
In the commercial sector, there is, among great companies, a fanatical focus on brand management: the process by which a business provides assurance to its customers that whatever product or service it produces will be worthy of the brand. If a series of new products or services do not live up to the brand, the erosion in the company is real and measurable in the marketplace. A strong brand is forgiven a mistake from time to time, but a string of mistakes, especially unacknowledged ones, breaks the bond of trust, which then takes enormous time and resources to restore and in fact often the customer changes brands. It is the same thing with museums. There should be a clear expectation that each museum should have a process in place for assuring the trustworthiness of its products that is reasonable and understandable to people of common sense.
I would like to close my remarks with a charming story about the Smithsonian that I feel could be a very helpful and useful parable that can guide us in transforming our work in the future. Soon after assuming the duties of Secretary of the Smithsonian back around the turn of the century, the scientist Samuel B. Langley was concerned that the Institution did little to address the needs of children, who did not care much for arcane natural history labels and who could not even see the objects displayed since they were often on such high shelves. To meet this concern, he appointed himself the honorary curator of the Children's Room at the Smithsonian and he gave himself instructions, and I quote, "to see that a room was reserved and properly prepared for little children who wished only to look at wonder and find out such things as little people most want to know."
In a letter to himself, accepting the appointment, Langley wrote,
"The Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution has been pleased to confer upon me the honorable but arduous duties of the care of the Children's Room. He has at his service so many men learned in natural history that I do not know why he has chosen me, who knows so little about it, unless, perhaps, it is because these gentlemen may possibly not be also learned in the ways of children, for whom this little room is meant.
It has been my purpose to deserve his confidence and to carry out what I believe to be his intention by identifying myself with the interests of my young clients. Speaking therefore in their behalf and as one of them, I should say that we never have a fair chance in museums. We cannot see things on the top shelves which only grown-ups are tall enough to look into, and most of the things we can see and would like to know about have Latin words on them, which we cannot understand: some things we do not care for at all and other things which look entertaining have nothing on them to tell us what they are about...
We think there is nothing in the world more entertaining than birds, animals, and live things, and next to these is our interest in the same things even though they are not alive. And next to this is to read about them. All of us care about them and some of us hope to care about them all our lives long. We are not much interested in Latin names. However much they may mean to grownup people, we do not want to have our entertainment spoiled by its being made a lesson."
As curator of the Children's Room, Langley created experiences that built on the specialness and importance of the Smithsonian's resources and his own scientific knowledge and training. His connectedness to his young audience provided an empathy and perspective that informed his work as well, and the result was an experience that, according to contemporary accounts, was novel and highly participatory. Together they created a relationship of trust and future engagement.
We all can do well to learn from Langley's lesson. Thank you.
MR. BRETOS: I think indeed we can learn from those lessons and it is always enlightening to hear such things have happened. That means they can happen again as we move into that mysterious future that awaits. Thank you very much, Harold. That was a wonderful presentation. If there is one thing certain in the future, especially as we look at the social landscape of the United States of America, it is that it's going to be increasingly more and more varied. We're going to see more and more people, different faces, different color, different languages, different cultures and, perhaps, different expectations from what museums are supposed to do for us as a society.
The next presentation, by Irene Hirano, is "Responding to Community Forces: The Japanese American National Museum." Irene, like Harold, has been connected to the Smithsonian in many ways. She's now executive director and president of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, a position she has held since 1988. She received a bachelor's and master's degree in public administration from the University of Southern California. Irene brings to the museum over 20 years of experience in nonprofit administration, community and public education and community affairs with culturally diverse communities nationwide. She served as a member of the Smithsonian Institution's Commission on the Future, and currently serves as a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities and the Cultural Tourism Council of the Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau. She is a trustee of Marlboro School, member of the Board of Governors of the University of Southern California, and a board member of the National Health Foundation. Let's welcome Irene Hirano.
The following is an edited transcript of proceedings from "Museums for the New Millennium." Do not quote or copy any of this text without the written permission of the author.
MS. HIRANO: Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here because I think what's happening in the museum field now is very exciting and challenging.
We have an opportunity to be an important catalyst in creating relevant institutions for exploration and dialogue as our country prepares itself for this next decade.
Prior to addressing the topic of how external forces worked to shape and develope our museum, I'd like to share with you a little bit of my background to give you a context for my perspectives. Since the early 1970s, I've worked in community organizations on the local, regional and national arena. I've been involved in developing organizations which were established to provide education, social services and leadership training for Asian-American communities as well as other ethnic communities. I was not trained in the museum field, but it was my administrative and community background that the Board of Trustees sought out when I was recruited to become the director of a newly established museum. What appealed to me eight years ago and what continues to be important to me was the potential to create an institution that would be based in the community and could ensure that our history was told from a personal perspective accurately, sensitively and in a meaningful way to a broad audience. This background is not unlike that of many who are entering the museum field now, and I think that what excites me about our work today is the potential that I see for museums in the future.
In the mid 1980s, a new museum was founded in Los Angeles in response to a growing concern that the history of Japanese Americans was absent from our history books, educational materials and all forms of mass media. The Japanese American National Museum was created to preserve and share the history and culture of Japanese Americans within the context of a multicultural American experience. There was no inherited collection, no large individual contributor, but a group of people with an intense motivation to ensure that their history and culture was documented.
The history of Japanese Americans is not unlike most other immigrant groups. They came to America to search for a new and a better life. They were brought to Hawaii in the 1800s as contract laborers and came to the west coast in the late 1800s and early 1900s, working as farmers, railroad workers, running family stores, and working in industries, such as fishing and lumber. Like many immigrant groups, they faced continued discrimination and, in the case of Japanese Americans, this culminated in the unconstitutional forced incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, mainly from the western U.S. during World War II. [See "A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution."]
After the war years they set about rebuilding their lives, for the most part not talking about this dark chapter in our history. But a younger generation, those products of the civil rights movement, began asking what had happened and how could it happen? After many years of a national effort, Japanese Americans were provided with redress and reparations and a formal apology from the U.S. Government.
It was during this time that many Japanese Americans began to recognize that their history and that of their early immigrant parents were absent from history books. They were not reflected in museums, in historical societies, and in other institutions. They found that many people in the U.S. believed it was something that could not and did not happen. (Even now we get a number of letters that challenge this fact of history.) They began to realize that their experiences might not be documented unless they ensured that it would be told. The first and second generations who were incarcerated during World War II had never talked about what happened to them in the war. They didn't talk about it to their children or to others. My own family, who was incarcerated in Arkansas, hadn't talked about it and it wasn't until college that I began to realize that the "camp life" that my family and other relatives occasionally talked about was not a social gathering.
After many years of silence, those Japanese Americans realized that the interpretation of their history would be left to others to tell. This fueled an intense need to give their history a home. That was the motivation behind the creation of our institution, and was to ensure not only that future generations of Japanese Americans would have a home for their history and culture but that their history would be viewed within the context of a broader American experience and that visitors from around the country and around the world would come to learn that history.
Institutions like ours, which are devoted to ensuring that their stories are told, are growing out of the continuum of community development. Ethnic communities have been creating churches, social organizations, cultural centers and other institutions for many years. The particular building that houses our museum was formerly a Buddhist temple, built in 1925 by early Japanese pioneers to Los Angeles. They rented out a portion of the building to pay the mortgage and the building served as much as a community center as it did a Buddhist temple. It was an appropriate restoration of a building that was very much rooted in the community.
But how does an ethnic museum appeal to a broader audience? How does it respond to the many constituencies even within their own ethnic group, regional differences and age differences among other divisions? These are questions that we continually grapple with. One of the key ways that this is accomplished is through partnerships and collaborations. I believe this will be one of the most critical ways that our museums will work in the future. We cannot do diverse programming effectively unless we work together. With different segments of our own constituents, with other organizations, and other institutions.
One type of collaboration involves working with a particular constituency within our own ethnic group anxious to preserve and share their own story. We have developed regionally specific exhibitions in which we work with a particular community to develop and design the exhibition with local resources, identify the collections within those communities, develop educational packages with local school teachers and retired educators, and raise funds within that region to create the exhibition. For example in Kona, Hawaii, an exhibition was recently developed about the local coffee industry. A local community in Kona raised over $250,000 in their own locale to put together an exhibition that is currently touring Hawaii. The exhibit recently drew over 40,000 visitors to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. It drew another 10,000 visitors to a resort hotel in Kona.
The exhibit will eventually be donated to the Kona Historical Society when it has completed its travel, which will include the mainland, Brazil and Japan.
While the exhibit was at the Bishop Museum, we worked with the Kona Club of Honolulu which recruited over 100 volunteer docents to staff the exhibit. It was their first experience in volunteering in a museum. This type of community participation provides a more intimate experience to visitors, one that's personal and interpretive. It was their family stories and they were best able to make it come alive. But who benefits? The local Kona community was able to bring together much of their history which was in danger of being lost. They gained expertise in collections, oral history, exhibit design, and other museum fundamentals. Those institutions in Hawaii such as the Bishop Museum and the Kona Historical Society drew in new audiences and volunteers. The Japanese American National Museum is able to fulfill its mission to provide programming nationally which involves communities in telling their own story. What our museum brings to the partnership is the local community, volunteers, expertise, funding, and new audiences.
These partnership projects have been funded by the NEH and the Rockefeller Foundation which has provided seed money. But it's the local community that raises the funds to make it a reality. Another type of collaboration that we engage in is between different institutions. Through a three-year partnership funded by the James Irvine Foundation, our museum is mentoring new emerging institutions from other ethnic communities.
In the first year our staff worked with the new Korean American Museum in Los Angeles to develop a joint exhibition which was shown at both locations. In the past, local Korean Americans would ordinarily not venture into a Japanese American institution but this exhibit invited them into our doors. This year we are partnering with Plaza de La Raza and the Watts Tower Arts Center which enables us to develop a working relationship with two other organizations serving different constituents. The exhibition, "Finding Family Stories," encourages artists to express their family experiences through the arts. The project involves the close working relationship with artists, local community organizations and their staffs to explore ways in which our experiences intersect, exploring local commonalities and differences.
This must be the direction for the future. Every museum will have its own community or its own natural constituency. In order to broaden that constituency, we can work with different types of institutions, learn from each other, find ways to be mutually beneficial and not try and duplicate what others may be better equipped to develop.
These types of collaborations take place with other ethnic organizations, but also with established institutions like the San Jose Museum of Art or the Oregon Historical Society where we have been able to work together in reaching a segment of that museum's local region, bringing in new volunteers, local members, and donors.
But what implications does all this have for our own financial survival? In an era of dwindling resources, we see new museums starting and flourishing all over the country. Most Asian-Americans have never interfaced with established museums in their given communities. It's a new market to be tapped. The ability to involve a new segment of museum supporters doesn't mean that they will only support institutions like ours, but once they become involved, they can potentially support other local and national cultural institutions.
In the last several years, the Japanese American National Museum has raised in excess of $40 million for operations, two capital campaigns, programs, and an endowment. Most of this money has come from those families who have never supported museums or cultural facilities before. The foundation for the museum came from Japanese Americans from around the country who joined as members and donors. Our donor base is now over 35,000 and grows by several thousand each year. Most recently the museum appealed to the Japanese corporate community and we've just completed a $9.5 million campaign in Japan which will go towards the construction of a new pavilion that will begin later this year. This is the largest contribution by the Japanese corporate sector towards an American institution. Our particular museum is not about Japanese history or art, but about the experience of Americans with Japanese ancestry. Since World War II, there has not been a close affinity between Japanese Americans and Japan and this marks new connections, bridged through education and culture.
In building a strong connection to the community, it is possible to finds new donors and new volunteers. What's happening in the Japanese American community is also evidenced in other areas, the Wing Luke Museum in [Seattle] Washington, the Chinatown History Museum in New York, the Korean American Museum in Los Angeles, and the new National Filipino Historical Society.
As I said, I have a great deal of enthusiasm for the museum field. I think the growing emphasis on cultural tourism and the bringing together of museums and their surrounding neighborhoods is one of the external forces that have to be considered by local, community-based institutions. We are located in the downtown civic center of Los Angeles, in the little Tokyo community. This was once a vibrant community but more recently, as other downtowns have found, they faced the difficulties of an economic down-turn and many local businesses have been forced to close. The opening of the museum and the expansion that will take place has an opportunity to draw visitors not only to our building but to the surrounding neighborhood and to provide visitors fuller experience including restaurants, churches, shops and so forth.
We have recently instituted a regular Little Tokyo tour as one of our public programs, taking a museum experience out into the neighborhood. We feel we have a responsibility to reach out and to serve as an economic stimulus to the local community that surrounds us. It is possible to respond to that need within the context of a museum's mission. Some of our major exhibitions have been accompanied by special events, which bring in many out of town visitors benefiting the local hotels and restaurants. Our sponsorship of a national Japanese American family expo in 1994 drew 20,000 people to the convention center locally to see displays that were developed by 100 community organizations. Last year we paid tribute to Japanese American veterans nationally in a show that drew over 5,000 veterans from around the country.
What will the future hold? Will future generations be interested in history museums? This is the question that many of us are asking today. Each year our board of trustees assessses where we've been and where we are going. And in that strategic assessment, we spend time asking ourselves whether our environment has changed, are there new competitors, and what are the current issues which the community is facing? We have to be willing to take risks and make mistakes along the way. We have to acknowledge that we could have done it better and we have to be flexible and open to new ideas. We have to be willing to stretch and to maintain a big vision. Those are the demands that the constituents we serve will continue to place upon us.
The particulars that work for our museum won't work for all museums because we are continually trying to adapt a Japanese American philosophy, perspective, culture, and values in how we do our work. This occurs whether we are developing an exhibition or raising money. But we and other community-based institutions can bring a new dimension to the museum community - we can learn from each other.
In closing, I want to acknowledge that our museum, and I personally, continue to benefit from those in the museum field. Staff here at the Smithsonian, those like James Early, Lonnie Bunch and many others have extended a generous hand and we have learned from each other. It is that spirit of community that needs to be fostered and nurtured so that our individual museums will prosper and so will our museum field collectively. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE].
MR. BRETOS: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank Irene. This is a case where one sees the principles enunciated earlier by Harold: of specialness, connectedness and trustworthiness, at work. So ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now yours and I hope the ladies and gentlemen up in the gallery as well will participate with enthusiasm. We have some time for questions and answers. And we're ready for you.
Voice: Jim Joy, HMS Beagle Group.
I cannot help but be impressed by the contrast of this session and what was presented at 9:00. How do we go about sensitizing people who may still be in the ivory tower to come on down, walk outside and see what's going on in their community and to hear what you people have said here in this session?
MR. SKRAMSTAD: Maybe this isn't the answer you want. There is room for both the ivory tower museum and for the engaged museum. It sort of depends what the museum does. The J. Pierpont Morgan Library, or the Frick in New York, are never going to be one of those really user-friendly, sort of community-engaged places. But, the fact is, the community it serves likes what it does, gets pleasure out of it, is willing, apparently,to support it in one form or another. And that's good. I think we [sometimes] get the sort of stereotypical institution that has become so internal in where it's going that it doesn't realize what's going on outside. And I think there's just a reality check [that has to be ] with us all the time. I hear from many of my colleagues again and again, "Well, if we could only tell them our story." They hear your story - they're not interested. There are so many other demands, especially for public resources today, that are pretty damn compelling. Unless you can put it in compelling terms that are real and trustworthy, the buckets are going to begin to go empty. And I think in a lot of cases for museums, it's going to just take that. In a sense, if you look at corporate America, again and again the experiences of really smart corporations have been to almost create a crisis before there was a crisis. [Look at] so-called "Neutron" Jack Welsh at GE. GE was a highly successful, pretty profitable company. How could he get people to see the need for mega change? His watchword became "if it ain't broke, break it." And the CEO in a corporation that size has immense power to break things. And he broke those things and the only way they could put Humpty Dumpty back together again was in a dramatically different way. Time and time again, you see successful businesses sort of see the "cliff" over there and they create their own artificial cliff, a little closer, and, if nothing else, scare people over it.
I think that part of the fundamental role of leadership in museums is to see it before it's out there. But for a lot of museums, I think they are just probably going to struggle and go to over the cliff.
MS. HIRANO: We see two ends of the spectrum: Those museums that are having a hard time financially...and institutions that are reaching out, making connections and are in fact able to bring in a great deal of new resources. I think a lot of museums who are having difficulty are beginning to ask: "Why is that?" So I think that, in a sense, the results and the directions will as much help to open the dialogue as will anything else.
MR. BRETOS: Questions.
Voice: I'm Sharon Reinckens from the Anacostia Museum.
I think I'm following up on the question before. Irene talked about 100 volunteers coming together to provide volunteer services that never occurred before. In that instance, you allowed somebody to provide leadership. I think a lot of the new world that we're looking to in museums means a new role for leadership and I wonder if you can give us some thoughts on that.
MS. HIRANO: I think that's entirely true, that it's remarkable when you ask people to come together to become involved. I think that's the key thing - that whether they become involved in looking for collections, become involved in staffing and exhibitions, or raising money - there are leaders out in the community. What we have done time and time again is to turn to the existing network that is already there: community organizations that are providing other types of services and have the expertise within their ranks to transfer those into work that we ask them to do. We went to a group, as I mentioned, which was mainly organized around a social function, and asked them to become involved in this exhibition. The natural leadership that was there organized the shifts and recruited all the people - and for them it became great fun. In fact, in a couple of weeks, they're going to have a luncheon to honor those that were involved.
What they found is that there is so much more that they can do with their time. Most of them are not working and are older people. They found that not only was it something that they could contribute but it was lot of fun. And I think that's another key: that we can make a museum more fun in the process of people becoming involved and being able to share a part of themselves. But I think there is a lot of leadership within those particular communities that we're trying to reach and we just need to tap it.
Voice: My name is Dan Sipe from Moore College of Art and Design. I am a historian who teaches at an art college so I am not a typical museum person.
The connection that you're talking about [or] one of the things that has been floating through this is the...electronic possibilities of connection. Working on a project with students, one of the things that I've found is the idea of a "transparent" museum, where people can actually see how a museum works. Docents like museums because it's fascinating [to see] how it runs. It's much more interesting to see the museum with all the layers than it is to just see the facade that's presented. People like to be involved in that. The idea of a reflexive museum where people IN the museum ask questions ABOUT the museum and share those questions with other people, with the audience, is something that people also like a lot.
And the idea of a participatory museum, with possibilities for people to ask a whole series of questions about an exhibit, through electronics means, and to have the possibility of offering people the chance to make their own multiple interpretations - and to have competing interpretations - is something that a whole group of people would be interested in doing and who will become much more engaged [with the museum]. One of the things [they could discover is finding how hard it to] interpretations...You understand why you really do [need to] have these professionals [working in the museum]...because it's nowhere near as simple as we think.
So I think bringing people in, making them more critical - but also more informed - is something that has incredible potential. So I would just like you to comment on those possibilities.
MR. SKRAMSTAD: I couldn't agree more. [It's] part of the cultural shift...We in the museum field talk about outreach. I think what's happening with the electronic connectivity is we are going to get in-reach and there is going to be a fundamental change. The more ubiquitous data or information becomes, the more useless it is. So, in a sense, we're going to have to be a source where people can reach in to create a different kind of experience. We can set up that kind of connectivity that I think is an extraordinary resource, probably not for all museums but for a lot of museums. But I think the transparency issue is more, as you indicated, than just an electronic issue. I think one of the problems of being a professional in any field is you get very jaded about what you do and you don't think it's very important or very interesting. I know our staff spends hours trying to think up new and innovative programs where, in some cases, if you just gave the public some of the access to the things [the staff] get to do, they'd go nuts over it. It allows them to be an insider and everybody wants to be an insider in some form or another.
[There is a lot of value] in that. The more transparent you are, the more people are really going to see what you do. I think it's too bad that museums haven't had students around because students are the real drivers of "transparency." They ask all those really good questions that we haven't asked for a long time. And we have to have the answers on a pretty regular basis.
I think it could be a really exciting kind of synergy between our public. What we find in many cases is that the public is very respectful of the kind and the type of work that museums do. The more they get to know the [staff] and the institutions on a human scale, the more they find them to be trustworthy institutions. Take an issues like fundraising: all fundraising, in my opinion, is based on the "girl scout cookie" principle. Whether or not you want any girl scout cookies, when people you know, love and trust sell you girl scout cookies, are you going to say "No, I have enough. Thank you very much." You will say, "I'll take another one." I think museums have tended to sort of push back on that;...we have to be professional about this. People, especially in a self-service society, want to be insiders on part of this.
MR. BRETOS: Let me add something to that, and in reference to the anecdote you mentioned earlier about Secretary Langley. The more we talk about new ways of doing things, the more convinced I become that the old ways have a lot of merit; that many things that have been tried and tested, as Secretary Heyman mentioned this morning, really have an awful lot of merit and we need to do more. We need to do many things better that simply are not reaching segments of a population that haven't had access to them before. It's not so much in changing many of the ways that we have, but in making them more and more accessible to people that have been deprived from access in the past. A great deal, I think, of a solution of how to interact with this new and multiple and diverse society lies precisely in that. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We just have to make it more accessible to more people so that they, too, can roll along.
MS. HIRANO: I think one of the things that technology will enable us to do, beyond the opportunity to reach new segments, is the ability to connect organizations and institutions, and those that have resources that might not otherwise be visible. We're beginning to look at how different organizations that have materials can be connected so that [more people can have access.] There are people who won't go into a local historical society but, by virtue of being able to connect, can access and really enhance the work that that local organization does. [This] makes it accessible to a lot more people than would have been so in the past and, I think, creates connections that we would not have been able to do before.
That's one of the applications I'm very excited about, in terms of really expanding beyond just what it can do in terms of the particular parts of our community that we want to try to reach.
I think for students, there is a value. We're doing work with schools, making accessible materials that we have directly to teachers. But it doesn't replace the actual experience; to share a quick example: we have been doing some work with one of the schools in the east Los Angeles area. They came and had a tour and we've been doing some work through the Internet to get them connected, at school, to our collections. The students discovered...that there had been a Japanese garden at the school, created by students before World War II. The students began to ask what happened to the garden and why it wasn't there [now]? As they began to learn about the fact that students were forced to leave school and were put in camps and the garden then went by the wayside, the students got very excited about restoring the garden.
And so what's occurred is that they have actually connected with some of the Japanese American alumni, because the school was a very good mix, and the alumni have worked with the students now to raise monies to restore the garden. They are going to re-open the garden in just a couple of months. I think it's that relevance and finding those connections.
So while the technology may enable the students to some degree to do additional research beyond what they can do with the school visit, it is then trying to take and make that relevant and real for them now. While technology will provide us with a tremendous amount of opportunity, I think it's just one tool and our challenge is: how do you link that with all of the other things that we can offer in the actual visit.
Voice: [My name is] Adrienne DeArmas
I have really enjoyed hearing all these ideas. I don't think there's anybody in this room that doesn't think "Oh, that's a great idea. I would love to do that."
Where's the money coming from? I hate to bring that up, but [as I hear] all of these ideas, I'm thinking "How could I take this to the institution I worked at, which is a small institution. We don't have the money for the staff, we don't have the money for the technology. I had to pay for my own Internet access just to bring that world into the museum, [just to get] our "foot in the door."
I love that idea about "insiders. I love the idea of volunteers and students and interns. But without proper training, sometimes you end up costing yourself money. The museum that I was at was a fire arms museum. We would get volunteers [who thought the experience was] great [but then] they'd go cock the trigger on a firearm and [break it.]
[From what I have heard today], are we talking about big museums? Are we talking about small museums? A lot of these things - technology, computers - we couldn't afford them in our small museum. There wasn't even an option. These are a lot of the questions, from what I'm hearing today that are raising in my mind.
MR. SKRAMSTAD: I guess my response is probably going to sound patronizing, but I don't think it makes any difference. I think it's something as basic as asking what business you are in and then looking at how you spend the resources you have and where are your partners. I think the big museum/small museum issue isn't an issue except if a museum is involved in a dying community or a community in fundamental serious trouble. The museum will die with the community.
A museum building in this country has always been associated as one of the basic building blocks of a community. [In the 19th century] you built a railroad, an opera house, a museum and then a university and then you found the people to fill them all up.
I think there's a life cycle involved in a lot of these kinds of activities that we have to admit. On the other hand, the bright news is, and again, this is a sort of broad brush-stroke perspective, we're going through right now the biggest transfer of money generationally in the history of this world. I can't remember how many hundreds of trillions of dollars are passing into hands. When it passes into new hands because of tax rules and whatever, a lot of it gets spread out. For those institutions who are really serious about their educational role, I would just assert there has never been more money available for education.
I'm sure those of you in small museums feel, to a large extent, kind of envious of those of us in large museums. Those of us in large museums, in many cases, feel very envious of you in small museums. You have the ability to turn on a dime. You don't have to carry this 100-weight load around. Getting a two-point change on our compass at our institution takes real work. It's a lot easier in an institution with three or four people, who are all running in the same direction . One of the smartest things one of our trustees, Roger Penske - who is a pretty relentless competitor - said was if you're all running in the same direction and you bump into each other, it really doesn't hurt a lot. I think in a small institution, you don't have enough people who could be running in different directions.
It comes back to this issue of mission. You really have to define what business you're in and, in my personal opinion, to say you're about objects doesn't do it anymore. Everybody is interested in the fact that museums have objects, but there are a hell of a lot of objects in the world and why is your special piece of it worth the support? And then, if you define what business you're in, how do you measure the success of that? And how do you get people excited and interested in what you're doing?
I personally agree with Irene. I think we are in for a most exciting ride in the next 30 years. It's going to be one of the most energizing periods for museums we have ever been in. And to come back to something that some people questioned: to me, the big challenge is how do we create new leadership which is going to be very different from the leadership in the past 30 or 40 years. We're going to have to bring an awful lot of people laterally into the field and be pretty respectful of the skills that they bring. Certainly, the more my institution has looked outside our own museum, the more we have found really powerful and enabling skills that complement the more traditional professional skills that already exist inside of the institution. (Which is a very long answer to your question, I'm sorry.)
MS. HIRANO: As I mentioned, I came from a background of community organizations. As Harold noted, girl scouts are great fundraisers. Every community has institutions that have been built by people who didn't have a lot of resources to begin with. Look at all the churches that spring up all the time - people coming together, believing that it's possible to do that.
I think the museum field can capitalize on the community organizing that has taken place for years and years. I think that there are tools out there that are waiting to be tapped if we can make those connections. As Harold said, we need to bring them in the door or open the door. They get very excited. It's great to watch people who have never been involved in putting an exhibit together or looking at family photos in a way that they hadn't before, get very turned on by the work that we do. And in that being turned on, they're willing to help make it occur. How you make it occur, we all know, is that you do need resources.
There's a lot of retired people out there who have the ability to give time, but also a lot of support, and I just think that we need to find and make those connections. In every community there is a whole network of people raising money and building institutions for social services and a whole range of things. We just need to tap in and make those connections.
MR. BRETOS: Even as we speak, the girl scouts are setting up out there in the hall. We have time for one more question which I hope will be very short and will lead to a very short answer.
Voice: [I am] Kim Igoe.
Harold, I think you made a really important point about what leadership skills are required in museums over the next 30 years. I would like to hear your comments, based on your experience in your institution, which has gone through a remarkable change and yours,also, Irene, an institution that's doing very new things and strategically moving in directions that museums traditionally have not worked in. Thank you.
MR. SKRAMSTAD: I think the museum director is going to be a lot closer to an orchestra leader in which that person can't play any of the instruments as well as the people within the organization. A person is going to have to have a lot more people skills. The person is going to be far more externally focused. Eighty percent of their work is going to be outside the organization. They're going to have to be a connector. They're going to have to be a cheerleader and a critic at the same time. The key is, you, as a cheerleader, always have to know when not to believe your own cheerleading. That's a hard thing for people. We begin to start reading our own press releases and thinking they're pretty cool. And we tend to talk [only] to our own staff. So I think clearly that it's going to be much more political...in the sense that if you're a public institution, or you get any public funds, you're going to have to be comfortable talking to people who are elected representatives. You're going to have to make your pitch out there. And that's going to take people skill. I am personally very excited for the Smithsonian just to see Michael Heyman out here. I can see him on the floor of the Congress convincing people to do stuff that they may never have thought about before.
I think on the one hand it also means the person has to continue to embody the core values of the institution, because that's where the rest of the staff is going to get them. That person has to inculcate those values and embody those values. It's a tough job and I think that's what's killing a lot of people. On the other hand, what I think is killing a lot more people is that they think they have to be the chief scholar and the chief keeper and the CEO at the same time. Those times are long past.
MS. HIRANO: We're finding the same thing. The ability to work with people, and again, it depends on the kind of institution that one sees itself being, but I think there's no question that whether you're a curator or developing programs or whatever, the ability to work with people [is important.] In our case, in terms of recruiting staff, I would say about 90 percent of our staff hadn't worked in a museum or any related field in the past. So we're training whole new generation of people that I hope will go on and certainly stay in the field and work in other institutions.
But it's hard. We've brought most of our program staff out of ethnic studies, where they do have a sense of community and that's why they went into ethnic studies. But at the same time [they have to deal with] the practical demands of working with groups who want to tell the story their way and how you negotiate that - the same kinds of questions that have been addressed in other parts of this conference. Staff have to be willing to listen and help move people through a process. There are a lot of people who won't want to do that and who will want to stay in the academic arena.
But I think it is the ability to help move things from what's the past and the present to the future. How can we make exhibitions relevant to people now? How do we take issues, like the attacks on immigrants, and make them real, as people see exhibitions about the past. I think those are all the kinds of qualities that we're going to need to demand in all of our staffs, not just those out on the front lines but the ones that are also looking at the collections, developing the exhibitions. They need those same kinds of skills as well.
MR. BRETOS: I might add in closing, from my perspective I see two particular virtues that need to converge in leaders today. The first is they have to be able to see problems as opportunities. There's nothing new by that. Don't be scared.
Secondly, more than ever before, we need to talk to more people than we imagined existed. We really need to be open: open to new audiences, to new possibilities, to new interlocutors and seek them, indeed. They're there. Well, thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for being here and I hope you all enjoy lunch. It has been a privilege to sit with our two panelists today.
MR. ELLIS: Look in your packets for places to eat on or near the Mall. I believe that will be a challenge today because it is raining as we speak.
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