Cheryl and I spent New Year’s Eve at a peace fire with some Native American friends up in the north woods of Michigan. I found myself thinking about the year just past and the year ahead and feeling pretty damn lucky. On the professional side, here are ten things I’m excited about working on in 2011.

If you have questions or suggestions about any of these, don’t be shy. The first few are about the innovation enterprise I recently announced. 

1. Learning about campus art museums. College and university museums serve a dauntingly wide range of audiences, on campus and off. Tom Shapiro and I have been fortunate enough to gather a small group of wonderful directors of campus art museums to conduct joint research and then strategize together about the opportunities and challenges. I’m excited about working this year with Tom and our partner Betty Farrell, who directs the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago, where the project is based. I’m also excited that this is Slover Linett’s first self-generated research project, a model that will let us explore new terrain and new partnerships around the culture sector and higher ed.
2. Firing up the Culture Kettle. My new R&D organization has been a long time brewing, and in 2011 the real fun will start. And the real work. Luckily, several great people have volunteered their time (yes, as in free help), and many more have expressed interest in collaborating. I’m excited about cooking up (love these kettle metaphors, don’t you?) some out-there research projects and some out-there experiments with exhibits and classical music. The latter will be a leap for me: I’ve done plenty of research about cultural programming and audiences, but I’ve never created a program for an actual audience.
3. Collaborating with Greg Sandow. Here’s a man who has created programs, and as Culture Kettle’s first Innovator in Residence he’ll be my guide and crony on the classical music side of the fence. Greg is a kindred spirit who is also very different from me. I’m going to learn a lot, and we’re going to have a lot of fun. The first experiments will probably have to do with young audiences, a category that neither of us fits in. But we’ll be working with young innovators, from musicians to marketers.
4. Seeing how Americans frame “the arts.” On the “R” side of Culture Kettle’s R&D slate, one of our first projects will be a collaboration with Nick Rabkin to study how Americans frame (in the George Lakoff sense) the arts and how they frame creativity and expressivity. We suspect the two frames were once closely aligned but have been slipping apart in recent decades, which may have something to do with what we see today: declining attendance at traditional arts performances but increasing personal creation and participation in music, dance, photography, etc. We’re hoping to get a new perspective on these tectonic shifts and spark a new conversation about what’s next for arts organizations and creative communities.
   
   It’s not all Culture Kettle, of course. The majority of my gray matter will still be focused on Slover Linett’s clients, staff, and future, and on new projects and plans that are springing up on that soil. Such as…
5. Thinking about science and social change. If certain national research grants come through for our clients and colleagues, 2011 will be a year of deep involvement for us in questions about science and society. How can we take action on climate change when the science is inherently uncertain? (Which doesn’t mean dodgy or political — just limited in its ability to predict complex interactions with certainty.) How can museums evaluate the impact of exhibits designed to change attitudes? How will the growth of “citizen science” (not to mention citizen history, citizen music-making, and other participatory trends) shape cultural institutions and the world around them? As the saying goes, I’m all over that.
6. Playing with classical improvisation. Ten years ago, when I mentioned improvisation and classical music in the same breath, people frowned and cocked their heads, like a dog hearing an odd noise. Nowadays it’s a hot topic, and its history is being reclaimed. I’m looking forward to seeing Gabriela Montero next month here in Chicago; she’s one of the musicians proving how much sense improvising makes in a classical context and how much it changes the vibe in the hall from past-tense to happening. I want to write about that this year, and better yet I hope to study audiences’ experiences of it.
7. Giving up books. No, not reading books, but the Books Editor job at Curator: The Museum Journal. After six years in that role, I was kicked up to Associate Editor–Theory & Practice, but we didn’t find a replacement for the book review department for many months. I’m happy to report that Theano Moussouri will be the new books editor starting early this year — happy not only because she’s a wonderful addition to the journal’s editorial crew but also because I won’t have to do double duty any longer. (Which I couldn’t have done at all without the expert help of Kate Flinner, the journal’s Editorial Assistant and until last year a colleague here at Slover Linett.)
8. Seeing the Cultural Infrastructure Project bear fruit. Hard to believe it’s been seven years since I first brought the question to Carroll Joynes, then director of the Cultural Policy Center: Is all this building of cultural facilities (art museum wings, performing arts centers) a sign that the sector is thriving or economic hubris that will have dire consequences? Carroll took the question to some talented cultural economists and other scholars around the U.S., got serious funding from Mellon, MacArthur, Kresge, and others, and masterfully brought the project to life. It’s scheduled to culminate late this year. Based on my limited involvement in the project these last few years, I’m really looking forward to seeing the report, book, website, and guidelines that emerge…and to seeing how the field responds.
9. Helping our team grow. Cheryl and I both became better leaders and mentors to our staff in 2010, I like to think, and that work has been more rewarding than I ever imagined. We added several staff members during the year, and now we begin 2011 as a cohesive team ready to do great things together. It sounds sappy, but I’m really excited to watch them continue to grow and learn and challenge themselves and each other in 2011. I’m also looking forward to collaborating more closely with our academic fellows, Rachelle L. Brooks and Michael Di Giovine, on projects that expand our collective skills and lead us in new directions.
10. Helping our clients grow. We’re researchers, but we’re also, in a sense, consultants. That’s a role more of our clients are asking us to play, and it’s one I’m increasingly excited about as the new year begins. The audiences we study in our research and evaluation work speak through us. But we also speak with our own voice, helping our clients see new possibilities, new paths toward their goals—even, sometimes, new goals. This year I’ll be working with my colleagues and our clients to discover the right relationship between findings and action, insight and innovation. That’ll deepen the already great pleasure of working with some wonderful people and helping some wonderful organizations move forward.

Whew. Maybe this is why one friend of mine has been asking me when the emergency cloning procedure will take place. And I haven’t even mentioned the new retreat center I’m helping envision in the Upper Peninsula, a place for dialogue between Western science and indigenous wisdom and spirituality. Or the Chicago-area cultural tracking study we’re developing...

My cup runneth over. Which can be messy. But it’s not a bad problem to have. Happy New Year to you and yours.
 

As some of you know, I’ve been thinking about what cultural institutions might gain if they let their own personalities and motivations shine through a little more. Maybe that’s why I’m seeing examples of subjectivity everywhere, including places far from concert halls or science museums.

I was camping last week with my family and some others in the Hiawatha National Forest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Our group had arranged for a visit by the “raptor lady,” Gayle Bruntjens, who runs Upper Michigan Raptor Rehab with her husband. Working with a few volunteers and a network of other nonprofits and government agencies, they take in injured eagles, hawks, and owls from all over the U.P., give them veterinary care, and eventually re-release the ones that heal.

The less fortunate birds — victims of accidents or human abuse, some of it mind-boggling — end up residing permanently with Gayle and making unexpectedly adorable appearances in her educational presentations at schools, camps, etc.

On the surface, her talk to our group was just like the animal demonstrations that go on at nature centers, zoos, and science museums all over. She explained what differentiates the raptor family from other birds, told us what to do if we see an injured or orphaned bird, helped a few hawks and owls out of their wicker hampers to show around to us, and gave us some information about her nonprofit and its mission.

But before all that, she did something that I rarely see in more established, professionalized settings. She told us, in personal and forthrightly emotional terms, how she got into this work and what it means to her. She told us her story, as context for the birds’.

And it happens to be a good one: beating the odds on a rare form of brain cancer, switching careers to a dead-end night job that gave her time to dabble in genealogy and discover her Native American heritage, and serendipitously running into a friend who needed a hand with some wounded birds of prey. She now sees her work as a fruition, even maybe a destiny, and she feels connected to the birds on a spiritual level as well as an ecological one. In Anishnabe teaching, raptors are the Creator’s messengers, and Gayle sees herself as being a messenger for the messengers. ...

Is collecting nature or nurture? Some thoughts on a little “museum” of found objects I saw on vacation last week.

Museum directors of a certain stripe are fond of saying that collecting is a universal human impulse, especially among kids. The idea is that all kinds of people can relate to museums because everyone knows first-hand the thrill of gathering, organizing, comparing, and studying cool stuff — and it doesn’t matter whether the stuff in question is Renaissance sculpture or dead, soon-to-be-smelly sea stars that washed up in the tide.

Last week, at a hotel my family and I were staying at on St. Martin (I know, it’s a dog’s life), we noticed that a table near the beach had been covered by a collection of shells, corals, seaweeds, sea-glass, stones, and other eye-catching specimens. It seemed to belong to everyone and no one, and a security guard I asked told me that it had been there about two months. During our week there we added a few things to it and saw other guests (kids and adults) do the same. Everyone seemed to enjoy picking things up, touching them, rearranging. There was also some taking away, as my daughters and I discovered when the sea star we contributed was gone the next day. 

Still, I found it delightful. (My girls never got past their indignation that some people were treating it as a trading post.) In this age of participatory engagement and what Clay Shirky has called “the power of organizing without organizations,” here was a community collection that had arisen without rules or even communication but which mirrored (in a raw, messy way) some very old museological impulses: it was organized by form but in a pre-taxonomic way; it mixed biological and inorganic samples, marine and land species, the everyday and the exotic; it seemed to evolve over time as better specimens of the same sort or new categories altogether were added (and others were “deaccessioned” for communal or selfish reasons); and it was of course unlabeled, a piece of installation art as much as armchair science.