When I travel and talk to museum officials, they often ask me to share ideas from other museums.  Recently, one such question put me in mind of something I’d read during Minnesota’s “Museums Month,” when Kaywin Feldman, director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Olga Viso, director of the Walker Arts Center, gave a joint interview to the Star Tribune.
At one point, Feldman says “One area we struggle with is lectures. We offer a lot of great speakers throughout the year, often doing lectures related to the collection, and I notice an older and older audience coming to those lectures. So we’re thinking about how to engage a younger generation in content delivery. We recently tried a pecha kucha [Japanese for “chit chat”], where our curators showed 20 images in 20 seconds. It was a way to deliver content but keep it very short and lively. We also followed a lecture on still-life paintings with a demonstration by a food stylist.”
She comes back later, adding: “I don’t mean to dwell on the lecture thing, but it really worries me, in part because I’m one of those people who really loves a lecture. I think we’re both experimenting with new ways to deliver content to people. We’re still content-generators; that’s the heart of what we do. But the way people receive it and participate has changed.”
So how is the MIA experimenting, with the ultimate goal of course of both educating and — if a museum plays it right – attracting a broader, younger audience. I spoke with Alex Bortolot, the Adult Programming Associate at the MIA. Read more about him here — he’s pictured at left.
He works on several programs, but the most relevant here seemed to be “Cross Talk: Two Experts. Two Angles. Too Interesting.” For Cross Talk, the MIA brings in an academic, who brings historical insight, and someone from the contemporary creative economy to present, for 20 minutes each, his or her angle on the chosen topic. Then, the audience gets its say.
The topics so far: “Manga, Anime, and Pop;” “What Fonts Say;” and “Playing With Our Food.” The art connection? Pop, the MIA’s poster collection, and the visual representation of food, going back to 17th century Dutch still lifes.
Broadly speaking, the MIA got about 25% more people for Cross Talks than for ordinary lectures. At Cross Talks, more than 60% were 45 or younger, while at lectures, about a third were 45 or younger.  The younger generation comes more often in groups, with friends, than as singletons — though older people also come in twos or larger groups.
There’s more: Bortolot says that the 45-and-unders are more interested in local experts than in someone flown in to talk about art. They want the connection to the “creative economy,” and they want to network. They don’t want merely to listen; they want to participate. They want a tone that’s lighter than a lecture.  “It becomes a professional schmoozefest,” he says. Bortolot isn’t bothered by that as long as “we give them a deeper understanding of the collection.”
All of that makes sense to me — MIA stresses that it is not cutting back on its straight lectures – and is probably transferrable to other museums.
I discovered another idea talking with Bortolot that I liked even better: MIA, which is free, tries to time its Third Thursdays to the opening of special exhibitions, which are not. Then it offers TT attendees (like those making T-shirt, at right) the chance to be members for a day if they sign up and provide contact information. When the time comes for member solicitation drives, those members for a day convert to real members “at a much higher rate,” Bortolot says. Smart.