 Oh, I'm live. OK. Good morning. Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for being back and up at 10 AM on a Saturday, a bright and clear and rather frigid Saturday. But thank you for making it down here again. I think we had a really, really energetic and lively discussion yesterday for some of us that went on past evening and past dinner and into the later night. So I'm all the more grateful too for all being back again this morning. We're starting off this morning with some folks who are coming from other disciplines. What? Theater people talking to people who are not theater people? Yes, that's what we're planning to do for the next hour or so. And this idea really came as Tori and I were invited to go and have a conversation at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference in Atlanta in November. One of that group had come to see and take part in the conversation that we had in Washington and thought it was really interesting and wondering if we could do a similar sort of thing with their group coming to Atlanta. But they sort of warned us. Remember, that's not just going to be theater people in the room and like, OK. So we had the conversation very similar to the conversations that we had in the six cities across the country. And indeed, there were many people in the room that weren't just theater people, including folks from music and dance and the museum world. And I think maybe not too surprisingly to some of us, the folks in the museum world were way ahead of what many of us in the theater world are doing in this area of connecting artists and audiences and thinking about engagement and thinking about contextualization of the work. And so as we were preparing for this meeting, we thought it might be really interesting if we were able to tap in to some of that. And so we turned to our colleague Catherine Peterson at Arts Boston to recommend some folks who were doing some great work here. And Boston and she introduced us to Krista from the Institute of Contemporary Art and Nick who runs the Fitchburg Art Museum near Boston here. And we had conversations with both Krista and Nick and were just so impressed and amazed with what they are doing in their own institutions. We were all the more convinced that we wanted to bring them in this morning to kick this day's conversation off and kind of open up our own thinking by hearing about what is happening in other places and in other disciplines. So we'll be doing that first and then we'll go off into our own conversations today. But I'll hand it over now to Catherine. Thanks Brad. It's a real pleasure to be with you here not just for this panel this morning but for the two days together. I had been hearing about triple play from my buddies Brad and Tori for a while and I had the pleasure of hearing Tori present about it at our national conference of local arts service organizations in Chicago a year ago and also from my colleague Deb where are you dead clap? Over there from League of Chicago theaters told me about the great experience that she had with the theater folks in Chicago. So it is so exciting to have you here in Boston. I wanna thank our friends at HowlRound also for being part of this. And I also wanna give a shout out to my colleague Julie Henrikus at StageSource. Julie, do you mind standing up for just a second? Julie is the person who really day in day out is fighting the fight, good fight for our theater community here in Boston. So we couldn't do it without you Julie, thank you. So I got this call from Tori and Brad saying Catherine, do you think you might have one or two people in the museum world in Boston who could talk about how they're using artists to connect audiences with their art? And I hesitated for all of around a second and a half and said the problem is gonna be when are we down to the right people because there are so many great people doing it? Well I have to say I am declaring victory here with the two folks who are at my left with Nick Capasso who is the director of the Fitchburg Art Museum and Krista Dahl who is the visitor experience manager at the Institute of Contemporary Art. And let me just tell you what you need to know about these two folks and why we are so grateful that they have taken their time on a very cold Saturday morning to be with us. So let's start with Nick. Nick is a public art expert. He has for 22 years was the deputy director for curatorial affairs at the DeCorteva Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Now Lincoln, Massachusetts is a very green, incredibly wealthy suburb around 20 miles west of Boston and it is a fabulous, fabulous place but a fairly traditional place in a lot of regards. Just over two years ago, Nick decided to take his considerable talents and experience and move another 30 miles west of Boston to Fitchburg which is a dine mill town in Boston. It's got a population of around 40,000 and so a very, very different context to be doing his work in. And he has a wonderful story to tell about what he is doing to really reimagine what the museum means on a very fundamental base. Krista is the, as I said, the visitor experience manager at the ICA, the Institute of Contemporary Art here in Boston. It is one of our absolute anchor cultural institutions. It is situated in the very hot Innovation District. It used to be the Seaport District but we now call it the Innovation District. And since it moved there, it's been around for what, 79 years? It's an old institution. It's been at around 13 different locations but since it moved to its new iconic spot with an iconic building, it's given it a chance to really reimagine again how it relates to the community. So these are the two folks that we'll be hearing from and I'd love to start with you, Nick. Considering you made this radical move, and it was radical, can you tell us a little bit about what that entailed in terms of what attracted you to Fitchburg and how you started thinking about it? What was it that you found so engrossing and exciting? Oh boy. Let's see, as Catherine indicated, I experienced a deep culture shock moving from Lincoln, Massachusetts to Fitchburg, Massachusetts. I've been the director there for just a little over two years and I follow a director who had been there for 40 years. So the word inertia loomed large in my new experience and I'm just gonna start out by sharing with everyone the most important conversation I've had around my work. And this was before I got the job. This was during one of my interviews and I was interviewed by a committee of eight trustees of the Fitchburg Art Museum and you get to the point in the interview process where they let the interviewer ask a question and my question to them was, why are you a trustee? Why do you care? Why do you give your time, money, energy, et cetera to this institution? And they went around the table and everybody answered the question individually and not a single one of them said the word art. And initially I almost had a heart attack having worked at institutions with very different boards where every trustee would have used the word art in one way or another. And then a couple of the trustees mentioned the word education, which I expected. But what they all said to a person was I want to give back to the community. All of them had grown up in Fitchburg during the glory days and Fitchburg was from the Civil War until the 60s and 70s, a very wealthy, powerful, stable community based on manufacturing. The global economy changed, everything went down the chute. The people who are now my trustees all moved out of Fitchburg, one town over. They still care about the city, they still care about the region. And because the art museum is seen as one of the oddly enough pillars of the community, it was their will to make it better serve the community. Under my predecessor, it didn't do such a great job of serving the community. He was a very old fashioned guy even when he started there during the Nixon administration. It had become the hushed temple of the fine arts for the right white people. And because of that, when I got to the museum, it was in a coma. The annual visitation was about 5,000 people a year. No school kids were coming. There were galleries where not a single thing had changed in any particular for 20 years. It was a tomb. So why the hell did I go there? Well, for a couple of reasons, I'd been a curator for a very long time and I wanted a new challenge. I wanted to direct an art museum and the context was so different. And the whole, basically the marching orders that I received from the trustees sitting at the table that day was something that I'd never heard before. Making a museum serve a community and I wanted to see if I could do that. The other two reasons I went is because it's, I'm sure, has anybody here been to the Fitchburg Art Museum? Not a soul. And I'm not surprised. There's no reason that you should have gone over the last 20 years or so. But it's actually a fairly big museum. How many people have been to Decordova? Okay, so a few people. All right, Decordova has a great big sculpture park. The Fitchburg Art Museum has twice as much indoor gallery space as Decordova. It's not a small museum and the physical plant is beautiful. So that's one of the reasons I went. The other reason I went is because my predecessor's idea of fundraising was building endowment. If you gave him a nickel, he'd put it in endowment. Which has its downsides, but the upside is that we have a $19 million endowment and that's something I can work with. I don't have to raise my own salary every year. I'm too old for that nonsense. So I really felt like I could affect change and that's why I went. And I can keep going here. We can let Krista talk a little bit. I'd love to hear from Krista. Could you set up a little bit about how you came to the ICA right at the time that it was opening its new building. Can you talk a little bit about what that new building meant to the ICA and what your particular role as visitor experience manager. That's such a great title. And I have to tell you, I was sitting there yesterday thinking I'm gonna rewrite all the job titles that aren't sponsored. We're gonna have to work on Tuesday. So please tell us about that. Sure. Well, I wish I could say it was strategy that led me to the ICA to begin with. And at this crucial moment, but it was probably divine providence and just freakishly good timing. I moved to Boston in 2006 to go back to graduate school thinking that I wanted to do a little bit of this hybrid education art thing that I still get to do at the museum. And the ICA was, as Catherine mentioned, undergoing a crucial time in its history, moving to its first permanent home in over 70 years, building a permanent collection and still holding onto this idea of being new, but also creating its own history at the same time. And in moving to the waterfront, now the Innovation District, the building includes a two-story education center. But I like to think of it as a three- or a four-story education center because really education is one of the great missions and achievements of the new ICA. And as the Visitor Experience Manager, I work with artists directly. Have any of you been to the ICA? Or how many people? Oh, great. Have, I hope, all of those have gone to the galleries at least once and you would have met my staff because instead of the traditional security guard, we have artists in the galleries and educators and people that we hire because they're nice and they like people and they love the art and they really want to create that bridge between the art that's on the wall or on the floor or spilling out into the viewer's space and make that bridge with our viewers. I recognize that if there are security concerns like people getting too close or touching or photographing things, they shouldn't that it's probably because they like it too. And so we work with those impulses and reward them instead of make people feel ashamed of them in the museum. And I also work with the Volunteer Tour Guide group at the ICA. They're a very cool group of volunteers. And as a member of the education department, everybody who works in our department works with teens in some capacity. Teens are a really, really strong focus of the ICA and we have a program that is recognized nationally and we've been doing more recently a big alumni study to find out why it matters to focus on this motley group. Can we start with this whole idea of you don't call them guards, what do you call them? We call them visitor assistants. Visitor assistants. And what does a job description look like? How do you hire these people? You're really casting them actually, aren't you? And how do you train them? It's true, it's true. Behind the scenes we get to kind of build the team and decide who would be the right mix and we're very, very particular. I work with two full-time supervisors who also contribute to the choices for the group because they're a supremely tight-knit group. And so the wrong fit could really send the wrong kind of ripples across the department. So we're very particular about the kind of person that we pick. And so the visitor assistant is tasked to do two very, seemingly very different things. One of them is to safeguard the art and the public as a traditional security guard would do. And the other part is what we call broadly contributing to the visitor's experience. And they do that through customer service, helping people find their way around, meeting their needs, restrooms, and other resources. And education, which is why they're formally under the education department and we really focus on their training to make sure that the information that they're giving our visitors is of the highest caliber and that they're representing the art on the walls and the artist's voice in the most authentic way possible. Nick, can you talk a little bit about, in particular, what kind of community you are serving in Fitchburg, the demographic makeup and what makes it interesting for you? In Fitchburg, the city of Fitchburg was formed by successive waves of immigration over 150 years. Currently, the demographic is about 40% Latino, primarily from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay, although we have folks from other Latin American countries as well, we have a very, we have other very small ethnic communities that we have a Hamung community, we have a small African and Arab community. And then the rest, the other sort of 50% is working class and lower middle class whites that have been there for two generations and generations. And one of the things that we talked about yesterday in this room was talking about how people who went to go to the theater wanted to have real conversations, they wanted to have authentic experiences, talk withs, not talk backs. What are you doing in Fitchburg to develop that kind of relationship so there's that kind of interaction between artists and the audience, between the art and the audience? We're doing, here's a good example. We want to, I'm gonna have to back this up just a little bit. One of the things we're doing to better serve the community is something we're calling the bilingual museum initiative. So we are working towards becoming a fully bilingual museum. So far, all our signage and texts and labels and all the stuff you see on the wall, both inside and outside the museum is in English and Spanish. We also have a bilingual receptionist, phone messages in both languages, all our social media posts are bilingual. We're working towards printed material and website, I'd have to raise some money for that. And to underscore all of this, we did some programmatic things. So one of the projects we did was we worked with a photographer named Mario Quiroz. And Mario was born in El Salvador and he currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He's an American citizen now. And he's a very bright and charming young man who will tell you within five minutes of meeting him that it is his goal to become this country's foremost photographer of his generation's immigrant experience. And he means it. So this is his practice. He photographs immigrant communities. So we brought him to Fitchburg to do a residency and we worked with a local social service provider for the Latino and Latino immigrant communities and together the artist, the social service agency in the museum invited many individuals and families from the Latino communities in Fitchburg to the museum to have their portrait taken by Mario. And these folks had never been to the museum before. And Mario did a professional portrait of them. He gave everybody a digital file for free so they could use the picture in any way they wanted. And then we had an exhibition of the photographs. He printed the photographs as 16 by 20 inch black and whites. He hand colored all the photographs. And so this was a way for the museum to make a very overt statement about valuing a segment of the community that had never felt valued before. And then when the show is over, all those photographs come into our permanent collection. So we've made art out of people through the tool of an artist. Chris, can you talk a little bit about how the ICA is working with artists, in particular with the team program that you mentioned? You really put so much emphasis and real heft behind making sure that there's authentic interaction between artists and the teens. Yes, our director, our wonderful director, Jill Medvedal likes to say that the ICA has three big initiatives, excellent exhibitions, excellent programs, and our teens are kind of the third leg of a three-legged stool. And so it comes from the very top, but we have two groups of teens that work with us throughout the year. One of them is the Teen Arts Council. These are 12 to 15 teens that come mostly from our Boston public schools. Roxbury, Dorchester, and South Boston are our primary neighborhoods, and they represent, they look and they look like they come from those communities, very different than the usual white, middle-class demographic that we have upstairs traditionally. And the Teen Arts Council plans events for other teens, and the other group of teens that works with us throughout the year is what we call the Fast Forward Program. This is a multi-year program for high school teens interested in film and video production, and they meet every Thursday or Friday and make work, highly professional work. They work with people in the industry, are mentored by professionals, and those are I think two of our most long-standing programs, but we have a number of entry programs to get to that point, to get to those groups of teens, and more recently, collectives that we've formed because we realized that teens want to remain involved at the ICA, and so we have a digital, a video, digital video photography, collective and a DJ collective that is for hire, if anyone has an event in the city and wants to hire some cool DJs and a slam team, poetry slam team, that meets with us regularly, and they go out and make work in the community, so it's, the teens feel very much at home at the ICA, they're often in the offices interacting with people from the director all the way down, down to my staff, and have kind of a comfort, and everybody seems to have this shared understanding that this is the museum's future, and both in terms of future audience, but also in terms of the artists that we hope to, that will come back and make work for the ICA. So you see it both as a, not only as something that's important to do for the teens themselves right now, but also as a way to build audiences for future generations, and you're tracking that. And very recently we started in the last couple of years to track our alumni, because we've been doing teen programs for about 10 years, and we wanted to know what was happening to those teens that spend so much of their time during the school year with us. Do they continue to go to arts institutions? Do they major in the arts? Do they even have any memory of the ICA? Does it leave an imprint on them? And the results so far have been quite astonishing. We've had about 60% of our alumni respond to surveys, and or volunteer to be interviewed on the phone, or in person by an outside surveyor to gather information, and something like 100% of our teen arts council alumni go on to college, are either currently enrolled or have graduated from college, and more than three quarters of both the Fast Forward and the Teen Arts Council group are in the arts, whether it's pursuing some sort of arts degrees or making work, and so the goals or the recommendation of the surveyor, I've never seen this happen before, is to keep doing what you're doing. But also to recognize that this group of alumni still have a really fondness for the ICA, recognize that this time for them was really formative as a human and as an artist, and want to remain in some way, or a lot of them want to remain involved, and so we've been doing more programming for alumni and also pairing, especially with the Fast Forward program, pairing alumni as some of the professional mentors with students, because they are deeply invested in this program and probably the best mentors we could ask for in some ways. Nick, one of the things we heard in a report back yesterday was how playwrights in there, the wonderful interviews and focus groups they did with audience members really heard about how audience members are just hungry to hear more about the playwriting experience about who the playwright is, just that sort of behind the scenes what goes into the creation of a work. Can you talk a little bit about what else you do at Fitchburg to engender that with the work that you do with artists? I'm thinking when I was thinking about what you were talking about, the community photography program, what kind of interaction was there? What did you see happen from the interaction between the photographer and those communities? I'm going to give a couple of different examples and actually I'm going to back it up again, because I think this is an important concept. The concept that we're working from in Fitchburg right now is the, and this funnels all our energy and imagination is that we consider our client to be the community. And I just want to talk about this for a second. Every arts organization, every nonprofit has a client. Those are the people we serve. We are in the business of serving people. That's what nonprofits do. So it's important to know who your client is and to reinforce that throughout the entire institution so everybody knows who the client is. And this may seem obvious and elementary, but in some ways it's not. I am sure that, if you follow my train of thought here, you were familiar with organizations whose client is really not the audience but is the board of trustees or the artistic director or colleagues in the field or the curator, right? This is a problem. This means you're not serving. You're not serving anybody but yourself. So you have to be careful about that. And then the other assumption that organizations make, museums and I imagine performing arts organizations too, is that our client is the museum going audience or the music-loving audience, whatever that is, right? It's very vague. It's okay. I mean we are serving those people but at Fitchburg we're looking at it a little differently. We're looking at the community as the client. And let me give you a couple of examples of how this works on both a large scale and a small scale. One of the larger scale things we're doing is this bilingual museum initiative which I already described. We also work, we're doing a lot with the schools. Both the public schools and Fitchburg State University which is the other major player in town. The university doesn't have a museum like many other universities. They don't need one, they have us. And what that means is we offer free admission to all their students, faculty and staff. Students get sent over to do assignments but we do far more than that. So we don't have time to go into the whole thing but one of the projects we did is we did a retrospective exhibition of an artist named Jeff Wormuth. And we worked in collaboration with several different classes in the communications and media department at the university which is their flagship program. And it was set up in such a way so that the classes were marketing and design firms. The professor of the class was the principal of the firm and we were the client. Undergraduate students at the university designed the exhibition, designed the logo and the branding, a website, a blog, a social media program, the marketing plan, educational interactives in the gallery and an 80 page print on demand catalog that lives on our website. And we implemented all of this. This was not a paper exercise and we were tough clients and what we got is about $30,000 to $50,000 worth of deliverables that we cannot afford. And what they got was a real implemented series of projects to put in their professional portfolios when they go out on jobs. And the artist, Jeff Wormuth, was intimately involved with this entire experience. So that's a fairly large scale project. A smaller scale project is we're working with another Cambridge artist named Douglas Cornfeld. He's a sculptor. He's building, I don't have a picture, but he's going to be building for us a 23 foot high steel sculpture for our courtyard. The way that we're making an outdoor sculpture, a community oriented project, is that the sculpture is going to be fabricated and painted and installed by students at the Montetucet's vocational and technical high school under the artist's supervision. He's gonna be artist in residence at the school. We also got the artist to agree not to give the sculpture a title. And so what we're gonna do once the sculpture is up, we're going to run an essay contest in the Fitchburg and Lemmonster public schools and whichever student writes the best justification gets naming rights to the sculpture. And then we'll announce the title of the sculpture. And when we put the plaque outside that identifies the artist and title and all that other business, we'll identify the student and also the essay. So these are small things. But in a community where creativity and imagination is sometimes hard to come by, these can be big things. Maybe you wanna riff a little bit about the work that you've been doing with Matthew Richie over the last 18 months or another artist and talk about how it's affected the way that they've worked with the folks who come to the ICA. Yes, Matthew Richie, if you don't know, is a visual artist. I think that's a very simple way to describe a lot of contemporary artists but he's primarily visual because he does so many things. And he has been working with the ICA in some capacity for the last year and a half. There was, for a time, a mural on the Rose Kennedy Greenway out by South Station. And we have a mural inside of the building that takes up what we call our art wall on the first floor that is... Can you just talk a little bit? I'm gonna stop you. What was your reaction to that mural? To the Rose Kennedy mural? Well, it followed the Osgemios mural. And the Osgemios are twin brothers from Brazil who are so cool. And their mural really raised eyebrows because some people read it as a terrorist, even though it was a yellow kid in pajamas anyway. This is smack in the middle of the downtown business district in what is now a green space. And it was, it creates a lot of talking, Boston. And Nick, you're affiliated with the Greenway so you can chime in here too in terms of... Yeah, no, keep going, you're doing great. So anyway, the Osgemios made a big splash. Which was great. Which was great. And that kicked off the Rose Kennedy Parkway too. That was the first mural project. That was the first mural project. And Matthew Ritchie was the very next... The second guest. The second project. And his in comparison was beautiful, but it's very tame in comparison if you were reading it. But it had mostly kind of black and white and shades of gray. And had these kind of beautiful sort of starburst or seed pod-like shapes. And a digital component. If you were near the title plaque, you could scan a QR code and it would have this beautiful video component. And I'd cruise through the Greenway and ask a handful of people what they thought because I was curious myself. And it was well received, but I don't know if it had the same buzz that the Osgemios, maybe for obvious reasons. But it was meant to kind of kick off the Matthew Ritchie project at the ICA. And then the art wall would reflect, literally reflect the mural outside. And he's very interested in the building and talking to the outside and in the theater talking to the other parts of the building, including exhibitions. And can I just interject something here so we don't lose the thread? And since we're supposed to be having a conversation, I think one of the great things about this art wall is that I think might be important for your conversations is this is an institutional collaboration. The ICA could not have done this by themselves. The Greenway could not have done this by themselves. And the Greenway, I'm the chair of the Public Art Committee for the Greenway. It's just so you know why I'm talking about this. The Matthew Ritchie mural came down this past fall and was replaced by a mural by another contemporary artist named Shanique Smith. And that was a project that was done in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts. So the Greenway sees this wall as a community resource that currently is being done in collaboration with contemporary art presenting institutions in and around Boston. It gives everybody a big stage for an appropriate contemporary artist. And I'm seeing this in my work in Fitchburg all the time and I'm not gonna belabor this. What I've determined is that in my economically stressed area, almost everything has to be done as a collaboration. There are not enough resources for everyone to survive alone and the challenge becomes finding the strong partners with whom you can collaborate. But I think it's key and I think it's also key to how nonprofits are gonna function in the 21st century. Stand-alone institutions are just becoming less and less relevant. So I'm sorry. No, no, I think that was terrific background. And Matthew Richie also worked with our teens. He did an artist residency last summer and then more recently we had the culmination, you might say, of Matthew Richie last night. We had a two-night performance with musicians from the breeders and the nationals and other art collaborations. He's a big collaborator. Do this kind of final interdisciplinary, cool rock concert with all these other components, including teens in Matthew Richie-designed costume, reading tarot cards for visitors. Oh, cool. And so the teens have really been folded in by this artist and treated as co-collaborators, as artists in their own right and Matthew Richie's work is deeply complex. So he's spent a lot of time kind of helping them decode his work and then make sense of it for other visitors as well. That's really interesting that the way this is structured, it's an artist collaborating with audience, collaborating with kids, collaborating with other institutions. We see more and more of this everywhere because it's part of the practice of the artists. It's really being driven by how artists want, not all artists work this way, but a lot of them do and a lot of institutions that are interested in connecting with their community are working with these particular kinds of artists. So I'll give you another example and I probably shouldn't jinx this but I'm going to talk about it anyway. We're about to embark on a big public art project in Fitchburg and we are working with a contemporary artist named Anna Schulait Haber who is a MacArthur fellow and we were very fortunate to be able to work with her and she does a lot of community-based public art and really thinks way outside the box. So what she's decided to do is she wants to take over our daily newspaper in Fitchburg. The Fitchburg Sentinel and Enterprise. She is going to be an artist in residence at the newspaper and they are giving her the front page of the paper for 26 consecutive days and she's going to do a project called the Fitchburg Alphabet and every day on those 26 days will be, you open up the paper, there'll be a giant letter A through Z and those letters will be created by topographers and letter press artists from all over the world, a different artist every day and then the rest of the front page will be short articles about things in and around Fitchburg that begin with A and then B and then C and it's all the content is supposed to be about a celebration of the community. So A will be about apples, not arson. But not in a cloying way and a lot of this content is going to be written by students at the university and students in local high schools and she's going to be working with them to implement this project. We are this close to getting this approved by the publisher of the newspaper but you can see it's the same kind of impulse that drives Matthew Richie that Anna can't do this by herself, she needs a museum to help her, she needs a commercial enterprise to help her and she needs a whole lot of kids writing a whole lot of articles to help her and she needs topographers from all over the world to help her, none of it can't be done alone. Enough to the crew here for questions for Krista and Nick. Can I just say while we're getting the microphones there, all my Boston buddies, can we imagine this for the Boston Herald or the Boston Globe, how about that, would that be it? Hi, I'm Ben Pesner, I have a question for Nick. What's in your permanent collection? And the reason I ask that is because the work that you've talked about involving artists that you commission or work with is exciting and there's a kind of fabulous connection to the community but like many theaters, I'm sure you also have many artists under your roof who either aren't here because they're dead. You have classics I guess I'm assuming. And also you may have artists whose work you show who come from a different place and aren't interested or able to create the kind of visceral community connection. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with that work and how you bring that to the community? Sure, yeah, because we're community focused doesn't mean we stop being a museum. We're still first and foremost an art museum. And I'm glad you asked because this all seems kind of silly if you don't know anything about the museum. So we have a permanent collection of about 4,500 objects. It is an art historical hodgepodge. It is a sprinkling of fairy dust from ancient Egypt to the present. But we do have real strengths in photography, photography, African art and American art. And this is what we're gonna focus on going forwards. And so the other thing we're focusing on going forward and this is a different kind of community. Our changing exhibition program is going to be devoted exclusively to contemporary New England artists because fewer and fewer art museums in Massachusetts are interested in this community in a strong and committed way. The place that I used to work to Cordova, this was the mission there. And I worked this mission for over 15 years. The mission changed and the artist community has felt abandoned by the museum infrastructure. So we're picking this up. We're going to be the center for this. And one of the fun things for me about working in a museum with a historical collection, I didn't have that at Cordova. They had a 20th and 21st century collection. We do whatever we can to connect our collections, our historical collections with contemporary art so we can bring the past and the present together. So right now our curator is working on an exhibition for next fall called Land Ho. And it's a silly title, but the idea, it's gonna be a group exhibition of contemporary landscape painting by New England artists. And it's gonna be exhibited in such a way that traditional landscape painting from our collection will be in the same galleries with the contemporary art. So that connection is not next to each other but integrated in the same exhibition which is something you don't see very often. Our African collection, we have, I'm very proud of our African collection because it includes traditional tribal arts but our curator is very interested in how the tribal arts of Africa, the forms and the symbols and the techniques and the materials have migrated through the African diaspora and are still vital to a lot of artist practice today. It's a living language. So we've been acquiring work by contemporary artists to show in juxtaposition with the tribal arts that inspired them and we commissioned a piece by Willie Coles and we purchased a piece by a Boston artist named Ife Franklin and these are currently being shown in our galleries. Hi, James Haskins from the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. I wanna ask about allowing photography of the art in the museum. I asked this for a couple reasons. First of all, I think it relates to us because of the rules that are intimidating to people and coming into our cultural institutions. And also I think it relates to our Twitter conversation about allowing Twitter inside the theater. And just to share with you an experience, I went to, I was in Paris this past summer and going to see the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, I was sort of appalled by all of the photography, sort of the selfie culture taking over the flashes. I mean, I just felt like I could not in any way appreciate the art. And so I'm wondering if that makes me sort of one of our stagiairate subscribers in the audience who hates sort of someone having their cell phone next to me in the theater or if we're actually compromising the art by allowing this. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. Great question. Yeah, it is. Kristen, do you wanna start off with that? Sure. Well, I have lived through the transition for the museum. A lot of 21st century art is not copyrighted because the artist owns the copyright. And so traditionally the default has been for the museum to say no photography permitted of any of the work because we don't have the photographic rights to it. But now it is becoming standard practice for the registrars, the curators, to say this is a part of the agreement that if you are lending an object to us, then the hope is that for personal use or education use only, that we can invite visitors to take photographs. So more and more the experience in museums in general, whether historical or contemporary, has been to be able to photograph the works. But it's also created a lot of challenges. And since I spend, and my staff spend all of our time in the galleries, those challenges are the frame of course of the camera between the viewer and the work. It's a different kind of relationship. And so rather than try to go back to the old way of doing things, just to say that we should be against the use of digital photography or smart devices, we've tried to find smart ways to harness those impulses or to harness those energies. So one of the ways is we have a brand new mobile guide which it lives on a website. You can go to our website in fact and look at it from, you don't have to download anything onto your device. You can just access it from the web that has videos and a lot of videos and text and better images, sometimes zoomed in images of like the Mona Lisa. If you wanna see that freckle on the side of her face, but you can't get that close to the object, that's where some of that information lives. And we've seen a real increase in users using that kind of or accessing information that way as opposed to the old fashioned audio tours where it was strictly audio. And we're also sneaking teen content onto those mobile devices too, teens interviews with the artists and also teen made sound responses to works in our collection. But the other place is because the other group that I work with are the traditional tour guides which are meeting school groups or meeting other booked groups and leading tours through the exhibition and as a protective manager of my volunteers, I'd like everybody to stow their phones when they're contributing to the conversation because so many times those devices interrupt the conversation of the teens or on their phones and the tour guides asking them questions. But the tour guides have said, well, maybe we should try and create windows where they use their phones. And so they more and more, and this is proving really successful, they've said these are kind of the expectations that we have a conversation together and that I wanna hear your voice. But then in these moments, we can pull out our cell phones or our smart devices and take photographs and then they, it's almost like a mini scavenger hunt. We don't like scavenger hunts, so scare us in the galleries, but it's kind of like find this or find something that appeals to you and then come back and we'll share them together. And so we don't lose that conversation, but we're moderating that a little bit. But ultimately the relationship between the viewer and the work is primary. And so that will only ever be one of the tools that hopefully we're using to still slow people down and get them to spend time with their work. These are just other mini access points to help facilitate that. But I can appreciate the attention. Hi, I'm Miriam Weisfeldt from Willi Mammoth Theater in Washington, DC. I'd like to go back to this question of relevance and interrogate it a little bit further because I think you all have given some wonderful examples of ways to build relevance by making community members, co-creators of the work, or subjects of the work. If I'm the subject of the photograph, then the medium and the space where the photograph is exhibited becomes relevant to me. If I co-created a piece of work, same thing, which is very cool. And I think many of us in the theater community feel like we often stumble on really wonderful ways also of empowering our audiences and community members to become co-creators. But I think one of the things that we're hearing in the triple play responses is that audiences see just as much value sometimes in interpreting the work of someone else with people that they love, with the people that they come with. They really value that social experience. And that's really good news for us because the primary work that we're doing still usually is work created by someone else and the invitation is to come and see value in it. And so I wonder if you all have found ways to expand the invitation to discover relevance in the work beyond co-creating the work. Co-curating the work, sort of deepening the community's tools for interpreting the work and then seeing value in that, if that makes sense. Sure. Vic, do you wanna get us started or Krista? Our wheels, our wheels. Yeah, the wheels are turning. Wheels are turning. Well, I think I can speak for us just generally that working with artists, with contemporary artists is a real pleasure because every artist's practice is different and some artists like Matthew Richier really, it's a part of the process as Nick is also shared to involve people in producing the work together even though at the end of the day it might have, it's the work of one artist and his project that he's sort of guiding the experience. But there are other artists that we've worked with who are more insular or make work without as much of that and so we need to find other ways of creating those bridges. And so I'm not, I don't know if I have the perfect answer to that but we have, we can create social opportunities where we may invite the curator to facilitate the conversation instead of the artist or if the artist has been interviewed by the teens, we can capture that conversation and make that public but not everybody has that access so there's still a difference between the artist's production and then the social component. Yeah, and I'll take a slightly different tack on this and I'm not sure it'll answer your question but I think it might be interesting information. We're at the Fitchburg Art Museum, we're involved in community collaborations well outside of the museum as well because we're a fairly stable organization in a city that is in many regards a train wreck. We have taken it upon ourselves to do a lot of things that museums often do not do. And I'm talking particularly about economic development and creative economy initiatives. This is a way for an institution to get out of its own box and really do something with some kind of lasting effect on the place where you live. So the things that we're doing primarily, we're doing these public art projects in Fitchburg outside of the museum, like at the newspaper along Main Street. We're also working with multiple partners to create a downtown cultural district and then the biggest and most important project we're working on is literally across the street from the museum is a boarded up middle school and we're working with a local community development corporation to turn that middle school and two other adjacent boarded up properties into a 50 unit campus of affordable artist live workspace not just visual artists performing artists and writers and everybody. And this is a way, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, this building is the biggest threat to our museum. You can't have a big boarded up building across the street from the museum, especially we're trying to attract attendance from Boston and the Metro West area and if people come out and don't feel safe, they're not coming back and they're gonna tell their friends not to come. So that's my concern on the micro level but the opportunity that this presents, if we can bring a hundred creative, educated, entrepreneurial people to downtown Fitchburg to create within art museum a strong cultural community, we can fix the city. Thanks a lot. I think we have time for two more quick questions, so. Hi, my name is Brian Pollack, I'm a playwright and I work in marketing at a theater in California and I was wondering if there are ways in which you measure the impact of your engagement programs other than in pure numbers, like of warm bodies coming into the building? Yeah, we probably, like most museums conduct, visitor surveys through the marketing and external relations department and ours usually go out after every major exhibition cycle, so three or four times a year there will be a big push for visitor feedback and they rate all aspects of their visit, including getting to the museum, the way finding which for the ICA has been more recently pretty challenging because of our areas under so much development but online and cafe and the rest and for my staff that evaluation is really important because so much of what we do is interpersonal, so how do we know it's working other than as you're saying box office and admissions numbers but it's to the number one sided feedback that we're getting in those huge compendiums is the interaction that visitors are having with the people in the museum which is primarily my staff and they're saying that they are warm and friendly and educational, those are kind of the two categories that we're getting a lot of feedback for and so we've started to do, we've really started to draw that team out a little bit and they give what we call pop-up talks that we give the staff an opportunity to give to start conversations themselves and take that security hat off for a moment and really engage with people in an education way and we're finding that those conversations are drawing repeat visitors and we're also doing family readings in the galleries, we call them, they need a sexier title so if anyone has a good one, we call them books and art right now, but we're- So I am asking us, we can come up with a better title. Where again the gallery staff picks a children's book that has been, we have a really nice selection that our family programs staff has provided for us and they read a book in connection with one of the works on view, often one of the works from our permanent collection, like we have this great Jason Middlebrook, it looks like a frame, a wooden frame and we've been reading a book called Not a Box in front of it, a great children's book if some of you might know and actually last weekend we didn't have any children in the museum when we had scheduled our readings so four adults sat on the cushions in front of it and participated in the reading in this rich dialect, so some of that feedback is still informal but I think that we're learning a lot about what's working from those visitor surveys. Thank you. We have one last time for one more question. Hello, my name is Dayfina McMillan from Theater Communications Group. Thank you for this, this has been helpful. Nick, this question is primarily for you. I love what you said about the client being the community and you came to this organization, it was in a 20 year coma and it seems like you had to sort of shift the organization to think differently about its values and so I'm really curious about how did you change the organizational culture? What were the challenges in doing so? How did you have to sort of change how people thought about this change in mindset, the board, the staff, sort of what was the internal conversation? How did you sort of look within yourself and make those changes to get to all these wonderful initiatives and new ways of operating? I get that question a lot because it does involve culture change but I was fortunate in that everyone, both internally and externally in the city was so sick of the status quo that everyone wanted change and as I said, my board wanted greater involvement with the community. Well, by God, that's what we're giving them. That's the change. I think they're getting more change more quickly than they bargained for which leaves them a little stunned sometimes but I've had very little problem with this. Everyone is so desirous of improving this institution. I've had some small staff problems. When I got there, my staff was a bunch of whipped dogs because my predecessors default position on everything was no. And so the initiative had been beaten out of these people and I swore I'd give everybody a chance and see if we could get them to wake up and almost everybody woke up and almost everybody is, we've had a couple of problems and we're dealing with them and we've dealt with one of them but otherwise, you know what I'm talking about, right? So the staff for the most part has been thrilled to be able to participate in a more vital and interesting place, which has been great. I wish I had a better answer for you. I wish I could tell you how to manage that change but I can't because I really have to manage it, so. It's about taking advantage of that energy and the time being right and the place being right and I think what we've heard this morning are incredibly bold, brave, warm, collaborative visions that we've heard from Krista and Nick and I hope you'll join me in thanking them for being here this morning. Thank you. Thank you. And I also wanna say a big thank you to Catherine because none of this would have been possible without when Brad and I said, can you cast this? And it's been great working with you on this. So thank you all so much. I wanna just take us really through the arc of the rest of the day because I think it's always helpful for us to.