 Welcome. I'm Tom Collins. I'm president of the Barnes Foundation, and it's a great pleasure to have you here this afternoon. Thank you to everyone who stood by us during our fire drill. I appreciate that. You'll be pleased to know it was our second one of the week, so it took us approximately half the time to get through it today. Thanks for sticking around. I'm going to introduce the program in the interest of concision and in the interest of acknowledging the many institutions and people that helped us on this program. I'm going to read. I hope you'll indulge me for just two minutes, because the rest of this is going to be rather freewheeling. So the last time you'll see notes. Earlier this year, we here at the Barnes Foundation completed a new institutional strategic plan that is intended to guide us as we grow the Barnes Service, our artistic, educational, and social service, into our second century, which begins in 2022. At the heart of this new strategic plan is our commitment to pioneer and pursue strategies for making Dr. Barnes' twin passions on the one hand progressive education about and through the visual arts, and on the other, diversity, inclusion, and social justice to evolve those into the 21st century. You've joined us today for the first in what we imagine will be a series of two by four innovation forums in which we will discuss one set of challenges we face as we attempt to carry out this mission. We've explicitly committed ourselves in this new plan to the goal of mirroring the diversity of Philadelphia in our audiences, our staff, and our board. And so we lead today with a very broad question, how can we grow our audience to be more reflective of Philadelphia? To help us answer this question, we have brought together two distinguished colleagues to my right, your left, who are leaders in this field. Maria Arias, who is vice president of diversity and inclusion at Comcast Corporation, and probably many of you know Siobhan Reardon. Siobhan is the president and director of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Terrific colleagues, and I'm so glad they're here today. Thank you very much. And we are here together with four students from Drexel University's Exite Center, Nicole Feller Johnson, Marin Larson, Mai Noyan, and Kenneth Nimley. Welcome. Thank you for being here. And I want to acknowledge two of my colleagues here at the Barnes Foundation. First, Barbara Wong, who is our new director of community engaged in Barbers here in the front. Please join me in welcoming Barbara to the staff. And many of you probably know Shelly Bernstein. Shelly is our deputy director for digital initiatives, but all chief experience officer. And you're gonna be hearing a bit from Shelly today. This is really Shelly's brainchild, so Shelly, thank you very much. And together, we are all going to share first some data, and then we're gonna talk through its implications. Each of our partners from the Exite Center will then have a few minutes to present one or more specific ideas about audience diversification in this program. And then finally, we're gonna open things up to conversation. And we have a hard stop at right around 4.30, so we promise we will be as quick as we can. I want to acknowledge that the data that Shelly's gonna be presenting to kick off each of four discussion topics today was produced in cooperation with Be Heard Philly, which is Temple University's Institute for Survey Research. And this working group has used this data throughout the week in a series of private conversations that lead us up to this moment. So you'll be hearing a few select data points momentarily. And so before I turn things over to Shelly, I want to thank Exite Center's Young Lu Kim and Carol Lindstrom for helping us to both plan and populate this conversation with really extraordinary new colleagues. I'd also like to thank Drexel University's LaBeau College of Business for their critical sponsorship of this first two-by-four forum. And with that, Shelly Bernstein. Let's see how we're doing. And this is how we're doing today. These are the demographics of Philadelphia. And these are the Barnes demographics of our audiences. This does not include the school partnerships that we work with. So there are 11,000 school kids that are not represented by this data. But what you see here is a pretty stark difference. And I'm gonna throw this right back to Tom to start talking about it. So how I'm gonna proceed today is Shelly's gonna offer a data point and a little bit of analysis. This is the first. And then I'm gonna turn immediately to our experts. And I'm gonna ask them first for some general observations about this data. Studies, for example, some of the studies we've reviewed in preparation. Very much a Center City institution is present. So our users actually reflect the better part of the demographics of the city of Philadelphia just because of the nature of our work. And so naturally, there is a variation and we see it as well in our programming and usership. What happens here in Center City is not what happens in our neighborhood libraries. And so therefore your services and your reach and the way you have the conversation with community is necessarily different. And so you do look at education levels, literacy levels, you look at access issues. And for many Philadelphians, one of the things Philadelphians don't do easily is traverse neighborhoods. It's not, most people are not gonna come easily from North Philadelphia or West Philadelphia to come to Center Cities. And so therefore, as Maria said, there is a real opportunity for the Barnes to understand who's in association in these neighborhoods so that their reach is much more broad spectrum. Very serious challenge, we have some very nuanced data about who's coming to the Barnes and from what zip codes in the city. And we have neighborhoods we simply don't reach. And I'm wondering to consider as we imagine how we get over that. You know, as we all know, Philadelphia is actually a fairly poor city, Southwest Philadelphia. You know, you watch where you spend your money and if it's Center City or buying food for your family, those are the decisions that are being made. And so how is it we understand the local economies in some of these neighborhoods and how every single citizen has the right to access to what's here in the Barnes. And so how is it we push that out, I think. So it's an issue in librarianship and one of the things that we talk about within our own libraries is we are a fairly passive profession and we wait for people to come through the door through up those big giant steps into this temple of knowledge and ask us a reference question. Well, that's not happening anymore. And so the paradigm shift is actually looking more deeply into community to understand what that relation needs to be so that people are actually using the free library. Of course, is that we're here, populations that you are going to be serving, many sub-populations. So you, in addition to the low income and representation. This is a relatively new enterprise for the Barnes and many cultural institutions, but you did something very novel which I think is suggestive. So free library of Philadelphia. And so we're very excited that we have half a million card holders. That's a giant number. There's 1.6 million people that live here in Philadelphia, but I'd like us to have 1.6 million card holders, right? So what we did was, there's exists and it's pretty dispersed around the city, but what it is was really home addresses that where there wasn't a card, this gives us an opportunity to understand at a very hyper-local level where it is we are marketing efforts need to go, the kind of outreach efforts we need to sort of pursue in our local neighborhood and live spots where there's not even, it is so interesting. So we have what any number of 20 libraries in West Philadelphia, so you can walk among many of them. The issues for us is that we have come to discover in some locations we've established a hotspot to try and reach communities at a very hyper-local level where we put a digital learning center in a local person we've began working with never crossed the transom of a public library, blew us away, said we have to change our issues around, so what are the barriers? So clearly not only the physical barriers exist, but there's also the intellectual barriers that we present in the way we present our materials or even present ourselves. We sit behind these big desks and we've got these big computers and it's a pretty intimidating process. And so as we look at our 21st century library initiative, it is all about breaking down those threshold for the first time, what we have to think about, what we have to do, so we'll circle back to that and we'll return things to Shelly for lightning round two. So lightning round two is about what I have visited, but much less of one for those who have not, versus almost true for the special exhibitions, of those who have visited, it's less of a driver, but of those who have not visited, it's more of a drive. Start to see that same kind of data trend happen in the public programs as a primary driver, where you see those who have not visited, that's a fairly substantial rise there for those who have visited. Interestingly, there's a 31.6% crossover rate, which means if you're gonna get- The collection, they're going, and so, but anyway, so there we are. And I was like, it wouldn't be interesting, it's about how it is you attract people by using less classical methods and to sort of, so, it's almost like, where's Waldo? And so, I do think that art can be intimate, think that there's that, there's that sort of, how do we make sure that people understand this is for everybody, because as we were saying yesterday, that many of the artists who produced this work were starving, hungry, homeless, pretty desperate people, and so relating those stories. I think the storytelling around I think is incredible and it has tremendous reach, no matter group of people that really are, just love to get at information, absorb information, dissect information, and figure out who is it that they can share this with, which is why places like this and beer gardens and restaurants and just the Johnny Brenda's, which is my favorite place, to just to really sort of dive deep into a topic and really explore. It's so simple but so profound, which is that to attract people to an institution like this, people have to be able to see themselves in what is happening here in some way. And I'm wondering if you're using technology to the local neighborhoods and into whether you use the library as your venue or say for instance, you wanna use, you can stream images to what do you see? How do you see it? What does it mean to you? Because I do think it really does help with that translation. You're not thinking very different cultural assets to them and you know, we speak one way here in Center City because we're kind of an intellectual hub. I'm just gonna say that there isn't intellectual hubs throughout the city. I think what we have to do is push out as everything and access becomes the... So we talked pretty extensively yesterday about two particular challenges the Barnes faces. One is the fact of course that it is a collection that we're best known for a collection of European modernism. And if we're talking about offering diverse audiences an opportunity to see themselves and what we do here, we have to figure out how to create a reception horizon that extends from that work, which is principally white and privileged and male, produced at least in that way to an audience that does not look like that. Suggestions about what we do. Artists in other communities, different diverse. There's almost kind of this is, but it's broader than this because art is really a story to tell. Conversation has to change to what you see as a person in the 21st century, what that object means to you and what's happening in that image. It's probably different and that conversation is necessarily because I know some of the students were challenged by what they were seeing. And so, and that's fair because in the way that we have NASA society, there's much more progress and conversations are necessary. Sort of the, I think what also doesn't get discussed about the Barnes, which is probably some of the, to me some of the most interesting parts of the collection is all of the African artisans and it is an amazing collection, but I think that there's just so much more to explore when you think about everything else that's here and then what that means culturally because I think you really can get into some of the cultural aspects of from. Alluding to another part of the conversation we have yesterday and this is germane to what I refer to as our other unique challenge here at the Barnes, which is that historically this institution has not invested in unpacking the ideas and the histories that are represented by the pictures and objects in our collection beyond the method that was pioneered by Dr. Barnes, which is, we loosely relate now to visual literacy education and that is something we're actively doing and by unpacking those ideas, by telling those stories, we create many more points of entry, many more points of connection and I think we'll probably hear some ideas that are related to that idea momentarily but lightning round two is now over. We move on to lightning free. The social visit with friends or family is in fact a primary driver. In fact, it's almost 63, 67% among both groups. Visits as a primary driver is something that is incredibly important. To have visited it's only 20%, but of those who have not, their look, it's a 42%. So those who have not visited, people state for not visiting museums at all, like museums were very, very hot. What was the age, what was the average, you know, since here for them because other sets of data that we have, the consideration of cost is roughly equal among the two groups. For those who have visited, it's in those who have not visited 27%. So we start to see that tide shift. You see some things that say things like of those who never go to museums, the reason too expensive with much lower than other considerations such as don't like, not for me. It is certainly conflicted in our onsite data versus the data that we've captured here. Especially if it's really enticing free programming that's gonna get out some social issue or some amazing conversation that folks have been wanting to have. It hasn't arisen and all of a sudden there it is. But you have to remember, so Daniel, so that doesn't surprise me either because this is a group of people that loves to be informed. They are at information, information gathering. And if it's for free, they're going. And if there's a free beer there, there's a civic engagement on a lot of this. And I think that that's social justice as a main thing, it's consistent in the quality. It was surprising. We did diversify our audiences pretty wildly during some of these free programs. But there was a large, unpredictably large percentage of people that came to those free events that were in our typical demographic. This is the tip of the iceberg. But you get some sense of the landscape that we've covered in some of these private conversations and some sense of the questions that we're asking of ourselves and we're being asked by members of our community. I would like now to turn things to our guests from Drexel's Excite Center. And I believe, Mark's gonna give us an introduction. Student in Drexel's new design research program as well as fashion design. I'm going to talk with you a little bit today about our rebranding strategies. Early focusing on building relationships with millennials and underserved populations provided to us by Be Heard Philly. When you're looking at the left-hand side word cloud, that represents old perceptions, ideas that people have about the Barnes Foundation. The perceptions that we hear repeated are in larger type. So you can see where people's priorities are, what they're thinking about the situation, how the history of the Barnes has contributed to their perception of what's here now. On the left, we have an idealized word cloud, which is our vision of what we'd like to communicate about Barnes, what we're hearing being here as part of a team, what we're hearing from staff members, what we're hearing about the Barnesian philosophy. To this end, our education and community, which we believe are at the core of your values here. And social use with friends. We want people to see the Barnes Museum as a place of creation and exploration, not a staid collection. And so we've created the hashtag I belong Barnes because we want people to know that it is a place of welcoming and they have a place here. It is not just for one demographic. It's also like to reintroduce the Barnes totem as a new Philadelphia icon. I am a native Philadelphia and I know how strongly we feel about our art and architecture as symbols of who we are as a city. We're very connected to our landmarks and the Barnes Foundation is fortunate enough to have an Ellsworth Kelly beautiful totem that we believe people could use as a touchstone, place of meeting, and very importantly to a younger generation, a selfie spot. Photography is not allowed in the galleries because of danger to the art and artifacts and young people and even children need a place to take that picture. Sometimes we're looking for an improved social media rollout. Currently the Barnes does not have a Snapchat presence and for anyone in our age group we all know that's an absolute necessity for getting information to us. And you can see in this beautiful puppy picture of Marin that we took that the Philly geotag is the only one available to you when you're at the Barnes. There is no Barnes Foundation geotag and in addition to creating a Barnes Foundation geotag we think it would be a good idea to have geotags of various locations within the Barnes. The Barnes is not just a museum, it's gardens, it's classrooms. There are all different settings here that encourage people to explore the grounds. In these lines we notice that Facebook also only has a single check-in point, an official check-in point for the Barnes, but we feel that by putting more check-in points throughout the museum grounds we would encourage people to experience more of the space and give them more of a reason to return. We would like to introduce a digital guest book because we want people to see themselves in the collection as Shyvana Maria said over and over again it's very important to people to have their identity represented in something, to find an access point. So upon entering the museum we would, you could have digital photograph taken that would be uploaded to the site and you could put filters on it that would be Cubist or Impressionist as the regular collection determines or if you want a folk art filter or something else that more fully represents you that would be available as well and you could go onto our website to find your image which would be hung in the virtual gallery and this would also give the Barnes Museum an opportunity to collect data on the people who are coming and seeing these pictures. It would be a great time for us to ask them about their experience and give us a fuller picture of are we getting to our customer? Is our participant happy? Are they finding themselves in? We feel disconnected. They feel that the museum experience is not for them and we really seek to change that especially considering Dr. Barnes's philosophy of education and you can see here special events to create, even though there are educational programs here in existence, we feel that partnerships like the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia or different local schools and showcasing student art would be a great way to get these families out here and to create a more family friendly into identity community. I think it's really important to cater to a diverse set of interests. People who feel like they need to identify with as a Jamaican born. This installation was inspired by 19th century flinters a really recurring theme in the Barnes Foundation as well as African American. This is a connection to people who normally would not education. We believe that by recognizing different organizations and individuals within Philadelphia that embody this modern Barnes philosophy you will be able to have a wider audience and also spread our biases. This is just a geographic representation of the data that you have heard of the Barnes Foundation and the percent who have visited the Barnes Foundation and you can see that the two areas that have the largest discrepancy, people who have art church in West Philadelphia, West Philadelphia local, in order to find artists who system to be put in here at the Barnes which means that this ticketing about the horizon between the two communities and this would be at that literal horizon. So people from the community can walk by and access to the Barnes library, the Barnes such a transparent space and city facing, the artist traditional 2D art sculpture music or the communities that we're pulling from around the city facilitating again that who have spent so much time at the Barnes and have become so immersed in the Barnes philosophy become ambassadors for the Barnes once they go back to their community and they can talk about what the Barnes actually is and what their experience was really like instead of just the foundation. Education piece of it. So as we mentioned earlier, there's a disconnect so much of an awareness with the community and what's taking place in the Barnes. Barnes mission, as you can see, the promotion of the advancement of education and the appreciation of fine art. So what we're looking to do is increase art enthusiasm across the communities. So with the engagement from these communities that have low awareness, we're promoting or positioning our education outreach program, Barnes pushes out digitally. So if you can imagine a platform, a virtual platform where it's pushed out to the communities digitally and what it's looking at is promoting something to those communities that are below the digital divide. So for those communities don't have access to technology, they can go to the local library. They could take access to the public computing spaces. So with this technology, we're looking at bringing Barnes art and curriculum to the masses. So with this curriculum, we have, I'll say users, but for this space, I'm gonna say the student. So let's look at it as a student. So we're gonna take a student at a school or in the after school program. They have the opportunity to visually get curriculum based on a Barnes model to create art from the Barnes philosophy, which they could add their own features in representing of their community themselves. But on top of that, they can create a digital art type pen pal where they can connect with other people, other students, users in their community and across other communities. So I don't need to be in a specific zip code to touch base and create art with someone else. And with this pen pal type of situation, we're creating a social network. So with these social networks, I can reach out to someone we can create art and hopefully upload it up to the Barnes web cloud space. And if the Barnes has some type of digital display, I could say to my pen pal, hey, let's meet over at the Barnes and view the artwork that we get together. So we have a meetup space at the Barnes, view our digital art or even grab inspiration during our tours, find a quiet space and create art together at that time. What we're looking to consider this as is blending art and technology. So blended learning in a sense. So if we have this blended learning platform, we can reach these lower resource communities and these underrepresented communities. And underrepresented communities, most people think of these poor communities, but there's also a community where you have to look at the disabled, which we talked about earlier. So we could use art for autism. We can use art for mental health. So we can promote art from the Barnes in the Barnes mission as a therapeutic type of form or nature. So we can bring these people to the Barnes, increase traffic, access, engagement and just awareness all together. So with this impact of reflection. So when we say reflection, we're looking at the reflection of the community that's being brought into the Barnes space and we're looking to empower our communities to participate in their arts through the Barnes Foundation. So everything is connected with and through Barnes. So Barnes is that outreach, is that helping hand that's being extended not just to one community but to all communities. So I'm helping this community connect to that community and it's all based through Barnes. So increasing access into and across the Barnes pipeline. So the pipeline is just the starting point where we're reaching out to these communities to gain access. So what we wanna do is once they gain access is keep them in this pipeline to help them throughout the whole pipeline. How can we, so we need to ask questions, how, what do we need from you? How can we keep you coming back to the Barnes? So all this within this digital platform could be implemented. So we can have, as you mentioned earlier, we can have questionnaires, question forms, data gathering that we can use to pretty much promote more of what we're looking to do and spread it across the public. That's great, I'm actually a little weepy. So what we're gonna do now is I'm gonna turn things over to Shelly and I're gonna switch places and Shelly's gonna facilitate a little public conversation and while she and I are switching places, maybe we can get some... A piece of it, the digital, of course you've heard me on the digital. I'm very excited about this. This is, you've really come at it with a fresh set of eyes. The messiness of that becomes art later. That's a great problem to have because those constraints making more creative and especially the generation. I go to churches in Europe where you can take pictures of everything while mass is going on. So the idea that you could go into a collection and see this amazing span of artwork but not be able to have a record of it to take with you was just flabbergasting to me. And we talked about kind of some crazy ideas about putting platforms up where people could do what I was doing. But really what it's about is access. It's not really about that rule or that collection because like you said, all of those things are a place for a creative workaround. So if you have to stand on the couch, you're gonna stand on the couch. You're gonna find a way to get in. If you're motivated to do so, if you feel like you have a reason and a place to go, it's upsides and it's downsides. But that's definitely one of them. You can't take pictures but you can always come back. Do you have similar issues at the library with constraints? The shushing thing, you know, it's been serious for years, bases and inside is banquets and tables and chairs. And on the outside is the culture and civic engagement. Let's say we did implement an artist and residence program. It's not necessarily being chosen by staff at the Barnes. What if those artists were applying and the application process was all public, this was chosen by the public. You know, you start to wonder how you can get outside of yourself a little bit in making sure that we're doing, and sort of think about ways to every single thing that they do well. They're gonna do some things really well. Those partnerships can strengthen those that resolve. So I mean, there's the opportunity to mix. It's a start for understanding what's happening, but it's only a start and it requires, I think a certain commitment on the ground to go through and we should have said at the beginning. I wanna be cautious of time because we're... Don't see that map. The more feedback we have, the more data we're able to get. The more people are willing to complain. Tell us your problems. Tell us how you're feeling. Tell us how you don't feel represented and be specific in your complaints because... We mentioned getting out into the community and finding out what we can do for you. So you telling us what you need, like what you just did, beautiful. But I feel that this needs to happen more often. Too many times we are waiting for the complaint before we start to move and we need to jump ahead of that and bring that to the communities. That's how I feel. So we need to progress as a sort of underpinning of it all.