Co-Creative Educational Programs

     While there are few institutions that integrate co-creation into as many functions as the Wing Luke does, there are several museums where co-creative practices happen in pockets, and these pockets tend to reside in education departments. Education staff members are more likely to be hired in part for their ability to be responsive to and collaborate with community partners and program participants. Educational programs traditionally focus on deep engagement with content, and co-creation fits into that overall mission.

Teen leadership, isolated program -YES (suggested subhead, SB)

     Several institutions run robust youth programs that are essentially co-created, in which teens are empowered as staff (often paid) to contribute to and participate in museum projects. For example, the St. Louis Science Center's Youth Exploring Science program (YES) is a community-based program in which 250 under-served teens, recruited from community partner organizations, are employed by the museum to participate in science learning, professional development, and service back to the community. This program is physically separate from the rest of the museum and is housed in the Taylor Community Science Resources Center, a place with a related but different mission and constituency from the overall museum.

Employees of the YES program work in partnership with their students, and while they definitely provide some formal instruction, they do so in a co-creative environment which is frequently teen-led. For example, in one YES program called Learning Places funded by the National Science Foundation, teens in St. Louis (as well as teens associated with the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul) designed, installed, and staffed interactive science exhibits and activities for local community children's organizations (Girls Inc., Head Start, Boys and Girls Clubs). In an echo of the discussion of staff roles at the Wing Luke Asian Museum, a Learning Places community evaluation report reported significant staff time and attention was spent communicating with community partners and mediating interpersonal and cultural issues among teens and community partners throughout the process.

     When a co-creative project is run in one pocket of a museum, it can often clash with other parts of the institutional culture. In the case of the YES program, for example, YES teens are empowered to manage their program's digital presence by blogging, sharing photos on Flickr, posting videos to YouTube and Blip.tv, sharing links on Delicious, and posting their own "how-to" guides on Instructables.com. Because YES staff have a co-creative approach to relationships with YES participants, there are fairly loose guidelines for what teens may post, and participants share everything from reflections on their science learning to photos of themselves dancing.

     In the context of YES, these activities are not only appropriate but desirable because they promote technology skills and help YES participants feel ownership of their program. But the marketing department of the St. Louis Science Center does not necessarily want YES teens and their experiences to be the face of the institution to the wider online audience. As of 2009, the YES website is not integrated into the overall Science Center website, (Suggest that isolation and limited access is a form of risk-management. It may be a key component to education-based projects for a traditional institution. There are many ongoing education programs within art, history and science institutions that do not link to the full institution in terms of gallery space, website, membership. SB) and accessing it via the museum's website requires some concerted effort. While the YES program powerfully fulfills the museum's mission "to stimulate interest in and understanding of science and technology throughout the community," it is not presented as a flagship to audiences that are not already in the know. 

Cultural community leadership, public exhibition - Oakland's Day of the Dead(suggested subhead, SB)

     For some institutions, this tension can take the whole museum in a new direction. The Oakland Museum of California has a long history as a community-focused institution, reaching back to its roots as a radically democratic museum in the late 1960s and 1970s. In recent years, however, audiences have dwindled, and in 2008, the museum began a major renovation with the goal to reinvent all major galleries in an effort to reconnect with their community roots.

     The museum has ambitious goals for increasing visitation, and specifically, for increasing the number of local visitors and visitors who are demographically representative of the museum’s highly diverse neighborhood. To accomplish these goals, the museum has drawn inspiration for several new initiatives from a long-standing co-creative project: the Day of the Dead exhibition. 

     Day of the Dead is a project of the museum's education department that has been running annually since 1994. The museum partners with local artists, community members, and curators as guest curators, and these guests assemble diverse artists, school groups, and community members to build shrines, or ofrendas, as offerings to the dead. The shrines are mounted in a dedicated exhibition space within the museum, and they range from funny to heart-wrenching to political in tone. The exhibition typically is open for two months surrounding the Day of the Dead (November 2) and features regular gallery talks and tours by participating artists. The museum hosts a community celebration on a weekend-day before the Day of the Dead, a free party that includes crafts and demonstrations, live music and dance performances, a market (mercado), and a ceremonial procession into the museum gardens.

     Day of the Dead and the celebration program are enormously successful for the Oakland Museum. It is literally the only time of the year (and for the festival, the most notable day of the year) when the museum teems with local visitors speaking many different languages. On the day of the celebration, 3,000 to 5,000 people come to participate, and throughout the run of the exhibition, it enjoys about 1,000 visitors per day (mostly student groups).

     As project director Evelyn Orantes noted, the project's co-creative community roots have played a big role in its growth and success. Day of the Dead wasn't conceived by museum staff but by the institution's Latino Advisory Council. The museum had approached these community leaders and asked what they could do to connect with a greater Latino audience. The Council came back and suggested a Day of the Dead program. Day of the Dead is one of the most important traditions in Latino Mexican culture, but it also plays a major role for activists of many stripes in the San Francisco Bay Area. Day of the Dead celebrations became popular in the 1960s and 1970s as a way of reclaiming culture and being politically active, and a lot of the early festivals took place in San Francisco. Why, asked the Latino Advisory Council, didn't the Oakland Museum become the home for Day of the Dead in San Francisco’s East Bay, where many Latinos live?

     While the Day of the Dead program does attract many Latino and Mexican visitors, it also attracts other new audiences to the Oakland Museum. The exhibition enjoys high visitation from health industry groups, support groups for families with relatives in hospice, groups of terminally ill patients, people dealing with grief, and grief counselors. The student audience isn't uniform either; Headstart facilitators bring preschoolers to learn about art, elementary and high school students come to connect with cultural heritage, and university Spanish and ethnic studies classes visit as well. As Orantes noted, "the topic of death transcends culture or ethnicity. It's something we all grapple with. And here is an educational institution providing you a safe way to gather tools to grieve, which is so polar opposite of anything we learn from western culture about death and the grim reaper." The Day of the Dead project isn't just for a specific demographic community; it's for all people who desire a more personal and emotional connection to cultural experiences. Again, as Orantes put it, "the exhibition has a real intimacy that you get right away - about your mom who died, or your child. The instant level of intimacy from the subject adds this whole other closeness between the museum, participant, and the viewer. It's a program that makes people feel like this is their place, their museum, and there's a sense of ownership."

     While the Oakland Museum staff are working to incorporate this kind of co-creation and its positive audience response into other programs, they have a long history of understanding the tension that comes when a traditional museum engages in a co-creative project. It's no accident that Day of the Dead has been the only exhibition produced at the Oakland Museum by the education department as opposed to the curatorial art, history, or science departments. The co-creative process, like that at the Wing Luke Asian Museum, is highly deliberative. Everyone involved in Day of the Dead from the staff side, from educators to preparators, needs to be able to engage with guest curators and artist participants in a "constant conversation," providing feedback and support as needed. The Museum frequently employs professional curators, artists, and community leaders as guest curators, and each of these groups has a different required learning process to work well with the museum's rules and goals. Orantes commented that working with professional curators is easiest because guest curators require little instruction in exhibition design and development and are able the exhibition happen mostly on their own. But she also reflected that the years in which the guest curator was an artist or community leader have led to more provocative installations.

     Reflecting on the highly integrated and collaborative way that Day of the Dead is developed, executed, and received by visitors, Orantes said, "In some ways, it's almost like having a community center in the museum. And I hesitate to put Day of the Dead in that box because it will be devalued. People will say that the artists that we bring on aren't 'artists,' they are 'community artists.' This is a program that challenges the basic ideas about how art is displayed. We take an egalitarian approach, merging artists, community members, and school groups, so you will often see the work of an established artist right next to an installation of glitter-covered macaroni. And I think some museum people don't know what to do with it." As at the Wing Luke Asian Museum, Day of the Dead's co-creative format is a radical departure from the way things are typically done in a traditional museum, and Orantes and her cohorts are still struggling to define what that means for the Oakland Museum's overall path forward. (Oakland has taken a big risk to expose this work as major annual public exhibition, limiting it in time to 2 months/year, but not limiting geography, coverage or participation. SB) 

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