Sing Me Your Story, Dance Me Home Community Connections Project: How travelling exhibitions can be leveraged by small museums to engage their communities

Westmuse, Vol II, 2008

By Lexie Smith Kliebe and Margaret Kadoyama

Can a traveling exhibition serve as a catalyst to engage museums with their communities? When a museum hosts a traveling exhibition, can staff develop long-term partnerships that keep community groups and individuals interested and involved in the museum after the traveling exhibition has closed?

The California Exhibition Resources Alliance (CERA) thought they could. As a non-profit providing high-quality, affordable exhibitions to cultural organizations with limited resources, CERA staff were aware of many museums that wish to learn about their communities, seek connections with these communities, and involve community members in their operations.

Common challenges that museums face when engaging local community populations include: 1) lack of knowledge about how to appropriately reach these groups; 2) lack of time to work collaboratively; and 3) getting people to work together both within and outside the museum. These questions and challenges can be especially daunting to smaller organizations but the rewards can be far-reaching. Through a 21st Century Museum Professionals Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, CERA sought to address these challenges by launching a new project where staff of small museums are trained to foster community engagement in conjunction with the traveling exhibition “Sing Me Your Story, Dance Me Home: Art & Poetry from Native California.”

The Sing Me Your Story Community Connections Project provide staff at the seventeen host museums an opportunity to participate in professional development activities. They learned how to engage community leaders in planning for traveling exhibitions and related programming, with a specific emphasis on nurturing meaningful relationships with local Native communities.

The project team includes CERA staff members Joan Jasper, Lexie Smith Kliebe, Adrienne McGraw; former CERA Executive Director Lisa Eriksen; Consultant/Exhibition Curator Theresa Harlan; Community Project Consultant Margaret Kadoyama; and the Sing Me Your Story Advisory Committee. Advisory Committee members include Sherrie Smith-Ferri (Dry Creek Pomo/Bodega Bay Miwok), Director/Curator of the Grace Hudson Museum & Sun House in Ukiah, CA; Judith Lowry (Mountain Maidu/Hamawi Pit River), featured artist in the exhibition; Gerald Clarke (Cahuilla), professor at Idyllwild Arts Academy and featured artist; Paula Allen (Karuk), Specialist for United Indian Health Services, Inc. and Curator for the Potawot Arts Gallery, Arcata, CA; and Linda Noel (Konkow Maidu), featured poet.

The process to support the host museums in connecting with their communities had three primary components:

Community Involvement Workshop – In December 2006, staff members from each host museum attended a workshop where they learned core strategies of community engagement and dynamics of diverse communities. Advisory Committee members discussed creating an appropriate environment for the exhibition, appropriately involving Native communities, and techniques needed in observing Native protocol. With the Community Project Consultant, Curator and Advisory Committee's guidance, the participants drafted a strategic community involvement plan based on their museums' individual goals, objectives and resources.

One-on-One Consultations – Consultations with the staff at each host venue help to address planning and implementation issues related to each museum's specific community involvement needs and plans. These consultations support each museum to further develop and refine its individual plan and assist with implementation and outreach efforts.

Monthly e-mails – Through monthly emails, lessons from the field are sent to every host venue by the Community Project Consultant. These include reports about current activities and stories from the host museums' experiences, as well as suggestions and tips for working with communities. At times, when a staff member at a host museum sends a note about a particular challenge, the project team asks the advisors for their perspectives and advice on addressing the challenge. The Community Project Consultant provides these suggestions directly to the museum, and also creates a more general “lessons learned” note that is sent out to all the host museums.

Through these three components, the project team provides ongoing support to encourage host museum staff to build long-term relationships with their Native communities.  

Project Outcomes

To date, over 18,000 visitors have seen the “Sing Me Your Story” exhibition at the first five host venues. Each of these institutions leveraged a prepackaged, traveling exhibition as a platform to actively connect with community members. The following two examples are models of various approaches the museums have taken.

Through participating in the project, the Maidu Interpretive Center (MIC) in Roseville, CA wanted to develop open dialogue with Native communities and expand community awareness of the museum and its exhibits. This was achieved by:

•  Hosting Public Programs – The museum hosted three free evening receptions featuring Native Californian artists and poets from the exhibition, many of which were local to the museum. The staff made a point to welcome and honor community elders during the public programs and greeted each individual person attending the public programs as they entered the door.

•  Marketing of Exhibition and Public Programs – Using a visually striking image from the exhibition, staff distributed postcards in advance inviting all the regional rancherias and other Native organizations, as well as regional libraries, museums and City of Roseville offices to the opening.

•  Building Partnerships – The staff had outlined “the formation of a Native American advisory committee” in their strategic plan, and through exhibition planning they formalized an advisory committee, which included representation from each local rancheria. The museum became a partner in the Placer County Native Network and met with Chapa de Native Health Center and other individual Native people and artists in preparation for the exhibit. Through these new partnerships and contacts they asked for feedback on their permanent exhibits, suggestions for what community members would like to see at the museum, and whether the Maidu Interpretive Center was being responsive to community members' needs.

The Senior Supervisor of the MIC, Kris Stevens, reported that with the involvement of their local Native community members, the “Sing Me Your Story” exhibition and Community Connections project had been extremely successful for their museum because they had: 1) seen an increase in attendance, 2) seen a large change in their audience demographics, and 3) established and deepened relationships with their Native communities.

A year after hosting the “Sing Me Your Story” exhibition, the MIC staff is building on its initial success in community engagement by working on new collaborative projects. This winter, they curated their own contemporary Native art show featuring a local artist. “People really want to be involved when a member of their community, someone important to them, is showing their work or being recognized in some way.  We will continue to have as many of these smaller shows as we can manage, with our limited staff and budget.”

The Hi-Desert Nature Museum in Yucca Valley, CA also achieved many of their goals outlined in their Community Involvement Plan this year. Assisted by Advisor Gerald Clarke, the staff began working with regional Native community members to plan and publicize programs to augment the traveling exhibition. Specifically, Hi-Desert fostered a reciprocal relationship with the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum to cross promote programs and resources to each other's audiences. The Museum has decided that the public program they held for the “Sing Me Your Story” exhibition will become an annual event, and Hi-Desert staff will continue to work with the people they had initiated connections with through this project. Lynne Richardson, Museum Supervisor at Hi-Desert, said,

"Our main goal is to keep the momentum going. The Sing Me Your Story project served as a catalyst. We're a small museum with a staff of four, so we are limited in resources. With the momentum from this project, we are now doing the same thing with our other communities. We're looking at working with our local Latino community to plan a ‘Day of the Dead' project, and we're trying to do this with more of our local communities."

These are examples that show how a traveling exhibition can be a means to engage community members that can go beyond the closing date. The Sing Me Your Story Community Connections Project will continue providing support to host museums and their staff through 2010. The real outcomes of the project will be the relationships that host museum staff members develop and nurture with their Native communities, and their ability to use these same skills in developing relationships with other groups in their community. Through this, we will see more community-engaged museums. That's the best outcome of all.

If you are interested in learning more about this project and the lessons learned please contact the California Exhibition Resources Alliance at info@ceraexhibits.org.

Lexie Smith Kliebe is Project Manager for the California Exhibition Resources Alliance, which is based in San Francisco, California. Margaret Kadoyama is a consultant specializing in audience development, community involvement and education strategic planning. She also teaches at John F. Kennedy University Museum Studies department.