The Civilians, Inc., a theatre company in Brooklyn, NY, is producing The Great Immensity, a touring play with songs and video that explores our relationship to the environment, with a focus on critical issues of climate change and biodiversity conservation. The play has been created with a network of partners including the Princeton Environmental Institute and Princeton Atelier Program/Lewis Arts Center, which will maintain an ongoing relationship with the project. The play uses real places and stories drawn from interviews conducted by the artists to create an experience that is part investigative journalism and part inventive theater. Attendance at the performances is projected to be about 75,000. A major goal of the project is to help the public better appreciate how science studies the Earth's biosphere and to promote an inquisitive curiosity about our place in the natural world. The initiative also intends to create and evaluate a new model for how theater can increase public awareness, knowledge, and engagement with important science-related societal issues. Project deliverables include the development and testing of online content, podcasts, and videos as well as special community education and outreach efforts in each community where the play is staged. Performances will be accompanied by post-performance panel discussions with the artists, local scientists and policy makers. After the completion of the initial tour, the play will be published, licensed, and made available to other theaters to produce independently.
Extensive research of the exhibit, Kachemak Bay, Alaska: An Exploration of People and Place shows it to be popular and effective with visitors on every communication and affective goal set forth in the Exhibit Master Plan. Research also finds that Community Collaborators who helped to create exhibit elements found the experience deeply meaningful and satisfying, meeting every desired cognitive, affective and behavioral outcome established for the collaboration programs. Pre- and post-test surveys of the exhibit involved nearly 600 visitors to the Pratt Museum. In most studies, Travelers and
The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) contracted Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. (RK&A) to study the public art installation and project FLOW: Can You See the River? The project was conceived by visual artist Mary Miss to engage Indianapolis residents with the White River. The study, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), was designed to determine the effects of the FLOW project on Indianapolis residents, particularly in regards to their awareness and perceptions of the White River.
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Randi Korn & Associates, Inc.Indianapolis Museum of Art
A NSF EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) was awarded to Principal Investigator John Fraser, PhD, AIA, in collaboration with co-Principal Investigators, Mary Miss and William Solecki, PhD, for City as Living Laboratory for Sustainability in Urban Design (CaLL). The CaLL project explored how public art installations can promote public discussion about sustainability. The project examined the emerging role of artists and visual thinkers as people with the skills to encourage conversation between scientists and the public. The grant supported an experimental installation
The Language of Conservation was a collaborative project between libraries, zoos, and poets nationwide to replicate a project originally undertaken by the Central Park Zoo. The project model built zoo, library, and poet-in-residence partnerships in five host cities: Brookfield, Illinois; Jacksonville, Florida; Little Rock, Arkansas; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and New Orleans, Louisiana. One aspect of the evaluation was to assess the collaborative process within each of the five partner sites, across the project as a whole, and with project leadership to determine the strengths and challenges of
The Language of Conservation was a collaborative project between libraries, zoos, and poets nationwide to replicate a project originally undertaken by the Central Park Zoo. The project model built zoo, library, and poet-in-residence partnerships in five host cities: Brookfield, Illinois; Jacksonville, Florida; Little Rock, Arkansas; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and New Orleans, Louisiana. It was anticipated that the zoo exhibits would result in positive outcomes for zoo visitors who encountered the poetry, including increasing the conservation thinking and language used after a visit and creating a
In this article, Marjorie Schwarzer, Professor of Museum Studies at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, California, describes eleven of the most influential exhibitions from the 20th century, according to NAME members surveyed for her book "Riches, Rivals and Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America."
This project comprises the NSF-funded portion of the renovation of a 25,000 sq. ft. natural history gallery called "CHANGING CALIFORNIA." ORIGINAL PROJECT DESCRIPTION: The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) will develop, implement, and evaluate Hotspot California, a research-based natural science gallery transformation that will explore the educational potential of wildlife dioramas to engage the public in urgent environmental issues. The exhibition will showcase five real places in California that exemplify high biological diversity and complex environmental issues. Innovative approaches to interpretation will emphasize personal connections to these places and infuse static dioramas with visualization technologies that illustrate environmental change over time. The project will explore how such enhancements to dioramas might help visitors develop place-based connections to the natural world. The project has four major deliverables: 1) an innovative 25,000 sq ft gallery exhibition installation featuring five specific California places where California's unique biodiversity is threatened; 2) an application and evaluation of a new participatory exhibit design model involving community contribution, collaboration, and co-design; 3) a two-day "synthesis symposium" for informal science education professionals to consider broad applications of project findings for the field; and 4) "Diorama Dilemmas: A Source book for Museums," synthesizing relevant literature, case studies, and findings from the project's research and evaluation generalizable to the field. The project has evolved since the NSF award, but it remains aligned with its original goals. The team increased the number of California places from five to seven and worked to add a strong human presence within a gallery previously devoted almost entirely to other species. Innovative reuse of OMCA's dioramas and habitat cases continues to be the project's core, but the team's approach has emphasized re-contextualizing rather than revising those exhibits. New elements include iconic artifacts and environments reflecting recent human impact on California, relevant objects from OMCA's art and history collections, digital visualizations of dynamic natural phenomena, and spaces for hands-on investigation. Community focused elements include multiple co-created exhibits and media programs offering inspiring encounters with Californians deeply involved in these seven places.
The Exploratorium will develop a hands-on, interactive, traveling exhibit "Garden of Complexity: Self-Organization in Nature." "Using the metaphor of a garden (a universally appreciated symbol of beauty and contemplation)" and arguing "that the essence of science is to extract organized observations from the complexity of nature," this exhibit will allow visitors to observe some of the self-organizing systems in a quiet, contemplative environment. The exhibit will be about pattern and how the natural world emerges into states that are perceived as pattered or organized. Four sub-sets of this theme will be explored; organization into patterns; surface effects - rubbing and flow; rotation, circulation, vortices, and the granular state - a different state of matter. Both existing and new artworks/activities will be used in this exhibit. The new additions will be created by individuals in the Exploratorium's Artists-in-Residence program. Their creations are both aesthetically and educationally interesting. In addition, the exhibit developers will experiment with new techniques in exhibit interpretation and they will develop activities that provide linkages with formal education. The exhibit will be circulated by the Association of Science and Technology Centers to nine sites over a three year period. It is estimated that it will reach 2.5 million people.
The New England Aquarium proposes to develop a traveling exhibition based on recent research implicating human activities in the worldwide increase in jellies. Humans are changing oceans so that they are becoming more suitable for jellies than for fish. The exhibition is expected to reach 12 million people -- primarily families with school-aged children -- across the nation. No jelly exhibit to date has shown jellies as important indicator species and ecosystem linchpins. Dissemination will include materials and programs for school and community outreach. A Sea Jelly Activity Kit and a community art/science program will be developed. In each year of the project approximately 100 urban teens will intern in the jelly culturing facility, where they can learn about the science of culturing jellies and present their experiences to the public.
The Exploratorium will develop a series of Internet resources on three popular topics -- cooking, gardening, and making music -- to encourage users in science education activities in relation to daily activities. The three-year project will include the development and testing of resources that explore the science behind these topics, using the notion that we all, consciously or not, are "accidental scientists" who engage in the scientific process in the course of everyday life. Target audiences include general public adults and youth. Components of the site will feature aspects of cooking, gardening, and making music that are intended to appeal to diverse communities. The resources will also serve formal education through the Exploratorium's national and local network of educators.
In this article, Joan Krevlin, Partner at BKSK Architects, discusses the "Preschool Playground" exhibition at the New York Hall of Science, where children discover the environment and learn principles of science through sensory exploration. Krevlin outlines the background, planning process, and design of the unique exhibit.