Reposted from Artnet News

Since states across the US began lifting lockdown restrictions in May, reopened museums have adapted by adding a number of health and safety measures.

Hand-sanitizing stations, mandatory face masks for staff and visitors, and social distancing guidelines, sometimes with one-way routes through galleries, are the new normal. A few institutions are even checking guests’ temperatures upon arrival.

Still, with outbreaks in many states intensifying, it appears that reopenings may have been premature—and they are forcing museums in new hot spots to consider closing once again.

We checked in with institutions in the new “big three” red zones of Texas, Florida, and California to see how museums there are faring.

Is everything bigger in Texas?

Texas museums got the green light to open on May 1 and initially held back, opting for greater caution. But in the second half of the month, many museums across the state gradually resumed welcoming visitors.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, led the pack in reopening to members on May 20 and to the public three days later, making it the first major institution nationwide to do so. The San Antonio Museum of Art followed suit on May 28 for the public. Today, open museums in Texas include San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum and Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Kimbell Art Museum, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

“Since reopening our doors in May, we’ve heard that the museum has offered a welcome escape during these uncertain times,” Émilie Dujour, the PR and digital communications manager of the San Antonio Museum of Art, told Artnet News in an email. “As long as we can continue to safely offer a means of comfort to our guests, we will remain open in service to our community.”

But the Texas coronavirus numbers over the past month tell a disturbing story. On June 15, the seven-day average for new confirmed cases was just over 2,000. By July 16, that number had ballooned to more than 10,926, and it set a new single-day record of 15,038 positive tests

For now, museums can remain open, but citizens are being encouraged to stay home and, if they do go out, are required to wear face masks in public (in counties with more than 20 cases).

At the Museum of Fine Arts, “we continue to carefully monitor the situation,” publicist Kathryn Jernigan told Artnet News in an email. “Should there be an incidence of transmission on our premises, or should the city advise that we reclose the museum’s facilities, we have procedures in place to do so.”

Closing again “is a possibility,” admitted Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth communications director Kendal Smith Lake in an email to Artnet News. But the institution doesn’t regret reopening: “I can’t look backward. We are a respite for the community and a good choice to get out to do something.”

Florida museums testing the waters

In late April, Pérez Art Museum Miami announced that it would remain closed until September 1. At the time, it was the longest planned closure of any US institution. Now, two and a half months later, with Florida announcing the highest single-day record for number of positive tests in any state—it confirmed 15,300 new COVID-19 cases on July 12 alone—that date suddenly seems optimistic.

“I’m still hopeful—we’re more or less six weeks away,” museum director Franklin Sirmans told Artnet News last week.

For Floridians, the stay-at-home order expired May 4, allowing museums to reopen at a reduced capacity. About a month later, cases begin climbing steadily, from just 667 new cases on June 1 to a nationwide record of 15,300 new cases on July 12. In response, the state closed bars again on June 26, but museums are still permitted to welcome visitors.

Before the dramatic uptick in cases, the PAMM had been planning to host some outdoor programming beginning in mid-July. “That is on hold for now,” Sirmans said. “The last couple of weeks have been difficult as far as COVID goes in this state. We are doing everything we can to be as informed as possible, including convening a meeting every couple of weeks with all of our peers, which has been incredibly helpful.”

Just steps from the PAMM, the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, which is in large part open-air, reopened on June 15. The Rubell Museum in Miami followed suit on July 1.

But other institutions—including the Bass in Miami Beach, the ICA Miami in the Design District, and Florida International University’s Wolfsonian-FIU, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, and the Jewish Museum of Florida—have yet to announce plans to reopen.

“We’re all trying as cultural institutions to look out for each other as much as possible,” Sirmans said.

Closures reinstituted in California

In California, to combat soaring numbers, Governor Gavin Newsom ordered museums in 19 counties, including the state’s disease epicenter of Los Angeles, to once again close their doors on July 1. An order banning all indoor business activities statewide—including museums—followed suit on July 13. The next day, new cases in the state topped 10,000 for the first time.

For some museums, the new order meant canceling pending plans to reopen. The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach had been aiming for a members-only opening on July 8. Others, like the Hammer Museum at UCLA, were targeting a September reopening.

Only a few institutions had reopened their doors before the restrictions were reinstated. The Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA both began welcoming the public on June 19. The Huntington Library, Art, Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino opened its grounds to members on June 17 and to the public on July 1; the outdoor facilities remain open today.

The first museum in the state to resume welcoming visitors was the Laguna Art Museum on June 12 (the first date it was legally possible to do so).

“Our team had already been planning for reopening, so with guidelines we were ready to reopen with new protocols for health and safety,” Cody Lee, the museum’s director of communications, told Artnet News in an email. With timed ticketing and a strict cap on visitors, “attendance during the time in which the museum reopened was very limited.”

Closing anew is a disappointment, of course. The order to shut down came just three days after Laguna’s public opening of “Granville Redmond: The Eloquent Palette,” which already had its run cut short at its only other venue, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. It’s the largest-ever show dedicated to the deaf California landscape artist, and the first in more than 30 years.

And the reintroduced restrictions scuttled plans at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles to set up by-appointment visits beginning July 7. That means the exhibitions “Ann Greene Kelly” and “Ree Morton: The Plant That Heals May Also Poison” will no longer reopen at all.

Nevertheless, institutions recognize the importance of taking steps to combat the pandemic. “Though we had hoped to keep our doors open longer, the safety and well being of our visitors and staff remains our top priority, as it has throughout the COVID-19 crisis,” reads a statement on the Bowers Museum’s website, promising that the institution “will remain poised to reopen just as soon as it is once again deemed safe.”

An abundance of caution

Most of California’s major museums never publicized formal reopening plans, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, the Broad, and the Getty Museum, all in LA, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Arts Museums San Francisco, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

And while most museums are back in action in Fort Worth, it’s a different story across much of the rest of Texas. The Contemporary Austin and the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin remain closed, as does the Menil Collection in Houston.

“The museum’s pandemic response plan ties our reopening to a sustained decrease in local COVID-19 hospitalizations,” Sarah Hobson, the Menil’s assistant director of communications told Artnet News in an email.

In numerous instances, institutions have also opted to push back planned reopenings.

“As much as we wanted to reopen, it didn’t make sense,” Elyse Gonzales, director of Ruby City in San Antonio, told Artnet News. “At this time, with so much still uncertain and frankly very worrisome about our health system’s ability to manage, it is best that we postpone until a moment when San Antonio is in less a precarious situation.”

The African American Museum in Dallas made the same decision. “We have actually had the ‘reopening dates’ and we have had to let all of them pass by because of the surge in the coronavirus in Dallas County,” W. Marvin Dulaney, the museum’s deputy director and COO, told Artnet News in an email. “We have done everything to open—put in place social distancing protocols, purchased masks, and added hand-sanitizer stations throughout our building.”

The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History canceled its planned July 9 reopening just a few days ahead of time. “We’re trying to wait out this peak,” Doug Roberts, the museum’s chief public engagement officer, told Artnet News. He’s visited the city’s neighboring art institutions and felt safe, but a science museum is a different story.

“With fine art, you can observe from a distance,” Roberts explained. “Our museum has all these hands-on activities. People come to play with things, interact with things, touch things, do little science projects—all of those things that make our museum special are impossible, or very difficult to do safely, during COVID.”

In Dallas, six downtown museums, including the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Crow Museum of Asian Art, issued a joint statement on June 29 that they were not planning to reopen anytime soon.

“We’ve been working through many different and evolving reopening scenarios and timelines throughout the period we have been closed,” Jill Bernstein, director of communications at the Dallas Museum, told Artnet News in an email. “In light of the rising number of COVID-19 cases in our city and state and how quickly the situation is changing locally, we are continuing to monitor developments right now and will confirm a re-opening timeline as soon as we determine we can do so responsibly.”

Dallas institutions are communicating regularly, Nasher director Jeremy Strick told Artnet News in an email. The individual museums may have slightly different timelines, but they agree on the basics: “the sooner we see significant improvement in public health, the sooner we can resume fully normal operation.”

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Reposted from The Art Newspaper

After weeks of upheaval over its handling of accusations of racism from former employees, which resulted in the resignations of five senior staff members including its chief curator of painting and sculpture, Gary Garrels, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Plan to be completed by December.  

The museum’s troubles started on 30 May, when it responded to nationwide protests over brutality against African Americans, including the police killing of George Floyd, with a post on its Instagram account featuring Glenn Ligon’s work We’re Black and Strong (I). Taylor Brandon, an African American woman who formerly worked at the museum, slammed the post as hypocritical, calling the response a “cop-out” when some in the top ranks were “profiteers of racism”. Her comment was deleted, leading to an uproar, with at least two organizations—No Neutral Alliance (NNA) and xSFMOMA—calling for a revamp of the museum’s hiring, collecting, and programming policies, and for the museum’s director Neal Benezra to step down.

Benezra’s public apology received even more flak. Correspondence posted online by NNA shows the director attempted to meet with Brandon and the organization in June, but the museum could not meet preliminary demands. These included and “ethnic/racial percentage breakdown of current employees and work in the collection” and a consultancy fee for Brandon and her group.

Since then, five senior staff members have departed or are on their way out—the most recent is its chief curator of painting and sculpture, Gary Garrels, who was denounced by in-house staff for making what they saw as racist remarks. After a presentation about new acquisitions by artists of color and women, he reportedly said: “Don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.” And in a recent staff meeting, he said that to avoid collecting the art of white men would be “reverse discrimination”. Garrels apologised for his comments and resigned last week; he is due to leave the museum on 31 July.

Already gone are Nan Keeton, the deputy director in charge of external relations, who defended the deletion of Brandon’s comment during a staff meeting; Marisa Robisch, the director of human resources; Cindi Hubbard, recruitment and staffing manager; and Ann von Germeten, chief marketing and communications officer.  

The recent DEI declaration was crafted after a series of in-house meetings, some apparently with the entire staff. Admitting “longstanding inequities at the museum,” the document sets out what SFMOMA will be doing to remedy that. Some items are already in place, such as two interns in art history and curatorial studies from a consortium of Black colleges. The institution will also be hiring a Director of Employee Experience and Internal Communication and a Director of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, and initiating “anti-racist and implicit bias training” for all staff.

SFMOMA is also considering how to carry through “a breakdown of the racial and gender diversity of our staff, trustees, and collection”. While a tally of the staff and trustee members might be straightforward, the museum has more than 50,000 objects in its collection, which it estimates will take two people six months to study.

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Reposted from The Art Newspaper

Although the re-opening of New York’s museums remains weeks away, other art institutions in the northeastern US are beginning to allow the public in after months of lockdown, with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass Moca) leading the way on 12 July. Located in the rural Berkshires region and housed in a sprawling former factory, the museum is well suited to social distancing, but challenges remain.

Over the weekend, the museum welcomed roughly 1,000 visitors, which represents about half of the usual footfall this time of year under normal circumstances, according to its director Joseph Thompson. “Even though we have about seven acres of exhibition space, as well as that much outdoor space, we have to calculate entry based on the size of our lobby, to prevent queuing and congestion,” he says. That means the museum can only admit 75 people every 30 minutes in order to stay in compliance with the state’s rule of eight people per 1,000 sq. ft to maintain social distancing. Masks and hand sanitizer are, of course, kept in ample supply for visitors, who must book their entry time in advance.

Around 70% of Mass Moca’s annual revenue comes from earned income generated through ticket sales, and the bulk of that revolves around live events and musical performances, which remain on hiatus for the next six months to a year depending on the advice of the state and federal governments. “We’re looking at doing ‘micro’ events for 100 people in our venues that can hold up to 4,000 people,” Thompson explains. “That’s a significant loss, so there a lot of line items getting cut here. We’ve had a successful round of fundraising in light of the pandemic, but we will need to do another round if we want to stay open for the winter.”

A popular tourist destination in the summer, the state’s visitor economy was on track to push past a billion dollars in direct and indirect spending in 2020 before the pandemic hit. But a Massachusetts Cultural Council survey found the Commonwealth's nonprofit cultural organizations lost more than $55.7m in March. State Representative John Barrett co-filed two bills requesting $75m in Covid-19 hardship grants from the government to support the struggling sector but, even so, the economy slowed to a halt and unemployment in the Berkshires reached 28% in May as virus cases dwindled to a handful.

Mass MOCA laid off 122 of its 165 staff members in April due to lost revenue. But re-opening has brought a lot of those jobs back. “We’re now back to about 75%-80% employment, but I think that’s where we’ll unfortunately have to stay for a while,” Thompson says. He adds that the museum is currently looking at ways of retooling its business model to use its facilities for more behind-the-scenes event support, production and artist residencies in order to increase revenue and bring back more staff members.

Some of the exhibitions also had to be rethought and updated in light of re-opening into what is a vastly changed world from March. Blane de St Croix’s large-scale exhibition of specially commissioned new works addressing the scale of climate change, How to Move a Landscape, the opening of which was delayed from 23 May until now, is accompanied by wall text that positions global warming as an overarching emergency amid many other crises currently unfolding, including the pandemic and the systemic racism highlighted by recent Black Lives Matter protests.

Other shows have taken on new meaning in light of recent events all on their own. A new installation by the Crow Nation artist Wendy Red Star in the museum’s free-to-enter Kidspace provides a valuable lesson for adults and children alike on Native land rights and broken treaties with the US government just as the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling. The decision upholds a long-ignored 1866 treaty the Creek Nation signed with the US, which recognizes much of Oklahoma as sovereign tribal land. And Ledelle Moe’s massive, felled sculptures peppering the large Building 5 of the museum in her exhibition When (until September) recall the many Confederate and colonial monuments that have been dismantled amid anti-racism upheaval in the US and the UK in the last month.

Museums cannot just sit idle while they have been closed, Thompson says, adding that culturally speaking, “things have taken on a new gravity”.

At the nearby Clark Art Institute, re-opening over the weekend also went smoothly once again helped by ample acreage, though the storied permanent collection remains unchanged. The museum has also capped visitors at 25% of the building's capacity — an undershot of the 40% permissible under state's guidelines.

The Clark’s 140-acre bucolic grounds will also be the site of a contemporary group show featuring commissioned installations by artists such as Jennie C. Jones, Eva LeWitt and Haegue Yang. The show, planned before the pandemic, marks the first outdoor exhibition in institution’s history and could not be timelier given that fresh air is a friend when it comes to controlling the virus. Originally due to open this summer, production of many of the works has been delayed due to Covid-19, so instead it will open in September. Analia Saban’s Teaching a Cow How to Draw, however, has already been installed. The work takes the form of a fence that separates the museum campus from the paddock where the local cows roam, the rails of which illustrate drawing concepts like two-point perspective and the rule of thirds.

The opening of the Norman Rockwell Museum, also in Western Massachusetts, on Sunday morning was a more crowded experience despite timed entry, perhaps due to its smaller size or the popularity of the American illustrator's work. Visitors wore masks, but many galleries had up to six or seven people at a time when the max capacity to allow for social distancing was just four.

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Reposted from the New York Times

Whitney Donhauser, the director of the Museum of the City of New York, had hoped that, come next Thursday, the museum’s halls would play host to its first masked, socially distanced visitors.

Not so fast, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Friday. Mr. Cuomo said that when New York City enters Phase 4 of its reopening plan on Monday, indoor cultural attractions, malls and indoor dining will not reopen yet.

“We’re not going to have any indoor activity in malls or cultural institutions,” Mr. Cuomo said on a conference call. “We’ll continue to monitor that situation, and when the facts change, we will let you know.” He added that he was looking at the potential of a second wave — “a man-made wave” with the potential to arrive by plane, car and train from the West and the South, where Covid-19 cases are increasing.

“We are still in a precarious position, not because of anything we have done, but because of the negligence of the federal government, and the states that, frankly, listen to the federal government,” Mr. Cuomo added. “I am very worried about the spread that we see across the country, and the inevitability that the spread will be here.”

Zoos and botanical gardens will be allowed to reopen at 33 percent capacity. Four city zoos plan to reopen to the public July 24 at limited capacity, with masks required for all visitors over age 3.

The New York Botanical Garden has announced plans to reopen on July 28 with visitors required to reserve timed-entry tickets in advance.

Monday had been the earliest date that cultural venues could potentially have reopened, but most of the city’s museums had adopted a wait-and-see approach, with a few exceptions.

The Museum of the City of New York had announced plans to reopen July 23. Fotografiska, a photography museum in the Flatiron district that opened last December, only to close its doors in mid-March, had initially planned for July 29, with timed-entry admission in half-hour increments and an overall capacity of 25 percent. But the museum announced Thursday, even before the governor’s announcement on Friday, that it would be postponed.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced weeks ago that it would reopen Aug. 29, and it remains to be seen whether the virus situation in the city will remain stable enough for cultural attractions to reopen by that date. “Embedded in our announcement is that it is merely a plan, which of course is still subject to state and city approval — and this week’s public health developments underline exactly why that is the case,” said Kenneth Weine, chief spokesman for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Many institutions, like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, have not publicly announced their reopening plans.

Ms. Donhauser said in an interview on Thursday that while she supports the governor’s decision, the museum feels confident it can reopen while keeping visitors safe. She said the museum’s small size and simple layout make it easy for visitors to navigate with social distancing. “We’re ready to go as soon as the governor tells us we can,” she said.

Many museums are already planning measures to protect visitors, once they are allowed to return. The Museum of the City of New York will use a timed ticketing system and limit visitors to 25 percent of its capacity. Plexiglass barriers will separate cashiers from visitors, and touch-screen experiences will be temporarily closed.

The Met has said it will require masks and will also cap visitors at a quarter of the museum’s capacity. The New-York Historical Society, which is now planning on a Sept. 11 reopening, will also require masks for anyone over age 2, provide hand sanitizer stations and conduct temperature checks for all staff and visitors.

In Los Angeles, some museums opened their doors in mid-June, only to close them earlier this month after an order from Gov. Gavin Newsom of California when coronavirus cases surged in the state. Several Texas museums, including the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, pushed back reopening plans after a similar spike in cases in Dallas County.

New York City is the only region that has not yet entered Phase 4 of Mr. Cuomo’s reopening plan. Regions outside the city began entering Phase 4 in late June.

Mayor Bill de Blasio had expressed similar concerns Thursday about reopening indoor spaces too soon.

“The outdoor elements I feel good about and confident about so long as we’re clear about the standards and enforcement,” Mr. de Blasio said. “The indoor is causing me pause.”

“There can’t be a slippery slope there,” the mayor continued. “Indoor is the challenge and we have to be really tight about it. I think there are substantial elements of Phase 4 that can move ahead. Others, we have to be very careful about and deliberate about.”

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Reposted from Museums and Heritage

A collaboration between arts organisation Metal and artist Eloise Moody has yielded a new digital project designed to give the public a unique tour of six UK museums and galleries.

Each episode of The Caretakers, a week-long series of behind-the-scenes explorations, will focus on one object at an institution – selected by a member of the security or maintenance teams.

The project is designed to reconnect the public with items they have been deprived of during lockdown while also giving a voice to workers whose knowledge of museum collections and cultural buildings often goes unheard.

“While security and caretaking staff are the only people allowed inside our national museums and galleries, The Caretakers allows us to perch invisibly on their shoulders, seeing what takes their interest and noticing what they stop to consider. We are granted a personal tour offering fresh perspectives on suspended collections,” notes Eloise Moody, the architect of this antidote to traditional curator-led tours.

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Kettle’s Yard, Museum of London, Royal Museums Greenwich, Pitt Rivers Museum and Southend Museums are the six venues chosen to participate in the project led by Metal, an Arts Council funded organisation with bases in Liverpool, Peterborough and Southend.

“One of Metal’s chief aims is to support  artists in strengthening their practice and amplifying their voices. The Caretakers project, conceived by artist Eloise Moody, is a powerful opportunity to amplify those marginalised voices working in the cultural sector in a beautiful and intriguing way at a moment in history that is reframing all our thinking,” explains Andrea Cunningham, Assistant Director at Metal Southend.

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Reposted from Artnet News

As a third wave of the novel coronavirus sweeps across Hong Kong, China’s special administrative region has instituted its strictest measures yet for combatting the spread of disease, including once again shutting down the city’s museums.

The government first made the decision to shutter museums in late January, during the early days of the pandemic. At the time, there were only eight confirmed COVID-19 cases in Hong Kong, six of which originated in mainland China, where the outbreak began.

Over the past week, there have been 253 confirmed cases, including 182 local infections, with a record 52 new cases on Monday, according to the South China Morning Post. There have been a total of 1,521 cases in Hong Kong, and over 13 million known cases worldwide.

Hong Kong’s Leisure and Cultural Services Department issued a statement announcing the closures, saying that “the leisure and cultural venues/facilities reopened earlier will be temporarily closed starting from July 15.”

Affected institutions include the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the HK Visual Arts Centre, and the University Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Hong Kong. Non-government institutions are following suit.

The West Kowloon Cultural District is closing the M+ Pavilion, where “Shirley Tse: Stakes and Holders” was scheduled to be on view through October 4, and the Liang Yi Museum is also shutting down.

The new restrictions also include mandatory face masks on public transportation and limiting restaurants to take out after 6 p.m. Prior to the current spike, the government had lifted restrictions on parties of more than eight at restaurants and permitted gatherings for up to 50 people. Now, they are limited again to four people, as was the case back in March.

This is the second time that Hong Kong has been forced to quell a new rise in case counts. The city eased restrictions in March and reopened museums on the 11th of that month—until the number of cases suddenly doubled from 157 to 317, and institutions closed again.

Art Basel Hong Kong, which was scheduled to take place this past March 19 to 21, was canceled in February.

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Reposted from Artnet News

A year ago, getting to see the Mona Lisa without thronging crowds was a privilege afforded to the likes of Beyoncé and Jay Z. 

But big crowds are now unimaginable at the Paris museum, which reopened on Monday, July 6, after more than three months of lockdown.

The closure—its longest since World War II—meant a €40 million drop in revenue for the institution, which typically accommodates 30,000 people a day.

On Monday, just 7,000 people reserved tickets—an unsurprising figure, given that 75 percent of the museum’s visitors come from overseas. The Louvre says it expects more local crowds for the foreseeable future.

But at least some tourists did make it on Monday, including Steve, who declined to give his first name.

“We think it was nice and not so crowded because they don’t have so many international tourists yet,” Steve, who visited with a friend from Finland, told Artnet News.

For the moment, 30 percent of the museum remains closed, including the galleries devoted to the arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, as well as the lower level of the Islamic galleries.

As expected, face masks are now a must. Tickets, with set time entries, must be reserved online, and visitors must follow one-way color-coded trajectories throughout the museum to avoid bottlenecks. Social-distancing markers now adorn the floors of the 16th-century former royal palace, and hand-sanitizing stations are peppered throughout.

Lily Heise, a museum visitor who lives in Paris and works as a travel writer, told Artnet News she immediately booked her ticket, noting that she would normally avoid the “unbearable” crowds that show up during the high summer season. The new situation made visiting the museum “all the more desirable,” she said.

“The quieter sections of the museum were blissfully peaceful and you could almost feel like you had the museum to yourself,” Heise said. She likened the experience to visiting the Louvre on its typically quieter late openings, on Wednesday and Friday evenings.

On Twitter, some visitors expressed particular excitement at seeing the Mona Lisa, which the Louvre is allowing people to see in small groups, without the usual “chaotic mob.”

But visitors we spoke to said the Denon Wing—where the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and French large-format paintings live—was still the busiest part of the museum, which has long been an issue at the Louvre.

“I didn’t go for Mona Lisa but I saw her and it was pretty crowded,” said another early-bird returner to the museum, Cristina Birsan, an administrator at a Parisian university. “I thought that it would be a kind of more intimate atmosphere, but not quite.”

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Reposted from Artnet News

After months of debate, France has decided to stick to tradition in reconstructing Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, rather than replacing the 19th-century spire with a contemporary design.

Designed by French architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, the spire collapsed in the April 2019 blaze that tore through the church’s wooden attic. Wrongly identified as a false alarm, the fire raged unchecked for close to a half hour before firefighters were called to the scene.

By that time, the wooden timbers of “The Forest,” as the attic was sometimes called, were almost beyond saving. Firefighters focused much of their energies on salvaging the cathedral’s Gothic belfry towers from collapse. As they fought to combat the flames, the 800-ton, 305-foot-tall lead-coated spire crashed through the vaulted stone ceiling, tumbling to the cathedral floor.

Extinguishing the conflagration took nine hours.

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, President Emmanuel Macron promised that the cathedral would be rebuilt within five years—in time for the 2024 Olympics in Paris—and announced that there would be an international architectural competition to redesign the spire, which was added to the 13th-century cathedral in 1859.

“A contemporary architectural gesture” could make Notre-Dame “even more beautiful,” said Macron.

The idea was met with skepticism from numerous architects, conservationists, and academics, and polls showed that the majority of Parisians favored restoring Viollet-le-Duc’s design. (The original spire, built between 1220 and 1230, fell into disrepair and was dismantled in the late 1700s.)

The French Senate passed a bill requiring that the reconstruction be faithful to its “last known visual state,” and Philippe Villeneuve, the cathedral’s chief architect, even threatened to resign if Notre-Dame was not rebuilt the way it was. He clashed with Jean-Louis Georgelin, the army general in charge of the reconstruction, who favored a modern replacement spire, during a meeting of the National Assembly’s cultural affairs committee in November.

Macron’s change of heart follows the recommendation of the National Heritage and Architecture Commission, an advisory body for restoration projects, which met last week and heard testimony from Villeneuve.

The committee said that recreating the previous appearance of the cathedral would “guarantee the authenticity, the harmony, and the coherence of this masterpiece of Gothic architecture.” That also includes eschewing modern, potentially safer materials—even though the 460 tons of toxic lead coating the fallen spire posed a major health risk to Parisians. (Wood, on the other hand, might be safer than you’d expect.)

Macron “has become convinced of the need to restore Notre Dame de Paris in the most consistent manner possible to its last complete, coherent and known state,” read a statement from the Elysée Palace, the president’s official residence. Instead, the city will pursue another “contemporary gesture” in the “redevelopment of the surroundings of the cathedral.”

Proposals for a new spire had come in from around the world, reimagining the structure ways ranging from Studio NAB’s plan for a greenhouse with an actual forest and Ulf Mejergren’s rooftop swimming pool.

British architect Norman Foster presented a design for a glass roof with a crystal spire; Brazilian architect Alexandre Fantozzi’s designed one entirely of stained glass; the Slovakian firm Vizum Atelier suggested a light beam piercing the heavens—a goal of Gothic architects—while French designer Mathieu Lehanneur favored a 300-foot gold leaf-covered carbon fiber flame commemorating the fire.

Work on the fire-damaged building has been delayed at various points due to extreme heat, concerns about lead pollution, and the recent two-month shutdown of Paris. An architectural competition could have potentially drawn out the process even longer, jeopardizing Macron’s tight timeline.

Last month, workers finally began removing the 200 tons of twisted metal scaffolding, melted by the flames, that had been in place around the cathedral due to an in-progress restoration project.

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Reposted from AAM

Looking for some good things in a terrible time, people have pointed out that air pollution plummeted as the world locked down, sea turtles are nesting undisturbed, managers are realizing telecommuting actually increases productivity, and insurers, providers, regulators and patients are embracing telemedicine (which, done right, could reduce costs and improve care in the long term).

In several recent webinars and interviews, I’ve been asked whether any good will come out of the pandemic for museums. Given thirty seconds or so to answer the question, I’ve tossed out some things that come to mind: financial stress and practical limits on loans may lead museums to explore their own permanent collections to create new exhibits. (We saw this happen during the 2008 recession as well.) Cost, logistics and the fact that the public is unlikely to want to crowd into packed venues may finally end the reliance of some museums on “blockbuster” exhibitions (which are already recognized as the financial equivalent of an unhealthy sugar rush). Long-term downturns in tourism may lead some museums to pay more attention to the needs and interests of their local communities. I think these could all be good things.

But sometimes when people ask this question, they are hoping to hear how the pandemic may change power structures, authority, pay, and working conditions in museums—aspects of our field with which they were already profoundly unhappy before the pandemic struck. I’ve been frustrated in trying to give that query the attention it deserves in the brief context of a Q&A, so I’m tackling it in this blog post. Frankly it’s too big a question for a single post, either (perhaps a graduate thesis?) but I hope this is at least a productive start.

When it comes to deep structural changes, the answer to “is this crisis an opportunity for change” is complicated. As Jim Dator wrote in 1994, when offering advice on writing stories of the future, “catastrophes can happen in your scenario, but they cannot be the cause of a new and perfect humanity which sees the error of its ways, and now is all sweetness and light.” The fact that a museum is going broke, laying off staff and facing the danger of permanent closure, doesn’t mean that it is going to respond by raising salaries for front-line staff, instituting pay caps for executives, adopting a flat management structure, or welcoming union organizing efforts.

Which isn’t to say that these things—pay reform, reorganization, and improved working conditions—can’t happen, but they aren’t an inevitable or even a likely result of disruption, absent other forces at work. In this post I profile one example of such “other forces”:  local activists using the disruptions created by the pandemic as an opportunity to build a preferred future for their city.

Reinventing Venice
In the past few decades, Venice has become a “tourism monoculture,” with half the city’s 50,000 residents directly employed in tourism, indirectly supporting the other half. Even as the number of residents shrink, the city hosts 20 million tourists a year. Those two trends are intertwined—Venetians are being squeezed out by the soaring cost of housing in part because 8,000 apartments have become dedicated Airbnb rental units. Tourism lowers the quality of life for those who remain in the city—damaging the Venetian lagoon’s already fragile ecology, degrading monuments, monopolizing transportation and clogging the narrow roadways. This recent article in the New York Times outlines the vicious economic cycle that drives Venice’s reliance on tourist dollars and how COVID presents an opportunity to break that addiction.

Italy was one of the early hotspots in the global pandemic and imposed draconian travel restrictions to tamp down the spread of the virus. Even after the government lifted travel restrictions in early June, Venice has seen few tourists. The paucity of visitors has had some positive effects (you may have seen videos of fish and jellyfish returning to the city’s clean and empty canals) but this has devastated the local economy. Some residents see this lull as an opportunity to achieve something they have long wanted—a sustainable model for tourism that supports a livable city, a healthy ecosystem, and a more diverse economy.

COVID-19 has spurred disparate groups to coordinate their efforts to reshape Venice as the economy rebounds, promoting actions that will create healthier forms of tourism and new sources of income for residents. For example, cultivating fewer, wealthier tourists could free up housing and minimize environmental damage. Promoting and expanding local universities, while emphasizing programs relevant to local issues (climate change, cultural preservation), could support jobs untethered from tourism. In the Times article an art curator points out that “Arts foundations and research institutes from all over the world should have an interest to open a chapter here.” And (per Richard Florida) some locals believe that Venice’s economy could be supported by the creative class—especially digital nomads who can choose to work from anywhere in the world. These ideas, in turn, suggest specific short-term steps toward this desired future: converting empty B&Bs to student housing; offering incentives to arts organizations to open local outposts; creating coworking spaces to support start-ups and individual entrepreneurs; drafting regulations that discourage day-trippers and cruise-ship tourism while encouraging long-term stays.

This is a wonderful vision, supported by great ideas. I hope that this informal coalition holds together and relentlessly pushes officials, residents, and businesses to walk this path. Absent this kind of concerted action to create a new economy for the city, tourism in Venice may well rebound to the old monocultural model, because the existing incentives and structures favor the pre-pandemic system.

Lessons for Museums  
Your vision of a better future for your museum, or museums in general, may seem as improbable as a dream of a clean, livable Venice in which people from abroad may experience its history, architecture and culture as students, researchers, or independent workers in addition to a modest number of tourists. The pandemic has gutted the traditional business model of museums just as thoroughly as it has emptied the Venetian canals, and this may present the opportunity to build new systems rather than simply rebounding to the status quo. But, per the example of the “sustainable tourism” activists, it isn’t enough to know what you don’t want (be it monotourism, reliance on paid admissions, or inequities in pay and power) you also need to envision what you want in its place, design a financial model that can support that new system, and identify what steps you can take to bend the future in this direction.

Last year I led delegates to Museums Advocacy Day in a short exercise in backcasting—a tool for plotting a course from the present to a desired future. In the next post in this series, I’ll explore how you might use backcasting to identify what you can do now to create a path towards a future of healthy, sustainable museum operations.

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Reposted from Security Management Magazine

One of my first experiences with workplace training occurred when I was employed as a roughneck on an oil service rig in 1986. No training was provided, and so the rig was rife with accidents and near misses. Whenever I asked the rig manager why we were doing something, he would curse me out and tell me to shut up.

After a few months, the manager pulled me aside and told me that if I did not figure things out soon, he would fire me. I told him I would learn faster if I received some training. He ignored my comment. But as it happens, I had learned enough to keep my job, and when a new man was hired to my four-man rig, I took it upon myself to train him.

In two weeks, I taught him everything I had figured out the hard way over the previous few months. When he was fully trained, the rig manager, who had watched the entire process from five feet away, took me aside.

“I knew I was right in threatening to fire you,” he said smugly. “It obviously motivated you.”

I learned two things from this experience. First, training is a powerful preparation tool that can also save time and sustain a safe working environment. Second, not all managers are leaders.

Skills and Competencies

Besides being a powerful preparation tool, training is also a complex process. Most jobs, including security guarding, are complicated, so to train for them successfully students need to learn and understand both foundational and task-specific skills.

For example, writing a security incident report is a complex process requiring verbal and communication skills; the ability to gather and analyze various pieces of information; the ability to structure that information in coherent order; the ability to understand potentially complex legal issues; and an understanding of the investigation process.

Learning skills such as these can be viewed as a process of achieving competencies. As defined by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Human Resources Department, competencies are “observable and measurable knowledge, skills, abilities, and personal attributes that contribute to enhanced employee performance and ultimately result in organizational success.”

The ASIS Foundation, working with the University of Phoenix and the Apollo Education Group, created an operational security industry competency model in 2014 and later refined it in 2018. The competency model consists of several layers, starting with personal effectiveness—which includes interpersonal skills, integrity, initiative, adaptability, flexibility, reliability, and an interest in lifelong learning.

Above this first layer are academic competencies, which include security fundamentals, business foundations, and critical thinking. At the third level are workplace competencies, including teamwork, strategic thinking, problem solving, and working with technology. The fourth level consists of industrywide technical competencies. The fifth level consists of industry sector functional areas, and the sixth consists of occupational competencies and requirements. All six layers can inform a well-rounded and effective security training program.

Training Program Development

All aspects of security require personal and professional competencies and skills. Security occupations are challenging and complex, whether a security officer is de-escalating a potential workplace violence situation, a security manager is building a comprehensive operations management program, or a chief security officer is developing a global security plan. Training and education are necessary.

While some skills needed for security may be transferable from other occupations, other skills are not. They can only be learned either in the classroom or in the field—preferably both. However, since most organizations do not have the time to wait for their employees to learn through trial and error, many skills are best learned in a training program.

The first step in developing a training program is to identify the intended outcome. For example, if a security officer requires patrol skills, then it is necessary to identify specifically what he or she needs to be able to do. Defining necessary skills requires a full understanding of what these jobs entail, and this usually means research. For example, major purposes of patrols include detecting and preventing unauthorized activity, ensuring compliance with organizational operations, inspecting physical security systems, and responding to emergencies. These are all complex actions, and they require specific skills to support them.

Once all this is identified, the next step is the creation and acquisition of course documents for both instructors and students.

Instructor documents include lesson plans, course syllabi and maps, and marking rubrics. One of the most important documents is the lesson plan, in which the instructor details training topics, length of delivery, student activities, resources needed for content delivery, and detailed learning objectives. These learning objectives will focus on achievements such as knowledge acquisition, cognitive skills enhancement, and psychometric skills development.

The marking rubric is the document by which students are graded. A rubric helps both the instructor and student; it provides a road map for the consistent marking of assignments. Finally, course documents can also include participant manuals, textbooks, handouts, technical vendor literature, legislative statements, and presentation material.

Besides course documents, the program may include training tools such as standard operating procedure and enterprise resource planning documents, any relevant legislation related to guarding or other relevant tasks, and personal protective equipment such as uniforms, masks, and weather gear. Any other equipment that the employee is expected to operate should be identified. This may include fire alarm panels, video surveillance, lighting controls, access control devices, and building management systems.

Training Delivery and Adult Learning

Program content creation requires a key decision: how the training will be delivered.

Generally, it is best for students to work in an active learning environment where they have an opportunity to practice skills. This is not always possible due to program limitations; sometimes it is necessary to deliver training in a passive environment. However, results are more likely to be disappointing with the latter method. It is also important to remember that the more time passes between learning and practicing, the less knowledge the student will retain.

When considering content delivery, remember that there are several types of training and education categories, including cognitive, psychomotor, and affective.

Cognitive training is generally considered to be foundational knowledge that provides the “why” of the material. For example, if the student is learning how to operate a fire alarm panel, the training material could include the fire code, the technical fire panel manual, and the standard operating procedures. These documents provide information on how the panel operates and what is expected of the operator.

Psychomotor skills development involves the actual hands-on operation of the fire panel, including how to read the panel, how to answer the fire phone, and how to acknowledge alarms.

Affective training focuses on the ethics of operating the fire alarm panel in the most professional manner possible.

For all three of these categories, it is the responsibility of the trainer to understand the various teaching strategies and tactics available to them in order to best deliver the material. Here it is important to understand adult learning, which differs from child learning in several ways.

First, adult learners have considerable personal experience to draw upon, whereas children are closer to blank slates. Second, adults have a desire to understand why they need to learn, so they can connect the effort with a desired outcome. Children, for the most part, learn because they are told to.

Third, adults usually require opportunities to self-reflect and internalize the knowledge they are gaining. In contrast, children will make sense of the content through socializing in class. Finally, adults know they learn best in certain ways and tend to stick with those methods, while children are more open to different learning styles. These differences make it necessary for adult learning instructors to deliver training in a variety of ways.

Given the importance of adult learning, program trainers should be required to have formal training (certification preferred) in adult learning and experience working in adult learning environments. Hiring trainers that lack formal training contradicts the program’s inherent message that training is crucial. Given this requirement, the hiring organization should be aware of adult learning opportunities in its region. Many universities and colleges offer adult learning certificates and train-the-trainer programs.

A good trainer should be able to explain how to create a training program, what the learning outcomes should be, and what tools will be used. In addition, trainers should be able to show examples of security training material they have created in the past.

Within the style of adult learning, the trainer may employ a variety of teaching methods, including lecture, discussion, in-class student assignments, reading assignments, class discussion, and fieldwork with practice opportunities. As I learned when I informally trained our new hire as a service rig roughneck, hands-on exposure is one of the most effective methods of skill development training. Providing students with the opportunity to instruct content can also be an effective learning method, but for this to be successful, the instructor must provide the student with sound feedback.

Testing

Following content delivery, the instructor must decide how students will be tested on the material. Will there be immediate follow-up testing? What would that testing look like? Will there be written examinations, hands-on practice testing, or both? Will the tests be individual exams or graded group-based exercises?

This is where the marking rubric comes in handy. The rubric allows the instructor to provide guidance on how students will be tested and what assignments will consist of. Overall, the rubric tells the student what the instructor is looking for, and it lays out a consistent marking scheme that helps the instructor justify the grades handed out. The rubric is the road map for both parties.

One of the more effective forms of testing is scenario-based, in which students are placed into a realistic work setting similar to one they might encounter in their jobs. This is an example of psychomotor based training, and it offers students an opportunity to practice skills development in a safe setting.

Finally, students can also be tested on fieldwork. Here, the student is required to implement knowledge learned in a work setting. Afterward comes a reflection piece, whereby the student is required to write about the experience—an overview of what did and did not work, what they learned, and what they would do differently. Reflection is a powerful learning tool.

Training Records and Evaluation

Evidence of training is important, so records of training should be retained. This practice serves all involved; the student has proof of course passage, the training program has enrollment records, and the future employer will have proof of training.

One way of keeping training records is through the development of field training manuals that can be assigned to each student guard. The manual can be built around standard operating procedures, and as the student is trained on each aspect of the job, both the trainer and trainee sign off on each component.

Finally, training programs need evaluation, and both the content and the instructor should be evaluated for effectiveness.

One evaluative option is the Kirkpatrick Model’s four-step methodology, in which four questions are asked of the trainer: Did the students enjoy themselves? Did they learn the material? Did the training change the students’ behavior? Did the employer receive value for the training program?

In addition, there are several learning theories that are relevant to program evaluation, because they detail the complex learning process between trainer and trainee. One of these sets out criteria that must be met for the training to be successful, including the students’ physical and mental environment, the reasons that students are in class, and the instructor’s ability to deliver complex themes.

Further Assistance

Finally, there are many reference documents available that may assist in the development of training programs. Some of them include the ASIS International Private Security Officer Selection and Training guideline; the Enterprise Security Competency Model; Security Supervision and Management,Fourth Edition, by Davies, Hertig, and Gilbride; and The Professional Protection Officer, Second Edition, by Davies and Fennelly.

As I learned as a roughneck, training helps employees be more productive, and safer, work smarter and not harder, and enjoy their jobs more. While training is a complex process, a well-developed security officer training program, led by instructors who are themselves well trained, will maximize the chances of success for all involved.

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