Author Archives: Max van Balgooy

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About Max van Balgooy

President of Engaging Places LLC, a design and strategy firm that connects people to historic places.

Program in New England Studies Offering Diversity Scholarships

Program in New England Studies at Hamilton House, 2013.

Program in New England Studies at Hamilton House, 2013.

Historic New England presents its Program in New England Studies, an intensive week-long exploration of New England from Monday, June 16 to Saturday, June 21, 2014. Now entering its second decade, the Program in New England Studies features lectures by noted curators and architectural historians, workshops, behind-the-scenes tours, and special access to historic house museums and collections. Last year I had a chance to talk with some of the participants and they said they were attracted by the chance to see the houses and collections, but found that they really loved the expert lectures.

This year, Historic New England launches a diversity scholarship to support a mid-career museum professional or graduate student.  Applicants must represent a racial or ethnic minority group in the U.S.  The scholarship covers the full registration fee of Continue reading →

Video: Tom Explores Los Angeles

Tom Carroll explores “places that might change people’s perceptions of Los Angeles” in a series of thirteen short hip videos and demonstrate what is possible to create with just a handful of people.  Carroll studied art at Occidental College and led tours at the Los Angeles State Historic Park and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  In creating these videos, he uses, “a lot of what I learned as a tour guide, speaking loudly and slowly, knowing when you are losing your audience.”  Could you create a short video exploring an historic place in your community?

Corcoran Dismantlement Offers Lessons for Museums and Sites

Corcoran 2014The recent news that the Corcoran in Washington, DC, will be mostly dissolved and its parts distributed to the National Gallery of Art (NGA) and George Washington University (GWU) is generating lots of discussion on whether this is a good thing or not, and who should take the credit or blame.  For those unfamiliar with the Corcoran, it’s an unusual museum because it’s a combination of art gallery and art college.  Students use the art collection for study and inspiration, and the art gallery exhibits student and faculty artworks along with historic American paintings and sculpture, connecting past and present.  It’s a great approach for providing a rich environment for the study and appreciation of art for both students and the public.  Other museums have followed similar paths to create deeper places of learning, including the Henry Ford Museum with its charter school, the Academy of Natural Sciences in its merger with Drexel University, and the American Museum of Natural History offering a Masters of Arts in Teaching.  Yes, museums and historic sites can offer more than just an hour-long tour or a morning field trip.

The Corcoran was created in the Gilded Age, the era of the first major public museums.  Unlike its contemporaries such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran seems to have gone asleep in the mid-twentieth century and like Rip Van Winkle, it couldn’t wake up.  It made attempts to move out of its slumber, including Continue reading →

Recap of Historic House Museum Symposium at Gunston Hall

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On Saturday, the Historic House Museum Consortium of Washington DC hosted an all-day symposium on “how are historic house museums adapting to the future?” at Gunston Hall in Virginia.  The sold-out symposium featured three speakers, a tour of Gunston Hall, and lots of time to chat with colleagues during breaks and over lunch.   The cost?  A mere $15, truly a bargain.  The symposium not only attracted professionals from Virginia, Maryland, and DC, but as far away as Connecticut!

I opened the symposium by discussing Michael Porter’s “Five Forces” as a way of identifying opportunities and threats to help historic sites prepare and adapt.  If you’re not familiar with the Five Forces, it’s a framework for identifying those issues that have the biggest impact on your operations.  This is a much more useful alternative to SWOT, which may be a good outline for summarizing an analysis, but it’s not a helpful way to analyze a situation.  If you’d like to get an introduction to the Five Forces and how it applies to historic sites, take look at my presentation (warning: it’s an 18 Mb pdf).  Even better was the discussion that followed, which explored a wide range of ideas from the growing role of photography to changing demographics to the interpretation of African American history.

Jana Shafogoj at Morven Park discussed how the current emphasis on STEM has allowed their site to Continue reading →

Video: Luminous Hall

The Centenary of the University of Western Australia was celebrated with “Luminous Hall” on February 8, 2013, a 20-minute performance created by Illuminart.   Luminous Hall is a “narrative architectural projection” on the exterior of the historic Winthrop Hall that combines mapped projection with music, stories, and drama interpreting the history of the university and local community. Moving beyond son et lumier, the form engages the viewer in history in an extraordinary way.  Other examples using Norwood Town Hall and a Night Mural Picnic are available.

Museum Advocacy Day Highlights

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Last week was Museums Advocacy Day and this week is Historic Preservation Advocacy Day, so Congress is getting lots of visits from people who care about our nation’s history and culture.

Museums Advocacy Day has improved each year.  The schedule is well organized and the training and materials are thoughtfully assembled to give everyone a clear idea of what might happen during a congressional visit and the priorities for requests (with lots of good background information so you can speak about issues confidently).  At the top of the list was a request for “robust funding” for the Office of Museum Services at IMLS, protection of the charitable deduction, and permission for museums to be eligible with schools for federal teacher training funds.  Even if you weren’t able to join us, the American Alliance of Museums provides lots of information and ideas for advocacy at home (although the handy “Issues at a Glance” from the Advocate Handbook doesn’t seem to be available online).

IMLS, NEH, NPS, NFS, and NEA talked about their needs but they didn’t seem to be aware Continue reading →

Video: The Leopold Museum

A hip video by Philipp Kaindl promoting the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which houses the world’s largest collection of paintings by Egon Schiele.  The video is not just about the collections but also the activities and people in and around the museum and told without any words.  Can any of these ideas be applied to historic sites or history museums?

Period Rooms at a Modern University

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During a recent visit to Pittsburgh, I visited the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh.  At 535 feet, it’s the tallest university building in the nation and dominates the skyline east of downtown.  Despite its name, it’s more skyscraper than cathedral.  It’s also an historical and architectural landmark, built between 1926 and 1937 as an Art Deco “cake” with Gothic Revival “frosting.”  For those of us working at historic house museums, what’s most interesting are the Nationality Rooms, a series of 29 classrooms on the first and third floors designed and furnished to represent different nations and ethnicities.

The classrooms vary in size but each have Continue reading →