Culture24's Blog

Come see us at the Museums & Heritage Show 2012, posted May 14th, 2012

It’s a big week for Culture24 – our Museums at Night festival of late night openings kicks off on Friday and it’s looking to be the biggest and best yet. Not only do we have more than 500 events confirmed across the UK but we were immortalised by Modern Toss in the Guardian Guide this weekend in this uncannily accurate portrait of our campaign team.

Before the big weekend though there’s the Museums and Heritage Show – a fantastic opportunity to meet and talk to museum and gallery folk. It’s on the 16th and 17th May at Earl’s Court, London and Culture24 is very pleased to be supporting the show again this year.

Our DDE and BBC partnership teams – Ruth, Conrad, Sean and Jack – will be on the Culture24 stand (T3) both days. If you’re going to the Show do drop by and see them, they’re a friendly bunch and will fill you in on the many ways we can help you to reach audiences (for free!).

I’ve also worked with the team behind the Show to curate a stream of seminars on the theme of learning. All day on Wednesday 16th I’ll be chairing sessions across a broad range of topics, bringing together a mix of speakers from nine different organisations, all of whom are working on the front line in cultural education.

The potential of the cultural sector to support teaching and learning, across all age groups, is something that’s long been close to our hearts at Culture24 Towers. I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to draw attention to some of the great work going on in the sector already and to explore ways this can be built upon, particularly in the wake of the Henley Review into cultural education.

The programme for the learning seminars looks like this:

10.00 – 10.40: Adult learning & working with volunteers

Essex opens the day with a short journey through the needs of adult learners in museums and current policies which may influence those needs. Then discover how the Manchester Museum, with Imperial War Museum North, developed their award-winning In Touch Volunteer programme as a way to diversify their volunteer workforce and to engage more deeply with local communities.

Essex Havard, Campaigns and Fundraising Coordinator, NIACE; Anna Bunney, Curator of Public Programmes & Kate Glynn, Volunteer Coordinator, The Manchester Museum

11.10 – 11.50: Engaging young people

Teams at English Heritage and The Wolverhampton Art Gallery have been working with young people on a range of projects with great success. Find out how young enterprise students created a brand new retail product for Stonehenge and how the Gallery’s ongoing Artforum project not only attracts young people through the doors but then embeds them within the life of the organisation.

Harriet Attwood, Education Manager South West, English Heritage; Jen Dooner, Outreach Worker, Wolverhampton Art Gallery

12.20 – 13.00: Making the most of Arts Award

Join the Arts Award team to find out how the award’s flexible framework can help you build relationships with young audiences aged 7 -25. Hear from Marina Castledine about the exciting new levels, Discover and Explore and also have the chance to hear from The Holburne Museum (Bath) about their experience of delivering Arts Award.

Dan Ellitts & Marina Castledine, Arts Award; Emma Finch, Holburne Museum

13.30 – 14.10: Open data – what’s the big idea? Plus working with older learners

Two themes for the price of one this time, though both are about more people doing more with more of your stuff! Jo explores how museums, archives and the heritage sector can open up their collections, from APIs to Wikis, and looks at the role education departments can play. John follows with a step-by-step guide to attracting and working effectively with older learners.

John Stevenson, Director, GEM (Group for Education in Museums); Jo Pugh, Education & Outreach, The National Archives

14.40 – 15.20: Schools & museums: a working relationship

The Langley Academy is the first school in the UK to work towards embedding museum learning across the curriculum. Get the inside track on how the school is getting on and the impact of this approach. Also, from the other side of the fence, hear how one of the school’s local partners, the Oxford Museum of Natural History, provides support and how this has impacted upon their working practices.

Jenny Blay, Head of Museum Learning, The Langley Academy; Janet Stott, Head of Education, Oxford University Museum of Natural History

So – we’ll hopefully see some of you at the show, you can book here (again, for free). If you can’t make it to London follow the day’s discussions via #MandHShow on Twitter.

Lastly, don’t forget to check out Museums at Night this weekend – find out more at www.museumsatnight.org.uk.

Anra Kennedy, Content & Partnerships Director

Celebration of Museums at Night at 11 Downing Street, posted April 19th, 2012

Last night Frances Osborne hosted a reception at Number 11 Downing Street celebrating Culture24’s annual festival, Museums at Night.

Arts Minister Ed Vaizey paid tribute to the work of the arts and heritage sector through difficult times, and commented on the fantastic results that happen when the sector collaborates.

We were delighted that so many representatives from museums and galleries came along and shared their experiences of running Museums at Night events, with each other and with our funders the Arts Council. It was lovely to catch up with our partners from Liverpool’s Light Night, Newcastle and Gateshead’s Late Shows, and Scotland’s Festival of Museums.

 

 

Lots of our campaign partners attended the reception, including the Sky Arts team who will not only be filming a documentary over the weekend, but are also subsidising museum sleepovers and running competitions to promote Museums at Night.

We were happy to introduce Karen Brookfield from the Heritage Lottery Fund to Laura Crossley, who is coordinating the HLF-funded North Norfolk cluster of Museums at Night activity, Victorian Nights.

It was also good to meet Anne Larouzé from Nuit des Musées, and to catch up with Loyd Grossman, who together with former Culture Minister Chris Smith founded Culture24 (then the 24 Hour Museum) over ten years ago.

The evening offered a great opportunity to show a renowned historic building in a new light – find out more about how we brought Downing Street to life with stories, food and music from the time it was built on the Museums at Night blog.

By Rosie Clarke, Campaigns Officer

Artists, venues, voting and jelly: the inside track on galvanising UK arts audiences, posted February 15th, 2012

Museums at Night campaign manager Nick Stockman on our audience-building competition currently keeping him busy…

Connect10 is a new national competition for cultural venues to win one of ten artist-led events during Museums at Night. We had the good taste to not call it ‘Britain’s Got Cultural Treasures and Very Interesting Artists’ and people all over the country are voting in their tens of thousands for artists as diverse as Claire Barclay, Bompas and Parr and Simon Roberts.

Polly Morgan pieace: CarnevaleThe Connect10 idea is essentially an extension of Chris Pensa’s wonderful Love Art London concept, which takes art lovers behind the scenes with artists to their studios, writ large on a national scale plus a competitive twist. In 2011 Culture24 worked with Chris on an idea to use Facebook to market Museums at Night by devising a series of competitions that Love Art London’s membership could enter culminating in an event with Michael Landy. We at Culture24 wanted to see if Facebook could be used to excite interest in the campaign without using direct advertising. Our PR company Bullet’s hard work attracted £1.1 million worth of PR to the Museums at Night campaign last year, I doubt whether more than a few pence of that was generated by the Facebook idea but it did get us thinking.

What if we worked with numerous artists and venues could compete to win them? Could this be a way to get more artists involved with venues they wouldn’t normally go to? Could this be a way to help venues communicate with their audiences, galvanising them into voting for their local museum and gallery all the time creating an army of advocates? Could this project also help discover the lost city of Atlantis? Well as we are currently not quite half way through the voting period and almost exactly three months away from Museums at Night, Friday 18th – Sunday 20th May, we shall have to wait for all the answers but I can tell you a little bit about what we’ve achieved so far.

The first task after getting approval of funding from Arts Council England was to sign-up the artists. This Chris did with aplomb. He found ten people with the right kind of pioneer spirit, willing to cross the frontier from art to museum. The main requirement of any artist getting involved with this project is a sense of adventure: as it transpires artists could be travelling to the northernmost museum in the British Isles in Thurso or one of the southernmost in Guernsey. That spirit is reciprocated by the venues; Polly Morgan will be bringing her live taxidermy demonstration, Jon McGregor his suitcase full of stories, these are no ordinary museum experiences.

We received 121 completed event submissions forms in a three work period in January. Considering the short amount of time available to devise and submit ideas this was astounding. At one point it did seem like everyone wanted Bompas & Parr to lead an extravagant, Georgian-style banquet featuring austerity (and belt) busting pies filled with birds, marzipan sculptures and gilded flummery ‘fish’. One venue wanted them to recreate a siege in jelly! As it panned out all the artists received plenty of ideas they were happy with and we were able to proceed to the vote with at least two venues vying for every artist.

The vote is the part of the project that has initiated most discussion and excitement at Culture24 towers and beyond. This is the bit when venues get the chance to reach out to their communities, inspire them and entreat them to vote. It seems to be working, to date we’ve received over 10,000 votes with just under three weeks still left before the polls close. At the start of the project I would have taken 5,000 – 6,000 on any spread bet (Culture24 employees are not allowed to vote or bet on the outcome for that matter!) now it looks like it could top 50,000. Incredibly busy, sometimes under resourced staff and volunteers in 28 venues are pulling out all the stops to win an artist. In doing so they are reaching out to their local networks in ways some of them have never done before.

Once the people have spoken and the winners are chosen the adventure does not stop: all the participating venues in Connect10 will receive some cash support for a Museums at Night event even if they have to look around for another artist or different feature for their night. We are supporting venues through the voting process with marketing and PR tips, information and images from their chosen artist and ‘How to’ event management guides. The key objectives of this project are capacity building and audience development and while we’re learning, building audiences and bridging gaps in the museums and galleries sector look out for a 75 foot jelly King Kong looming from a honeycomb Empire State Building*.

The arts and museums sectors may never get the chance to come together in quite the same way again.

(This one didn’t get through to the public vote!)

Meet the artists in Museums at Night’s new Connect10 competition!, posted January 10th, 2012

We’re delighted that Arts Council England is funding Museums at Night 2012, which will take place over the weekend of Friday 18th – Sunday 20th May. Project
Manager Nick and myself are already deep into the planning stages, and are very
happy to welcome our two new campaign interns, Beth Hogben and Rosanna Gore.

For the first time, we’re kicking off an exciting new competition called Connect10 which offers the chance for UK arts and heritage venues to win one of ten adventurous contemporary artists and a share of £7000 for a Museums at Night event.

Art work consisting of the words 'Join The Art Party' in 3D block capitals in shades of orange, red and blue against a dark background.

Join The Art Party, 2011, (c) Bob and Roberta Smith

We’re incredibly impressed with the calibre of the intrepid artists who’ve signed up for Connect10. The ten creatives who could be heading to any UK venue are Scottish sculptor Claire Barclay; Jellymongers Bompas & Parr; installation artist Ryan Gander; novelist Jon McGregor; taxidermist Polly Morgan; photographers Terry O’Neill, Martin Parr and Simon Roberts; and installation artists Bob & Roberta Smith and Susan Stockwell.

We’re inviting all the venues on our database to look for connections between their collections or location, and the work of one of these artists. They can then pitch an exciting Museums at Night event idea involving their chosen artist to Culture24 through this simple online form.

Culture24 will select the two or three most interesting event ideas for each of the ten artists, and open them up to an online public vote to decide, for instance, whether Martin Parr
will be sent to Manchester, Middlesbrough or Merthyr. The sky’s the limit: we’re looking for really creative ideas that will capture the imagination of the artists, audiences and the media!

Photograph of woman in striped outfit floating on raft shaped like an orange slice.

Bompas and Parr - Courvoisier Lake (Image Credit Barney Steel)

Our goals for Connect10? Well, we’re hoping this will offer a great audience development opportunity for venues to reach out through local and social media channels, motivating their fans and advocates to come together and vote to bring an exciting artist
to their town.

And at last we can offer money as well! We’ve wanted to do this for some time: in our post-Museums at Night venue surveys, every year we’ve learned that even small bursaries would enable more events to go ahead. So for Connect10, each successful venue that wins an artist will also receive a £500 bursary for their event, while the venues who get through to the public vote stage but don’t win the artist they wanted will still receive £100 to support an alternative Museums at Night event.

Want more information about Connect10?

See our 9 top tips for a successful Connect10 event.

Read the Connect10 terms and conditions for venues.

Submit your event idea.

To receive monthly e-newsletters from the Museums at Night campaign, bringing you news of partnerships and promotional opportunities you may like to take advantage of, simply sign up here.

By Rosie Clarke, Museums at Night Marketing Coordinator

DISH-ing out the digital in Rotterdam, posted November 14th, 2011

DISH2011: Digital Strategies for Heritage Conference

December 6th-9th 2012, World Trade Centre, Rotterdam (NL)

DISH2011 is the bi-annual international conference on strategies for digital heritage. It offers you opportunities to find knowledge and inspiration and to discuss with colleagues the effects of digitisation and digital change on your organisation.

Keywords for the conference are inspiration, knowledge, skills and networking.  This year the themes are Business for Heritage, Co-creation and Crowdsourcing, Institutional Change and Building a New Public Space.

They have pulled together some really great international keynote speakers including:

* Katherine Watson, Director of the European Cultural Foundation and a fellow Culturemondo committee member

* Michael Edson of the Smithsonian Institute, who has been leading their work on a Commons

* One of the UK’s most creative thinkers on digital and culture, Charles Leadbeater

* Clifford Lynch from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)

* Ann-Katherine Kuhlemann (Social Stock Exchange), who in 2010 was elected by Capital magazine to its “young elite” list of “top 40 under 40″ in politics and society

* Samuel Jones from Demos and the co-author of Culture Shock


The program includes a massive 75 sessions, with a presentations by me on the Culture24 ’Lets Get Real‘ report and a workshop on ‘how to evaluate success’.

There will also be the presentation of the Digital Heritage Award 2011, which this year is focussed on crowd souring projects, as well as the International Jodi Award 2011 (which Culture24 helps to support).

20% discounts, tickets and travel

The nice people at DISH are offering everyone in the Culture24 Network a very generous 20% discount on ticket prices. Just register on the website and send an email to info@dish.nl stating where you saw this offer. Find out more here: www.dish2011.nl 

Getting there is easy with cheap flights to Schiphol (Amsterdam) from Ryan Air, Easyjet or British Airways that shouldn’t cost you more than £50. Trains run regularly to Rotterdam and take about an hour.

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