Who knew the Louvre commissions comic books?

The Louvre, working with NBM, a New York-based graphic novel publisher, publishes stories about the museum by different artists: they are already on their fourth volume, Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert by French artist Marc-Antoine Mathieu.

From Publisher’s Weekly as quoted on Amazon:

Mathieu’s [story] follows an expert hired to catalogue a vast, half-ruined museum; he encounters inhabitants living in the lower reaches who have no understanding of the location or its contents. A Kafkaesque catalogue of paradoxes ensues: paintings kept in the dark so the light will not damage the colors that no one will ever see; statues restored then broken then defaced to keep their states “authentic”; a frame maker who considers his contribution the true definition of painting. As years go by, the expert becomes old and unkempt as further and further levels of absurdist cataloguing are discovered. Eventually, he discovers the deepest layers and the secret behind the Mona Lisa, even as he passes his journal on to another “expert” for a continuation of these meaningless attempts to quantify art without perceiving its beauty. The story is rendered in grim, gray tones, which make the endless rounds of the museum workers look all the more fruitless. Like the expert, readers will be glad for the rays of real light and art at the end of this dark satire.

Read an excerpt at New York Magazine: but beware. The excerpt may be a spoiler that possibly gives away the secret behind the Mona Lisa. Hopefully there’s another secret to the Mona Lisa and the one in the excerpt is just part of a larger plot.

The NBM site also has further excerpts.

The British government announced today that two sixth-formers (between 16 and 18 years) from every school in Britain will visit the Auschwitz death-camp to learn about the Holocaust. The government will provide £200 per trip, with the schools raising the remaining £100. The program started in 2006, but the government has confirmed today that the program will receive £1.5 million of funding each year until 2011, when the program will be reviewed.

Students on the day trip will leave at 5 am, visit the town of Oswiecim, the crematoria, the barracks, and the museum, meeting survivors and listening to their accounts, returning to home by 10 pm. As well, both before and after the trip, students will attend seminars on the Holocaust. The hope is that the students will in turn share their experiences with classmates and families.

From the Times Online:

“We are very aware that there’s going to be a time where there aren’t any survivors left to go into schools,” [said Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Education Trust.] “The young people on these visits themselves become eye-witnesses.

“For a lot of them, it’s life changing. They suddenly realise what they value and they see it is important to challenge prejudice today. We don’t want young people wandering around the camp and sobbing. It’s not about making them cry, it’s about helping them to reflect on what it means.”

Interestingly, a comment in response to this article brought up some questions about our own, North American attitudes to the Holocaust:

Why send British schoolchildren to Auschwitz? Have we forgotten that British colonists started the importation of African slaves to North America? So why not send these children to visit any one of the Slavery Museums in the United States? Oh, there aren’t any, you say. But there are at least 23 Holocaust Museums in the U.S. Why such an anomaly? Could it be that Americans wish to hide their own inhumanity to man by flooding the country with museums that are designed to imply that only the Nazis were capable of such inhumanity[?]

By Fred Kirchner, Knoxville, TN

No slavery museums in the U.S.?

A quick Google search turned up the Maryland Sandy Spring Slave Museum & African Art Gallery, Inc., America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee (whose website states, “We are America’s only memorial to the victims of the Black Holocaust”), Alabama’s Slavery and Civil War Museum (“The Slavery and Civil War Museum is the only museum in the country that offers a re-enactment tour allowing thousands of visitors to see, hear, feel, and experience the history of enslavement”), New York’s Sankofa Slavery Museum (which, despite the name, appears to be an temporary exhibit), and the United States National Slavery Museum in Virginia (“the only museum in America among more than 16,000 that has as its primary mission education, re-education and policy formation regarding slavery in America and its enduring legacy”) – this latter museum still without funds to have a permanent site.

Why are these museums not as well-known as the more prominent Holocaust museums? What is to blame for this lack of recognition?

From “Museum Image Touted as End of Poverty in Africa” in the London Free Press:

Imagine a museum of poverty.There’s the last mosquito carrying malaria, the last foot-powered irrigation pump, the last home without electricity.It’s the building Parker Mitchell, co-CEO of Engineers Without Borders, hopes to one day construct, marking the end of poverty in Africa.

For much of the public, museums are still about the past, acting as glorified antique shops filled to the rafters with things we’d forget otherwise. Hence Parker Mitchell’s proposed view of a museum of poverty, meant to illustrate the things we hope to one day know only through exhibits.

Yet things have changed and are changing in the museum world, as we move beyond the static displays that dominated until now. Museums are no longer just about old things. Some museums may have foregone artefacts entirely, using reproductions, while others may be using their artefacts in unique ways.

While Mr. Mitchell’s suggestion came at a fundraising dinner to solicit donations, why not a museum on African solutions to everyday problems? Why not a museum that harks back to the earlier days of museums?

Having recently read Harold Skramstad’s article “An Agenda for American Museums in the Twenty-First Century” (from Daedalus Vol. 128, No. 3, Summer 1999), I was happily reminded that museums weren’t always temples of icons: the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and the Edison Institute (now the Henry Ford Museum) in Dearborn, Michigan looked to the technology of the every day. Both were industrial museums and both sought to inspire their audiences with contemporary American ingenuity.

Mr. Mitchell shares another story from his experience:

In Cameroon, on one of his trips to Africa, Mitchell stood and watched as three young boys sped down a hill on a bicycle — a universal childhood scene.

But this bike was made entirely out of wood. And the children made it themselves.

“It’s unbelievably humbling that in six years of primary school, in six years of secondary school and five of engineering education that I couldn’t even conceive of how to build a bike like that. And these kids had it working perfectly,” he said.

So why not a museum of African ingenuity? One showing off the wooden bikes, crocheted plastic bag purses, tire sandals and homemade helicopters? There’s already the Afrigadget blog devoted to the topic; hopefully a museum can’t be far behind.

Welcome to the Museum Programming Blog.

Though based in Vancouver, this blog will look at what’s happening in public programming at other museums and organizations around the world, as well as grassroots efforts by communities around the world. It’ll give me a chance to sort through my folder of program-related bookmarks, with the hopes that I or my colleagues will take these great ideas and run with them, or, at the very least, admire their success. Though there are some great programming and education blogs out there, the aim of this blog is to highlight specific creative efforts, through links, interviews and photographs.

My own background is still limited as I have only worked in the museum field for six years. My experience so far has taken me from a historical house museum to a civic museum, from marketing on a zero-dollar budget to working with decent resources, from volunteering and summer student work at a variety of museums, non-profits, festivals and galleries to a long-term museum position. I am a local public programmer: my work mostly focusses on out-of-school children’s public programs, drop-in family programs, adult lectures on historical and contemporary issues, community development, and special events. My own interests run the gamut of film festivals, community traditions, blogging, the visual arts, and immigrant issues. I am a big believer in preserving traditions outside museums, whether by learning languages or upholding community events.

Though I love nothing better than hunkering down for hours to do research on some new project, there’s also that great feeling of sitting down to relax after a successful special event or having a grandmother approach you on the street to tell you how much she and her grandchildren enjoyed your last program.
In the future, I hope to be joined by other museum workers in writing for this blog. If you are interested, please contact me either through the comments or email.

Thank you for reading this blog: I hope you enjoy learning about these great programs as much as I did!