AAM Conference

I am in Minneapolis at the American Association of Museums annual conference. I presented yesterday on Truth and Cherished Myths in Museums.


Last night, I was at the Minneapolis Museum of Art in a room that had both a band and a Rietveld chair. So, that to me is pretty cool. Kind of all my favorite things right there.

In fact, lots of chairs; a Marcel Breuer chair, a Charles Mackintosh chair, a Mies Van Der Roe chair, and a bunch of Frank Lloyd Wright furniture.

Chairs represent one of the greatest artifacts to showcase the culture of design. They have a utilitarian function that is directly tied to the proportions of the human body. And in the history of the human body, the chair is nearly the same as it had always been. You can not design a chair that does not conform to the same basic size as the "chair," because if it can not function as a chair, it is really not a chair. So when you see a bunch of chairs together, you can begin to clearly see, and begin to understand, stylistic difference of period design.

I pointed this all out to the colleagues I was with. They pointed out that I was kind of a dork. Then we went to listen to the band.

Four-Way Test Speech

Lucas competed in the Rotary International Four-Way Test Speech Contest today. About four weeks ago he won the club contest in El Centro. Today, we drove to Rancho Bernardo and he competed in the Sub-Regional Contest. He placed second. But the top two were advanced to the Regional Contest.

When he heard about the local contest, and that there were only four people signed up he thought it was an easy way to make a little money - there is prize money for first, second, and third place. But it was not the plan to win. He has a really good speech, its really a sermon, about the difference between Rotary on Grand Turk, and here in California.

After the contest was over we stopped by the Studio Diner, which I think I blogged about once before, to get a chocolate malt.

We had a good talk breaking down the results of the contest. Lucas said that we only have three rules in our house:

1. If you're not first, you're last
2. If you lay on the floor you get stepped on
3. There is no such thing as too much chocolate

Now, I am pretty sure that first rule is from a movie. And the second one is actually more of a life lesson, than a rule. And the tird one is a rule. In any case, Lucas would set the bar pretty high for all three rules.

It was a good four-way test speech contest this year. One of the girls told Lucas that the competition this year was at a totally different caliber than it was last year. She has competed every year for the last four years. Last month we had never even heard of the Four-Way Test speech contest I was very happy that Lucas worked on in his speech three different days this week.

El Centro Arts Festival

I think the best thing that I have been able to do at the Imperial Valley Desert Museum, so far, was to get Jessica out here. I have never worked with anyone who had more drive and aptitude with a desire to achieve excellence. I met Jessica at the Society of American Archivist conference in Austin, Texas, in August of 2009. She came to the Turks and Caicos National Museum to help run the Afterschool Homework Program grant and in the process cataloged and conserved 333 archival collections.

Read this for nostalgia.

In January, I hired Jessica as a curator to move the re-curation of the Imperial Valley College Archaeology Collection forward. But because of her willingness to take on any project everything is moving forward.

Yesterday, we hosted a hands-on coiled-clay art tabled at the El Centro Arts Festival. We went through 100 pounds of clay working with over 100 youth at our table. Jessica made a connection at Kohl's while we were hosting a booth at the Mid-Winter Fair and Fiesta and not only did they sponsor our coiled-clay art table, they provided five volunteers.

Hurray for Kohl's. Their volunteers were amazing. It is cool that in this small community how many of the national corporations interact as very local organizations. Without them I think the community would be hard pressed to get anything funded. The Kohl's just opened here right before Christmas. We go all the time. I think it reminds us of home.

The coiled clay art activities are becoming the core of our public outreach program. The activity is tied into our ceramic olla collection at the museum, but as an art activity it integrates very well in the school system. We piloted the project last summer at the museum. This year we piloted the project at the Southwest High School Art Club, and we have now been asked to develop programs for Desert Gardens Elementary School and Holtville High School.

Very Busy February

Ouch! where has February gone. This has been a crazy month. I am sorry for not blogging.

I came out to the Imperial Valley 13 months ago to create a plan to open a museum that was built in 2008, but never opened. Well, on March 1 we opened a museum.

This month has been spent meeting with the Board of County Supervisors, with Caltrans, with SDG&E, and the superintendents of Imperial Unified Schools and El Centro Elementary School District.

In between all of that, we have built exhibit walls and installed a conservation lab.

Weekend in Ensenada

I spent this weekend in Ensenada hosted by a Doctor friend I met through Rotary. We had two goals, volunteering at the Thousand Smiles clinic, and making contacts with our partner museums in Ensenada. I would write a lengthy blog on the clinic, but I don't want to get all mushy but it was very...touching. You can find more information at ThousandSmiles.org.

I have to tell you, at first I was not sure how I could help with a dental clinic. But I learned something about myself that I had never really though about. After many, many years in the museum field, I can do data entry and filing like nobody's business.

On the other hand, Ensenada was amazing. Like Grand Turk on steroids. Or maybe like Grand Turk with a million more people. I am sorry I did not take more pictures. I had meetings and saw museums and ate at taco carts. The highlight of my weekend, however, was a Saturday visit to a local fishmarket on the beach. We ordered a half a dozen oysters from a small stand and sat at a makeshift table right at the high tide line. As boats came in, people swarmed to buy fresh fish. It was very reminiscent of my first experience buying fish on Grand Turk. My friend bought two dog snappers. I bought a 4-foot reef shark for about eight bucks. I had the shark cut up into about a dozen or more steaks to bring back to El Centro.

Yesterday, I took jalapeno and cilantro crusted shark to the Super Bowl party.

New Stuff: FYI

Just FYI for anyone who follows all the crazy antics of trying to open a museum:

This week we started a Facebook site http://www.facebook.com/IVDMuseum

And the blog is now focused on all the stuff that is going on: http://www.ivdesertmuseum.blogspot.com/

First Public Event at IV Desert Museum

This week marks exactly twelve months that I have been at the Imperial Valley Desert Museum. During most of that time I have been the only employee and have been writing plans to open the museum. On Saturday, we held our first public event, a "Star Gazing in the Desert" event. We had four amateur astronomers come out to the museum to set up telescopes. Saturday was a dark sky night, and it is really dark in the parking lot of the museum. When we planned the event a couple months ago, we set a goal of having 20 people show up.

I started to get nervous on Wednesday when Davis brought a flyer home from school that a friend gave to him. The friend had no association with the museum, and he did not know that Davis was connected to the museum. He just said it looked like a cool event and thought Davis would want to go. A local business who was sponsoring the event put out an email and told me they had 8 people had responded the next day saying their families would be there.

I met with staff and told them we should rethink what we were going to do. We replanned for 50 people. On Friday we set up the building. On Saturday morning I bought more drinks and refreshments.

At 3:45 two students came from the local community college. They said that their environmental science teacher told them to come. If they took a picture at the event they would get extra credit in the class. Then people kept coming, and coming, and coming. At 5:30 we had 78 people in the building. The final attendance count was 135.

There is an anticipation of the museum opening that is peculating just under the radar here. I said a year ago that I thought we had a twelve month window to do something, before the momentum would fade. This week we are going to have to rethink our plan and strategy. Things are going to start moving really fast.