Crossing the velvet rope, jokes, and nerf gun wars. Is that what fourth graders really want? For the Creativity Incubator: Long Island, we brought Museum Anarchist Frank Vagnone to Oyster Bay to visit Raynham Hall Museum. But he wasn’t our only voice of anarchy – we got input from 75 fourth graders, a major constituency of the museum.

Originally built around 1738, Raynham Hall was home to the Townsend family – including “Culper Jr.” – George Washington’s spy. The house is furnished to both the Colonial and Victorian eras, and has the notoriety as one of the most haunted buildings on Long Island.  Raynham Hall Museum, like many historic sites, connects well with 4th grade local history curriculum. For a typical fourth grade tour, if the weather cooperates, the students start outside to hear about the differences between the architecture of the Colonial and Victorian eras evident in the house. Then, the kids are given a tour of the house, get to handle Colonial objects from a teaching collection, and see a demonstration of invisible ink.
 
The tour incorporates different types of activities, but what do the fourth graders really think about it? To prepare for the workshop we decided to ask some students who had recently visited. And even crazier, we wanted to ask them to be museum anarchists too.

This month's challenge is short and sweet...six words, to be exact. It comes to us courtesy of Ernest Hemingway, who famously wrote "For Sale - baby shoes, never worn".  Now, we want you to craft a six word story about an object in your collection. Get the details here.

Remember - all you have to do is complete the task, and take a photo to share on social media - this can be a photo of your team doing the challenge, and/or whatever product happened to come from the challenge itself. Use the hashtag #creativityincubator - and post in the CI Community on FB, or on Twitter or Instagram - that’s it! Remember to tag GHHN and NYSCA in the posts so we can see them! (GHHN - Greater Hudson Heritage Network, @theGHHN, NYSCA - New York State Council on the Arts, @NYSCArts)

To see other photos from this session, click here

​For over a decade, LaPlaca-Cohen, a marketing and design consultant serving cultural organizations, has been studying Americans’ behavior in relation to cultural consumption.  Culture Track 2017 is the current iteration of such study that looks at how different generations define, access, and relate to cultural experiences. 
 
Some of the key findings are trends that have been solidifying in the last decade. For instance, millennials have expanded the definition of culture to include categories and experiences such as food festivals and television, both forms of entertainment that a decade ago would have fallen way outside traditional disciplines.  Newer generations are also redefining the way they consume culture, seeing themselves as active participants rather than passive audiences. Opportunities in which one can interact, share, and affect a cultural experience are the most popular among millennials. 
 
This generational shift in cultural consumption is unfolding at the same time that the US is experiencing dramatic demographic shifts.  A phenomenon once experienced only by large US cities is now expanding across the rest of the country. The rapid growth of Latino communities in the US, refugee relocation programs across the states, and immigrants leaving behind large metropolitan areas in search of more affordable lives in smaller cities and towns have contributed to this phenomenon.  
 
City administrations, public school and library systems, and churches and other civic institutions are now faced with the challenge to rethink their public service in order to accommodate an increasingly diverse population. Museums and other cultural organizations are also struggling to shift their cultural offerings in order to accommodate these new participants that demand more interactive, relevant cultural experiences.  

On November 14th, 2017 I and other museum professionals from central New York attended a lively and inspiring Creativity Incubator provided by NYSCA and the Greater Hudson Heritage Network at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. Lia Tamborra, presenter and member of Museum Hack, challenged us to select an artwork in the MWPAI and construct a two to three minute presentation around it that incorporated many of the elements of a Museum Hack tour: an ‘icebreaking’ introduction, a lively and engaging salvo of facts about the artwork and artist in as interactive a manner as possible, and a punchy conclusion that would leave a lasting impression. Each group had about ten minutes to research and plan their talk before delivering. No sweat! Our group (the names of my four or five partners have not lingered in my memory, but it truly was a team effort to put this together) chose the 1951 painting, Number 18 by Mark Rothko. What follows is a transcription of my wild and wooly presentation, recreated to the best of my memory with the conversational tone and sense of last-minute panic retained: