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7/1/09
Prof. Mark Allen Tapped to Alter The Hammer
Museum Visitor Experience |
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In June, The Hammer Museum (in West Los Angeles) announced that it had received $1 million grant from the James Irvine Foundation’s Innovation Fund to enable the Museum to create a new kind of interactive museum: “an artist-driven visitor engagement and education program that encourages daily contact among visitors, artists and Museum staff and activates the spaces, exhibitions and websites in imaginative ways.”
Pomona’s Mark Allen, professor of art and founder of the Los Angeles-based Machine Project, has been tapped as the program’s first artist innovator. Among the ideas he mentioned for the Hammer Museum in a recent
KPCC
Radio “Off Ramp” interview was an event where children would visit the museum during the day and damage art works followed by an evening event when conservators could repair them in front of the public. (Ann Philbin, director of the Museum, can be heard laughing in the background.)
For Allen, “What’s so interesting about museums is that they’re like a giant iceberg of all these people doing these fascinating things underneath the surface of the water. Often the public gets to see is just this tiny little point that comes out. So, how are these amazing, beautiful works of art that have been around for a hundreds of years, how do we take care of them, how do we repair them if their damaged, how does the chemistry of all of that work. That seems like something I’d like to know more about and I bet others would as well.”
Other potential ideas mentioned by Allen include guide dogs that would take visitors to specific works of art and teaching visitors to create their own forgeries and then leading them on a treasure hunt to find one hidden among the Hammer’s masterpieces.
The goal of the program will be increased visitor engagement and transparency of how artists and museums work. Guest artists will be invited for one-year terms to design and implement changes to visitor services and educational programs, working with the curatorial staff.
Allen will officially start his residency in September. He may be best known for the November 2008 event “A Machine Project’s Field Guide to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,” in which he led 35 artists in a day of performances, new installations and workshops. The event received glowing reviews in both the
New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Machine Project collaborates with artists to produce site-specific work, provides educational resources to people working with technology, and promotes conversations between scientists, poets, technicians, performers, and the community of Los Angeles.
# # #
Link to LA Times story:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-innovate17-2009jun17,0,3654068.story
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