Culture pour tous

SHARING THE MUSEUM

 

With the Sharing the Museum programme the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is welcoming community organization projects and adapting itself to a clientele that it is not accustomed to. This initiative is a growing success with over 14,000 persons participating in the 2007–2008 activities.

In 1999 at the end of a long reflection process on the Museum’s openness and its role in society, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts created the Bridging Art and Community programme for community organizations working with audiences which are not among its usual clientele.

According to Hélène Nadeau, the MMFA’s Education and Public Programmes Department Head, the initial aim of this community outreach was to “make the Museum accessible to those who do not customarily frequent it,” and this through the offering of free educational and cultural activities. The Museum realized that the distribution of free entrance tickets is not an effective audience development factor and that there was a need to promote awareness raising. The identified clienteles are numerous: cultural communities, senior citizens, youth at risk, people from poorer neighbourhoods, disadvantaged families, and those with physical and intellectual disabilities, etc.

The MMFA integrated this idea of “adapted projects.” Rather than initiating audience development projects itself, the Museum’s Education and Public Programmes directly invited the community organizations to propose activity ideas, educational material or even events. This is an important responsibility sharing that bears witness to an openness that does not, however, diminish the MMFA’s implication.

The organizations make use of the Museum to accomplish their mission and the Museum also accomplishes the objectives it set for itself, notably to reach audiences that were considered to be outside of its traditional client pool, all the while promoting an accessibility to art and the valorization of its collection.

The activity calendar is drawn up to suit specific needs and this without any pre-established rules. At times there may be only one visit, at others three or four, and the project can be followed up by creation workshops and conclude with an exhibition of the created works.

“During the project implementation,” Hélène Nadeau explains, “one of the challenges was to convince the financial backers of the value of an open project with imprecise parameters. The approach is based on an attentiveness to the needs of the community organizations, and the project is thus guided by few rules. In this case the cultural mediation relates to an educational act the results of which are difficult to quantify, and which makes funding harder to justify since it does not correspond to market rules or the quantity of tickets sold.”

Let us highlight some examples. A group works with young single mothers and seeks to initiate discussions on maternity with 15- to 16-year-old youth, which is not an easy task. In order to stimulate discussion the Museum organizes an activity around various works form the collection depicting maternity scenes. Again using works from the collection, another project of a similar nature proposes workshops on identity with groups of homeless persons from the Accueil Bonneau; another one uses the room of Canadian works as a source of inspiration to introduce newly arrived immigrants to Quebecois culture.

For the institution, the primary impact is to foster interest and curiosity among the audience and to encourage them to make further explorations. Secondarily, mediation can also enable the communication of an experience, knowledge and specific contents. One of the obstacles at the outset of this mediation process concerns the very image of the MMFA’s, which is often judged to be luxurious, elitist or hermetic. It is necessary to dispute or deconstruct these stereotypes, not just among the various clienteles but also within the institution itself where training was provided for the education team, guides, educators, and the reception and security staff. Training that has been qualified as more “emotional” than theoretical, and which is primarily made up of stories and observations by the organizations’ facilitators. The Museum underlines that this project has completely changed the outlook of the educational service, which was used to developing a supply and now receives demands.

In May 2008, the Museum confirmed its commitment with the holding of a “sharing fair” where 10 participating organizations related their experiences before the representatives from other organizations. Close to a 120 persons participated, and this initiative led to several collaboration projects. The Museum is finally also getting something back in terms of attendance. For 3 months, all the participants of Sharing the Museum received a pair of tickets and 40% among them were actually used.

In 2009 the project will celebrate its 10 year anniversary. It is now part of the Museum programme and independent of external funding, a fact that bears witness to a mutual and exemplary mediation.

www.mmfa.qc.ca/en/activites/organismes.html