GEORGIA     2007  

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Tbilisi
April 29–May 9, 2007

Advanced Training

Consultant: Stephano Carboni

Stefano Carboni, Curator and Administrator in the Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, visited Tbilisi to offer curatorial advice on many issues related to the organization and implementation of the recently formed National Museum of Georgia. This was achieved through visits and on-site discussions with curators and administrators in different museums in Tbilisi and individual meetings with the main officers of the National Museum.

Two full days were spent in workshops with staff of the National Museum discussing permanent galleries, temporary exhibitions, museum organizational charts, fundraising issues, budgetary issues, the different models of American and European museums, display and environmental issues (for example lighting, temperature and humidity control), how to condition an existing environment, display cases, labels, text panels, and educational kits and programs.

Mr. Carboni held two seminars for a limited number of staff of the National Museum. One focused on conservation and display problems for on an upcoming exhibition on embroidered Georgian textiles in the Museum of Fine Arts. The other was on architectural drawings, distribution of gallery spaces, display issues, bookshop, restaurant, cultural interest and potential of the village and area of Kakheti for the regional museum of Kakheti, due to open in the fall of 2007. He also gave a lecture on his current exhibition, Venice and the Islamic World, 828-179, during which he presented the content of the exhibition and discussed the complexities of the organization of a major international loan exhibition.

The new institution of the National Museum has entered an exciting though complex and challenging phase of internal structural organization while leaving behind an antiquated curatorial approach and culture. As they write their mission statement, they must also search for a proper place in the development of the cultural life in the nation. To this end, Mr. Carboni has several recommendations: They must develop curatorial and educational programs, begin to liaison with other institutions in Georgia and especially abroad, develop ambitious restoration plans for virtually all of their buildings in Tbilisi and in the country, conduct huge fundraising efforts, and much more. International financial help for short-term projects, special exhibitions, and for the renovation of existing exhibition galleries through proper lighting, air conditioning, and temperature and humidity control, would be of great help to the Georgian National Museum at the present stage of its development.

 

Tbilisi

Advanced Training
May 15–18, 2007

Consultant: Ward Mintz

Ward Mintz, Executive Director of The Coby Foundation in New York, traveled to Tbilisi to work with the Georgian National Museum (GNM) on audience research and development, outreach, and museum education. He conducted a three-day workshop with GNM staff members, a majority of whom were museum guides, and he met with Education Department staff to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a proposal that the GNM had submitted to the Open Society Institute (OSI).

During the workshop’s three days, Mr. Mintz had only a professional interpreter for the third and final day. Undaunted, he began the workshops with a discussion on “Honoring Visitors,” or becoming a more audience-driven institution. He then introduced “Excellent Judges”, the framework developed by Beverly Serrell and her museum colleagues in Chicago to evaluate and discuss exhibitions from a visitor-centered perspective. The second day began with an activity based on the Excellent Judges Framework. Each participant was to use the Framework to evaluate the exhibition on the Soviet Occupation of Georgia in the S. Janashia Museum. During the discussion of the exhibition, it became clear that most of the participants preferred focusing on the content of the exhibition and expressing pride over the antiquity of Georgian culture and the suffering under the Soviets rather than analyzing the exhibition within the context of the Frameworks. One bright spot was the discussion about how to engage underserved communities. Using the Azeri villages between Dmanisi and Tbilisi as an example, they discussed how to do outreach and work with local leaders, choosing to bring them into the museum or doing programming at their site and involving them in the decision-making about content.

On the final day of the workshops, Mr. Mintz talked more about museums and communities. He then assigned a project to six small groups: to brainstorm a program or exhibition at one of their museums and choose one to present. The program had to be designed to attract an audience the museum doesn’t already have (age group, region, ethnic group, etc.). The winner was a program of tours of the GNM’s history collection that would be offered to members of the Georgian military, for which funding could be pursued from the Ministry of Defense.

The day after the workshops ended, Mr. Mintz met with the Education Department staff to discuss the GNM’s proposal to the Open Society Institute (OSI). He pointed out that a proposal like this to OSI, which stressed outreach to diverse audiences, needed also to exhibit some preliminary efforts to communicate with those audiences, to gauge their feelings about GNM’s ideas, and to identify leaders who could be partners in whatever is chosen. He also learned that there was no individual in the museum who coordinated the guide program and was therefore responsible for training, communication, and evaluation. He suggested that filling such a position would give greater assurance that the museum mission, which encompasses the quality of the visitor experience and serving people of diverse cultures, would be met. When he learned from his Georgian colleagues that they do not have access to museum-related literature and publications, Mr. Mintz was struck with the idea that The Fund or the OSI could help facilitate a program to do so.