country
activities

Kiev, Ukraine

Seminar
August 31-September 6, 2008

Consultants: Deborah Ziska and Catherine Schwoeffermann

Last year, The Fund received a request to assist museums in Ukraine with their communications, marketing, and fundraising efforts. To this end, The Fund organized a four-day seminar, Museum Exhibitions, Communications, and Public Outreach, which was led by Fund consultants Deborah Ziska, Chief of Press and Public Information at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and Catherine Schwoeffermann, Executive Director of The Stewart W. and Wilma C. Hoyt Foundation in Binghamton, New York. The seminar was hosted by Ihor Poshyvailo, Deputy Director of the Ivan Honchar Museum, and Olha Krekoten, Cultural Affairs Assistant at the US Embassy in Kiev. Thank you to the Ivan Honchar Museum for hosting the seminar and the US Embassy for their support in making the seminar possible.

Forty participants attended the seminar and included 38 Ukrainian directors and senior staff primarily from art, ethnographic, and history museums in Kiev and the surrounding suburbs. Two women, one from Ukraine and one from The Netherlands, represented the Delegation of the European Commission to Ukraine.

After welcoming remarks from museum director Petro Honchar, Ms. Krekoten gave a brief history of Fund seminars in Ukraine and explained the mission of The Fund and the goals of the seminar. Seminar organizers had requested a short presentation on trends in U.S. museums in the 21st Century, which Ms. Ziska gave. Her presentation emphasized rising attendance, community outreach, interactivity, family programs, the use of communications technology, and branding.

Ms. Schwoeffermann’s presentation focused on exhibition planning, development, and interpretation, especially how to integrate issues of cultural equity, respect, and acceptance. She explained how she creates exhibitions that are interdisciplinary and experiential while emphasizing the power of story.

By highlighting four major exhibitions and related education and public programs, she illustrated how exhibitions could be effective without being expensive, as well as many other considerations, such as positioning of objects to show similarities, creating vistas to draw people forward, and various ways to tell the objects’ stories.

In order to illustrate the power of social media and the web to connect people of all cultures, Ms. Ziska began her presentation with a popular feature on YouTube.com that shows a young man named Matt dancing to music in various countries throughout the world. She then displayed a variety of corporate logos and introduced the concept of branding to illustrate how people’s feelings about corporations often fit with the company’s brand. This was followed by a discussion of how museums and their exhibitions can also be branded.

The primary topics of Ms. Ziska’s presentation were the elements of a promotional campaign for an exhibition. She also showed the participants how they could utilize social media for promotion. Actual examples of branding that targeted young adults were presented from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art in Washington, DC. Flyers, bookmarks, and postcards and their avenues of distribution to target audiences were presented as effective, low-budget ways to promote exhibitions.

Ms. Ziska ended her presentation with another YouTube video of Matt; this time he was joined by natives of the countries, all dancing together with great joie de vivre. She explained that one can dance alone, but if others are invited and welcomed to join, they often will do so. Mr. Poshyvailo requested that the whole group do a similar dance on the seminar’s last day and videotape it for YouTube.

During the seminar, the participants were divided into four working groups, an idea that was initially met with some skepticism. At Ms. Schwoeffermann’s suggestion, each group was assigned to one of four exhibits, and they were asked to spend one hour visiting or touring them accompanied by presenters and consultants. They were encouraged to assign people in their group to lead, record, and produce the presentation, as well as to consider multimedia, such as jpegs, Web sites, white board illustrations, or actual examples of objects. It was apparent that they continued to do research and communicate overnight; all four groups made creative use of multimedia. In addition to resourcefulness, creative problem-solving, and respect for each member’s contribution, each group demonstrated that they thoroughly understood the presentations and assignments. Overall the presentations were enthusiastic, thought-provoking, and professional. Ms. Honchar was so impressed with one group’s reconceptualization of an exhibit that she asked the group to advise the museum on an upcoming exhibition.

At the request of the participants, the end of each day was devoted to an open-question forum with Ms. Ziska. Subjects ranged from how exhibitions are developed and their timelines to standards of security.

The seminar ended with the hosts, presenters, and participants dancing to the music in Matt’s YouTube video, which was videotaped for a potential posting on YouTube. Judging by the high level of participation, an expressed commitment by participants to use the knowledge gained at the seminar, and requests for additional seminars, the seminar was a great success.