There are a number of museums around Spain specifically devoted to the works of Pablo Picasso, with their own unique monographic collections. Just recently the Museo Picasso-Colección Eugenio Arias in Buitrago de Lozoya (Madrid) celebrated the 25th anniversary of its opening.

The museum and its collection have a fascinating — and moving — story behind them. Eugenio Arias was Picasso’s barber and friend, and he put together this significant collection on the basis of the works given him by the artist during the twenty-six years of their friendship.

The two men got to know one another in Vallauris in the South of France, where Picasso began making ceramics in 1946 at the Madoura workshop. M. and Mme. Ramié, who owned the pottery, mentioned to Picasso that a Spanish exile had opened a barber’s in the little town, and the artist first visited Arias’s shop in 1948, the year which marks the real start of their friendship, although they had met before, briefly, in Toulouse in 1945.

The works that Picasso gave to Arias were all closely linked to their respective interests and the topics that continually cropped up in their conversations: bulls and bullfighting, politics, and the barber’s trade, in all a total of sixty drawings, ceramics, posters, prints and sculptures.

In the late 80s, when most of the collection was acquired by the Comunidad de Madrid, Eugenio Arias made it a condition of sale that the works were to be on permanent display in his home town of Buitrago de Lozoya. Today the museum that bears his name, managed by the Comunidad de Madrid, is housed on the ground floor of the Town Hall.

Museum’s newsroom

Finally back to Barcelona, being one of the stranded Europeans (new word to me, now too familiar), I’d like to share with you some first impressions. The past week has been a great week for the Museu Picasso.

It began with the interesting Wikipedia –Museums Day which meant for both communities a first approach at such large scale. (I blogged about it, only in Spanish and Catalan). As a direct outcome of our twittering and blogging about it, we received an email from a local wikipedian offering to cooperate and asking about the possibility for a meeting, which of course we are delighted to schedule. And I intend to include some wikipedia monitoring and writing as a practice for our students of the new Postgraduate course about Museum Management that my museum and the University Pompeu Fabra are about to launch next Autumn (more details coming soon).

Meeting Wikipedia-Museums, Denver April 13 2010

After the Wikipedia Encounter, the three intensive days of MW Conference followed (Fotos on flickr). A deluge of good presentations, lively discussions and interactions, some projects in perspective as well. Lots and lots of food for thought (as well as “real” food!). Among the contacts, a few for our brand new Postgraduate course I just mentioned.

At the end of the Conference, double surprise. The good one: the Museu Picasso online community project was awarded with the Best of the Web in the category of Social media!!! We are extremely grateful to MW, to the Jury and, above all, to our audience / users that are the real deservers of the Prize.

Second surprise: the volcano and subsequent cancelled flights. I had my connection in London… On Saturday 17th it was a little stressful, first not knowing how or when we could be back home. To United Airlines I can only say: better watch your info services. When all media and airline companies had informed about cancelled flights, they still kept confirming theirs to London both on their website and on telephone! Once this was settled, and being stranded for a few days, I decided to take the most out of it and, together with also stranded Maria Souza, from Oporto (Portugal), we head to spend those days in New York, from where we’d have our flight back.

These days have proved to be a magnificent opportunity to revisit museums, to have meetings with NY museums (among them the Social media team of MoMA, @MuseumModernArt , thank you, Victor and Allegra!) or the “mobile” meet-up organized by @mia_out for us, stranded, where two museum people, two wikipedians and three designers discussed Wikipedia, mobile interpretation, outsourcing and social media.

With the MoMA Social Media team | Informal meeting on museums and mobile interpretation, NY

To the good memories of MW2010 Conference, I’ll take back with me the nice and unexpected stay in NY, where “stranded Europeans” have been most welcomed! Huge thanks to all NY museums and to @museweb for their support and hospitality.

And… last but not least, the book Twitter for Museums, edited by Museumsetc, was published last week. It contains a chapter where we were offered to explain the @museupicasso experience on Twitter. The chapter can be downloaded for free at http://pea.to/eK.

All in all, due to the Award and to the book, we have been receiving tons of DMs, tweets, RTs and emails. We are immensely grateful to all museum people and @museupicasso friends. More details about MW Conference and other NY museums stuff in other posts to come (asap). Hope to see you soon. All the best.

Conxa Rodà
Project Management
@innova2

This post was going to be a report on and assessment of Museums and the Web 2010, the annual MW conference held in Denver, Colorado, from 13 to 17 April, about which Conxa already advanced some information in her previous post. The conference brought together over 600 specialists from around the world to consider issues such as the uses and design of culture websites, the management of online collections, the construction of social networks in 2.0 environments and mobile multimedia resources for cultural institutions.

That’s what this post was going to be, but something happened at the conference which made us decide to change the focus slightly — something we are very excited about: the Museu Picasso won the award for the best work in the social media!

Each year the M&W presents the Best of the Web awards in recognition of those projects in various Internet-related areas which provide the most creative and effective response to the needs and aims of the museum or institution.

The various award categories include those for best online education project (this year’s winner was the MoMA’s MeetMe project), the best exhibition website (the MoMA again, with the site for the show Bauhaus: Building for Modernity), the best low-cost small-format project (Dulwich Picture Gallery, for Dulwich OnView), research (Victoria & Albert Museum, V&A Search the Collections), innovation (Royal Observatory, Greenwich, SolarStorm) and social networks, the category for which the Museu Picasso was nominated.

The international competition is open to cultural websites from all over the world, which are reviewed by a panel of judges made up of leading professionals from major museums and cultural institutions and web design and software companies. This year’s panel included representatives of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago), the British Museum (London), the Getty Institute (Los Angeles) and the University of Art and Design (Helsinki).

So it was a great honour for our project to be singled out for approval by such experts as the best in its category in 2010. We are very grateful for this recognition of the work we have been doing here at the Museum represents. Of course, this award is really a tribute to all of the Museu Picasso team, whose day-to-day work is what gives us stories to tell and provides the social networks we have constructed with significance.

And we are also very grateful to all of you for reading our blog and keeping in touch with us on Twitter, our fans on Facebook and Flickr and YouTube and all the other social networks we have taken part in: we want you to know that without you none of this would make sense — your contribution really is invaluable to us here at the Museum.

Conxa Rodà and Anna Guarro

For the third year running the Museu Picasso will be taking part this week (in Denver this time round) in the top-level international M&W conference, a real generator of knowledge and ideas about interactive museography, digital communication, mobile applications for museums, social media, the creation of content by the public and a host of related subjects.

In 2008 we ran a session at the Usability Lab presenting the then just revamped Picasso website. In 2009 we were asked to be part of the International Program Committee, which is responsible for, among other things, assessing and orienting the review of papers to be presented at the conference. And as we were going to be in Indianapolis, we decided to make a CRIT Room presentation of some of the improvements we made to the site in its first year of operation. This was an excellent way of publicizing the site — we even found comments on a blog from Sweden — and to cap it all we were given a prize for one of the best posts on the conference’s blog. You can read a report of MW2009 in Patrimoni Gencat blog.

Museums and the Web: www.archimuse.com

This year — 2010 — the Museu Picasso is even more deeply involved. First of all, as members of the Program Committee. The selection of papers has been particularly difficult, because the number of proposals received is four times more than can be accepted. So the short-listing of just 25% of the submissions means applying very strict and well reasoned criteria — as a result of which the highest quality is ensured.

Multi-institutional Collaboration

In addition, this year we will be moderating one of the sessions — the one on multi-institutional collaboration. On the strength of the proposed presentations, this promises to be extremely interesting. We promise to blog every last detail of the session (and the rest of the Conference, of course). At this point let us invite all of you who would like to participate via Twitter to send us your questions or comments during the session itself (Saturday, 17 April at 1.00 p.m. local time (MDT), 9.00 p.m. in Barcelona. The Conference’s hashtag on Twitter is #mw2010. If you add it at the end of your tweet it will appear in the stream of all the tweets generated by the Conference.

Wikipedia

And finally, this year there will be a special pre-Conference day for an unprecedented meeting of selected representatives from museums around the world, including the Museu Picasso, with top editors from Wikipedia. The purpose is to lay the basis for a stable collaboration that will both ensure the accuracy of museum-related content and open up collaboration in the production of such contents by the museums. It’s true that Wikipedia still may contain inaccuracies and omissions, but in recent years the quality control has been getting better and better — and bear in mind we’re talking about the sixth most visited website in the world. Almost all of us have used it at one time or another, so it’s only fair that we should contribute to enhancing it, with a view to providing an even better service to our users. You can now have a look at the preparatory writings for discussion on the Conference website and join in with your opinions, problems or experiences.

Best of the Web

The People’s Choice Voting for the best museum websites is open until 15th April. You don’t need to attend the conference to take part, just register free online and cast your vote. Take a look at the list of nominees you’re sure to make a lot of interesting discoveries. It’s not likely that the Museu Picasso will win, because there are so many really great projects, but the mere fact of having it nominated — we’re in the Social Media category — is a very good way to get known.

For the Museu Picasso, playing an active part in Museums and the Web has already helped us a great deal: knowledge, network and dissemination are the keywords that sum up the values it provides. So we are delighted to be able to give something back by helping the Committee to publicize the Conference. The papers are all now accessible online and #mw2010 can be followed on Twitter.

Conxa Rodà
Project Manager

Are there any questions or issues you would like to see discussed at the Museums and the Web Conference?

As head of the Visitor Services department I have just spent three days visiting some of the most famous museums in the city of London – the British Museum, the National Gallery, Tate Britain and Tate Modern.

In all of these museums I had the pleasure of meeting the heads of the various departments responsible for visitor services and of discussing with them issues to do with guided tours, audio guides, activities, accessibility, complaints, signage and tour management, including others.

Like the vast majority of cultural institutions in Britain, these museums believe that art and culture are not a luxury but a part of the DNA of a country or city and, as such, a necessity.

At the same time, and again on the principle that art and culture are part of the social fabric, these museums approach their working from the perspective that visitors and workers alike should feel they are part of the cultural institutions in question, creating social networks, collectives and initiatives not just for large numbers of people but also for a wide spectrum of audiences.

In seeking to achieve the goals of involving the public and making the institution an integral part of society the museums have generated a wide variety of activities: for example, the Tate Modern has become a regular favourite with local families, the British Museum also offers a range of special activities for children and young people and the National Gallery has, among other things, set up a series of agreements with the universities.

The extension of opening times has also made it easier for more people to visit the museums, and a wide range of guided tours aimed both at the general public and at specific groups, with an emphasis on accessibility, has opened up the museums’ contents to new audiences, with the invaluable assistance of the many volunteers who freely give their time and talents to the museum as part of their interest in and commitment to the legacy they conserve.

In all of these institutions feedback from the public and the museum staff is very important, and they all have questionnaires and comments forms for visitors to express their views and make suggestions. At the Tate Modern, for example, there are walls displaying the observations of visitors and workers, whether those delivered in situ or received online.

All of these factors and many more help visitors feel they are part of the culture and are actively involved in the creation and construction of a museum – not merely observers but participants who contribute to the construction of the institution and its programmes.

Here at the Museu Picasso we are opening up new lines of development in Education, Activities and Public Programmes. Enriching exchanges like this one with museums with such a wealth of experience help us understand where we are and where we are going, making the museum into a truly accessible space, generating knowledge and building the community.

Deirdre Haughey
Visitor Services

What experiences or ideas do you have on how virtual and in situ actions can be integrated in the museum? In institutions with a high online participation, how can this be incorporated to the visit to the museum?

We are launching the Meeting Point Season of Multidisciplinary Performing Arts, a brand new venture conceived as an exploration of how the languages of circus, dance and music interrelated and in turn give rise to new languages and new disciplines.

These creative fields are very close to the processes and interests of Pablo Picasso, but at the same time they are disciplines that have undergone a formal and conceptual evolution. Here at the Museum we wanted to explore this evolution and contribute to a tremendously vital cultural moment that is of great relevance today.

The season is also a development of an earlier project, Sundays at the Picasso, from which it has inherited its small format, its proximity to the public and its commitment to performers of the highest quality.

We also want to thank the season’s curators, Francesc Casadesús and Jordi Fondevila, for their magnificent work, and the Mercat de les Flors for their invaluable cooperation. The relationship between the Museum and the Mercat, two institutions which might appear to have very different interests and fields of action, has been very fruitful and rewarding for both, an experience of sharing knowledge and skills that we hope to repeat and extend to include other institutions.

Our first guests are CaboSanRoque and their Machine Music. We’re sure you’ll love them! It’s a great pleasure to give them (and give you) a very warm welcome!

Anna Guarro
Public Programms

It’s just two years ago now that we started educational activities at the Picasso: in April 2008 we launched a pilot project with four models of visits-cum-workshop. The service and the range of options have kept on growing, but we are eager to go still further: issues of accessibility, the museum outside the museum, expanding the virtual education space… In light of all this a visit to Expodidàctica was obviously a great way to find out what other institutions are doing, learn about new materials and gather the latest information on the use of cutting-edge technologies in the fields of art and education.

I visited the Fair two days running and in addition to chatting with a number of groups I took part in several workshops. I want to tell you about two proposals in particular — a project and a workshop:

The Travelling Museum, from the Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona, is a project designed to open doors, to take the museum out beyond its walls to all those who want to experience, learn about and work with all that the museum has to give us but are unable to make a visit in person. Despite the difference in subject areas it was very interesting and useful to get to know the project at first hand. Many of the objectives are common to the whole spectrum of educational initiatives and absolutely essential starting points: introducing the subject, stimulating people’s interest, curiosity and desire to know and learn, promote active critical learning, enhancing communication skills, participating in a process of discovery in a group, evaluating and respecting the material, enjoying the activities and having fun. For all these reasons and more the project was awarded 3rd prize Innova at Expodidàctica, and I rate very highly everything it has to offer us.

Animo, from the Utani collective, is a fun-to-use educational tool for creating audio-visual animations. The group that developed it defines it as a learning tool which uses a contemporary language and adapts readily to any age of user, making the most of their creativity. Among its many great features it makes the working process stimulating and fun, allowing audio-visuals to be created around the concepts worked with in a short time, encouraging teamwork and using technologies in a transverse way. I must also tell you that it doesn’t take a lot of explanations to be able to use it: four of us were given 15 minutes with the tool and asked to make a short with a few dolls and some odds and ends. We made our first animation with no advance preparation, and in the process took part an open and entertaining dialogue about what we wanted to do, came to an agreement about how we wanted to do it, had fun developing it, felt satisfied with the result (a bit too short, perhaps, but attractive and very quick) and really enjoyed ourselves.

I think that with just these two proposals we have plenty of ideas to be going on with… many thanks to their creators and to all the others who made this such an enriching experience.

Maria Alcover
Education