12th of August 2010

The visitors of Paris’s museums in images

Like the photo blog about their visitors that came out about the museums of New York, today we dedicate one to the visitors of the museums of Paris, taking advantage of the participation in the Rencontres Web-Musées, which we also write about on the blog. The truth is, a certain amount of time has gone by, and there are so many things to talk about on this blog, that it has stayed on our to-do list. Now that the time for holidays has come, to take and look at photos, we would like to share it with you. Read more »

6th of April 2010

Boring, a Museum? Discover and have fun with creative educational initiatives

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: Read more »

26th of March 2010

The unseen work involved in putting on an exhibition

Our latest exhibition, Secret Images. Picasso and Japanese Erotic Prints, has been awarded the ACCA Catalan Art Critics’ Association prize in the Historical Research Exhibitions category. The ACCA 2009 Awards ceremony was held on March 23 in the MACBA, where the prize was received by the Museum’s Director, Pepe Serra, and the two curators, Ricard Bru and Malén Gual. This award represents a much-appreciated recognition of our work and a stimulus to undertake further research along similar lines. We almost feel as if we were dreaming. Not only have we learned a lot and had great fun working on this project, but the exhibition has had a very positive reception from critics and public alike and now we have won the prestigious ACCA Prize, which we have collected so excited. Read more »

3rd of March 2010

The Picasso Museum on Twitter @museupicasso

Yes!!!  We have finally joined Twitter, the social network that we needed to complete the first phase of  our Social Media presence, launched in May 2009. Some of you are maybe wondering, but, weren’t you already on Twitter? And others may ask why weren’t you? Or even , why are you now?

I have answers for all these questions (sort of). The first one is a clear No. And there were several  reasons for that. First, to start small and grow from there. We opened this blog and profiles on Facebook, Delicious, Flickr, Youtube and Slideshare. The most time-demanding for us are the blog and Facebook. Twitter is tricky; it may seem that to post a short message now and then is not much time-consuming. Read more »

21st of January 2010

20 major projects for 2010 in Museu Picasso

We are starting to carry out a number of ambitious projects for this year. It is possible to take this jump forward due to new lines of action and new services (education, activities, research, internet, publics, etc.) that have taken on form and grown at a good pace. There is still a lot to do, in a social, cultural and economic environment that is permanently changing. The museum, thanks to the effort and professionalism of the whole team, continues on its path towards the aim of positioning itself as a centre with a totally consolidated public vocation for generating knowledge around the figure and work of Picasso at an international level, while at the same time closely linked to the social and organisational networks of the city, and activator of processes of creation.

Below is a list of the major projects that we are working on. Some of them starting and to be completed within the year, while others have a longer time scan, and will start and continue a process that will be completed over the next few years, as is the case of the new reasoned catalogue.

Read more »

29th of December 2009

Happy 2010!

Thank you to the readers of this blog, to our fans on Facebook and to our followers on Twitter. Our best wishes for 2010!

6th of October 2009

Some thoughts from the director on the museums of the future

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the current debate surrounding the future of museums.

Of particular interest in this regard is this summer’s debate between the directors of the British Museum and the Tate, Neil MacGregor and Nicholas Serota, and now that the Museu Picasso has just presented the new programme and new lines of action, which are beginning to become a reality, I would like to offer one or two of my own thoughts on the subject.

The museum as a centre of production and space of dialogue. The first thing that is needed is an exercise of self-criticism, in order to move on once and for all from the simplistic conception of the museum as a repository of heritage and offer more heterogeneous and more complex proposals, in keeping with the diversity of today’s public(s). In recent years, society has been evolving increasingly rapidly while museums have changed very little; they have not kept pace, many are still offering cultural products that are too static and rigid.

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24th of August 2009

How do you look after more than 900,000 visitors a year? Taking care of Visitor Services at the Museu Picasso

With close to million visitors a year, open to the public 10 hours a day, six days a week, plus evening activities, like all good museums the world over the Museu Picasso has a great team working in what tends to be known as ‘visitor services’.

The fact is that a million visitors a year isn’t all that much compared with the more than eight million who visit the Louvre, but our museum has something of a handicap in terms of its physical structure of five medieval palaces, connected to one another. A wonderfully rich historical heritage and an excellent example of secular Catalan Gothic architecture, with some wonderful details, the place is a bit of a maze, and it isn’t easy to guarantee a smoothly flowing itinerary.

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10th of August 2009

Want to join our community? The Museu Picasso in Barcelona welcomes you

Participation on the Internet is now synonymous with 2.0: any company or institution nowadays that wants its Internet project to be participatory will obviously make sure to incorporate the tools that social networks make available. In the same way that virtually no museum today is in any doubt about whether or not it needs a website, a presence on the social networks is a natural addition to the active and activating presence on the Internet.

Museums around the world are slowly but inexorably coming into the fold. Those in the U.S. are doing so with real energy (the Brooklyn, MoMA, Metropolitan or Smithsonian are excellent examples), those in Europe, more cautiously (with the notable exception of the UK, especially the Tate, National Gallery or Victoria & Albert). In this country we are among the more timid, but still there are some interesting upcoming initiatives, such as the Guggenheim Bilbao’s WikiDocentes, the Facebook profiles of the Prado, Reina Sofía and Fundació Miró and Youtube profiles such as the MNACTEC_Museu Ciència i Tècnica de Catalunya).

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