3rd of September 2010

After “ASK a CURATOR” : notes for avaluating a good idea

The 1st September was noteworthy in the museum world for an innovative initiative promoted by the untiring Jim Richardson, Ask a Curator. In short: 343 museums from 23 countries from all over the world put their curators at the disposal of the questions users wanted to ask them through Twitter.

The figure alone for the amount of participation is significant in itself. More than 9.000 tweets have been recorded. But I would like to highlight some other interesting factors. Read more »

20th of July 2010

Discussing Wikipedia & Museums at the Picasso in Barcelona

Do you remember my remarks about the Museums & the Web conference? Well, we’ve just had an informal mini Wikimedia session here in Barcelona. This was prompted by the happy coincidence of three factors: the arrival of Liam Wyatt, who has just concluded his stint as Wikipedian-in-Residence at the British Museum, the growing interest of local museums in what is a real outreach phenomenon, and the dynamism of the Wikipedia community of Catalonia (Vikipèdia). Read more »

28th of June 2010

The students ‘open up’ Las Meninas! Joint Venture between the Escola Deià and the Museu Picasso

On Thursday, 17 June the Museu Picasso hosted the presentation of the book LAS MENINAS # SÈRIE OBERTA, the result of collaborative venture between the Museum and the Escola d’Art i Superior de Disseny Deià. The story begins with an invitation to the city’s art schools with the aim of opening the doors of the Museum and generating dialogues with young design students, encouraging them to take a fresh and freely critical look at the institution.

The Escola Deià, which specializes in interior design and ephemeral architecture, centred the project on the exhibition concept, with a particular focus on the series Las Meninas, one of the most important works in the Museum’s collection. Read more »

22nd of April 2010

The Museu Picasso wins a Best of the Web 2010 award for the most innovative social networks project

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! Read more »

12th of April 2010

The Picasso at the Museums and the Web Conference

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. Read more »

23rd of March 2010

The users have the word: 8 months of the blog at Picasso 2.0

We’ll be giving details and figures in another article soon. In the meantime, today we’re giving the word to you, the users of the blog. We want to thank all of you that have dedicated a few minutes of your time to letting us know your opinion. You’ll find here some of the comments we’ve received in the blog.

Our visitors, online and in person, come from all over the world and comment on any aspect that we’ve highlighted over the last few months through the social networks. This internationality has been well reflected in the participation of the contest Become a fauvist!, just as Cristina says: “(…) What is really curious is seeing where these photos come from, and to check out the international spread of the Museum and its initiatives. Well done.”

Some congratulate us with just a few words “Fantastic!!!” (Olga) commenting on the new presentation of Las Meninas while others are a bit more expressive “The Picasso museum’s doing a great job, it doesn’t matter if you come back every new season. And las Meninas is the star attraction; pity about the colour of the wall, that doesn’t help such a fantastic legacy to stand out. Congratulations.” (José). Read more »

12th of March 2010

In the Picasso Museu we tell stories… with imagination

Last Saturday took place the first “Contes i Tocs” that this Spring Patricia McGill will tell to children and their parents within the museum galleries.

This activity was organised by Marta Iglesias from Public Programmes. I wanted to attend both out of professional interest so as to get to know this new offer for the family public, but also, as a mother, to live this experience with my children.

The participants and Patricia met up in the Pati Finestres of the museum, and that was where the story began. Nice blue coloured monsters with three eyes and one leg, started to spring up in everyone’s imagination, while she made us take hold of a rope, and pulling on it, led us round the rooms of the museum until we reached Las Meninas, where we found more monsters, princesses, cats and dogs, vacuum cleaner-coffee machines, piano-boats, and even the Little Prince and Little Red Riding Hood… The children and their parents added bits to the story and she intertwined the stories while offering a different way of looking at the works of Picasso, based on her words and our imagination, both individually and what we constructed together between us. Read more »

3rd of November 2009

How we chose the winners of Become a Fauvist and more about the process of the competition on Flickr.

It’s now three months since 30 July when we threw ourselves into this photo initiative in parallel with the Kees van Dongen exhibition of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, and last week the short-listed pictures in the Become a Fauvist competition were posted up on Facebook and Flickr. Now, on the blog, we’d like to let you share the sensations of those three months of competition and, above all, show you the winning photos and some of the runners-up.

Become a Fauvist was exciting for us: this was the first interactive experience that we have organized with your help and your contributions. Using Flickr we were able to enjoy this participation to the full, and thanks to your enthusiastic response to the initiative - and taking advantage of the city festivities - extended the competition an extra week to give those of you who still hadn’t snapped the photo you were looking for a little more time.

The jury responsible for selecting the finalists and the winners was made up of the Director of the Museum and the heads of the following departments: Publications, Press and Communication, Photographic Archive and Internet.

Read more »

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).

Read more »