30th December 2011

The Museu Picasso’s 2011 in images

The task of choosing the most representative images of this year that is coming to an end was far from easy. Between us, we have worked on a lot of projects! Exhibitions, activities, research and restoration, education, registrar, library, publications, communications, administration, visitor services… it’s a long list. Here, then, is just a taste of what the museum has done in 2011.

Read more »

19th September 2011

Today’s museums seen by postgraduate students / 2

Here is the continuation of the selection of ideas put forward by students from the Postgraduate Course in Museum Management. As you can see, the new waves of museum people have plenty of critical force. Let’s listen carefully to what they have to say.

Intelligent interactive museography: not to trivialization

‘Currently, we can still find museums that belong in the nineteenth century, and others that have exaggerated the formula and become theme parks for family fun.’
Núria C. Read more »

15th July 2011

Our Postgraduate Course in Museum Management under Exam: Assessments and Improvements

The first edition of the new Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Management, run jointly by the Museu Picasso and IDEC-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, has just come to an end and it’s time to take stock. We are doing an internal evaluation at the Museum, we have asked the students for their assessments, and we want to share them with you, the readers of our blog, and with potential future students of the course.

First of all, a figure: 76.2% of the students who took the Postgraduate course would recommend it. Of all the various indicators, this one is especially significant for us. This is not to say that we haven’t identified areas for improvement, which is of course to be expected of a project that has just started, and normal for a venture involving a large staff and a number of different partner institutions.

Postgraduate students in the IDEC classroom. On the right: In the classroom with Pepe Serra director of the Museu Picasso

Read more »

21st January 2011

Top 17 projects of Museu Picasso for 2011

Here we present you a list of the projects we will especially be working on this year that has just started.  In recent weeks the whole team of the museum has been proposing, revising, debating, budgeting, and fixing dates for the list of projects for the immediate future. Here are the top 17, but they are many other working lines and open programmes, some structural, some in specific moments, which the museum is working on.

This year the museum is growing with a new building that will be the Centre of Knowledge and Research.  This will allow us to give a major boost to the areas of debate and study around the work of Picasso and the relation between Picasso and Barcelona, a field in which there is still a lot to research and to discover. Read more »

30th December 2010

2010 of the Picasso Museum in 21 images

By making a choice of the most representative images of the work we have done in the museum this year that is coming to a close, we ourselves have been able to visualise the reach and quantity of the projects in which the whole team has been working! With a relatively small team a lot of work has been carried out.  Whether it has been good or not is up to you to decide.  The rate of participation in the multiple activities organised, plus the more than one million visitors we have received, plus some awards indicate that we are heading in the right direction, but we still have to do more and better.  Your comments and criticisms help us to improve so that the museum becomes a space of more and more knowledge open to debate and participation.

[click on the images to enlarge]

1 2

Read more »

20th May 2010

How to make a museum work: a different Postgraduate course

Postgraduate and Masters Degree courses have been proliferating in an almost vertiginous way in recent years. Training is always a key element, but in times of economic recession it probably is more so. However, between the knowledge acquired in academic training and the necessary requirements and skills for developing professional practice there is often a gap that is difficult to fill. That’s what we intend to do through this Postgraduate course.

How are the loans of works managed? What is done on the day the museums are closed each week? What preventive measures are adopted to preserve the collections? How is a strategic plan produced? How does the storage work? How are the laws that affect museums? How can you attract visitors and, above all, participants? How is the digitisation of the collection done? What opportunities are opened up by the social web or web 2.0? What best practices can be found in museums round the world? The list can go on, but this should give a notion of what we propose to cover. Read more »

9th April 2010

Museums as part of society – and vice versa

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. Read more »

2nd February 2010

Best practices in the management of a museum

The management of cultural institutions, which is talked about a lot nowadays, goes back a long, long time.  Who doesn’t know the Greek or Roman theatres?  They didn’t function by themselves.  For sure, behind the stages, there were people, the majority often anonymous, who made sure that everything functioned correctly.

And what can be said about museums? Throughout the world there have been teams of people, sometimes more numerous, often rather reduced, often referred to as administration, and now linked to resources, who have carried out the ‘functional’ work.

At the Museu Picasso of Barcelona there are a number of us that work in the administration of the centre.  We could call ourselves the back-office.  Everything from the area of production, maintenance, security, management of the public, management of the services and obviously the economic administration.  Without each of these functions, it would be difficult for the museum to open its doors every day and offer the visitors exhibitions, talks, concerts, and all types of activities linked, in our case, to the life and work of Pablo Picasso, or the neighbourhood in which we are located,  La Ribera.

Read more »

24th 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.

Read more »