Nina Simon has a degree in electrical engineering and mathematics, but today she re-engineers museums to make them better.
In 2006, she launched the Museum 2.0 blog as a public forum for her ideas and research about how museums can be more accessible, democratic, flexible and reflective of their communities. She wrote the book The Participatory Museum in 2010, and it’s become a blueprint for museums and institutions to engage meaningfully with more people. The next year she was hired as executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, where she put her ideas into action to turn the once-placid place into a flourishing cultural hub.
Last year she wrote the book The Art of Relevance. It’s filled with lessons and insights on increasing relevance for libraries, public parks, small businesses, theaters, political movements, after-school programs, churches, just about anything, she says, that merges passion with public service.
The book doesn’t have the word “museum” in it. That’s not to signal a move away from foundational museum stuff as much as it suggests an outward expansion on top of it.
Simon’s been taking her message on tour across the nation, and on Thursday, April 13, she brings it to the Salinas Public Library during National Library Week. One part of that message concerns the invitation organizations offer the public to walk through their proverbial doors.
“When you want to make your work relevant to somebody different from you,” she says, “you have to get to know them to know if you’re saying ‘welcome’ or ‘keep out.’”
Case in point: The National Park Service uniform. Simon tells the story of park ranger Betty Reid Soskin, 94. “She wears [her uniform] after work, in the streets of Oakland, because she says, ‘I’m announcing to young people of color a career path and opportunity that I didn’t know existed until I was in my 80s.’”
Then there’s Cam Juarez from Tucson, whose job is to encourage more Latinos to visit Saguaro National Park. He told Simon the uniforms may not be a “welcome sign” to the Latino community, because they look similar to border patrol uniforms.
“That’s what makes this work so complex and interesting,” Simon says. “There’s an amazing museum director [of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art], Dr. Johnnetta Cole, who said the most important document for a museum director to read is the county census. What she meant was, know your community.”