HOW TO SURVIVE A PANDEMIC: UNIQUE APPROACHES TO SUSTAINING

Museum Innovations | Sara Fontes

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The pandemic has been really difficult for all of us, but especially for the arts & culture and the tourism sectors. As emerging professionals in the museum field where these two sectors overlap, it is a scary phenomenon. How will the museum field weather this storm and survive until we get there? Luckily, museums large and small are finding ways to overcome the drop in visitors and funding. 

Cat and Mouse Badge by The British Museum on Sketchfab

Some large museums are promoting and increasing accessibility to their online digital collections. With places like the British Museum, the Uffizi Gallery and the Royal Ontario Museum having virtual reality versions of their permanent exhibits, doing “radio” shows on facebook, 3D recreations of objects and 2D digital photographs of some of their collections.

But what about small museums? How do small museums survive this crazy pandemic when people cannot come through their doors? Some smaller arts institutions are also digitizing and offering their collections for free online, similar to viewing objects and art works in the physical world. John B. Aird Gallery in Toronto is one such place. There are grants available for digitization from the Canada Council for the Arts, but there are limits to the amounts you can submit and receive. There is not always enough grant money for everyone, leading the museum sector to be creative problem solvers.

Traditional Brine Pickles at A Festival in Poland. Source.  

A small museum in Kitchener, instead of its annual picklefest this year, partnered with sponsors to create a pickle box and the box sold out. The Vincent Van Gogh exhibition by Lighthouse Immersive offers a drive-thru version of the Van Gogh show by Atelier des Lumières. A museum in Saskatchewan has started a 50/50 lottery, the type that you would find at a sports game. As with usual 50/50 lotteries, the museum gets to keep 50 of the pool and the winner gets the other half. 

Approximately five people at the Van Gogh Experience Show. They are looking at paintings by Van Gogh being projected on the walls. Source.

In the spirit of creative problem solving and virtual solutions, I will be reviving my predecessor’s "Museum’s on a Budget" series. I’ll be focusing on things useful during the pandemic such as digitization, libraries of things, virtual tours, and 3D object scanning.