Last week the team headed south to the Columbus Museum of Art to check out their Center for Creativity and to chat with the awesome Merilee Mostov. Such a great trip! Such great discussions!

At the moment the museum only has a couple of galleries open as they are in the midst of an expansion and renovation project. It’s set to reopen later in the year, and they’ll have a snazzy new wing when they do. In the meantime, the Creativity Center continues to be open so we headed to Columbus to check it out.

The main spaces are hubs of ideas jam-packed with opportunities for creating, thinking, solving, and playing.

Each of these points was directly connected to works of art that were hung nearby, such as the station that is set up to allow visitors to create their own images using their phones along the lines of photographs by a Russian photographer from the collection displayed on the wall next to it.

The center also includes a space called The Wonder Room that incorporates works created by local artists specifically for the space.

There are opportunities for visitors’ imaginations to run wild.

And the team jumped right in (we will always take an opportunity to play, apparently).

The Imagine the Possibilities installation was really exciting– visitors had created so many different things, all using only one material in only one color. Some of the objects were just amazing, and it was fantastic to see they way that participants built off of one another’s creations.

I was also really impressed with the inclusion of feedback stations throughout both the Center and the museum as a whole. They are taking the responses that they receive at the feedback stations and categorizing and analyzing what they hear from visitors. They get a lot of feedback, which means a lot of data– so much to work with!

I think one of the themes in our museum reconnaissance missions this year has been creativity as a medium of engagement. It’s run, like a thread, throughout the conversations we’ve had with our colleagues and counterparts, and some of the installation at Columbus made me think a lot about what the Denver Museum of Art is doing, as well as some of the things happening at the Art Gallery of Ontario. One important piece that both the Center for Creativity and DAM have in common is real estate (always a commodity in short supply). As we’ve been visiting museums that have incorporated this into their floorplans, we’ve been thinking a lot about what positive experiences we can take away from the installations that can be done without (permanent) space. Are there spaces available for shorter periods of time? What can we do that would last a week? A day? A couple of hours? As we’re winding up our (fiscal) year this month, these are all questions that we’re going to be focusing on in the year to come.

Also, icing on the cake that was a great day out was that on the way back to Cleveland we stopped in at Grandpa’s Cheesebarn. We tasted cheese. We tried out jams. We met Grandpa. It was all the awesomeness you would imagine Grandpa’s Cheesebarn to be.