#55: Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art)

-- AI-Generated --

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:00:00]:
It also makes it dynamic rather than static. You're physically moving through all these different interactives and it supports the art. Everything we do at Cleveland Museum of Art is about supporting the art. It's never technology for technology's sake. It's used to attract and understand, not to distract.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:22]:
Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:30]:
Welcome to the lay of the land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern. And today we are taking a visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Our guest is Jane Alexander, who is the chief digital information officer for the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she is responsible for creating awe inspiring and iterative digital projects supporting a vision of innovation, of technology implementation, and of digital transformation that exemplify the CMA's mission. In her tenure at the museum, Jane has moved the organization to be a data driven, forward thinking institution through championing endeavors like the Open Access Initiative in 2019, allowing the public to share, collaborate, remix, and reuse high resolution images of 30,000 public domain artworks, as well as the metadata for 61,000 artworks for commercial and noncommercial purposes. Jane has led many iterations of ArtLens Gallery, originally known as Gallery 1. This world renowned innovative experience uses cutting edge technology to inspire visitors to look closer, dive deeper, and connect with the museum's encyclopedic collection. Jane also leads the development of digital experiences, which includes revealing Krishna, an unprecedented immersive mixed reality exposition, which opened in November of 20 21.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:05]:
An entirely new museum experience where technology is used alongside exceptional Cambodian artworks to tell the story of these objects and their restoration. This will be the first scholarly exhibition of its kind. Prior to joining the CMA Jane developed and directed Columbia University's distance education program and has served as the technology director and design consultant to Frank Gehry's Peter B Lewis campus at Case Western Reserve University and as the virtual CIO to the Great Lakes Science Center. This was really cool. So, I hope you all enjoy my conversation with Jane Alexander.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:51]:
So I wanted to start really with your role as the chief digital information officer for the Cleveland Museum of Art. I feel like it's probably one of the coolest jobs that might exist. But I I'd love if we could just kind of baseline, how do you describe your role and responsibilities, and we'll we'll go from there.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:03:13]:
So, I've been at the museum a decade. The mission of the museum since 1916 has to been has been to create transformative experiences for the benefit of all forever, which I found fascinating that in 19 16, that was the mission statement, and it's currently our mission statement. So I joined during the building project when we had a $320,000,000 addition restoration of the entire building, and so I was brought up brought in, in 2010 in the middle of that. And, as part of that, not only, all the infrastructure and storage and everything we need to do in a building, but there was going to be a space dedicated to the intersection of art and technology, giving people toolsets to look closer and understand art, and take away the intimidation of an art museum. So my role really is to, with a fabulous team and multiple partners and cross collaboration, create awe inspiring, iterative digital projects that really give people ways that make art matter to multiple audiences. As part of my job, I I mean, I oversee everything from, you know, outward facing, but to all the applications in the entire museum from ticketing to donors to our collection databases, our digital asset management databases, which, all everything we do pulls from one source of truth, so that's where all the data data lives. We also oversee all the capture of analytics through all these different systems that we're facing and, the actual systems themselves. And then they, oversee cybersecurity, Wi Fi, storage, everything, like infrastructure wise, and then, of course, the support.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:05:19]:
The not only the help desk for within the museum staff, but outward facing, we call them ArtLens Techs, to remove any barriers of technology for visitors so that visitors can always be focused on the art, not the interface.

Jeffrey Stern [00:05:34]:
Can you tell us a little bit about what drew you respectively to the worlds of art and technology and and their intersection? How did you get to to where you are today?

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:05:45]:
Well, I grew up in, New York and went to museums all the time, but I don't have an art history degree. I have a applied mathematics and an architecture degree, so I love the spaces, but I myself, except for reading the didactic next to the artwork, really didn't have didn't know what else to do. And then also having, well, now my girls are all, young adults, but 10 years ago, even we had always, from when they were young, gone to museums, it's a great space, and we would do different things to get the kids to look closer, and one game I used to play is find the baby because in art museums there's lots of babies in the

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:29]:
There are quite a few years.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:06:31]:
There's babies all over. So the idea that I had the opportunity to think differently and give people an introduction so that they truly could understand how to look at composition, be it abstract composition or geometric composition, that they could understand symbolism, that they could understand that there's an actual purpose to art objects, and kind of all through gameplay. And with these and even just get familiar with the collection through creation and, deep diving, and by having those tool sets, you'll be able to go into the galleries comfortable and not only recognize artworks, but they'd be able to dive deeper at a different level.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:14]:
Yeah. There there's a lot of topics I'd love to explore with you here about kind of this intersection of art and technology and innovation. But I I wanna kinda pull on something you mentioned in the beginning, the idea that I don't, I don't have the phrase verbatim, but that this vision is about the future and kind of forever into the future. And in, in many ways, I think from the work that I've seen from you and from the museum is about kind of creating the museum of the future and and experimenting with, like, what that actually looks like. And so I I'd love to just maybe start with some some context on on some of the projects that you've overseen, and and we'll we'll kinda go deeper onto each of them and and explore them because they're they're all really interesting in their own right, but just to kinda level set for for everyone listening.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:08:05]:
Well, yeah. I I mean, I've had, as you said, I have a dream job and I've had the pleasure of really doing things that, I mean, our art museum is, I really will say, it's the most digitally innovative art museum in the world. I have not, I've been lucky enough to gone everywhere and, you know, we really even we really have been experimental but iterative. We constantly build on what we learn. We don't do any one off projects. I mean, a lot of times museums get a grant, and they'll do some gadget, and it they you know, it's sort of out of date before it even launches or the content isn't easily updated or they've hired a firm to do it and now they have to spend more money. And so from the very beginning, when I took this job, I knew that hardware changes all the time. In 2010, when we talked about even, the app that would, have every object in the museum at all times so museums' artworks go on and off each week.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:09:10]:
Like, 200 objects can change what's on view all the time. And so wouldn't it be nice if you had a device that wherever you are, it would let you know where, you know, you could have, but you create your own you could personalize your tours, you could look up any information, you could find where you could go, and that it would connect to that big visualization of our collection, our collection wall, that anything that you see, you know, it kinda democratizes the entire collection. And when you choose something, it is saved directly to your phone, and then the phone could take you directly to the piece. At the time, it was like, well, do people are people even using iPhones? Are we our audience back then was 55 plus. And it was a year, I will tell you, in 2012 when we launched that everybody was getting an iPad, it seemed, for the holidays because they would bring it into our ArtLens techs and ask them to download ArtLens. The hardware is changing all the time, so it really has to be about the back end. It has to be about how you're setting up your content and how, and that everything is API driven. And by doing that and years of iteration on that, we're really able to focus on the learning goals of when we're creating something and focus on the outward facing experience.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:10:25]:
So that's been sort of the philosophy from the beginning. In 2016, we redid we began to redo gallery 1 and changed everything to ArtLens Gallery and we did that because I had begun to notice that we had these beautiful interfaces in, the main space, the Art Lens exhibition, combines actual masterworks with digital, so that you kind of play something, get the concept, and then look at the go and look at the art, see the art, play the game, and look at the art again, again, giving you a way to look closer. And I noticed that you can have the best interface in the world and people are intimidated, they overthink interface. Meanwhile, my daughter at the time was 8 or 9, and she would take my phone and download Angry Birds, and I would be like, who taught you that? Who taught you how to play that? It was like, no one. And I realized that digital natives, the way they learn is that they kinda just touch and move, and if their brain kind of is, like, they get it, and then they start over and they play. And I thought, what if we remove all the interfaces, remove all the touch screens, and make everything gesture based, and, like, could that happen, like, without alienating our non digital natives? And what we found and so 2016 and 217, we redid everything to, remove the touchscreen and we actually engaged the digital natives that we weren't really engaging the first time, and more people were now interacting because if you design something well and they watch how it works, anyone, everyone plays. So all different ages, could work that way. So that was a big change in how we thought about ArtLens Gallery.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:12:13]:
I will say other things that we've done that, I mean, and that's ongoing or we're always thinking and, honestly, in the next year, we're really thinking about, again, the museum of the future, and with everything that's been going on, you know, how do we make a museum multiple voices? How do we make art relevant and matter to more people? So during, you know, March 2020 when the museum closed down and we went home, lots of museums were putting up, you know, videos they had made and those sort of virtual Google tours. And to me, those weren't relevant relevant or engaging. So we really took on thinking about audiences from home. Everybody from the like, how does a member how are we gonna keep our members when they're not able to go to the museum? What do members need? Versus, what do all these teachers and students and college students who are now working from home? What about all of us? What about workers who the, where they work the place, those moments, those watercolor moments that we, our team, you know, works at an art museum where there's all this art around you, what can we create for them? And we ended up doing a few, using artificial intelligent games. We did videos at the very beginning about from curators from home, on what's on their mind, and it was everything from, you know, they'd pick an artwork and talk about loneliness, or they would talk about the need for a haircut from a Grecian Urn, and everything that was going on. And then as the world opened up a little and the museum was open again, we went back into other types of videos. And we and when the museum was closed, we also had a set of conservation videos because even though we were all home, people still needed to care for these artworks. And so we constantly did different things as things were changing, making things relevant.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:14:11]:
And I do remember in the fall of 2020 when we at the you know, back we all thought that by the fall, everybody oh, kids would be back in school, college kids wouldn't be online, and we created ArtLens AI, which I'm really proud of and I really recommend taking a look at, which it was share your view. And so you are no longer in the classroom, so you take a photo from where you are and you upload it chart lens AI, and it matches it with an object from our collection. Everything we do, because it's API driven, automatically takes you to the artwork and then all the metadata and all the videos and things that are associated with that. So we constantly are always thinking about audience. We're thinking about learning goals, and, we constantly are innovating and, iterating on things we've already learned. And I guess the thing right now that's super exciting that, no, we have a state of the art exhibition called Revealing Krishna. It is this scholarly exhibition about the exchange of fragments and the cooperation and stewardship between the National Museum of Cambodia and Cleveland Museum of Art. Basically, we have an object, our Krishna, which was cons you know, that that different parts were found in the seventies and conserved and it was in the galleries.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:15:35]:
And through technology, and in 2014 through 16, they realized that it was conserved incorrectly and that the some of the parts were were belonged to a different sculpture. So we actually exchanged fragments to recon and so cam the National Museum of Cambodia reconstructed the object, and we did. Very fascinating, but very hard for an average visitor to walk into a gallery and see fragmented sculpture and get and understand the story. So, I worked very closely with the curator to say, this is a chance that mixed reality can make a difference. Non western shows aren't usually as popular because people just aren't aware of the artwork. They don't have a relationship with it. So we really we we created a couple of goals, and the first one was a lot of people don't know where Cambodia is, let let alone Phnom Da, where these 8 gods, including our Krishna and their Krishna, are from. And so we started with immersive video where you walk through cinematic view, and you travel the waterways to Panamda.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:16:51]:
And that alone was different. Understanding what the landscape looked like, what it felt like, you know, traveling to there. And then there's another component is all 8 gods, we actually have loan the the on the exhibition currently, there's 4 4 of the sculptures, but the other 4 couldn't travel because they were fragile or too large. And so we made life size photogrammetry where you can interact, gesture based wise, interact with each god to see different hotspots and understand their iconography. So again, you're now now by doing that, you can see more than you can see actually when looking at the sculpture. So we find people do that. They have ways of looking at the artwork and actually go back to the actual object. But the big thing we did was a HoloLens 2, tour.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:17:43]:
And it's one of the first only tour I know of in that you don't go into a space with a group of people and and hear the story. We wanted to make sure because we knew we had to onboard people who were scholars, people who knew nothing about the artwork. Yeah. People who had never used technology, people who knew technology. And so it's a whole it's we kinda set it up and we need to get a lot of people through it. So we set it up almost like a ride where, you know, every 2 minutes, a group of 6 leave this there's 6 different stations and off they go to Pananda, and from Pananda they go to Brussels where these fragments were found in the Stokely Palace, and then they go to this garden where they were buried and recovered, and then they go to the conservation labs where you actually see the parts and how they were exchanged and what worked and what didn't work. And then in the last station, and this is where digital also is truly helpful, is you we worked, and everything always has to be actually authentic. So we have exactly what the sculpture in the cave temple was found, what it looked like, with the jewelry it would be wearing, all polished, not the weathered stone that you see in the gallery.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:18:59]:
So you're putting everything in original context because sculptures and pedestals and galleries are very hard to understand. So after you have that, you then walk into that gallery where those sculptures are and you have a whole different way of looking at them.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:15]:
Yeah. I it's really such a cool idea because I remember I also grew up in New York and went to all these museums and you get these guided tours and they bring you through and they tell you the stories, but you have to like, make it up in your head, what it all looks like and the the size, the scale of it, all the context around it. And I imagine it's just kind of this fascinating experience to actually kind of experience it as it was in the context with all of the this other information around it that is accessible in a way where you don't have to imagine what it what it looks like.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:19:48]:
It also makes it dynamic rather than static. You're physically moving through all these different interactives, and it supports the art. Everything we do at Cleveland Museum of Art is about supporting the art, It's never technology for technology's sake. It's used to attract and understand, not to distract. And so, I mean, the word immersion is everywhere right now, including, like, immersive Van Gogh. And when people say, oh, I'm not into ours is very different. That is, you know, a lot of projectors and a 30 minute video made from images in Van Gogh's collection. But ours is always about using creating things that bring you to the actual art, bring you to understanding, bringing you to learning more and it's not just which is fine.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:20:46]:
Sometimes an experience by itself is fine just to just to sit and watch, but this is really we create tool sets to bring you into the the experience and start your relationship with that object and hopefully with the entire Cambodian collection and all of our Asian collections.

Jeffrey Stern [00:21:04]:
Yeah. I know. It's it's a few things there I wanted to to ask you about, but that idea you mentioned of designing for the digital native, it feels like very clear what the use of technology unlocks and affords that kind of the traditional museum experience lacks. And and one of the the phrases I kept thinking about is as I kind of prepared for our conversation today was was state of the art and how it's just kind of funny that the word art is used to refer both to art and kind of antiquity, but also truly the most future state. And I I thought it was kind of fun because what you're doing is kind of stewarding the past and history, but also, like, you're saying, like, it's for the art and not for the technology's sake. It's it's about accessibility of the art. But with that, I wanted to ask kind of about a few maybe specifics because I I don't my sense is that, most people probably don't think about museums as highly innovative organizations. But, obviously, how you think about it is very different.

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:11]:
And so one of the ideas you mentioned was kind of this iterative process, and I wanted to hear how you think about and and leverage the use of data and kind of how it drives your decision making.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:22:22]:
Well, I'm a data lover, first of all, and I well, I'll use as our we we we capture analytics on everything, and we also work with evaluation teams and the data to make decisions, going forward and what works and not works. 1 in the gallery 1 from the very beginning, everyone like, I mean, we launched it and I went to a conference a month later and I was like, oh, it's amazing. And then they were like, does it work? You know? And, and then the purpose of gallery 1 I mean, technically everything works, but the purpose, the goal was to get people into the galleries, to give them the tool sets to look closer and dive deeper, and have an emotional connection with our art. So we did do a study and, we, you know, through Meraki endpoints, we collect all this data. And, we were able to show that people who spent over 5 minutes in ArtLens gallery spent 30 minutes to an hour in addition in the galleries. They also went to more galleries and they did and they went to the store too. But that was interesting. But then the evaluations, that's the data.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:23:37]:
The evaluations, I think this is very complex. There's a white paper on our line if anyone's interested in it. But one of the other takeaways is that people who went through ArtLens Gallery that they self assessed when they left the museum, they had learned a lot more. They were taking away a lot more from their experience than the people who skipped it. And so, again, those were two things that said, oh, okay. This is working. And just as we were diving into more, and different ways of thinking, when we as you know, we all went home in March 2020. And we were kind of bummed because we were working on this revealing Krishna exhibition, and we were just prototyping of it.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:24:23]:
And I told the team, this is an opportunity to really think differently because everything's online. We're now everything is going through us, and you'll appreciate this since you're in New York. Cleveland has some remarkable you know, we have the Cleveland Museum of Art, we have the orchestra, we have the metro parks, But the rest of the world doesn't know it. Although we think they do, they don't know. So if we're you're not a East Coast or a West Coast Museum, you can I mean, yes, scholars know about our collection, but the pandemic was an opportunity because place didn't matter? It was all, like, who had the best tool sets online? Where was it easy to download? Where was their things that were constantly being updated and new information? So we did we had a cross collaborative team, people from interpretation, education, design, technology, digital, and, we had weekly meetings on the projects we were working, and we had weekly analytics. And it started off with, like, 4 pages. It was a 20 page report each week where we had visualizations and we looked at for our live events. You know, people kept wanting to take it was it was also really helpful to to help the museum think differently.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:25:38]:
Peep you know, we would have normally a 2 hour member party, and people wanted to put that online. It's like peep that you can't translate. You have to think about it differently. And it was hard to tell people 30 minutes is is really the the sweet spot for doing these kind of programs. And even though some people will stay on till the end or whatnot, we looked at the data. We showed when people jumped off. We showed that at q and a, how many people stayed on which on certain talks and how many jumped off as soon as we got to that. We looked at video lengths because we're making all these different kind of videos.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:26:11]:
And we now are doing a whole series that we're continuing with called Art in 60 seconds. And, it was especially when people were being zoomed out and the and not only did those videos get more hits, but people watched longer, the 62nd video, than the 3 minute video sometimes. You know? And so it showed, like, we were able to say, you know, Shay, like, this is actually more effective, you know, if you do all this work and no one's viewing them or watching it, you can do it. So analytics are extremely important. Prototyping is another thing that's unbelievably appropriate, especially for this exhibition. We had to prototype the journey, the the 360 video, multiple times so that the blending was right, and because we have to build in another space, that was the thing that was very important. The accuracy of the content is extremely important. So we, worked very closely with the scholars that are involved in it.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:27:08]:
The accessibility, the UX, and the UI of everything, so that, again, it's about the art. Even, oh my god, what an incredible story. I had no idea that this is how museums you know, this is why museums have artifacts in their collections. There's all this talk about, you know, during wartime when different things are looted and, you know, everything should just live in the where they came from, but this was a case that showed the best practice and that not only with working with the National of Cambodia were we able to tell this great story, but we have create we have the resources that we've created of all 8 gods photogrammetry that is on the website that anybody can use, we can we have a HoloLens, software that can be used around the world. I mean, there are multiple reuses of assets that would never be able to be brought to to so many people.

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:11]:
Yeah. It introduces a few ideas I I wanted to to bring up with you as well. One is of all the initiatives that I've seen, I think the open access one is really fascinating because I think it it speaks to a few of the ideas you've introduced so far, but but one that struck me was like the just percentage of things that are displayed publicly in the museum is such a small percentage of what the museum has. And there's really this enormous collection of of artwork that people don't get to see. And perhaps you can just describe a little bit what the open access initiative is, but it really seems to be innovative in a lot of fronts, both in terms of how people like myself as a museum goer get to interface with art that they wouldn't get to see otherwise, but also the legal framework around it, like creative comments, public domain, provenance, all these kinds of things. So I'd love if you could just maybe explain what it is and and why it's important.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:29:12]:
Sure. Well, I'll step back a second in that, you know, a lot of times I get call from different organizations and museums around the world, like, we wanna do what you're doing. You know, Who did you use to make that, or what did you do to do that? And I'm always like, are you do you guys have a digitized collection? Because that's where you have to start. You have to start with digitizing your collection. And before I came, during the building getting in 2,007, when the building project began, they had to take every object off you, and they had the foresight to begin to photograph that. So that was, like, step 1. And we currently we're almost at we're at almost at I just looked at the analytics today. We're almost at 98% fully digitized of the entire collection.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:59]:
Wow.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:30:00]:
And so digitized collections is important. But then also, the digital asset management systems and the, collection you know, it's reliable, but being able to pull from it means that as the data changes, as a curator finds out that something discovers it's a new date or writes a new didactic or realizes that there's a different title to this artwork, it doesn't you don't have to update anywhere else. It updates everywhere. It updates on collection online. It opens up in our open access. It opens up in the 20 different interactives it can be in. And so by having one source of truth, it's also easy to know that everything is always accurate. So digitizing collections has always been the number one thing.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:30:50]:
I had really wanted, we're a free museum, and so it was the next logical step to have an open access collection. And what open access is is that objects that are perceived in the public domain are available to the public to, share, reuse for any way they want, even commercially. And that's very scary to a museum. And we were not the 1st museum to go open access, but when I saw, like, the Rijksmuseum and the Met Museum, once I heard that when our director was in, 2/18 was like, let's do it. I was like, oh, great. That's gonna be easy. We already have the back end in place. I wanna make sure everything's available on GitHub.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:31:36]:
I wanna make sure everything is downloadable in our API. But then I started to look at the different sites, and I realized they didn't have a good API. It wasn't as searchable. And everyone we have now sort of led the charge on a best practice, which is really good. But my other thing is when I went to sites, it was very hard to understand, you know, how can I download this? What is open access? It's different licensing also. And then sometimes you you'd be able to use it, but you still had to get permission or you could only use it for educational purposes. So I wanted, creative commons 0, which is the most open practice. And museums in the past were about they used to make money from, you know, people would pay to be able to use an image in a book or something like that.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:32:22]:
And so something's in the public domain. We went from protecting everything to really we're caretakers. And as caretakers, we should be sharing this. And we don't we don't decide what you wanna use it for. It is it is it is your choice to how to use it. And by by having top we also the other thing I want to make sure is that we offered a lot of times when you download objects in open access, it's not a large resolution. We wanted everything to be high res tips. We're gonna do it.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:32:55]:
Wanna do it right. You know? And, I think it was the director of the reichs museum said once when they did open access, you know, people always are, especially now with people having phones and everything, you know, are have use kind of the wrong image of an object of a masterwork. So why not us provide the actual correct image, you know, for the public? The other thing is by having an open access and making it useful, it was to me that all the metadata associated with it was important. So a lot of times in open access, they didn't include the didactic, the description of the artwork. They didn't include the provenance. They didn't include the exhibition history or the citations because there's this feeling like, well, it's always being discovered and it's not it's gonna be changing it, you know. But we're all gonna be dead before the research is done on all these objects. So and by having an API, as things change, you update it.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:33:49]:
So I really fought for, provenance be available. And by having all those we have 36 fields of metadata associated with an object. If it's known, it's up to 36 fields. By having that along with the image, you actually keep the scholarship, the thing that people are scared about with open access. And we're in multiple repositories now. We were just looking at Wikimedia this last month. They have part of the month, 3 objects, and they picked 3 of them were right from our collection. And we had, I'm gonna say the wrong number, but I do know, like, we've had 8,000,000 views from Wikimedia alone on Cleveland Museum of Art's collection.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:34:32]:
So we're becoming a resource for everybody to use, for not only scholars or teachers or museum goers, but it can be used in multiple ways. People use our collection for visualizations. NASA used it for a visualization project that, you know, wasn't about the art, but was about looking at the use of metadata with art. So it's it brings again it makes our objects and what what makes art matter to a lot more audiences and not just from the voice of the sort of the single voices, but multiple voices.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:06]:
Yeah. I think one of the really powerful and cool things about making stuff open is that people can build on it, and it's not you don't always know what they're gonna build. And those are those are some really interesting examples. I I was wondering, like, of the things you've seen people build on top of this stuff, what have been maybe the most surprising projects or or things of that nature?

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:35:29]:
During COVID, when everybody's Netflixing and streaming, I did not see it myself, but my 2 amazing project managers and my daughter, no, the the show, Bridgerton, which was like the number one show on Netflix at some point during COVID, had 2 of our artworks in it. Everyone saw it. Everyone was going crazy. The interesting thing when you looked at the analytics, the ticks to the actual artwork went way up. People saw it, and they actually went to the collection online. That also happened with HBO Hacks was on, and there's an object called, it's a Gauguin object that was in the show. But the thing recently that was crazy, some people say controversial, but I don't say think it is at all. There was always this worry about, you know, when I wanted to do open access.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:36:24]:
Well, what if if people don't, you know, use an object and something we don't like, like, that's okay. You know? Like, they were like, what about if someone uses it on the side of a a milk carton? I'd be like, that would be great. I mean, again, it's actually it's growing your relationship and knowing the collection. And I don't know if I think everyone's seen it, but the very first ad for meta for Facebook's meta made this video from an object in our collection. We had no idea, except that on Monday morning, our object went through the roof. And then the next week had all these articles about the company and Facebook and all all this, but meanwhile, they would mention, oh, and the object is from the Cleveland Museum of Art. And so that object by an artist who was a little crazy in his time and was actually a tax collector, you know, I almost think he would've like, his object, and he's a famous artist, but was, like, looked at constantly. And it's still it's one it's the top one that's we just went through the analytics.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:37:33]:
It's the top object looked at. And I think that's great. Because people were like, oh, I this ad, it's so awful and Facebook's evil and, you know, I just saw comments online. But what I laughed about was, yeah, but everybody went to the original artwork. Everyone went and looked at the original artwork, not the animated version of it. So I think that's fabulous.

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:58]:
Yeah. 1, I'm just gonna throw this question out there. In some vision of the future, you know, kinda tying in this this metaverse, you know, especially there's billions of more digital natives in the world kinda transitions online where these biggest companies are now explicitly focused on the metaverse and the space tying the digital and real worlds together. Is there a future maybe not too far away where kind of the museum experience follows suit into the into the metaverse?

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:38:32]:
I don't know. I mean, here's the other thing. We don't do innovation, as I said, technology for technology's sake. We solve a problem. People ask me for years, are you gonna do VR? Are you gonna do, you know we did AR in 2012 because I wanted your you know, back then, no one was doing it, but that you could hold your your phone up to an artwork and hotspots would pop up to give you more information while you were, you know, so you didn't have to look while you were looking at the artwork. We used HoloLens, you know, it's I was very scared about using HoloLens for the revealing Krishna exhibition because it's another barrier, like, once you're handing out headsets. So we had to do a lot of work so that it's a smooth transition. So what will we do in the future if it's solved? You know what? I I like to always understand what's out there, what people are doing, and then when it's it's it's try it solves a problem of, learning something we're trying to achieve, then who you know, we do it.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:39:33]:
It's hard sometimes for the museum because we do things that have never been done before. And it's I mean, even, I really pushed that we had to have provenance in our open access. It was really important. It sounded scary, but I did point out when we publish books, we have the provenance, and that's out of date. This is at least gonna be constantly updated as new things are discovered. And it's about transparency. Our museum really is about let's be transparent about everything. This is truly about making, you know, again, as I said, our goal is to go from one voice to multiple voices, making art matter to multiple audiences and bringing more people into this is a free museum.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:20]:
Yeah. No. It's it is very cool. I guess when you are thinking about different technologies, and kind of evaluating them internally for, you know, which of these are going to respect and and and serve the art well, how do you kind of, like, test things? You mentioned kind of prototyping process, but do you kind of run experiments before stuff is rolled out? How do you think about that?

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:40:46]:
Oh, constant. Like, this whole revealing Krishna. So for the journey, the, 360 we built we fully built a prototype twice, and there's not space in a museum to do that. We did it the first time in between an exhibition down in an exhibition space, and the second time we did it in we had to remove art in Art Lens, while Art Lens was closed during the pandemic to do it the 2nd time. For the HoloLens, the development, we I mean, developers will do things. We will, then look at it for content. We'll look at it for use. We'll bring people in who haven't seen it or done it, see how that works.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:41:25]:
When we moved to gesture based, we filmed you know, it said, you're being filmed, and we had 1 object art object, and we had a wall right before you went to Artland's gallery, and we said, we are learning new technology, we're testing. And we not only had an evaluation team who talked to people and watched what they were doing, we also had a camera watching what people are doing, and it was really interesting to me. There would be, I remember this mom, probably had a 6 year old, and you have to kind of put your hand up to kind of grab the object and put it in the oculus, and the mom was just kinda didn't know it. It was just moving her hands, and the boy took the mom's hand and put it there, you know, to show her.

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:04]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:42:04]:
And the other thing is we don't wanna create things from scratch. We look at UX and UI that's already in place. You know, when when we heart when on our visualization wall in 2,000 and 12, the hearts for favoring was already happening on Instagram or, you you know, like, we don't we we change what is how are people using things, and then we we, you know, we improve on it or we think about what makes it better. So we constantly prototype. We also we test, We iterate. We evaluate. And, we don't just no. We don't just, like, throw something out.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:42:42]:
But what's great is when we have something in place, we can then update and change, like, the way our games and stuff are set up in Art Lens Gallery right now. We can change content themes and do other different things that are easy. We don't have it can just go live because we the the actual functionality of the interactives has already been tested and are working.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:06]:
Yeah. At an industry level, how do you feel the state of museums has been post COVID and how many are trying to follow suit with what you're doing? What's what's kind of the the lay of the land there?

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:43:20]:
Well, I do think COVID took a lot of people by surprise who weren't investing too much in digital innovation. As I said, because of open access, because of our digitized collection, because of our back end systems, and because of our API, we were able to pivot really well. And our numbers were everything, like ticketing and all these things were going down. Our online views went through the roof in 2020 and even higher now. We have not slowed down since open access launched in 2/19, And a year later, we, like, wait. I think we went up a 100 we're 400% since open access launched, and that was the highest ever then.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:05]:
Wow.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:44:05]:
I think museums, I mean, I just know from job descriptions and words like digital and innovation

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:12]:
and

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:44:13]:
are are a lot more prevalent to, senior leader positions. That's the other thing. To me, I've I've always talked about how this position has to have a seat at the table. I've been lucky that I report to the director. I'm part of the executive team. Because if it's not about the entire strategy for the museum, it's, again, not going you need you need to be holistic to this this strategic plan of the institution. So I do think, a lot of museums realized they didn't have it. We had people in house who shifted what they were working on and slightly their, skill sets, but, we already had a technical team in place, so we were able to really go fast.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:44:55]:
I mean, it was kinda crazy and the longest we work long days as it is, but it was my whole team was working, like, it was like a as you said at the very beginning that, like, my sense of time, I it's like that that's a lost year. It was like, work all day, have a glass of wine, get up the next morning, and do it again. You know?

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:15]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I mean, there's really a lot more things I wanna ask you about. I wanna be cognizant of time though. In terms of the things that we haven't discussed of other initiatives that you're working on, things you're excited about, anything you wanna highlight specifically here?

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:45:32]:
Well, as I I really am gonna push that Reeling Christian is open till January 30th, and I honestly think it's the only mixed reality exhibition that is out there. So even as a case study, if you're interested, you don't have to be interested in Cambodia art, you are going it's storytelling, digital storytelling, and with real artifacts, I highly recommend coming. My next big project is a completely new website, which has not been done, I mean, I didn't even launch

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:03]:
Oh, wow.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:46:04]:
We we've redone collections online part of the website because we had to to be able to do what we wanted with open access, but this is a reboot of the main site and the collections online and the store and our ecommerce part, so it's all holistic in one. But what's a little so this is a big project that part of me is like, but we're going to try to, as we do in many projects, be a best practice and this is about inclusive design and accessibility. We want this truly to be an accessible site that improves the overall experience for every user. A lot of times people feel like by adding accessibility, it takes away the designer credit, but that's because it wasn't done correctly. So we are working with experts. So, hopefully, this will be a you know, I want, you know, buying a ticket to be a pleasurable like, to be fun. Don't almost be like, that was fun. And I do want it, and we are focusing on accessibility.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:47:08]:
And also, even from a point of content, how we can bring new audiences in through even how a website bubbles up the different content and all we do at a museum.

Jeffrey Stern [00:47:21]:
I look forward to that. Website design

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:47:25]:
is a challenge. That's a that's a

Jeffrey Stern [00:47:26]:
large undertaking. Can imagine. Well, the, the the closing question we have for for everyone that that comes on is not necessarily your favorite thing. And I'll I'll make this one a little different for you. But for things that other people may not know about, your hidden gems in Cleveland, but then I'd also love to hear your hidden gems of the museum.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:47:50]:
Oh, okay. Well, in Cleveland, it's funny because it's not when I moved to New York, I thought it from New York in 1997 to work at CASE, I thought it was only gonna be, like, a 3 year project and I would then go back to New York. And my first question was, where's the lake? And I lived on the east side, my kids all went to Shaker High School, and it was amazing how many people really didn't access the lake, you know? And when my kids graduated, I moved I live right on the way look, I have a on the 25th floor of a building right on the lake, and I, I mean, I I just it's unbelievable. It's just an unbelievable resource. I face downtown. I see sunrise every day. I post in fact, I post way too many images of sunrise. And in fact, which is kind of fun because I do that all the time.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:48:46]:
I was asked to do, like, a mini little art show on my sunrises from from, which is funny because I'm not I don't consider myself an artist, but, you know, art show as a technologist. But, I I think the lake is a hidden gem. It's this large amazing thing that you can easily have access to. You can get you can do water polishing and canoeing and kayaking and boating easily, way easier than you can in any other city. And it's just, especially during COVID, watching it change, you know, all different colors and freeze and unfreeze. And it's just to me, like, that's one thing that if I ever left Cleveland, I will never have a view like this again. This is just incredible. So that to me is it's large, but for some reason, it feels hidden to all of Cleveland.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:49:41]:
And then a hidden gem in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Oh my gosh. There's so many aspects. You know, when people come to visit, first of all, they can't believe it's free. It's an unbelievable facility. It has programming and, and most of it is free or, like, our exhibition is $15 I mean, it's the deal of a century. I mean, I will say Art Lens Gallery, it's not hidden, but it is something that no other museum has really taken that investment to do something that really speaks to to all ages and to truly create something that you can go with your your college kids or your teenage kids who don't, that's when I, you know, my kids were teenagers when Galleria went open, that's when I realized we had to change, They they they weren't they weren't interacting as much, and that's why we changed it to, removing did for for the digital native. But I it really is I don't you know, when someone new starts here and I give them a tour, they're always like, and this is free? Like, does anyone know this exists? There is a little bit because I think people have a, you know, what an art museum is, or they went, you know, it's an amazing art museum and they went when they were young, but they haven't, you know, they'll ask me, they'll say, oh, where do you work? And I'll say the Cleveland Museum of Art, and they're like, oh, I used to take art classes there, they were so great.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:51:12]:
I'm like, oh, have you been recently? And I can always tell when they haven't really been recently because they don't they don't know how much it's changed. I mean, this, it's just to me unbelievable resource. But if I have to also dive deep, the the Indian collection, there's a glass box and it's on the, west side, and it's just fascinating. The art is beautiful. The it's all glass. You see, especially in the fall, to me, it's just magical. And there's never a bad day when you're frustrated, you just kinda go walk through the galleries, but that is, to me, something that I wouldn't have been something I would have looked for, and I find it, you know, really moving. And then, of course, again, I don't know if this is hidden, but stargazer is my favorite object in the collection, and it's beautiful, and it's so tiny and it's the one of the oldest objects in the collection, and she's just amazing and, you know, I fall in love with it every time I see it.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:52:20]:
So but, I mean, there's the thing about it, there's something for everyone. There really is.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:26]:
There is. Yeah. It is it's a pretty special place for sure. Well, Jane, thank you very much for coming on and and sharing all the kind of inner workings of the very, very cool stuff that that you guys are doing over there.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:52:41]:
Well, thank you, Jeffrey, for having me. I hope I kinda get so excited that it I just ramble about all of it, but you just have to come and see it and experience it yourself.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:51]:
Yeah. No. I I will be again and and everyone should as well.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:52:56]:
Okay.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:57]:
If folks have anything they would like to follow-up with you about, what is the the best way for them to do so?

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:53:03]:
I'm, like, on all social media, but you can you get you can find me on LinkedIn or on Twitter at I think I'm at Jane c Alexander. If someone writes me, I'll always answer a question.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:15]:
Well, thank you. Thank you again, Jane. I really appreciate it.

Jane Alexander (Cleveland Museum of Art) [00:53:18]:
Yeah. Great. Thank you, Jeffrey. Thanks for asking me. This was fun.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:23]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffrey@layoftheland.f m, or find us on Twitter at podlayoftheland or @sternjefe, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show.