Seema Rao is the deputy director and chief experience officer at Akron Art Museum, in Akron, Ohio. This museum aims to enrich people’s lives through modern and contemporary art, and dates back to 1922. Rao, who has been with the museum since 2019, is also the Principal of Bright Ideas Studio. She previously worked at the Cleveland Museum of Art for 17 years.
In the Akron Art Museum’s centennial year, blooloop speaks to Rao to find out more about how it balances its digital art collection with its more traditional works of art. She also spoke about how the museum has been engaging with audiences throughout the pandemic, and the philosophy behind its growing TikTok presence.
A background in digital
Rao has a master’s degree in Art History as well as a master’s in Information and Library Science, with a focus on user experience design.
“My degree is in user experience design, but I would say that I started in museum education and worked my way up, I did a lot of early work on museum digital. When people were doing social tagging in 2000, one of my big projects was working on a microsite. I suppose that I was in museum digital before we had web 2.0.”
“So, I’ve seen a lot of these things come up and I have done a lot of work in museums around digital and education over the years. And now at Akron Art Museum, I do a lot of digital. For instance, we joined TikTok this year and I’ve been helping us do that. We did a whole series of art appreciation through candy on there recently!
“But my real day job is about how digital is really just a tool to bring people to each other and to collections. That’s the crux of all my work.”
Akron Art Museum
Having initially joined the museum in the role of senior experience officer, Rao soon moved into her current role of deputy director and chief experience officer.
The Akron Art Museum is a mid-sized museum of modern and contemporary art, the majority of which are American collections. It is home to around 6,000 objects, half of which are works on paper.
“Akron is 40 miles South of Cleveland,” says Rao. “We get a lot of visitors from Columbus, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. We’re within driving distance of all those places. Northeast Ohio’s metropolitan region is about 4.5 million people. Before COVID, we had about 75,000 people a year.”
Akron Art Museum is one of just a few museums in the city. There’s also a university art gallery, a children’s museum, and a historic house.
“We host every fourth-grader from Akron public schools,” adds Rao. “It’s pretty awesome to see them, and we hosted them this year as well, virtually.”
AR at Akron Art Museum
In 2020, Akron Art Museum launched a new augmented reality (AR) project.
“It’s called Interplay,” explains Rao. “We were generously funded by the Knight Foundation and had originally planned to commission an artist to do a public work of art, an AR public work of art. And then, it being 2020, the idea of public art changed. People were staying inside. So, we instead commissioned an artist to do an AR work of art that is a poster. Anybody can download it and display it in their house. It just looks like a beautiful poster, but then you can play with it in AR.
“It was wonderful, and we had a great turnout for the project. I think it exemplifies what I believe in, it was making the best of what you have for the most people. We also ended up giving it as holiday presents at local grocery stores because we were pretty much closed down as a state. And then we started partnering with lots of institutions in our city to give it out.
“Plus, every fourth-grader who visited us last year in real life, got a printed poster.”
Digital outreach
Akron Art Museum has a new website, launched earlier this year, and has continued to make strides in digitisation and digital outreach.
“Now, we’re rolling over our collections database and how it’s used on the website. We thought, why not just do it all? So, we’re doing a giant collection inventory. We are also getting ready to do eBooks. We’re going to be working with Getty’s free software, Quire.”
Looking at our social media strategy and our digital strategy, we realised that both of them were about access for our community
“In addition, we’re in the midst of a massive digitization project of our collection. We’re photographing everything. We want to do all these digital projects because we felt like they are all interconnected. They’re all about access. The website was probably the beginning of it because it houses so much.
“Looking at our social media strategy and our digital strategy, we realised that both of them were about access for our community, the people who come in person or digitally, and about understanding what they want from us.”
Akron Art Museum and COVID-19
The last two years have not been straightforward for the museum. It initially closed on 14 March 2020 in response to the pandemic, with the doors remaining closed until the second week of July 2020. Then, as the second wave hit, it was closed for a second time, from the beginning of November 2020 until 18 February 2021.
“But, when we opened again, at 30% capacity to start with, we saw a great increase in new visitors. Most people were new visitors, in fact.”
In part, this is due to the work that museum staff were doing on digital content and digital outreach.
“We had staff working on digital, from home. They did all kinds of stuff. For our Instagram feeds, we had a lot of people making art. Process videos are really popular, and a lot of our staff are artists, so they did that. We also pay regional artists to license their videos.”
Helping the community
“Working off the Cooper Hewitt protocol, we did a lot of visual descriptions,” says Rao. “Also, another thing that we did, which had a digital component, was that a lot of staff made creativity care kits and art supply bags. So, they built those in real life, and then we did a lot of videos that connect to those on our YouTube page.
“The second time we closed, a lot of our staff rolled up those AR posters that I mentioned, so they could be taken to different places.”
“We also have an annual game fest, for video games, and we did that virtually this time around, creating a digital arcade on our website. There’s a brilliant game in it called Doodlebug, about these creatures that you can’t see, but that exist in Akron, like the pothole monster and the canal creatures.”
Showcasing exceptional art
The Akron Art Museum’s permanent collection is formed of around 7,000 pieces. It also holds temporary exhibitions throughout the year.
“We have some exemplary pieces. For example, we have a great Mickalene Thomas. We have an exceptional Alma Thomas; we have a great wall painting by Sol LeWitt. Then we also have some great regional artists. In terms of digital, we have a great Brian Bress and a great Jenny Holzer.”
“We’re hoping to keep the balance of interesting, surprising things like digital art, but then also traditional arts, like our show More is More: Visual Richness in Contemporary Art that has a wonderful projected film by Dalena Tran alongside traditional works like a painting by Ronald Jackson.”
Starting conversations
Talking more about the museum’s digital artworks and how they fit into the gallery space, Rao says:
“Brian Bress has a work that has two screens. It’s two people, two beings. The two screens are next to each other with faces, and then people are taking care of each other. And I’ve had so many interesting conversations with visitors in the galleries since COVID because it feels so resonant with Zoom. You know, you’re seeing people on screens and then also taking care of people.”
“For us, digital art starts conversations. We had a previous show called OpenWorld, which featured a great VR work by Rachel Rossin. And that’s another one where people felt like they were doing something. And we had a Bill Viola in there that people loved because they were doing a video game.”
But does digital art need to be interactive for people to connect with it?
“I don’t think so,” says Rao. “Not in my experience at the Akron Art Museum. We had a Tabor Robak that was self-generating code, and it had this visualization, but visitors didn’t have to do anything. That same artist had another one that looked like the blade runner, and it was beautiful, people just were mesmerized by it. I do think there’s something about the fact that is within the vocabulary of their life.
“Even our Nam June Paik, which is CRTs, old TV screens, still mesmerizes people. It’s right across from our Richard Estes, which is one of my favourite paintings in our collection, but I don’t see people staring at the same way as the Nam Paik, even though I think the Estes should fall into line with what a lot of people perceive as art, because it’s so well painted and it’s so realistic.”
Akron Art Museum and TikTok
The museum has also started a series on its TikTok channel called, ‘Why is that art?’
“People have asked me, they literally just walk into the galleries and say, why is that art? I started with the Morris Lewis because I love it. But people are like, my kid could do that. And so, I started with that. I said, well, let’s talk about ‘my kid could do that’.”
The Akron Art Museum’s TikTok is a chance to have some fun, while also talking about deeper topics. The museum has had more than ½ million likes since starting in February 2021, and millions of views.
“There’s one where my husband was like, you sound like an art used car salesman. But they’re all serious underneath.”
@akronartmuseum #duet with @akronartmuseum #abex #abstract #expressionism #arttok #arthistorytiktok #museumtok
♬ original sound – Akron Art Museum
“We had done a big study when I first walked in. We called it the Think Tank, but we just asked people how we could improve ourselves. Basically, we had different questions, like, what do you want to know about this? And what is hard to understand about this label? So, I had all these questions, and the vast majority were asking, ‘Why is this art?’
“It’s at the heart of why people have a hard time with modern and contemporary art. I think it’s fear. It’s this fear that ‘I don’t get it’. And in some ways, I find it fascinating that I don’t hear that with digital art.
“Our goal right now, with social media, is we want to delight and entertain. As one of my colleagues says, we want to dissuade people from fear by increasing people’s joy. And I think that that’s good, because fear is what we think people come to modern and contemporary art with, and we want them to instead have joy for it.”
Looking to the future at Akron Art Museum
On future plans for the museum, Rao says:
“One thing that we’re debating quite extensively is: what is the relationship between virtual and physical content? I think they’re all real. I don’t think you can call digital fake and the stuff that happens on-site real. That’s not true anymore.”
“We can never give up digital programming, we’ve opened Pandora’s box. But we’re happy about that. The very first month we were closed, we started virtual versions of our AAM After Work events. I did one on Linocuts. And one of the people who attended was all the way over in Aberdeen, in Scotland. It’s great to have that global reach. So, we’ll always want to do that, but we also need to balance the wellness of our staff and our onsite visitors.
“Our first goal is to understand what people will need in ‘the after’.
“We took our garden space and we’re doing a big garden installation that has a scavenger hunt that goes with it, a printed scavenger hunt. That was because we knew people would want to be doing things outside and that they would want to be together.”
Top image: Jenny Holzer. All Fall Text: Selections from Trusims, (1977-79), Living, (1980-82) and Survival, (1983-85), 2012. Array of five double-sided LED Signs with stainless steel housings: blue and green diodes on front, red and yellow diodes on back. Museum Acquisition Fund 2018.14
