DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT AS A MEANS OF CONNECTION

Skylar Pauel. Untitled (digital artwork for the IntuiTeens Quaranzine), 2020.

DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT AS A MEANS OF CONNECTION

by Paula Santos

Take your mind back to that time—March 2020. Suddenly, unthinkable things happened.

The NBA shut down suddenly. Tom Hanks and his wife had COVID. Intuit closed on March 15. There was a sense of anxiety here in Chicago.

Intuit was scheduled to have its monthly third Thursday After After Work event, a drop-in program where people joined with their own art projects and were invited to socialize with each other as they worked. But we couldn’t open our doors to our regular crowd. Should we allow people to process what’s happening on their own, or should we even go online? Is this the right first step for us?

We had never done online public programs before, we had no infrastructure to do this, and we anticipated the learning curve to be steep. As an educator who relishes connecting with people in front of works of art, for me all this was an incredible challenge. What first drew me to Intuit was the possibility to create meaningful and intimate experiences for the public by sharing artworks that resonated with people’s lived experiences. When the museum closed its doors, the staff decided fairly quickly that we wanted Intuit to continue to be a place where people could gather and connect with works of art and each other. While I had only joined the staff a couple of months before, I immediately knew that Intuit’s greatest strength was its highly collaborative culture and willingness to take risks.

We moved forward with our first online session: Art After Work. Debra Kerr, our president, welcomed the group from her home and shared one of her favorite collaging techniques (packing tape stickers), in case anyone wanted to try it at home. The program was more successful than I could have imagined. People were happy to connect with others around the country. They were looking for a moment of respite among so much change, and Intuit’s staff warmth was felt among participants even through the computer screen.

I’m so glad we took that risk. That first online session of Art After Work gave me the inkling that real personto-person connection was possible online, and Intuit would do well to begin exploring how to do that in a meaningful way. While at the time we didn’t know we’d end the year still in isolation, there was already a sense during that first program that living life almost exclusively at home could lead to feelings of anxiety, loneliness and uncertainty. My role and Intuit’s role during the pandemic then remained largely the same: to create experiences in which people come together through art to create connections with art and each other.

As our ambitions for public programs and digital offerings grew, we became more intentional with the ways we worked together, especially as we grew accustomed to working remotely. After that initial program, it became clear we needed to be strategic with digital engagement. It required a different skill set than in-person programs. The strengths that drew me to Intuit — the highly collaborative environment and its organizational agility — were our biggest assets in the paradigm shift. I formed a team with our chief curator and marketing manager, and, together, we created Intuit’s Digital Engagement Strategy:

1

Social media: Daily engagement across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook that was relevant and sensitive to current events.

2

Learning resources blog: Highlight, repurpose and create new content by Intuit teachers, teens and collabrators for families and educators looking for online learning content.

3

Online public programs: Focus on serving Intuit’s core audiences with new programs especially designed for online engagement and using platforms those audiences are already using such as Instagram Live and Zoom.

Art After Work is a free series of facilitated artmaking workshops inspired by art and artists from the museum’s collection and exhibitions. Intuit hosts Art After Work on the third Thursday of each month.

One Night Stand is a free series of art talks led by Intuit staff or an outsider art scholar on the last Wednesday of the month. By focusing each program on one artwork, program facilitators engage audiences in conversation about the artist and how the selected work of art embodies their style.

In dialogue with an Intuit staff member, a contemporary artist discusses their background, their art-making and inspiration, and the evolution of their career at an Artist Talk, which concludes with an audience Q&A.

Due to the collaboration between education, exhibitions and communications, Intuit’s online impact grew to have a more reliable presence in a time of crisis. In particular, our online public programs have been an area of major growth and success. We have been able to feature artists, educators and scholars from around the country and welcome an international audience to our workshops and events. The ease with which the public has adapted to online public programs has meant that we have been able to attract large audiences for programs that may have had a more limited reach on-site. Furthermore, the ability to record artist talks or special programs, such as One Night Stand, means we are able to create an archive of how Intuit presents, interprets and engages with self-taught and outsider art.

The biggest success has been that Intuit’s digital engagement is here to stay, regardless of what happens in the future. Even when we are welcoming visitors at the museum, we will continue the suite of online public programs, which continue to be well attended. As we move forward, it is important for us to continue to examine what stories and whose expertise we call on in order to deepen the connections we make with our audiences.

Connecting with people through works of art seems like such a simple thing amid so many difficulties. Over the months, our contributions to people’s lives through art experiences feel dwarfed amid the weight of the fight for racial justice or the sheer revelation of how equity is at the core of every issue the pandemic has wrought. Yet, every single time we begin another workshop or sit down to look at one work of art together, it is a reminder that seeking connection is natural and necessary, and, therefore, digital engagement is integral to Intuit. •