Digital Initiatives and Strategy at the Hammer Museum
By Van Nguyen (Student, MSMDC)
vnguyen5@pratt.edu
Since its founding in 1990, the Hammer Museum has been a rapidly growing center for community, art, connection, and learning. Nowadays, the Hammer Museum is known in Los Angeles for being a contemporary art museum with extensive rotating exhibitions and public programs with a focus around social justice. Despite a packed events calendar and thorough and thoughtful exhibitions, this small yet underrated museum in Westwood Village does not slack on its digital presence.
I was lucky enough to chat with Philip Leers, Project Manager for Digital Initiatives at the Hammer Museum. Phil has been at the museum for eight years now, and during his time he has overseen extensive projects and digital initiatives at the museum.
Could you tell me more about what your job entails and what projects are currently under your scope?
I work primarily with grant-funded projects for the website. For example, we’ve had 2 separate initiatives funded by the Mellon Foundation. For the first, we created six digital archives focused on parts of past exhibitions or collections that we wanted to provide really rich and deep online archives for. We were also able to create Hammer Channel, which is the web archive for all the video documentation of programs and other recordings from 2005 to the present. It currently contains over 1000 videos. As part of the project, they’ve also all been fully tagged, given metadata, and transcripts.
Most recently, I’ve been working on the Bloomberg Connects app created by the Bloomberg Foundation. We were invited to join and given funding to develop content for the app and we’ve been working with them the past year. Specifically we’ve been developing various content like audio guides and video documentaries such as the one for the Ulysses S. Jenkins exhibit. We have content for major exhibitions and have included accessibility measures such as Spanish-translated material on the app and mobile closed captions.
Would you be able to give me an overview of the Hammer’s current digital strategy plan at the moment?
In our case, like a lot of institutions, we don’t have a written document but it’s something we approach in 3–5 year cycles which is sort of parallel tracks with most digital things. For example, with your website it needs a refresh within 5 years. Then, there’s the longer term vision which has to align with the mission of the museum and uphold the mission of the museum. There’s also the acknowledgement that digital infiltrates every single department. It means something different to everyone in the museum.
To define our digital strategy at the moment:
We want to maintain a digital presence that keeps up with our physical presence. We have a very active program of exhibitions and in-person programs and that’s always been a major part of who we are. One of our key tenets of our strategy is to make sure our digital presence has the same feeling of activity, of showcasing the breadth of what we do. With special projects like the Bloomberg app, like Hammer Channel, come more opportunities to provide more access to the programs and exhibitions we put on.
Accessibility is a key word for all of us. It means a lot of different things. We want to make sure there are as few barriers to access as possible on the website, and provide multilingual materials. In terms of our digital outreach, it’s important to look at how we’re expanding our audience and deepening our audience through our digital presence.
Digital strategy is hard. It sounds like a straightforward thing when we call it “digital strategy” but like I said, departments all use digital differently and even role to role it can differ. It can be hard to develop a strategy to serve all the stakeholders we have.
I would say we’re at a pretty good middle point right now. We know where we stand in the digital landscape. We want to be leading in some areas, thanks to the grant projects we’ve had, but we also need to be realistic that we’re not MoMA or the Met who have robust digital teams.
There needs to be tangible goals like growing our audiences and aspirational things like putting our collection online. We’ve done some of our collection but we haven’t done it all and we would love to have the entire collection online. We also know that might be a major initiative that might not be feasible now or might not be our priority. There needs to be some flexibility to it but you want it to be something used to keep everyone aligned.
How has the experience been like with the Bloomberg Connects app? Have visitors been engaging with it?
We’re still in the early stages of rolling it out and gathering data. We know people are using it but we don’t know how significant a number it is compared to other institutions on the Bloomberg app. We started learning what content people like. For example, we found out people liked audio content because they don’t necessarily like staring at their screens.
On-site visitors will check the website before or after but mostly, they’re not interacting with the digital Hammer while they’re at the Hammer. We thought this would be a great opportunity to grow things like artist profiles, audio, and video content for these exhibitions as they are opening and closing at the Hammer.
The app offered an opportunity to provide added value and to make people who are coming on-site aware of all we do digitally. It’ll add delight to their trip, interest to their visit, and put it into their mind that we’re a digitally-focused institution.
How did your digital strategy shift during the pandemic especially during the initial closures? Are there any projects implemented during this time that you’re hoping to keep going even now that the museum is open again?
One of the major impacts of COVID was not having programs and exhibitions. We thought, “well, what are we going todo? We’re not going to pull digital content out of thin air.” We also accepted that what’s going on with the Hammer may not be foremost on people’s minds.
Shutdown for me actually happened during the production of Hammer Channel. During the closures, I was overseeing a team of 12 people who worked in the store or public programs department because the store was closed and we weren’t doing events. We had the benefits of all these extra people helping us out with metadata and transcripts.
Ultimately, it put a lot more spotlight on our digital presence because we didn’t have a physical presence. There was a whole focus on what we were doing digitally, like how many people are we getting to come to a Zoom event versus a live event? For our lunchtime art talks, normally those happen in the gallery and there’s like 20 people in there, but on Zoom we can have 100 people there. It helped people to realize the potential that our online audiences have. It’s not just people who are going to come see the event who would join the Zoom. It’s the people that would attend plus people in New York, people in London, people that wouldn’t have come to the event otherwise. I think that was a shift of perspective.
We didn’t alter our course as a result of this, it just underscores how important the digital presence of the museum is when all we’ve got is online. Coming out of the lockdown and returning to a more normal pace of things, there’s more of an appreciation and acknowledgement that we need to think of our digital strategy as a place for growth and growing our audience. By working remotely, we were able to maintain the quality the Hammer is known for and learn about departmental dynamics. We learned that there are potential audiences for us that we were seeing come to online events.
Who are your main target audiences? How does this affect your digital strategy?
It depends, like for the Mellon project, it was a scholarly audience. For the Bloomberg app, it’s people who come on-site. We know who our core audience is. We have a local community of supporters of people who use the museum: a lot of students, a lot of UCLA faculty and family. We know we have a strong reputation in Los Angeles as a contemporary art museum with a focus on social justice issues.
In terms of a target audience, we want to build that reputation on a larger stage. We want people who are interested in art, but who may not have grasped what the Los Angeles art scene is. So really, we want to establish what our reputation stands for to get that to a more global audience. We want to let them know we’re an art museum, we put on these amazing programs, and you can watch them. You don’t have to be in Los Angeles to enjoy what we do.
Also, we have a target to bring as many people in Los Angeles to the museum as possible to grow our footprint in Los Angeles to beyond Westwood beyond the West side. We want to draw more people who might think that an art museum might not be a place they’re interested in going to but it’s not just art– it’s this, that, and the other thing.
We want to grow beyond Los Angeles but we also want to keep growing our local reach to bring more people through the doors and put the Hammer in more people’s minds as a place to visit.
To check out some of the projects Phil talked about in this interview, browse the links below:
Archive Topics:
UCLA Artists in Hammer Museum Collections
Corita Kent in the Grunwald Center Collection
Loss and Restitution: The Story of the Grunwald Family Collection
Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985
