…[C]ultural institutions in general and museums in particular play a significant role in the future of cities. They are part of the key infrastructure to keep our cities, where so much of us live, healthy, livable, safe and successful in the 21st Century.
- Eric Visser, “Museums in the City of the Future”
The next museum in Rochester is about the next Rochester. The Rochester we are creating, in the city we are inventing, for a world we are discovering.
The next museum in Rochester is about learning how to learn, how to create, how we become who we are becoming.
The next museum in Rochester is for our many vocations of making and doing and creating. Invoking an aspiring present. Evoking the global implications of our doing and making and creating. Convocations of doers and makers and creators. Participating. Observing. Learning from the lived experience of living next now.
There are no better emissaries of the next Rochester than Rochester’s children. Any purpose laying claim to what is next that is not a place where children are present does not understand where next is. The next museum in Rochester is a museum where children are embraced by opportunities to be children at play discovering their world and inventing all the ways they might become who they may aspire to be.
There are no better emissaries of the next Rochester than Rochester’s adults. Any purpose laying claim to what is next that is not a place where adults are present does not understand where next is. The next museum in Rochester is a museum where adults are embraced by opportunities to be adults at play discovering their world and inventing all the ways they might become who they may aspire to be.
There are no better emissaries of the next Rochester than Rochester’s seniors. Any purpose laying claim to what is next that is not a place where seniors are present does not understand where next is. The next museum in Rochester is a museum where seniors are embraced by opportunities to be seniors at play discovering their world and inventing all the ways they might become who they may aspire to be.
The next museum in Rochester is a museum that places us where we live and places where we live in the world.
The next museum in Rochester anticipates a changing world in a city where changing the world happens.
The next museum in Rochester erupts in the lively and lived experience of communities that comprise a city life whose livelihoods call others to us. The world comes for what we offer: wellness, work, and what comes next.
The next museum in Rochester is a museum that welcomes all for whom the city is a destination, where thousands of destinies come to reside and come to visit.
The next museum in Rochester invites the city and the world to be next to each other.
The next museum in Rochester is thoroughly about Rochester: who we are, where we live, what we do and make and create.
The next museum in Rochester is about coming to Rochester and knowing it thoroughly: who we are, where we live, what we do and make and create.
The next museum in Rochester is about what we can come to be by being here.
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Notes on #rochnxt: where should we make a place for next museum in Rochester?
Secular prayer is usually called "word magic" by those who think they can propose contrivances for its elimination. We have always been impressed with the feeling that these contrivances are examples of prayer albeit in disguise. - Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Towards History
I drafted most of the above a bit over a year ago - a visioning exercise of sorts, a secular prayer if you will. Since the summer of 2016 I have been working off and on with the children's museum on its next iteration. What it might be. What it needs to be. And the where and how it can be in Rochester at all. Its current location was ever transitional. A place to see if there is a place for it here and if so to move from to a better place. What ever is next - if there is a next - will be the next museum in Rochester.
I came across this piece above coincidentally as I was downloading the slide deck for the DMC Discovery Walk presentation at the upcoming city council committee of the whole. (Along with foam core fairs, these presentations are a familiar part of our civic liturgy.) More than coincidence, there was an element of serendipity.
Though I do not speak on behalf of the children's museum planning process, that process already acknowledged this sub-district of the medical development district as among its "five candidates for possible future homes." Is there a better place for a proposed center for "innovation, health, and well being and cultural exchange"?
Though writing of his home, Jasper Visser could have been writing here of ours and of Rochester's next museum:
Like many cities in the world, the one I call home – Amsterdam – is experiencing growing pains: The balance or lack thereof between tourists and citizens, the growing gap between the rich and poor, the collision between the city’s transnational outlook and my country’s growing nationalism… Cities all over the world explore how to thrive in the 21st century without falling apart. Museums find that as they transform from government institutions into civic institutions, they take on new roles and responsibilities and they are expected to play an active part in the future of the cities they are based in, and the communities they are part of.Save for contrivances to the contrary, the best purpose for the next museum in Rochester is discovered where it can serve that purpose best.
