Summer Evening at the Exploatorium

We've got a bit of a posting backlog here at the SFMM while I move.

Our soft opening of FREE Shrines at the Exploratorium last month was a lot of fun. It was our first evening event and a road test of one of our more participatory elements in the exhibit, the Ema Shrine. I'll talk about that later!

This time we used a more open-ended format for our "makers"- I gave folks a size and weight limit, but didn't provide a box for them to fill. The difference in form factors had pros and cons as I look back on this experiment. The pros were that the layout looked more like an exhibit the cons were that for folks encountering and usual idea in an unusual setting, I got the impression that it put a little more on them to grasp the overall idea.

Roadside Shrine: Patterson, CA

Catching up with April Banks and WeRide3000 as we continue to explore shrines:

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Exploring Shrines: between Mendota & Kerman

Each year we have an idea of sorts that we're exploring, and we invite you to join in (of course, we feel free to mix it up with surprising, and completely unrelated topics when the opportunity arises).

Shrine. Yes, shrines to the times, the past, the glory of them, the heartache. That's our area of interest for this year. We'll be posting challenges, interviewing folks as part of the exhibit development process, and generally co-investigating it with you.

To start it off, let me introduce April Banks. She is an artist and designer who is currently on a cross-country bicycle ride called "We Ride 3000" to bring awareness to public education.

Since she's going to be crossing the US at ground-level, we've asked April to photo-document a type of shrine we whiz by on the freeway- the roadside shrines. We'll be posting them here she progresses. This first image is from Rte 180 in California:


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