The Jim Blackaby Ingenuity Award was introduced in New Orleans at the 2004 MUSE awards ceremony. Jim Blackaby, a board member of the Media and Technology Committee, passed
away in the summer of 2003. Jim influenced many in the museum world with his innovative work in information services and Internet strategies. Conceived in his memory,
this award recognizes a project that exemplifies the power of creative imagination in the use of media and technology—a project that has a powerful effect on its
audience, and one that stands above the others in inventiveness and quality. The winner is selected from submissions to the MUSE awards of all categories and does not
necessarily have to be a winner within the category to which it was submitted.
The judges said:
Jim Blackaby was a gentle man who really cared about how museums communicated with people using technologies and how new technologies could be used to encourage
understanding and dialogue between audiences. The judges found the Street to Studio: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat Web site to be the quintessential
Blackaby project. It reaches out to teens who, in the midst of their growing, learning, and suffering, find a kindred soul in the troubled artist, and in Basquiat's
work they discover a vocabulary that they speak and intrinsically understand. The site encouraged teens to think about Basquiat's art in relation to social issues
and engage in dialogue in a "What do you think" section on the site. A remarkable number of thoughtful posts to this section along with an incredibly large
gallery of works submitted to the Web site by teens from across the world, clearly indicates that this site has a powerful impact on its audience.
The producers said:
A key goal for the Basquiat Web site was to encourage our teen audience to contribute to the site. Experience has shown that this can be challenging with topics new to the audience--they simply don't have the knowledge, or confidence in their own ideas, to participate in online exchanges. But we believed that Basquiat's art would speak strongly to teens and might elicit responses, so we developed two of the four main components of the site toward this end.
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Build participation into the project planning. Our teen advisors to the project seeded the "What do you think?" forum with thoughtful and provocative comments, which helped encourage a substantial amount of ongoing discussion over the life of the exhibition.
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Facilitate different kinds of contributions. The "Create an Artwork" gallery complemented the forum by offering visual rather than verbal modes of expression.
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Help your audience spread the word. The artwork tool included a viral marketing feature that let teens email their artworks to friends, inviting them back to the site to see the artwork and create their own.
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Trust your audience--but verify. Museums often worry about inappropriate contributions in online fora, but we placed some trust in our audience. Forum postings appeared immediately to encourage discussion, with museum staff reviewing submissions soon thereafter. They deleted very few (mainly off-topic or racist postings). Artworks, on the other hand, were reviewed before they were published in the online gallery. Inappropraite artwork submissions were not unusual, partly due to the sheer volume of submissions. However, the biggest challenge became defining "inappropriate," especially given the audience and subject of the site.
