Interview with Jay Mollica — — Director of Digital Engagement at Pérez Art Museum Miami
By Beatrix Walter, MS Museums & Digital Culture
For the past 40 years, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) has made a point to support the work of local, living artists while fostering new projects within the Miami community. Serving an eclectic community, this institution makes a point to champion diversity within their collection, in an attempt to match the diversity of Miami.
PAMM is just beginning to conceptualize their digital strategy and how it can continue to benefit not only their community, but the broader understanding of American art. I spoke to Jay Mollica, the new Director of Digital Engagement at Pérez Art Museum Miami, regarding his first steps towards a digital strategy.
[Beatrix Walter] I saw that you pretty recently started at the Pérez. Is there anything in particular that attracted you to the institution?
[Jay Mollica] I swore to myself I would never work in museums again when I left SFMOMA, so when I was approached about the Pérez job, it was a long process. What won me over was the staff. First of all, the Museum Director Franklin Sirmans, as well as my immediate boss Marc Rosenblum, and then the rest of the staff are just incredibly passionate, eager, and interested people. They haven’t had a digital department before, essentially I’m originating the department. There is kind of a blue sky thing and paired with the people, I’m down to try out anything. The Pérez itself as a museum is incredibly important because of where it’s situated. Miami is a cultural hub of the U.S., but they also locally call it the capital of Latin America. There is this potential for Miami to be sort of the gateway to the Western Hemisphere and not having a digital presence kind of hinders their ability to do so. Being able to provide the entry point there was really interesting. The collection has not been digitized and it is about three thousand artworks, which is small by museum standards. It’s an incredible collection. Being able to digitize these works and getting them online for the first time can inform the rest of the American canon. That way to inform the audience and bring in a much needed representation with a lot of Latin American artists and Afro Caribbean artists. Being able to push those artworks to a broader audience I think is incredibly important as well.
[BW] You’re talking about the public a lot, how important has audience been in the discussion process of developing your digital strategy?
[JM] Audience is incredibly important. At the end of the day it’s the mission statement of any good museum- to make art more accessible to people in a number of ways, whether it’s reachable on the Internet or whether it’s contextualized in a way that lets people relate to it better. Audience in Miami is incredibly important. In Miami, 60 to 70 percent of the people speak a language other than English, it’s one of America’s most multilingual city. Having the audience in mind informs questions on how to receive this information, like in English or Spanish or Creole.
[BW] Is your target audience for your digital programs the same audience as your in-person programs?
[JM] That’s a difficult question to answer because for in-person programs, you’re speaking to people who kind of live in the immediate area or visiting the immediate area. As a technologist, especially as a technologist at a museum, I think it’s important that whatever digital tools we make or whatever digital presence we have is informed by the people, the culture, the struggles, the aesthetics of the city of Miami and the Caribbean at large. At the same time, we we want to reach people, which is the great advantage of having digital. Being able to reach people beyond your horizon and being able to democratize access to learning and education.
[BW] How have you seen digital strategies change re-entering the field during the pandemic?
[JM] This was another reason why I felt interested in getting back into museums, which was my previous work. While I was working at SFMOMA, my work was focused on audiences outside of the building. You can fit a thousand people in a building, but you can reach a million people in a day if you create something that’s interesting and engaging for people. I was interested in broadening the perception of what a museum’s audiences could be. Museums are not typically like that, they can fetishize the building a lot. Don’t get me wrong, I love working in beautiful buildings, but watching the pandemic leave so many museums in the lurch wondering what to do next it became clear that the kind of work I had been doing at SFMOMA, albeit necessary at the time, became incredibly necessary with a pandemic. I just saw a greater imperative to broaden the idea of a digital strategy for museums.
[BW] What is the structure of your digital department currently and how many people are working on your team?
[JM] You are looking at him. I am originating the digital department. There is no digital presence. There’s a website which is about 10 years old and there’s no digital department. We have to redo all the platforms and digitize the collection. It’s going to be most important to get engineering skills and staff. Technical labor is getting more and more expensive while museums budgets are getting smaller and smaller, so museums have a tendency to outsource technical labor. I don’t believe that’s maintainable in the long run. It’s good for short bursts, but when you’re trying to continuously do upkeep, it’s unsustainable. Museums have an outlook that they will do the website once every six or seven years and then think it’s done. That’s just not how these things need to work. That’s not how they should work. It’s iterative and it changes with the context.
[BW] Are there any upcoming projects you’re excited about?
[JM] I am excited about the digitization of the collection, that is the big thing on my plate right now. Hopefully by this time next year will be getting ready to unveil a totally jazzed up digital presence. The idea is to digitize the collection and create a site that’s just for that and then build the rest of digital. We’re going to be looking into a new content management system. In terms of digital strategy and if you want to know how to assess these things, don’t use esoteric software. You want to focus on problems that are unique to your museum. Everybody has to host a website. Everybody has to maintain and update and deploy a website. Do not make those things difficult for yourself. Everybody has to do that. You want to focus on the things that only your museum wants to do or has to do.
[BW] Do you think the main way you’ll end up measuring the success of this strategy is just by knowing in a year from now all of these pieces will be digitized?
[JM] It would be nice if we had three thousand pieces digitized by next year, but I don’t think we will. I think if we can launch with like 10 percent, that would be cool. As for measuring success, that will be getting everything digitized for the first time, but another way I’m interested in measuring success is the bounce rate analytic. Often a museum website has these competing content where it’s screaming at you to buy a ticket immediately but on the other hand, it has this great informative content. There’s no financial incentive to keep people on the site reading content, they just want you to buy a ticket ASAP, so these sites tend to be more efficient than they are engaging. How do we know the bounce rate of when somebody lands on your site. Do they visit more than one page before bouncing? Paying attention to making the site traversable is where my interests lie. Is there a financial model where we can incentivize the creation of engaging content and not have to worry about just selling people tickets immediately?
Beatrix Walter
MS Museums & Digital Culture, Pratt Institute
bwalte16@pratt.edu
