Lori comes from a strong museum background, clocking 10+ years as Manager of Digital Content at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. She’s passionate about mental health and the museum industry, so it was no surprise to see her using her expertise to write about both—the exodus happening with professionals in the museum sector. This phenomenon is one piece of a much larger picture, what psychologists and economists are calling “The Great Resignation.” For four months in a row, nearly 4 million people each month have quit their jobs due to a number of factors related to the pandemic, from front-line health concerns to work-life balance. Museum workers come upon both of these issues, and many others besides. 

But for the cultural sector, this didn’t start with the pandemic. 

Lori wrote her original post, The Great Museum Social Media Manager Exodus, in August 2019 to specifically address the issues among social media managers. The concerns laid out in this first blog certainly hit a chord: The lack of proactive support for burnout and mental wellnessthe challenge of being overworked but unvalued; and the fact that, simply put, there’s a lot of better-paying work elsewhere.

Now, Lori has written a follow-up blog focusing more broadly on the museum sector as a whole.

Some interesting tidbits

1. Mission-guilt is fading.
2. Staff appreciation increased. Resources didn’t.
3. There’s no patience for fake virtue.
4. Words are not being matched with action.

Why is this important for 1909 Digital?

Everyone on the 1909 DIGITAL team has a breadth of experience while each has a depth of expertise. We have a number of team members who came from the museum industry, so we love to support museum professionals through our work. Their expertise has been invaluable while we have worked with the Canadian Museum of Immigration, Museum Computer Network, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and the Akron Art Museum, with the most recent being the National Indo-American Museum.

Our motto is “Family first, Health first, Mental Health first.” We truly aim to keep these three things top of mind in how we manage our workflow and processes. Our experience with the toxicity of social media and the broader museum landscape has directly led us to do our best to stay on top of our mental health. We are happy to continue to share the sentiments in Lori’s blogs, especially as they relate so closely to 1909 DIGITAL’s core values.

Feedback on The Great Museum Exodus has shown that it’s already making an impact for people and industries outside of the cultural sector! We urge you to read the blog and then consider how you and your company utilize social media, content breaks, and time management to keep mental health as a top priority for your team.

Click here to read Lori’s full post, The Great Museum Exodus.

As a kid, my dream was to become a newspaper writer. Another dream I had was to make a lot of money. If you know anything about newspaper writing, you know it’s not super lucrative. So I set my sights on advertising, and by the time I was nineteen, I was an Advertising Account Executive for the newspaper in my hometown. From there, I moved on to work for a Fortune 500 newspaper conglomerate, and worked my way from sales to account management, and eventually processes and training.

During my time in newspaper advertising, I got to learn and experience the “new” normal in advertising for my clients—digital advertising. During this time, I was also picking up speed in writing and transitioning into “influencer” status for my lifestyle blog. I’m a natural self-starter and willing to put the work in to learn how to be an expert at everything I do. To me, there’s No Such Thing as something I can’t do, just a series of steps I can take to get there.

All of these things have been smooshed together to land me here at 1909 DIGITAL. A little bit of advertising, account management, writing, social media, and blogging all go into what I do for our clients here every day. I’m so excited to join this team of experts to help make marketing and digital strategy dreams come true.

HOME LIFE

When I’m not swimming in Instagram posts or wading through Twitter, I’m a mother of three children under three. Yes, it’s as hard as it sounds. Along with my husband, we welcomed our shining star, Clara, to our family in 2018. We decided to add another member to our crew in 2021, but karma blessed us doubly! We now have identical twin boys named Pierce and Beck. I’m telling you, the vibe of my house is enough to make me Out of My Mind.

With all these kiddos, it’s hard to enjoy anything outside of them. It always feels like Something’s Missing, but it’s most likely my mind.  If I ever happen to have a moment of free time, you can find me at local blogger events, reading comedians’ memoirs, sneaker shopping with my husband, on the hunt for the best bread pudding in the city, or literally just zoning out in my living room watching people share grocery hauls on YouTube.

My blog’s a huge extension of me and now an extension of my family too. What started as a way to share plus size fashion with like-minded women has now turned into a space where I have shared my journey with PCOS and into motherhood, my journey to becoming debt free, and how I manage as a working mom who still has her hand in home life and the Clarity to express herself online.

I GUESS I JUST FEEL LIKE

In true blogger fashion, I will leave you with a listicle:

5 Facts that Can Speak for Me

1. I’m never physically or mentally able to sit through a movie. I will, however, watch a whole series of reality TV in one day.
2. I’ll save money by buying bulk meats, then spend $100 on a pair of leggings.
3. I only go outside because my daughter makes me. I much prefer the Great Indoors.
4. I got an inner-lip tattoo in 2009. Those tattoos have a general lifespan of 1-3 years, but mine is still going strong 12 years later!
5. I hid nine John Mayer song titles all throughout this post. That’s how strongly I feel about Mayer’s music.

1909 DIGITAL is an academically “Evocative” brand name. It’s slightly mysterious. When done right, an evocative name should cause people to ask, “What does it mean?” Things have gone just as planned for us. The story behind 1909 DIGITAL has inspired us from day one. It has built meaning into our brand and it’s let us share our values more frequently. Often we only have the opportunity to share the surface-level story behind our name. I’m eager to dig deeper into what 1909 DIGITAL has meant to us living and working through the events of 2020 and now as we embark on 2021.

Indianapolis City Hall Cornerstone | Photo courtesy HistoricIndianapolis.com

More than a quote

The main source of inspiration for our business is a quote from former Indianapolis Mayor Charles A. Bookwalter, “I am, myself, a citizen of no mean city.” This quote is inscribed on the cornerstone of Indianapolis City Hall, which was laid in 1909.

“No mean” was used frequently at the time to describe something as impressive, or not insignificant. The line itself originates from Acts 21:39, in which Paul describes his home Tarsus: “I am…a citizen of no mean city; and I implore you, permit me to speak to the people.” Not so bad, comparing Indianapolis to the home of the Apostle Paul, Cleopatra, and Mark Antony, right?

Beyond that, in 1909 “No Mean City” was the theme for Mayor Bookwalter’s political campaign. The front page of the Indy Star on July 28, 1909 showed a photo of the cornerstone ceremony with a banner hanging above the Mayor that reads, “Stand up for Indianapolis. No Mean City.”

Juxtaposing then and now

There’s something about placing opposite ideas side-by-side that’s intriguing. We weren’t the first to bring the idea of Indy being “No mean city” into the present day. The quote saw a resurgence as a community touchstone for LGBTQIA rights in the wake of the 2015 RFRA legislation and resulting “Indy Welcomes All” campaign. It was at that point that Indy being “No mean city” took on a whole new meaning. We are literally not “mean,” and all are welcome here.

Because other local groups have used the phrase for publications and initiatives, we chose its historically significant year for our brand name—1909. But it’s essential that we invoke the idea that contemporary and future ideals are our priority. This is why 1909 DIGITAL came to be. We’re proud of our humble Hoosier roots and also focused on the progress of our time, digitally and otherwise.

Lessons of 2020

The first year of our business coincides with a year no one will soon forget. At its worst, 2020 has numbed us to increasingly dire news and has normalized grief. At its best, the digital distance has humanized us and brought people closer together. Our core value is to be transparent and authentic humans. We’ve built a true “work fam” to keep us sane.

At the same time, we were deeply impacted by the progress and pushback resulting from Black Lives Matter and other BIPOC initiatives. As a business and on a personal level, there is power in understanding what you don’t know, in realizing that reactive response is not enough, and in learning what actions to take to truly make a difference. Most importantly, we’ll never stop learning.

I’m trying to do my part to take a second look from another less privileged perspective. In looking at the July 27, 1909 Indy Star photo of Mayor Bookwalter’s cornerstone-laying ceremony, it’s easy to see the exuberance and hope in the crowd. Look again and you’ll see that the crowd is made up of only white faces. We appreciate the positive connotations of Mayor Bookwalter’s 1909 “no mean city” quote. But what did that look like for the Black population in Indy at the time?

St. Petersburg, Florida Independent | August 6, 1910

What was happening in 1909?

It is through this lens that I began to look specifically at what the year 1909 was like for communities of color in Indianapolis. To truly understand the significance of our company’s namesake, we need a full, rich context. Not just the whitewashed front pages of the early 20th century. Here’s what I found:

• In late 1909 Madam CJ Walker was preparing to move her thriving hair care business to Indianapolis from Pittsburgh. She settled in the Indiana Avenue district in 1910 and by August had 950 sales agents. She later became America’s first female self-made millionaire.
• The 1909 opening of the Indianapolis Speedway didn’t involve the local Black community at all. In fact, in August of 1910 Louis Chevrolet essentially forbade the famed boxer Jack Johnson from running an exhibition race at the Speedway, stating, “If…management cannot confine itself to automobile racing without bringing a negro barn-storming pugilist, I believe it is time for the white drivers to quit the game on that track.” Papers as far off as St. Petersburg, Florida reported on this with surprise because northern cities like Indianapolis had the reputation for being friendly to Blacks.
• The town of Speedway, Indiana was developed only a couple of years later in 1912. While the neighborhoods were optimistically intended to support the industry around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, they also included racially restrictive covenants banning Blacks from living there.
• On the other hand, Indiana Avenue was the buzzing center of African American daily life and culture in Indianapolis. In the decade prior to “The Avenue’s” Jazz-Era heyday, 1909 was a time of budding businesses. The Indianapolis Recorder, the longest-running African American newspaper in Indiana, made its home in and around Indiana Avenue since 1895. It’s still thriving today.
• Indianapolis’ “Major” Taylor was a successful professional bicyclist at the height of the late 19th century bicycle craze. He was nationally and internationally known, becoming the first African American to win a world cycling championship. Taylor’s last professional race was in France in 1909. He retired in 1910 at the age of 32, pointing to the physical and mental strain of racial discrimination as a reason for stepping back from his career.

Major Taylor 1906-1907 | photographer Jules Beau | Gallica Digital Library | PD

So let’s go back to that phrase that Indianapolis Mayor Bookwalter stated on July 27, 1909: “I am, myself, a citizen of no mean city.” The quote survives from a time before things got a lot worse: before the revival of the KKK, before the term “redlining” existed, before mass incarceration, and many other atrocities. It lives in a time before things started improving: before Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream, before interracial marriage was legalized, before our first Black president, before Black Lives Matter became a spoken mantra. Indianapolis has seen progress. Indianapolis still has a long way to go. That’s the juxtaposition. The good and the bad. The past and the future. It’s our job to move forward with eyes open.

Before and After and Around

As a maker, thinking about meaning constitutes a pretty significant chunk of what I do. Often this translates to spending time with a work of art and attempting to put language to its web of ‘what’ and ‘how’ and ‘why’ sort of questions. While this is certainly part of the design process, what I love about visual strategy and marketing is getting inside the minds of the people we work with to understand the things that drive them.

With this knowledge, I get to immerse myself in the doing — finding the typeface that communicates a brand vision before any words are even read, determining what palette of colors will evoke the character of a business, selecting from the endless possibilities a mark that will represent core values: the logo. Research is undoubtedly one of my greatest pleasures, but this is very nearly equaled by the joy that getting into the details brings — finding the personality of a letter or the nuance of a particular blue. At my core I’m an introvert who loves exploring the way other people experience the world: reading psychology and learning about the way we think — certainly — but also the way we feel, before and after and around thought.

Lessons From the Field

If there’s one thing creative work has taught me, it’s that the path is rarely a straight line. In fact, Damien Newman’s ‘Design Squiggle’ on repeat might better describe the way I’ve lived my life and how I became part of the 1909 team. Following a highly academic and interdisciplinary university training in Aesthetics, I was fortunate to work with great museum educators at the Dallas Museum of Art. Before long I discovered I still had much to learn and made the decision to return to school, finding my way to small institutions dedicated solely to the study of art and design: the incredible Kansas City Art Institute and renowned Cranbrook Academy of Art. At Cranbrook — the “cradle of Midcentury Modernism” — I was surrounded day in and day out by incredible design, powerful mentors and peers, and an ever-expanding horizon of creative practice.

Through my focus on sculpture and the study of space I found installation, which became activated by performance, which took on new life through video, which taught me the potential in photography, which eventually exploded into a curiosity about all things digital as well as an emerging sensibility of craft. Shortly after — as an instructor — I found myself encouraging students daily to ask themselves not simply what things mean, but how they mean, to commit themselves to learning how to see. When my partner took a new job that required us to relocate, we decided there might be as yet unexplored opportunities. After years working with students in the studio, the stars aligned as the leadership at 1909 found that someone with my experience might be useful to have around.

One of the incredible things about 1909 is that each member of the team is more than the sum of their skills. To be sure, as Branding and Design Manager the decade I spent in formal training, my literacy with tools and software, and my passion for culture and the designed world constitute a critical part of what brought me to the team. But — I believe — it is my experience in museums and gallery spaces, my enthusiasm for collaboration, or perhaps simply my ability to ask questions and take the time to understand the answers that have value. I joined 1909 because the excitement of developing and implementing visual strategy is matched by a commitment to authenticity in business: we embrace our own humanness and get to partner with clients who share this vision, all while doing great work.

In the Studio and In Real Life

Outside of digital marketing I am most myself in my personal art practice. With a degree in sculpture and years spent teaching digital photography, I suppose it’s natural that my interests would converge where the spatial and virtual meet — digital environments and architectural sites. These projects — such as the recent timber frame church enclosed by immense coral I’ve animated — also allow me to explore my relentless fascination with extreme music and magical realist fiction. While melodic death metal or the grace of a Calvino vignette aren’t always literally present in my work, sagas and poetry are embedded in its genealogy. The constructions that populate my digital landscapes embody human values and character drawn from this material, as well as their narrative strategies. When I really think about it, I’ve always enjoyed puzzles and making order (or finding it, depending on your ideological bent) and perhaps my Rubik’s cube collection tells the whole story.

Although I spend a lot of time with screens, some of the most important parts of my life thankfully remind me to step away: running, climbing, and — best of all — parenting an incredible and curious daughter. Having the opportunity to be present for these moments has taught me a lot about meaning (thinking about meaning constitutes a pretty significant chunk of what I do, after all) and little else is as pleasurable as great conversation over great coffee. I hope our paths (demonstrably not straight lines) intersect and we’re able to share a little of both!