“ wHEN I HEAR THE wORd RELEVANCE,

THE ART OF

THE ART OF RELEVANCE

uSuALLy I juST SHuddER. I HATE THAT
IMpuLSE TO MAkE IT TOpICAL, TO MAkE IT AbOuT CuRRENT
EVENTS. RELEVANCE IS AbOuT MORE THAN juST THE

RELEVANCE
IT IS AbOuT wHAT IS
SuRFACE OF THESE THINgS.
INSIdE pEOpLE’S HEARTS.”
- MICHELLE HENSLEy, TEN THOuSANd THINgS THEATER

IF yOu AgREE wITH MICHELLE, THIS IS THE bOOk FOR yOu.

The Art of Relevance is your guide to mattering more to more people.
You’ll find inspiring examples, rags-to-relevance case studies,
and practical advice on how your work can be more vital to your
community. Whether you work in museums or libraries, parks or
theaters, churches or afterschool programs, relevance can work for
you. Break through shallow connection. Unlock meaning for yourself
and others. Find true relevance and shine.

“NINA SIMON IS OuR ORACLE IN THE ARTS.”

- CLAy LORd, AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS
“NINA IS ONE OF THE MOST IMpORTANT ANd ENgAgINg
VOICES IN THE FIELd. HER IdEAS ARE SIMuLTANEOuSLy
gAME-CHANgINg ANd AbSOLuTELy dOAbLE.”
- dIANE RAgSdALE
NINA SIMON
“NINA’S MINd, pASSION ANd ELOquENCE EVIdENT IN HER
wRITINg MANIFESTS RELEVANCE AS RAdICAL HOpE.”
- RObERTO bEdOyA

www.artofrelevance.org

NINA SIMON
 TABle of conTenTS

PrefAce BY Jon MoScone ......................................................... 16

InTroducTIon: unlockIng relevAnce ............................ 20

PArT 1: WhAT IS relevAnce?

A Walk on the Beach .............................................................................. 27
Meaning, Effort, Bacon ......................................................................... 32
Something Old, Something New.......................................................... 36
Two Delusions about Relevance ........................................................... 40
A Note on Irrelevance............................................................................ 45

PArT 2: ouTSIde In
People Who Don’t Normally Show Up............................................... 51
Start at the Front Door .......................................................................... 53
Some Doors Are Invisible ..................................................................... 57
Dumbing it Down................................................................................... 60
Whose Room is This?............................................................................. 63
The People in the Room ........................................................................ 66
Go Outside .............................................................................................. 68
Inside-Outsiders ...................................................................................... 71
Otherizing Outsiders .............................................................................. 74
Outsider Guides ...................................................................................... 76
Outside Institutions ................................................................................ 78
Making Room .......................................................................................... 81

PArT 3: relevAnce And coMMunITY

How Do You Define Community? ...................................................... 87
Finding Your People ............................................................................... 90
Wants and Needs..................................................................................... 92
Needs and Assets .................................................................................... 95
Community-First Program Design....................................................... 99
Relevance for One ................................................................................ 103
Relevance for Everyone ....................................................................... 106
Build a Door or Change the Room? .................................................. 110
Building a Bigger Room ....................................................................... 114

PArT 4: relevAnce And MISSIon

Steady in the Storm............................................................................... 121
A Hunt for Relevance........................................................................... 123
Relevance is a Moving Target for Institutions .................................. 126
Relevance is a Moving Target for Content........................................ 128
You Can Make Boring Things Relevant ............................................ 131
The Ugliest Painting on the Block...................................................... 135
Proactive Relevance .............................................................................. 138
Content versus Form ............................................................................ 140
Old Plays, New Forms, New Audiences ........................................... 144
Co-Creating Relevance ......................................................................... 147
Getting Past the Pretty Fish ................................................................ 151
One Core, Many Doors ....................................................................... 156

PArT 5: The heArT of relevAnce

Part Ex-Con, Part Farmer, Part Queen ............................................. 161
Measuring Relevance ............................................................................ 167
Transformative Relevance.................................................................... 173
Empathetic Evangelists ........................................................................ 179
A Great Treasure ................................................................................... 182

Index of Projects and Places............................................................... 186

Acknowledgements ............................................................................... 190
About the Author.................................................................................. 193
THE ART OF RELEVANCE

PrefAce BY Jon MoScone

Let’s face it: we have a problem. It’s not that we don’t see the numbers
declining, or the funding priorities shifting, or the world passing us by.
The problem is: what do we do?
This problem is a question of relevance, and it is a question that
drives me in every way. When I became artistic director of Califor-
nia Shakespeare Theater in the Bay Area in 2000, I was really fresh. I
promised the Board of Trustees that I could never deliver excellence,
but that I could deliver passion and the attempt at authenticity. And I
did. I believed, and still do, that we tell our own stories when we tell
the stories of Shakespeare and other classic writers. It is through our
personal lenses that we read, interpret, and communicate the words. I
gave the stage to artists who had bold personal stories to communicate.
It worked. Cal Shakes mattered a lot to the people it mattered to.
Our subscription renewal rates were always about 15% higher than the
national average. People came back, and they told their friends to come.
And then at one point, I saw that despite all the success we had
earned with the constituencies we held close, despite the open doors we
held for so many people, we had almost zero relevance to communi-
ties of color. Individuals yes, but communities, no. Not on terms other
than those we had proscribed. So we tried to make a new promise to
matter more to more people. We ventured to find out if we could mean
anything to people in Oakland through an engagement process around
a new play to be written locating Hamlet’s Elsinore in the kingdom of
drugs that ravaged so many people and so much of a city in the late
1980s.
We owned our lack of credibility in these new communities. We
partnered wisely, listened more than we talked, and brought new people
close into the process of writing and performing the piece. It premiered
in 2006 at San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts and its resident

16
 PREFACE

company, Campo Santo. We cracked open a door to classical theater

that was invisible, and therefore impossible to find, for people who had
never set foot in our space.
Yet after that, they still didn’t. We didn’t make good on the promise
that Cal Shakes was going to include stories that mattered to more
people. That was the new promise I made, and I had a hard time making
good on it.
We tried, moved forward, and fell back. We stood by the door unsure
how wide open it should swing. In 2009, Cal Shakes presented a play by
a black author, Zora Neale Hurston, Spunk, that brought the Harlem
Renaissance to the hills of Orinda, California. It was a big hit critically
and with audiences, many new to our venue. Once a year, we produced a
play specifically for audiences of color, and we began to crack open new
relationships, new conversations, and new relevance. Then, in 2011, we
presented a Shakespeare play, The Winter’s Tale, directed by and cast
entirely with artists of color. Our longtime audience rebelled. It broke
open a new conversation with key stakeholders and board members,
who saw the shift in relevance away from them.
On the surface, programming Shakespeare the way I did may
looked like a typical move for a typical theater to attract an audience
(and perhaps funders) it had decided it should/needed to/desired to
reach. Which made it not groundbreaking in the least. But deep down
there was something more happening. A current way underground the
surface of our stage had been tapped, and a nerve had been hit. I found
myself in conversations about race and privilege I never thought I’d
have. My belief in giving artists the space to tell their stories through
Shakespeare was put to a new test, not by the artists, or by myself, but
by a shifting audience.
I had to work anew to bring longtime supporters along as we started
mattering more to new people. We were no longer just relevant to
our culturally upbeat, politically engaged, educated and mostly white

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THE ART OF RELEVANCE

audience—we in fact took a risk in losing some of that relevance. For

some, I broke a promise I didn’t even know I made.
When I figured this out, and I saw how far we had to go, and what
a beautiful, necessary and difficult journey it was going to be, I knew
it was time to pass the baton to someone smarter about all this and as
fresh as I was the day I got there 15 years before.
The challenge of relevance is complex and deep. Even though my
focus has now shifted—to turning art into civic action at the Yerba
Buena Center for the Arts—the challenge remains the same. How to
make honest promises to new people—and keep them. The journey to
unlock the doors of our great big institution to let people in to experience
and participate in work that matters to them has made me even more
alive to the question of relevance than I ever thought possible.
All of us in the world of service—art, culture, religion, spirituality,
community—our work has meaning. Relevance enables us to ignite and
reignite that meaning. Relevance helps us find the key to unlock people’s
desire for it, and it gives them reasons to come in and partner with us.
If you are looking into the space of meaning and wondering why
you can’t get in, or looking out onto the street from that space and
wondering why they are not coming, then this is the book that you must
read, right now, and maybe twice.
This book will bring power to your struggle for relevance. It won’t
solve your problems for you. It will help you figure out how to be alive
to the question of relevance and meaning in your work. Which is the
surest route, I believe, to find answers.

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THE ART OF RELEVANCE

InTroducTIon: unlockIng relevAnce

When the Japanese-American family walked into the tiny museum at

Camp Amache in 2010, graduate student Kellen Hinrichsen was there
to greet them. Kellen welcomed the group: an older man, his daughter,
and grandchildren. The grandfather was born at Camp Amache, one
of many children born in captivity in the World War II internment
camps. Kellen showed the family around the museum, highlighting
displays related to childhood in the camps. The old man seemed to
enjoy himself as he and his family perused the museum. But his tone
was somber. He told Kellen that he had no paperwork from his birth
at the camp hospital: no intake paperwork, no birth records, not even
an original birth certificate. All the files had been lost when the camps
were hastily shut down.
Kellen realized that the museum might be able to help. Deep in the
archives of the tiny museum were stacks of newspapers printed in the
internment camp. Kellen asked for the man’s birth date and searched
the newspaper database. Nothing on that day mentioned the man’s
birth. Nor the day after. They checked one more paper, and there, two
days after his birthday, they found his birth announcement.
They found it. For the first time, the man had written proof of his
birth. The museum unlocked something of value, something he had
been seeking his whole life. He cried. His family cried. Kellen cried.
They took photos of the newspaper announcement and another one
about a woman born on the same day (the man hoped to track her
down). They thanked Kellen, took one last look around, and left.
Those newspapers sat in boxes for years. Many people might have
asked why they were relevant to anyone at all. But for the right people,
those newspapers were priceless. They were the key: to family, to
identity, to existence.
This is a beautiful story. It’s the kind of story that inspired me to

20
 INTRODUCTION

start writing this book. And I know it’s not the only story of its kind.
If you work in a place of passion and public service, you probably have
a story like Kellen’s. The teenager who found his calling in your state
park. The immigrant who first registered to vote at your library. The
prisoner who felt a little freer through your theater program. That girl
who found purpose in a poem. Heck, you yourself may be driven in
your work because of a transformative experience that opened a door
for you, long ago.
Here’s what fascinates and frustrates me about these stories: they
are not enough. If your work lives in a locked room with a tiny door,
with only a few keys out in circulation to open it, few people will know.
Few people will care. It doesn’t matter how powerful the experience is
inside the room if most people cannot or choose not to enter.
Those internment camp newspapers mattered to Kellen as a profes-
sional. They mattered to the Japanese-American family as an essential
piece of personal information. To nearly everyone else, they weren’t
relevant at all.
And “everyone else” often includes the people making decisions
about funding and societal value. To succeed, we need to expand our
value—and not just for the individuals to whom we are already relevant.
We need to matter more to more people if we want our work to shine.
To me, mattering more is a question of relevance. I’ve
spent the past five years leading the Santa Cruz Museum of
Art & History—the MAH—through a resurgence of community
involvement. When I arrived in 2011, the Board of Trustees was con-
sidering closing its doors. The MAH didn’t matter enough to enough
people, or to the right people, to succeed. Most of the community
didn’t even know it existed. Like so many of my colleagues in museums
and libraries, theaters and universities, parks and churches, we struggled
to answer the question: “Are you even relevant anymore?” with a re-
sounding “YES.” YES to funders, YES to politicians, YES to potential

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THE ART OF RELEVANCE

visitors and learners and creators and lovers.

And so we sought, little by little, to understand what mattered to
people in our community. To understand how we could replace our
locked doors with ones that opened widely to our community and the
cultural experiences they sought. We started experimenting, changing,
and expanding our audiences and offerings. We did so flying a flag of
relevance.
At the time, I defined relevant experiences as those connected to
the needs, assets, and interests of our community, and to the art and
history in our collection. But over time I started to feel uncertain about
this definition. I started to wonder if just making “connections” was
enough. Every time a marketing guru described relevance in terms of
cultural trends, I felt uneasy. Were we pandering at my museum when
we offered people content related to their own experiences? Were we
splashing a superficial coat of paint over museum traditions to motivate
people to attend? I didn’t think we were doing that—but I also didn’t
have other language or tools to define what we were doing.
These goals sent me on an exploratory mission to understand
relevance: what it is, what it isn’t, how it works, why it matters. I sought
out stories like Kellen’s, so I could dissect them, learn from them, and
share them with you. These stories aren’t just about someone making a
link to an institution. They are about making connections that unlock
meaning. That’s what I want to do. And I want to do it with more
people—with people with different backgrounds and perspectives,
people who might not think they could derive any meaning from a
museum at all.
The stories in this book are my field notes from this journey. They
are peppered with theory and surprising conclusions along the way.
I hope these stories deepen your own desire to pursue relevance in
your work, unlocking meaning and value for diverse people in your
community.

22
 INTRODUCTION

While this mission awakened my appreciation for relevance, it also

made me more aware of its limitations. Relevance is a paradox. It is
essential; it gets people to pay attention, to walk in the door, to open their
hearts. But it is also meaningless without powerful programming on the
other side of the door. If the door doesn’t lead to valuable offerings, if
nothing touches peoples’ hearts, interest fades. They don’t return.
This is a book about the paradox of relevance. I do not believe that
relevance is the panacea of audience development, a virtue above all
others. I believe relevance unlocks new ways to build deep connections
with people who don’t immediately self-identify with our work. I believe
relevance is the key to a locked room where meaning lives. We just have
to find the right keys, the right doors, and the humility and courage to
open them.

23
WhAT IS relevAnce?
Relevance is a key that unlocks meaning.

It opens doors to experiences that matter to us,

surprise us, and bring value into our lives.
 WHAT IS RELEVANCE?

A WAlk on The BeAch

On the morning of July 19, 2015, I pedaled my bike downhill towards

certain failure. It was a Sunday, 7:30am and chilly. I was headed to
the beach. My museum—the MAH—was holding a 130th anniversa-
ry party for the first surfers in the Americas. On July 19, 1885, three
teenage Hawaiian princes put on the first surfing demonstration ever
documented on the mainland of North America in Santa Cruz, Cali-
fornia. 130 years later to the day, we went to the same beach to honor
the princes’ legacy with a surfing demo on replicas of their original
redwood boards.
This all sounds nice on paper. But it also sounds like the stuff of
every poorly thought-out grasp for relevance. Surfing is huge in Santa
Cruz, but our museum was celebrating an anniversary no one knew
about, at a time of year when the waves are dead. At a time of day when
most people are sleeping. Tied to a museum exhibition few had seen.
Anchored by two ancient hunks of wood—those very first Santa Cruz
redwood surfboards, on loan from the Bishop Museum in Hawaii for a
homecoming tour at our museum.
As I locked up my bike, I steeled myself for minor embarrassment.
I prayed there’d be a few dozen people at the beach, a couple surfers on
the replica surfboards. I’d be a good museum director, say a few words,
and we’d call it a day. Hopefully, there’d be enough friends and family
to pat ourselves on the back and say we did something good for history.
I was wrong. I arrived at the beach to the biggest crowd I’ve ever
seen at 8am. I stumbled towards the hushed throng, heads bent before
a blessing of the boards by a Hawaiian elder. Legendary big wave
surfers shook my hand. Someone put a lei around my neck. I walked
with hundreds of fellow Santa Cruzans along the shoreline to watch
professional surfers attempt to ride the replicas. We lined the base of
the cliffs like barnacles. Crowds formed on the sidewalks above the cliff

27
THE ART OF RELEVANCE

edges, cameras hanging over the fence. The tide was low, the sun came
out, and we walked way out along the break, water swirling around our
shins, cheering the surfers on, watching them rise and fall.
Back on the beach, the mayor proclaimed it Three Princes Day.
Members of a Polynesian motorcycle club—a fierce pack of muscle
and leather in a sea of sand and flowers—hefted the replica surfboards
and carried them down the beach, like a reverse funeral for history being
raised from the dead. At the river mouth where the princes first surfed
in 1885, Hawaiian elders led us in a song of blessing. And then we got
into the water again—hundreds of us, on replica redwood boards and
longboards and shortboards and paddleboards and no boards at all,
paddling out to form a circle in the ocean beyond the break. We raised
our arms together and splashed in joy. We paddled back, dried off, and
spent the afternoon drinking beer and dancing hula in the courtyard
outside the museum.
The Princes of Surf project changed my work. It smashed museum
attendance records, garnered oceans of press, and shattered my pre-
conceptions about who connects with history and how. Grown men
fought for standing room at lectures about the history of the boards.
Couples stopped me on the street to marvel about the princes. Kids
wore commemorative t-shirts around town. Grizzled surfers pulled me
aside to ask if we could swap out the real boards for replicas, keep the
originals, and send the replicas back to Hawaii instead.
Princes of Surf changed my life personally, too. It turned me into
a surfer. It opened up a new side of Santa Cruz to me. It made me
wonder: what is relevance?
I’d always seen relevance as a link, a piece of connective tissue
linking someone to something. If something was relevant to you, I
figured, it meant that it mattered to you.
Clearly, Princes of Surf mattered to a lot of people in Santa Cruz.
But here’s the thing: a lot of the work we did at my museum was linked

28
 WHAT IS RELEVANCE?

to local interests. Many of our exhibitions seemed just as connected to

what it means to be a Santa Cruzan as Princes of Surf. What made this
exhibition different? Was it just about numbers—more people feeling
that link than was typical? Or was something else going on?
When I looked into the research on relevance, I discovered that
experts define relevance as more than a link. In the words of cognitive
scientists Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, relevance “yields positive
cognitive effect.” Something is relevant if it gives you new information,
if it adds meaning to your life, if it makes a difference to you. It’s not
enough for something to be familiar, or connected to something you
already know. Relevance leads you somewhere. It brings new value to
the table.
In other words, it’s not enough to say: Santa Cruzans like surfing,
ergo, they will like a surfing exhibit. Sure, they’ll like it. But will it give
them something new? Something that matters? That’s what makes it
relevant.
And so, instead of thinking of relevance as a link, I started thinking
of relevance as a key. Imagine a locked door. Behind the door is a room
that holds something powerful—information, emotion, experience,
value. The room is dazzling. The room is locked.
Relevance is the key to that door. Without it, you can’t experience
the magic that room has to offer. With it, you can enter. The power of
relevance is not how connected that room is to what you already know.
The power is in the experiences the room offers… and how wonderful
it feels to open the door and walk inside.
When I thought of relevance as a key, my understanding of Princes
of Surf changed. Princes of Surf wasn’t just an exhibition about surfing.
It was an exhibition that confirmed an apocryphal origin story about
Santa Cruz and surfing in the Americas. The whole project started
years before the exhibition, when a gang of surf historians discovered
those 1885 Santa Cruzan surfboards in storage at the Bishop Museum

29
THE ART OF RELEVANCE

in Hawaii. I remember the phone call when they asked if the museum
would support their research. I can still see those sunburnt surfers
sitting in my office, speaking in hushed tones about “Project X.” Their
discovery was so fresh, so explosive, so tenuous that they didn’t want to
name it out loud.
Their research checked out. The story was true, the boards were real,
and we worked hard to bring them home. The artifacts we displayed in
Princes of Surf—those two simple redwood slabs—are like the Shroud
of Turin of surfing in the Americas. They are proof that Hawaiians
brought surfing to Santa Cruz first.
That connection matters to Santa Cruz. It fulfilled a deep desire
for community identity and meaning. It unlocked a new door to un-
derstanding ourselves. Those boards whisper to Santa Cruz, you
are part of something greater than yourselves: across oceans, across
cultures, across time. It’s not about nostalgia. It’s about unlocking a new
connection to something deep inside.
Princes of Surf is simple. It started with a theme—surfing—connected
to our community. It started with a community—surfers—who were
invested in unlocking deeper meaning around their passion. And then,
it delivered something relevant: something new and shocking, old and
reverent, something we were hungry for in our hearts.
Relevance is only valuable if it opens a door to something valuable.
Once I understood the depth of Princes of Surf, I got embarrassed
thinking about all the other projects I thought were relevant, doorways
I had built for rooms that were hardly more than stage sets. Too often,
our work opens doors to shallow, interchangeable rooms. We adorn
the entrances with phrases like FUN! or FOR YOU!, but that doesn’t
change what’s behind the doors. We lie to ourselves, writing shiny press
releases for second-class objects and secondhand stories. The rechewed
meat of culture. We tell ourselves that as long as we link our work to
people’s interests on the surface, they’ll be rushing for our door.

30
 WHAT IS RELEVANCE?

And they may come in the door… but they won’t come back.
Doors to dullness are quickly forgotten. They give culture a bad name.
Relevance only leads to deep meaning if it leads to something substan-
tive. Killer content. Unspoken dreams. Memorable experiences. Muscle
and bone.
So let’s celebrate relevance. Not as an end, but a means. Because
relevance is just a start. It is a key. You’ve got to get people in the
door. But what matters most is the glorious experience they’re moving
towards, on the other side.

31