Today we’d like to introduce you to Laura Flusche.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Laura. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I grew up in a very small town in Texas — two traffic lights! I had a pretty normal childhood — I loved reading, I spent a lot of time working in my parents’ grocery store, and I also spent a lot of time dreaming about what my future might hold.
On my very first day of college at Trinity University in San Antonio, my first class was one in art history. I was hooked from the minute that the professor began to lecture. He was an amazing teacher, but it was more than that. I felt like I’d found my place. Art History opened up doors to whole new worlds — everything I learned seemed like a great adventure.
I couldn’t get enough art history, so after college, I headed off to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to get a master’s degree in Italian Renaissance Art. In the course of those studies, I was invited to spend a summer excavating on the Palatine Hill in Rome. That experience was another epiphany: I found the city’s intermingling of past and present to be intoxicating and I became fascinated with the processes by which we reconstruct the past from fragments that are pulled out of the ground. And so I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in classical archaeology. After some coursework and a few more summers excavating, I moved to Rome to do dissertation research — but my stay there lasted 15 years.
I finished my degree and started teaching art history and archaeology to American undergraduates studying abroad. My partner and I also ran a not-for-profit organization called The Institute of Design + Culture which offered on-site seminars (on archaeological sites, in art-filled churches and museums) for smart travelers who wanted to learn more about Rome than they might on a typical tour. It was an amazing life, but, at some point, I started to think a lot about whether or not living la dolce vita was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
In 2009, my partner and I decided to return to the United States. In order to decide where we’d move, we had a competition to see who got the “best” job. She won! We came to Atlanta because she landed a position at Georgia Tech and I spent the first months of my time here looking for a job.
One evening, during that process, we went to an opening at MODA, which was still in its downtown location. I was intrigued by the museum’s smallness and scrappiness and started volunteering. Shortly thereafter, I joined the MODA staff, just in time to help the museum move to its present Midtown location in 2011. I then served as the museum’s Associate Director for some years before becoming the Executive Director in 2013.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate in my life to find lots of people who have helped me open doors to new opportunities. Of course, not everything has been easy. I often struggle with big change while wanting it more than anything, so leaving my hometown and knowing that it was probably forever was hard for me at the time. And leaving Rome — the place I love most in the world — was extraordinarily difficult too.
Like many people, I’m the author of many of my own challenges and struggles — I have a tendency to create things that can’t be categorized or for which there is no model. The business my partner and I created in Rome didn’t fit into any categories — it was a new model that’s now been adopted by other companies who have scaled it in ways that we chose not to do.
At MODA, we’re doing a similar thing. We’re redesigning the design museum. We’re creating an institution that’s forward facing and highly interactive. We’re asking our visitors to re-think how they interact with museums and what museums can accomplish in their communities as we ask the question “can a design museum change the world.”
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
MODA is the only design museum in the southeastern United States. We define design as a creative process that inspires change, transforms lives, and makes the world a better place.
We’re known for our radical friendliness and our interest in exploring new ways that a museum can serve its community in the 21st century.
Traditionally, museums are institutions that preserve the past and that look backward. But there’s nothing to say that has to be the case. At MODA, we’re turning the museum around 180 degrees to make it a forward-facing institution that reflects the fact that design is a crucial tool for meeting present-day and future challenges, whether that’s how to make our phones more effective tools or how to get fresh water to those who don’t have it.
We’re also asking lots of questions about how a non-traditional museum can serve its community in innovative and out-of-the-box ways. So, you might come to MODA to see an exhibition — we certainly hope that you do. But you might also come to MODA to screen print posters that address proposed changes to DACA.
Or to be with a community of people who are inspired by Beyonce’s album Lemonade and want to use design as a tool for addressing our country’s pervasive race, class, and gender issues. Or you might enroll your child in a camp that teaches them to use Design Thinking in combination with science, technology, engineering, and math tools to create prosthetics for dogs with disabilities or to address another real-world problem.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
2018 is going to be MODA’s best year ever! We’re lining up compelling exhibitions, beginning with Designing a Playful City, which opens in February. As the world population becomes urban – more people live in urban areas than in rural areas now — learning to design ways for children and adults to get the playtime they need to be healthy and happy into our urban fabric is of the utmost importance. We’ll be looking at that in a playful exhibition that will be up from February to May.
We’re also really excited about our program of summer camps for 2018. Our camps challenge children to think like designers while learning to code, 3D print, design with Minecraft and CAD programs, create wearable technology, build and program robots, build electric circuits. Kids learn a lot and have fun — and we hold them at four locations including MODA, the Georgia Tech College of Design, the Lovett School, and the First Presbyterian Preschool in Midtown.
Pricing:
- Regular admission to Museum exhibitions is $10
Contact Info:
- Address: 1315 Peachtree Street NE
Atlanta, GA 30309 - Website: www.museumofdesign.org
- Phone: 404.979.6455
- Email: info@museumofdesign.org
- Instagram: @modatl
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MuseumofDesignAtlanta/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/modatl
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