2019 – Page 19 – American Alliance of Museums

Reflections on the Historic House Summit from Scholarship Attendee Sarah Ortiz-Monasterio

By Sarah Ortiz-Monasterio

On February 3-5, 2019, AAM’s Historic Houses and Sites and Environment and Climate networks hosted a rare convening of experts at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami, Florida, for “Sustainability: Governance, Relevance, and the …
American Alliance of Museums Names Task Force For Its National Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, And Inclusion Initiative

By American Alliance of Museums

ARLINGTON, VA – May 14, 2019 – The American Alliance of Museums (AAM) today announced the members of a task force charged with developing recommendations to embed diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion more deeply into its …
Futurist Friday: Deepfake Dali

By Elizabeth Merritt

What if you could speak with the dead? More to the point, what if they could talk back? I just read about a project at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, that uses “deepfake” technology to create a digital version of …
Ageism is All Around Us

By Bill Tramposch

Greetings! This is my second blog as Aroha Fellow for Museums and Creative Aging, and I begin by reiterating my invitation to meet colleagues who share an interest in creative aging during the 2019 AAM Annual Meeting in New Orleans this …
Why the Tenement Museum Launched a Podcast

By Kevin Jennings

Earlier this year, I gave the keynote speech at the annual conference of the Council of American Jewish Museums. The theme of the conference (as well as the prompt I received for my remarks) was “The Creativity Challenge.” In my speech, I …
I Can Haz Cryptokitties and You Can Too

By Elizabeth Merritt

I will be running a Cryptokitty meet-up at the AAM annual meeting in New Orleans on Tuesday, May 21 from 2:00 – 2:30 in the Alliance Resource Center in MuseumExpo. Join me for a brief tutorial on collecting, breeding and trading digital …
Designing for a Divided People: Planning the permanent exhibition for the Kurdistan Museum, Erbil

By Christine Echtner

“The next generation do not know about it. I talk to them, but it’s not like a film. If I tell them it may not stick, this way is more permanent.” Najiba Ahmad Hakeem, Kanitu Village, Kurdistan, Iraq about the Kurdistan Memory Programme …
Magical Machinery? What AI can do for museums

By Kristen Summers

When people hear I work with artificial intelligence, they often imagine that I create software that does magical things. Their minds go to humanistic androids or programs that predict distant future events. But the reality of AI is much …
Futurist Friday: Fractional Art

By Elizabeth Merritt

Here’s William Gibson, writing in 1986, offering an off-hand glimpse of art collecting in the year 2042: “He led her across the room and through a doorway. A graying, heavyset Frenchman in a rumpled corduroy suit was speaking into the …
Nothing Ventured…:The San Diego Natural History Museum’s internal venture fund is encouraging experimentation and growth.

By Judy Gradwohl

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2019 issue of Museum magazine, a benefit of AAM membership. Museums subsisting on tight budgets often don’t prioritize taking risks and experimenting with new ideas. Yet, museums that don’t …