Excellence and Equity (E&E), published in 1992, was a bold and profound manifesto, offering a concise roadmap for asserting the educational dimension of museums and a framework to help institutions evaluate their engagement with diverse audiences. Practitioners at different stages of their careers reflect on this initiative’s influence and impact. As we confront continuing challenges and concerns, what underlying principles of E&E endure? Looking ahead, what must we do now to ensure a future for museums that continues to reflect the institutional aspirations and vision embodied in this initiative?

Download and read Excellence and Equity.

Review the discussion guide for Excellence And Equity: The Public Dimension of Museums.

Transcript

Marian Godfrey:

So my background is not in the museum world. I was in the performing arts and then I became an arts grant maker. And the minute I became an arts grant maker, I got tapped to be on the committee that wrote Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums, essentially coming from knowing essentially nothing about museums, so it was a big tutorial for me. And I came to it with some open questions that really came from my other work, including: why is it that these major institutions this is back in 1989, including museums and also orchestras, were big this way, they all have mission statements that mention in the case of museums, objects and nowhere are people mentioned in the mission statements?That seemed to be a concern of mine. It was certainly a concern of my board of directors at Pew. And then my earliest tutorial came from Bonnie, who tapped somebody from Pew to be on this commission, and that got to be me, lucky me, and Steve Weil, who I met through this, who was still asking the question back then, “Museums, are they about objects or are they for people?”

And it was like, “Why is this a binary?” And it was interesting to hear Sam talking about his museum and budgeting. It’s still a binary, so I think that’s an area where everything about this conversation… Is it excellence or is it equity? That’s a binary. The whole effort I think is to get rid of that binary and to make those two things become part of the same concept. I think we’ve come a long way, and we talk a lot better about those kinds of issues, but are we walking the walk yet? Are these ideas in museums of DNA or are they just in the programs and the language? So, those are my questions specifically, Dean asked us to think about what was the environment and the context that gave rise to this whole movement.

And I want to thank the previous panel for setting us up so nicely. You heard some things about Excellence and Equity already. It too, as you’ll hear from Bonnie, was very contested. What were the outcomes and the outputs of that work that resulted in Excellence and Equity in all of its recommendations? [inaudible 00:02:50]. What needs to be done better? What hasn’t been done at all yet that needs to be done? And I’m asking the panelists to shape their remarks in answering one or all of those questions. And I’ll start with Bonnie, who’s the chair of the process.

Bonnie Pitman:

I am so happy all of you are here and are interested in book reports and policy statements that are 40, 30 years old, but it’s important to have a history to be able to move forward. And the message I’d like to give to all of you is that because you’re here, you’re change-makers, and you have the potential to take the association and the museum profession forward as a result of the work that you’ll hear about. This would be like your little backgrounder, but you can do this and you just need to identify the issues. So, we were lucky the Museums for a New Century came out. This is the actual publication. Many of us, who were alive at that time, and several of us were, Elaine and I were on the periphery of this. I was invited to several of the sessions because already I was known as an outspoken museum educator. And Joel Bloom and Rusty Powell very graciously shared a copy of the report with me in draft form.

And I started screaming because education wasn’t the third or fourth principle, it was at the end of the book almost. And I said, “You can’t possibly do this. This is an outrage.” Elaine, of course, forged in there and said, “We’ll start an uprising.” And it was all White guys except for Barry, and so they all started quivering. One of the women, Nancy Hanks, the Chairman of the Panel, National Endowment for the Art, died. And so there wasn’t a lot of representation for people like us. And unrelenting, we just pushed forward and said, “Change had to happen.” So, the behind the scenes that probably many people don’t know is that the wonderful report with all of its information and collections being first, because we all agreed they were important, I just said, “You could just move things around, mix it up.” No, that was the way it was going to be.

But we got up to third, which was a huge accomplishment. And Joel Bloom was rising as the next President of the American Association of Museums. And Joel was the Director of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. And Joel said to me, “When I become the president, I will appoint a task force on museum education, which you’ll chair because you’re an outspoken person.” And he said, “We’ll form the committee and you’ll write a policy document.” Not a big report like this, but just policy document that would govern or guide museums moving forward. And I snapped that up called Elaine, right away, who is my best friend. And how else do you do things except for with dear friends. And we asked Barry Gaither, who you heard mentioned, he was on the New Century report, of course Joel, who was the President of the American Association of Museums, and Mary Ellen Munley, who was one of the co-authors with Ellen. And she was at that time at a history museum in New York.

So, we had this background of the Museums for New Century, and we wanted to move forward and really integrate the role of museums as learning institutions in the force of the field. And what happened was 25 people, 13 of them were women, so we had already accomplished something just by the appointments. And six, I think were of different, I don’t know what the right word is today, different backgrounds. And some of them were very young, Sonnet Takahisa who isn’t here today was in her early twenties. And she’s doing like, “What am I doing here?” And we said, “You’re being trained. That’s what you’re doing here. And you need to be outspoken.” And she learned that. And this group of big museums, little teeny museums, very diverse backgrounds, directors, educators, curators, foundation people like Marian all got together for 11 feisty meetings, which were very controversial, and largely because my dear friend Elaine would say things that weren’t provocative, like, “Museums have to host everybody all the time. We have to be like Grand Central Station. And whoever walks in our doors, we need to be able to present and prepare and embrace them.”

And you’d watch half the room fall down and say, “But I just am a little teeny museum and I can’t do that.” So, there was a lot of controversy over the activist role of museums, a lot of controversy over who was responsible. And if you read Excellence and Equity, and I brought four copies of the original document, so if people want a real copy, you can come up and talk with me at the end, but what was fascinating is that the way in which we began to phrase things was that it was the role of the entire museum, the trustees who picked the director, the director who selects the staff, the staff who works with volunteers, all of the staff.

And one of the trustees in one of our many listening sessions said, “You mean even the guards?” And I said, “Yes, even the guards need to understand the educational mission.” And a very important fact, which I realized we didn’t put in here, is in 1969, museums received their non-profit status because of their role as educational institutions. I’m going to repeat that. In 1969, museums for the first time received their non-profit status because of their role as educational institutions. And this was a landmark change, but even though it had happened in 1969, in 1989, nothing had happened really. There were the yellow school bus domains in the museum, and occasional adult programming, but that was it. It was just thought of as an add-on. Always we were in the basement. My entire life was spent in the basements of museums.

So, the important thing is that the commission itself was dynamic and engaging. The times were changing. We were building on the strengths of Museums for a New Century, and launching into the beginning of a field that was going to chart a course change for museums. And one of the things that, I don’t know why I did it, but I decided we should have open forums at the annual meetings of the American Association of Museums. And I would stand up there with the entire attendance and people and say, “Let’s talk about Excellence and Equity.” And everybody had something to say. And the mics were passed around, and you couldn’t take notes fast enough. And it was huge controversy in the field and in the community and among our commissioners.

So what happened is… And I’m reasonably skilled at guiding through these things. And I realized that at some point we had to make a change. We had to stop arguing among ourselves and decide on a view that we could all embrace in. And I found out, and I just wanted to mention this in the report… I don’t have glasses on, so that’s always terrifying. And I’m a dyslexic, so I can’t read, so yeah. Well, I’ll just… Wherever it focuses in. Sorry. So, the key components of this report, it has 10 recommendations. It starts out, of course, with museums being educational institutions and putting that in your mission. So, many missions had been written that didn’t have education in them, or people. They wrote about the collections, but they didn’t write about the people.

So this one was, “First of all, the educational role of museums is at the core of their service to the public.” Going back to the tax reform. The second key idea in the book is, “Museums have the potential to be enriched and enlivened by the nation’s diversity as public institutions.” And it goes on, it talks about trustees, staff, volunteers. And we kept trustees in there all the way through. “And finally, the dynamic forceful leadership is needed within the museum community as well as in funding sectors.” And so one of the outcomes of Excellence and Equity was that we were going to… we rallied a lot of financial resources behind the book. So, that Marian started a program at Pew, the Getty did. There were several foundations that followed. In addition, many of the federal agencies followed. And also since I was the chair of the accreditation commission, I changed the guidelines from Museums in America to include the report of Excellence and Equity. So, that’s how change happened is because we built it in. So, Elaine.

Elaine Gurian:

So, as you’ve heard, my name is Elaine Gurian, and I’m a long time pain in the ass is really what I am. And I hopefully don’t stand alone, didn’t stand alone then, wasn’t the only one, but let me talk about Excellence and Equity within a political context. This is Excellence and Equity, and ‘and’ the most important word, because this was a fight between excellence and equity, and the real conversation was excellence or equity. Bonnie and Ellen decided over many, many, many drafts to write it as if excellence and equity were friends. And I really encourage you to read this document because it is often grammatically incorrect and intellectually unfeasible. It’s therefore really useful.

It has one sentence after another with the word and, in which the front end and the back end don’t match, and that is how it got published so that we could all walk away as friends. So, that’s your first political lesson, ‘and’ is an extremely useful political word. Bonnie and I were elected officials on the board of AAM. That’s important for you to know. We didn’t get just to be put on the board. We were elected on the board by our peers, because in those days you could be elected by petition, and therefore an educator was elected by petition every year, because the education committee, which had been started, not when I was already at AAM by Bonnie, by storming the general meeting and demanding that educators have their own committee.

So, if you’ve come here to a placid museum field, understand that Bonnie as polite as she looks, showed up at the mic to demand this. And the first committee was the educating committee. And thereafter, every year there was a petition for an educator to come on the board, which meant that we had votes on the board, which meant that when they decided to have this, we were already on the board. So, as a blueprint for you as a politician, you need to be in a place where the power is being made, so that was what was happening. Joel Bloom was the President. He referred to us as The Women’s Mafia. We would walk down the hall and he would shout as he was coming the other way, “Oh, here comes The Women’s Mafia.” So we could derail the politics that was going on, and that’s another point for you. Another point is that this is published, and whether you read it or not, it stands as a real thing. We could reference it.

And my friend David Anderson is sitting in the back. David Anderson and I have been friends forever. David Anderson comes from the UK. And because this was written, David Anderson was commissioned to write Our Commonwealth, which is this parallel policy payment paper in the UK. Do not underestimate when they publish something, that it has real value. The next piece was that it came up to the board for acceptance. There was a board vote for acceptance. All in favor, aye. Everybody raised their hand. And the minute all these guys in suits raised their hand, I understood that the faster they could get it off their table, the better. So, I stopped the vote. I said, “Do you understand what vote this is?” No, they didn’t want to understand what vote this was. And we stopped the meeting to discuss that we were overturning the dynamic between museums, that it was now going to be a dynamic between collections and people.

And did they understand that? And we went on at some length, and then we allowed the vote to take place. But we knew that this would be put on the shelf and never discussed again except to be pointed to about how smart they were to now include education without doing anything. So, this woman here who looks very meek, represented the Pew Foundation. And Bonnie, who understood that if we change the rules of application for money, that everybody would all of a sudden become interested in education. And she represented not only the Pew Foundation, but was a member of a group called Grantmakers for the Arts. And she had persuasion sufficiently so that all the grant making definitions and grant questions included education. You could no longer get museum money without education. And all of a sudden we became much more interesting. So, I want you to understand that, that we were playing the game of power politics in order to get this to happen.

It was not in a context in which we thought this up. The world was seething about what museums could become. This is a different political time, but the museum community was not seething about what education could become. So, if you want to change some of this stuff, all the tools of politics… And Bob and Donna was right, we were polite. I was barely polite, Bonnie was always polite, but we were polite in that this was a civil conversation, but it was a no holds barred argument. And that part is important for me for you to know about. I wrote a paper called The Importance of And in my book because it became the leitmotif of my entire career, that ‘and’ is the connector between complexity, that ‘and’ is the thing that you want to be dealing with, that nothing is simple and therefore you want to use the word ‘and’.

Marian Godfrey:

Nico, I think represents the next generation, at least, maybe two generations.

Nico Okoro:

Stop.

Marian Godfrey:

And I’m really eager to hear your thinking about where this whole argument has arrived so far and where it needs to go, as well as all the other wonderful stories you have to tell.

Nico Okoro:

Yeah, yeah, sure. Can you hear me okay? All right. So yeah, first of all, have you ever just looked around and felt like you’re in the right company? That doesn’t happen to me all the time at museum conferences, just full disclaimer, so I’m very happy to be here with y’all. It’s also even more clear to me that my work is made possible by all the amazing work that all of you have done over the years. So yeah, I guess just a bit about my background, since I’m not currently in museums, and it feels important to kind of disclaim a couple of things in terms of my orientation. I was drawn to museum work as a practicing artist through the mission of the Studio Museum in Harlem, which is where I got my start in 2006. I was born in 1984. We’re all talking about ’84. That’s like… I was born that year.

And that’s what drew me to museums. It wasn’t the mythical magnificence around collections and what they could mean in my life. It was really seeing on paper written the dynamic exchange about art and society, and the idea that there could be a space that is artists-founded, that has artists at the core of its mission that could support that kind of dynamism is what drew me to museum work. And so yeah, I think I only kind of bring that into the room because the Studio Museum is a place that I’ve worked for three, four different times across three different departments. And I think that’s also important to disclaim because so much of the data that I’m kind of seeing in these reports is not my lived experience. I feel like I was in a really protected, matriarchal, safe museum environment for all of these kind of difficult conversations.

So, I ended up back at the Studio Museum in 2014 to help build the public programs and community engagement department, which did not exist prior to that. It was kind of nested underneath the umbrella of education as most museums are want to do. And it was really the director Thelma Golden looking ahead and seeing this moment where they’re going to tear the museum down and this kind of radical moment of reinvention, looking at the name of the museum, which is the Studio Museum in Harlem, and really trying to renegotiate the museum’s relationship to the place in which it’s situated to the people that activate the space on a daily basis. And so for me, the opportunity to go back and to really build people into the mission of the organization in a way that felt radical and new again builds on the work of y’all and of this report.

And so in our prep conversations we were talking about the initial work that I did was really trying to seed collaboration within the museum before stepping out and hoping that anyone in the community actually wanted to be a part of anything that we were doing. And so doing this initial audit, which actually has really similar points to what I was reading in the report, which is: how does community engagement show up in your work? This is me asking collections, development, directors. And the general consensus was that it didn’t, that community engagement was not central to their thinking around the practice. And that’s not any fault of the folks in this position. It’s more a general understanding across the field, which was that, “I don’t know how much progress we’d really kind of been able to mobilize since this report.”

And so Thelma had this kind of vision to start this collective called In Harlem, which brought together all the different departments of the museum to really foster the kind of internal collaboration that was needed before we could actually go out and try and get anybody to go on this journey with us of saying, “We’re about to tear down the walls and not have a physical museum, but come with us to historic public parks, come with us to historic libraries, come with us to social service centers and let’s talk about how this mission lives in community, if it lives in community.”

And so there’s really radical practice in this kind of five-year period of A, building the department and B, kind of preparing the museum to step out into the community in a research authentic collaborative way. And so it was at that time that I think, Dean, that’s when I met you, right? And I had this idea that, this kind of goes back to the importance of scholarship and publications, which was people are trending towards this kind of radical practice, but they’re looking for permission. And what would it mean to just produce a publication that documents all of the case studies of really awesome ways of working in community that are led by artists, that are led by education staff within museums, that are led by the community themselves? What would it mean to produce this publication as record, historical record document of this moment, but also as permission for these emerging museum professionals that say, “I kind of want to do things differently than what I’ve inherited.”?

So for me, that was the impetus for writing the book, which is called Museum Metamorphosis: Cultivating Change Through Cultural Citizenship. It’s published by AAM and Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. I’m credited as the author, but I really think of myself in kind of an educational curatorial role of bringing 44 people together from across the field through really informal discussions to just talk about: where is change taking place? How is it sustained over time? What are the resources that are needed for this change to sustain over time? And so all of that work, it just felt so synergistic with what I was reading in the report, in ways that felt, again, both it wouldn’t be possible without your work, but then also the questions around what’s actually happened right since the report was published. And I just want to donate all the rest of my time back to the conversation because I am so happy to be here with y’all, and I really do look forward to learning just more.

Marian Godfrey:

Well, let me ask you a question that I think is really for all of you, and it comes directly… I’m listening to you and I’m thinking, “Okay, what’s the relationship between education and museums and community activity and community engagement?” It’s another ‘and’ in the title of the report, Education and the Public Dimension of Museums. It seems to me that the kind of community engagement you’re talking about in education, which is also another form of internal and external engagement by museums are probably very contiguous with their values and their goals. But is there a binary there or can you talk about how they relate to one another generally? Maybe all three of you could talk about that.

Elaine Gurian:

Well, the biggest thing for me is that while there’s the word education, this document is not about education as we understand it. And this document is an omnibus document with a definition of diversity that includes every trajectory possible, and it uses the word education to mean every engagement with human beings that is possible. The reason the document is this omnibus, and therefore if you read it carefully not useful, is that it has everything in it. It wanted to make clear that we were not talking about schools and buses. We were talking about human beings and their access to their patrimony. And that our responsibility to human beings and their access was every conceivable possibility, that the Grand Central Station was not a metaphor that you could roll your eyes about, that it was the real metaphor. So, that’s the way you need to read this. So, community engagement is central to this, but every other white thing you’re going to talk about it, we can make access possible to your own patrimony, is in this document. We did not mean education.

Marian Godfrey:

I just want to follow up another thing that you said. One of the outputs, as I think Elaine mentioned, was fortunately since I had access to funds, foundation funds, was the Program for Art Museums and Communities. And it was about the broader sense of education as an aspect of a museum, but the community engagement was sort of one of the outcomes. And we were able to support 10 art museums, which is how we focused the program nationally, which Pew was not basically a national grant maker at that time. But one of the frustrations that I had was that community engagement at that point was defined as getting people from the community into the museum. It didn’t really have much to do with getting the community and the museum out into the community. And I don’t know, do you think we’ve made progress on that front?

Nico Okoro:

I do. So the In Harlem initiative at the Studio Museum was really kind of holding that at its core, which was: in order for people to come with us in this journey of coming back to the museum, whenever it’s finally constructed, we have to become meaningful in their day-to-day life as it stands today. And so how do we meet people where they are, how do we meet needs where they are? And that really took some of the philosophy from the educational department and made it central in curatorial and development, in every department of the museum. And so this kind of task force that we created, it really did produce this collective decision-making body, which borrowed all the knowledge and wisdom from education, because many of the partners that we were looking to had 20-year long relationships with Shanta and her team in education.

So, it’s not cold calling people and saying, “Do you want to hang out?” It’s saying, “Shanta, who from your amazing matrix of local organizations do you think would be fun to be in conversation with around this moment?” So yeah, I think the other kind of important thing to note about In Harlem is that looking at historic Harlem parks, looking at historic Harlem libraries and thinking of those as sites where people already gather, where culture’s already happening, so it’s not taking the mission and imposing it on something. It’s identifying pockets of people and activity that align with the values of the organization, and trying to meet on shared ground. And so trying to shed the hierarchy and leave it in the building and step out, not as colonizers of public space, but as people that actually want to start a dialogue in hopes that maybe you come back to the museum when it’s done, but maybe not, maybe we just keep meeting you in the park.

Elaine Gurian:

It overtly says in the document that the Academy is not the only place where community engagement happens, and it overtly makes it clear that the museum’s responsibility to be in relationship is with all the organizations in which cultural transference of any kind is happening. So, that’s the moment where we no longer talk about the schooling you have or your credentialing as the only way in which you can be working in the museum, the only way in which we are organized.

Bonnie Pitman:

I think Elaine makes a really good point about the framing of the document because we wanted to push well beyond the yellow school bus. And I think when you ask that question today, when people think about museums as collaborators, that’s word that’s used in museums today, even among trustees and curators. They integrated this sense that the voice of the people that they serve in their community is important to listen to. And Excellence and Equity played a major role. What came out of the publishing of the document was basically fury and chaos for about 16 months as all the different people began to realize, “Oh my God, I’m responsible,” the trustees would say. And this was given out to all kinds of museum trustees across the country as, “Here’s a new guideline for you to think about a way to host… perceive your institution.”

And that sense of collaboration, the notion that people in your institution, trustees, volunteers, the public, the professionals that worked there, had to all be thought of together. And that you, very importantly, in the leadership roles were responsible for making that happen was critical. And the other thing that happened, is I remember in the early 1990s when places like the Field Museum of Natural History started this radical new way of organizing exhibitions with curatorial education and marketing sitting together at the table for the first time. It was amazing. So, there were all these, I love the word earlier, nuggets that began to happen across the profession that led to change, incremental and also because so many people were held accountable for it. And in accreditation, we held you accountable for it. It made a huge significance. So, collaboration and community participation in four years after this document was published were expected. They were expected.

Marian Godfrey:

And do we see them enacted?

Bonnie Pitman:

Oh, I think so today. I’d ask the field.

Marian Godfrey:

So, it’s not just rhetoric at this point?

Bonnie Pitman:

I’d ask the audience.

Marian Godfrey:

Yeah.

Elaine Gurian:

I am much less hopeful than I was then, so asking the audience is a good thing. Because I think the document spoke to the minority and the minority had presence and political cadence then, but I think the museum world has clearly not changed sufficiently-

Marian Godfrey:

Enough.

Elaine Gurian:

… nor was the blueprint adhered to. And that the same ‘and’ between excellence, which is really an argument for the transfer of the importance of the museum to the less important people, and equity, which was the reverse, still exists. And I would ask you to come back and say, “You have plenty of work to do. And do you agree that we haven’t gone there yet?” Yeah.

Nico Okoro:

Oh, sorry.

Marian Godfrey:

Yeah, go ahead.

Nico Okoro:

No, actually it reminds me a little bit of the peer review process for my book for Museum Metamorphosis, which I’ve never written a book before, so I don’t know what I’m doing. But there was a question which was like, “Well, I’m not sure that I believe that museums really need to change. So, much has happened over the last 20, 30 years. Where’s the case that this actually is even something that someone should read?” And in my mind, I’m looking at the 44 people that contributed to it, that are actively embracing change within their day-to-day practice in museums, and I’m saying, “Isn’t that the proof that it is happening, but that it needs to happen on a larger scale?”

And so a strange outcome of the book has been the folks that often come to me to ask me to come speak about it, are trustees and are people in boardrooms of these museums that see that it has a value, that understand that they can literally point to people on the contributors list that are artists in their collection, that are educators that have previously worked at their museum, that are saying, “Yes, the change is necessary, it’s happening, but we need the fuel, we need the resources to sustain it over time.”

And so yeah, I couldn’t have imagined that that would’ve been an outcome, and that’s not who I was writing the book for by any means. I kind of feel like it was similar, like I was talking to the people that were doing the work and I was trying to memorialize it forever. But yeah, I think it’s interesting the ways that publications can do something to the hierarchy, and especially publications with as much transparency and direct call to action as what y’all produced can do that.

Marian Godfrey:

I want to put my ex-funder hat on.

Nico Okoro:

Nice.

Marian Godfrey:

Because whenever I hear, “Yes, we embrace change, but we don’t have the resources to do it,” my thought is always, “When you bring up money, you’re avoiding the thing that’s behind money.” And I was going to frame a question about: to what degree are we actually walking our talk yet? And because I sense that its authenticity around this stuff is in some places but not others. It’s spotty. And so I’d love to hear about your thoughts, and then we’ll go with to your thoughts too, right quickly, about what else needs to be done. Where is that authenticity and how is that authenticity being cultivated? Elaine, you’ve already made the political case for what needs to happen, but…

Elaine Gurian:

Well, I think the fight is not won.

Marian Godfrey:

No. Yeah.

Elaine Gurian:

I don’t think there’s a general acceptance that the patrimony that we hold and trust belongs to the people who are the descendants of the makers. I think all of that story is not done. And who gets to talk and what they get to talk about and how they get access to and what they do with their access is not won. And I don’t know if you agree or not, but I certainly don’t think… I don’t end my career thinking, “Well, it’s good sailing from now.”

Bonnie Pitman:

I have a different perspective, not surprising, from Elaine’s, which is I’m the eternal optimist. The glass is always full, not half full. Why be half full? And so the great gift I was given in 2012 was I had been the Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, and for health issues had to resign. And I thought my life had ended because this was the job I loved and wanted to be doing for the rest of my life. But I was hired by the University of Texas at Dallas, and began working with the Center for BrainHealth. And that has fundamentally changed the way I view my work in museums and also what the future of museums are, because neuroscience is a relatively new science in the field. How our three pound brain really operates and how we create memories, how we sustain those memories, how we can change our sensory engagement, all of that we know a lot more about, and we’re learning every day.

And so the work I’m doing now is about the power of observation, whether you’re looking at art museums or history museums or botanic gardens. And it is about the way in which museums… about the way in which you can engage with the world around you, even in museums or your everyday life. And I think this is the role that museums should take more ownership of, is that we can practice this power of observation, which I’m going to teach on Saturday morning here at AAM if you want to come. I don’t want to be alone. But you can learn how to carry these skills that museums have been fundamentally teaching, but not really expanding into your everyday life so that your everyday life becomes a source of inspiration, inquiry, curiosity.

And we forget that walking down the street and seeing the hedge or… We see a green hedge, but do we know what kind of hedge it is and where it came from? And that comes from the botanic gardens or what kind of wall are you touching and where did the granite come from? You go to the Natural History Museum, or why are the typefaces so different on the streetwalks? That comes from design and art museums. The world around us is just as important to help people understand and make connections to as the world we have inside. And I think that’s part of the next exploration of the museum community.

Marian Godfrey:

Is it that it can form that bridge?

Bonnie Pitman:

Yes, I think we have to. Loo, if everybody… Even I, carrying my digital thing right here, we’ve got to take this and realize this is a part of our lives, but for museums it has to be something else. And we have to take our core strengths, our collections, our ideas, the knowledge we have, and expand it in ways that has applicability to giving joy in your everyday life. So, that’s my challenge to people is, I think it’s out there, we just haven’t figured out how to do it yet.

Marian Godfrey:

I just had this flash of what if you put joy in your mission statement.

Bonnie Pitman:

Yes.

Nico Okoro:

Well, so-

Marian Godfrey:

Yeah. Go ahead, and then we’re going to turn to the audience.

Nico Okoro:

Last thought. So, I’m working in a facilitation role with a group called Museums Moving Forward, that they just produced a data study in 2023 that looks at career advancement across the field, happiness at work, challenges, opportunities, barriers. And although the data is pretty bleak just in terms of retention, in terms of burnout, all of the things that we all know, there was a really amazing statistic about happiness at work just in terms of joy of the actual thing that you’re doing at your job across the museum field. And that’s across people at every level. That’s across people, different backgrounds, different salaries. And museum workers love museum work, and, for me, that is hopeful. And so I think part of my navigation through the ecosystem has been, I don’t do such a great job while inside a museum maintaining hope, but as a consultant and as someone who kind of chips away from the outside across multiple museums within the ecosystem, I feel super hopeful.

And so I think kind of identifying your role as a change-maker, if you are one, and really trying to find your people so that you can actually stay well as you do that work, I think that to me looks like what the future of museums can and will be. And it just comes back to individual people, because it’s not just about which institution is doing forward-facing work, it’s about how do you support those people in those roles, and then how do you as people on the outside continue to drive the change in community and elsewhere.

Bonnie Pitman:

That’s what I would say.

Marian Godfrey:

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.