Posts
Curatorial Practice
Curatorial Dreaming in the Age of COVID-19
The Museums and Equity in Times of Crisis series explores how museums can center diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion in the decisions and plans they make for weathering the …
How the Anchorage Museum is Telling the Story of Climate Change
As the world faces the unprecedented in climate crisis and pandemics, museums are more important than ever for facilitating essential human connection and meaning-making. As a result of …
What Can Data Teach Us About Museum Collections?
Author’s Note: When I initially wrote this blog post several months ago, it was to describe and celebrate an initiative that I spearheaded at the National Gallery of Art that made new …
A Small Museum’s Rapid Response Collecting Project for COVID-19
For historians, there is history in the making at any given moment. The life events, triumphs, and tragedies we experience and record help us define our ever-changing world for generations …
Quantifying a Commitment to Representation
I realized last summer that after twenty years in the museum field, I felt deeply frustrated. When I enrolled in my first museum studies classes in the late 1990s, there were audible and …
Why We’re Covering the Opioid Crisis at the Indiana State Museum
As museums look to the future, it is paramount that we stay relevant to our visitors and continue to meet their needs. Instead of only serving as stewards of the past, museums can put …
Silent No More: The new Lucy Burns Museum speaks to the centennial of suffrage
Suffragists are recorded as the first in US history to use silence as protest, calling themselves “Silent Sentinels.” US suffragists (rather than British suffragettes) were also the first …
Kayne Davis, 13, helps curate Mia photography show
Thirteen-year-old Kayne Davis lives in Whittier, just a couple blocks from the Minneapolis Institute of Art, but until October he'd never set foot inside the building. Now, a photography …
Making Space for Community Partners
The 2019 AAM Annual Meeting was hosted in Louisiana—a state known for its rich culinary and musical traditions that attract droves of tourists. But another notable, though less touristy, …
Design Shows Take On the Future. And It’s Not Pretty.
Museum curators and mindful millennials seek visions of a "clean," sustainable future. In Philadelphia, designers offer ideas to provoke. PHILADELPHIA - Design isn't what it used to be in …
Forging Deeper Connections
This article originally appeared in the January/February 2020 issue of Museum magazine, a benefit of AAM membership. A look at two museums that are successfully engaging their audiences …
A Modest Proposal for Museum Collections: Apply the principle of direct costs for deaccessioning
Some years ago, shortly before I assumed the directorship of the Ringling Museum of Art—the state art museum of Florida—the leader of the Florida Legislature declared, “I love Rubens.” The …