A New Way to See: Looking at museums through the eyes of the blind
Let’s talk about accessibility. In the twenty-first century era of inclusivity, museums are working towards making the visitor experience a more positive and unique one, as part of efforts to increase the number of visitors to museums. In …
CAMPing Out: Making Museums More LGBTQ-friendly with Chicagoland Alliance of Museums with PRIDE
Part 1: Katie Slivovsky, Exhibit Development Director, LGBTQ Access & Inclusion Chair, Chicago Children’s Museum Something wonderful is brewing in Chicago—and I don’t mean craft beer. I’m talking about the 80-plus staff from over 25 …
The Museum of Street Culture
One national trend I’ve been tracking is the recent rise in people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. On any given night over a half million people in the US are coping with homelessness. Over a third of these people are …
How Can Museums Empower Communities? TACA Perforum
Last month I had the honor of speaking on a panel organized by The Arts Community Alliance (TACA) in Dallas, hosted by the Nasher Sculpture Center. Every year TACA brings together speakers for Perforum: a Conversation to Advance Arts and …
The Citizenship Project
It is shortly after 6 pm on a rainy summer evening in New York City. Ten adults are gathering in a classroom at the New-York Historical Society, carrying umbrellas, notebooks, and pocket copies of the U.S. Constitution. They come from the …
Seven Tips for Starting an Equitable and Inclusive Internship Program
Ayanna Reed is the Director of Human Resources at the Oakland Museum of California. One summer during my college years I interned for the Port of Oakland, one of largest shipping ports in the country. I was a business student at the time …
Access and Inclusion Case Study: Connecting Students to the Museum Field
In a session at the 2017 AAM Annual Meeting in St. Louis, a look around the room revealed a small sea of mostly mid-career museum professionals with experience and interest in education and interpretation. The presenter posed a question: …
The Portal: A Real-Time Conversation with People Forced to Flee Violence
In TrendsWatch 2017 I highlight Shared Studio’s Portals in the chapter on Empathy. These bi-directional video walls host virtual “face-to-face” conversations between people around the world, and have been used by a variety of institutions, …
Converting Family into Fans: How the Contemporary Jewish Museum expanded its reach to a new audience.
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2017 issue of Museum magazine. Since its founding in 1984, the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) had been in a 2,500-square-foot space in the lobby of the Jewish Community Federation of …
Mapping Visitor Emotions to Make a Lasting Connection
Readers of the CFM Blog are also prime consumers of TrendsWatch, the Alliance’s annual forecasting report, which is available as a digital download and as a dynamic web version with real-time updates on this year’s trends. We are able to …
