Ethics

Museum Ethics in a New Gilded Age

By Elizabeth Merritt

Readers of this blog may remember Erik Ledbetter, who served as the Director of International Programs and Ethics at AAM from 2003-2010. I am sorry to share the news that Erik passed away last week while on the job as assistant manager at …
A Controversy of Monumental Proportions at the Kent State Memorial

By Mindy Farmer

The Kent State memorial commemorating the May 4, 1970, shootings has been polarizing since its inception. This article originally appeared in Museum magazine’s July/August 2024 issue, a benefit of AAM membership. On August 24, 2023, winds …
Reframing the Collection: How a Literary Catalog Experiment Brought New Voices to Interpretation

By Derek (DK) Nnuro

The University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art (Stanley) is part of the arts ecosystem at the country’s premier university for the study of creative writing. As a curatorial team, we have long been aware of the unique position this puts us …
Probing Grief at Historic House Museums

By Callie Hawkins and Rob DeHart

Historic house museums can connect their physical spaces with personal experiences, including grief. This article originally appeared in Museum magazine’s May/June 2024 issue, a benefit of AAM membership. Historic house museums often focus …
Toward Equity in Metadata: How Sandy Spring Museum Is Going beyond Reparative Cataloging

By Allison Weiss

Equity: freedom from bias or favoritism Metadata: data that describes and provides context for digital items, which in turn helps users find and discover these resources. Though Black and white residents numbered almost equally throughout …
Advancing DEAI in a Polarized World

By Minal Bopaiah & Jakob Wolf-Barnett

Recently, we hosted a webinar with museum leaders on values-based communications for diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion (DEAI). While all attendees were eager to commit fully to DEAI, many acknowledged the risks of doing so in …
Remarks from Benin Bronzes Repatriation Ceremony

By American Alliance of Museums

On October 11, 2022, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art hosted a repatriation ceremony in which officials of the museum transferred ownership of twenty-nine Benin bronzes and the National Gallery of Art transferred ownership …
Museums Discover Impact Investing

By Laura Callanan

CFM first flagged impact investing as a trend of significance to museums in 2013, inspired by a talk Seth Miller gave at SXSW in which he declared that “every time you spend a dollar, you are creating the world you live in.” Impact …
Essential Evaluators: The Silver Lining

By Rose Jones, Laureen Trainer, and Andréa Giron Mathern

Essential Evaluators seeks to gather evaluators in a common space to dialogue, reflect, and support each other in a world upended by COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protest movement. This is a time of uncertain and unknown expectations …
Fear Factor: In a contentious cultural climate, museums are wise to recognize the pressures to self-censor

By Janet Marstine

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2020 issue of Museum magazine, a benefit of AAM membership. In January 2020, it came to light that the National Archives had altered a photograph that introduced the exhibition “Rightfully …