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Advancing DEAI in a Polarized World

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 …

Remarks from Benin Bronzes Repatriation Ceremony

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 …

Germany first to hand back Benin bronzes looted by British

Germany is to become the first country to hand back the Benin bronzes looted by British soldiers in the late nineteenth century. A decision on the restitution was facilitated by the fact …

Baltimore Museum to Sell 3 Blue-Chip Paintings to Advance Equity

The Baltimore Museum of Art is deaccessioning three paintings, by Brice Marden, Clyfford Still and Andy Warhol, and expects to receive approximately $65 million from a combination of an …

Essential Evaluators: The Silver Lining

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. …

Fear Factor: In a contentious cultural climate, museums are wise to recognize the pressures to self-censor

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 …

Diving Deeper into Truth, Trust, and Fake News

In this series of posts, EdCom’s Trends Committee is taking a deeper look at emerging phenomena identified in the 2019 edition of TrendsWatch from the Center for the Future of Museums. …

As Nazi objects and fakes enter collectors’ market, should museums show them?

A recent rash of sales of Nazi memorabilia raise questions about dealing in such objects at a time when fascist philosophy is being embraced by populist radicals and demand is fuelling the …

Museopunks Episode 41: Digitization is not neutral

Over the past decade, museums have increasingly shared high-resolution open access images of their collections. Yet there are significant legal and ethical complexities related to digital …

The Top Ten Alliance Blog Posts of 2019

It was a whirlwind year of museums making themselves over for our changing world. Evolving ethics, social and technological transformation, and the looming presence of the bottom line are …

Toxic Philanthropy

We live in a time in which the public is hyper sensitive to the ethics of where money comes from, and where it goes. As I observed in TrendsWatch 2015, nonprofits don’t get a free pass in …
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Latest Stories from AAM

Seeding the Future at the New Children’s Museum

Category: Center for the Future Of Museums Blog
I’m a huge fan of speculative fiction—stories with the power to immerse us in the daily reality of possible futures deeply and viscerally. We can fall in love with fiction in a way we …

External Pressures on Museum-Going: A 2023 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers Data Story

Category: Alliance Blog
This visual Data Story is based on findings from the 2023 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, a national survey of American museum visitors from AAM and Wilkening Consulting. Every year, the …

Curatorial Chatbot: an experiment with AI at the Nasher Museum of Art

Category: Center for the Future Of Museums Blog
CFM has explored museum applications of artificial intelligence (AI) since 2017, notably business analytics, customer service, collections data analysis, and provenance research. Today on …

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