Tips for Museum Educators to become Exhibition Design Facilitators
As a museum educator, do you ever feel forgotten? Feel as though your expertise was relegated to the tail-end of exhibition planning? Do you wish museum education played a larger leadership role at your institution? In this blog post, I …
Exhibition Label Writing & Audience Engagement
Exhibition labels can be an important means to deeper audience engagement. This program provides several approaches for including audience voices and telling intriguing stories that can help audiences make connections as part of their …
EXTREME EXHIBIT MAKEOVER: History Museum Meets Reality TV
Sometimes people who work in small museums take me to task about some of the technologies I highlight in CFM forecasts (“we can’t afford that!”) When this happens, I point out it’s never really about the technology—it’s about the human …
Four Ways of Seeing the Future
Last July, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child project and co-founder of MIT Media Lab, keynoted at the WorldFuture 2013 conference. In the ten minute extract of his talk embedded below, he offers four ways of looking …
Institutional Evolution: How Monticello faced and interpreted a legacy of slavery
This article originally appeared in the September/October 2013 edition of the Museum magazine. A statue of Thomas Jefferson stands before a curved wall. A sculpture of the nation’s third president certainly isn’t unusual. …
Making Mysteries
This article originally appeared in the 2013 September/October 2013 edition of the Museum magazine. Don Wildman, host of the hugely popular Travel Channel series, Mysteries at the Museum, came to the Alliance Annual Meeting & Museum …
We Hacked a Museum Exhibition
You may have been following Nina Simon’s account of the Hack the Museum Camp recently hosted by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, or perhaps you read Paul Orselli’s letter from camp. Today Maria Mortati, who facilitated the event …
Unfinished Business
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2013 edition of the Museum magazine. An adult diaper, a pill box, a plain spiral notebook, a yellow sponge, a mess of bank documents, a photo album, a broom. Each of these items rests in a …
The Concept of An Exhibition
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2013 edition of Museum magazine. An excerpt from Exhibitions · Concept Planning and Design, The AAM Press, 2012. Museum objects are like words-they make sense only when they are organized …
Pop-ups and Emerging Museums
Recent posts on the CFM Blog on pop-up museums & exhibits have provoked a lot of interest, so I invited Katie Spencer, executive director of the Museum of Durham History, to contribute yet another perspective. Her museum, still under …
