Leading Forward: engaging with complex and controversial topics
I’m using the 10th anniversary of CFM, and the ninth year of this blog, as an occasion to revisit some of our most widely read posts. Today I’m re-posting an essay by Sean Kelley, Senior Vice President, Director of …
Postcards from the future
Last week I flew down to Miami for the Contemporary Art in Historic Contexts Symposium at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. Vizcaya gathered curators, scholars, educators, and artists from around the globe to delve into this topic, and I had the …
A Futuryst Look at the Museum of Tomorrow
I’ve been following the work of Futurist Stuart Candy since the inception of CFM. The Sceptical Futuryst—his blog dedicated to “how we might feel about tomorrow”– is a staple of my scanning feed, and I’ve made good use of The Thing …
Futurist Friday: Cognitive Museum Buildings
Here’s a short video from Jonathan Strickland of Forward Thinking on the emergence of “cognitive buildings”: structures that use the internet of things (IoT) to analyze performance and anticipate our needs. …
Unwanted Water
According to the Floodsmart.gov website, coastal areas of the US account for more than half of the nation’s population and housing. This pattern is reflected the distribution of American museums as well. This being so, the rising sea …
Designing for Resilience
One of the themes CFM focuses on in TrendsWatch 2015 is the changing climate of risk facing museums. Fully a quarter of museums & related organizations in the IMLS MUDF database are located in coastal areas with high vulnerability …
Reinventing the Historic House Museum: MJT meets the Civil War
Here is another brief brain jotting as I take a break from writing TrendsWatch 2015. I’ve been vastly enjoying blog postsand tweets from Frank Vagnone, author of the Anarchist Guide to Historic House Museums. I love the way he …
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 …
A Case Study in Survival from the Sacred Realm
Museums can learn a lot by looking at how other sectors—for-profit and nonprofit—are responding to the same trends and events that shape our operating environment. Religious communities, for example, are challenged by changing …
What if an Historic House was about Art, and Storytelling, and Change?
Many, many people are struggling with how to reinvent and reinvigorate the historic house. (Including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, whose “Re-imagining History House Museums” is one of the current projects in the …
