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Center for the Future of Museums Blog

The Center for the Future of Museums Blog shares musings on the future of museums and society.

A Growing Backlash to DEI

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By Elizabeth Merritt
Do you remember seeing this picture attempting to illustrate the difference between equality and equity? Now it also illustrates the latest battleground in the new culture wars. While a …

Consensual Curation and Our Common Future

By Tamara Serrao-Leiva
The best thinking about potential futures explores the full span of the Cone of Plausibility. By expanding our understanding of what is possible, we expand our choices regarding what is …

Join Me to Create a Future of Reparative Practice at AAM 2024

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By Elizabeth Merritt
It’s 2044, and around the nation, and throughout the world, US museums are seen as valued stewards and honored partners in the critical work of supporting communities and preserving …

Recruiting the Future of the Future

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By Elizabeth Merritt
I am very happy to announce that the Alliance is recruiting an Assistant Director for the Center for the Future of Museums. I hope you will broadcast that news, and help us find the person …

Your Guide to the Future at AAM 2024

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By Elizabeth Merritt
Hello museum people—I hope to see you in Baltimore, MD, May 16-19 for the 2024 Annual Meeting and MuseumExpo. There are always so many great sessions on the program that a common quandary …

Racing into the Future with TrendsWatch 2024

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By Elizabeth Merritt
It’s that time again! Check your mailbox for the 2024 edition of TrendsWatch, AAM’s annual forecasting report. Starting last year, we began publishing TrendsWatch as the Jan/Feb edition of …

Uncovering Future Artifacts: Come Play

By Katherine Prince
Museums sit at the balance point of past and future. Most often they apply their scholarship and curiosity to exploring things that have actually happened, but museums can flip that lens to …

When the Ancestors Call to You

By Isabel K. Handa & Amy V. Margaris
When we think about barriers to change, practical issues like time, money, and legal issues often are top of mind. This can be true, for example, when museums talk about repatriation, …

ISO Stories about the Future of Voluntary Repatriation, Restitution, and Reparations 

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By Elizabeth Merritt
From the digital desk of Elizabeth Merritt, Vice President, Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums: Museum people are natural storytellers, attuned to …

Twelve Museum Innovations in 2023

By Joseph O'Neill
Dispatches from the Center for the Future of Museums is a museum newsletter like none other, offering far-reaching analysis of emerging social, technological, economic, environmental, and …

Seeding the Future at the New Children’s Museum

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By Elizabeth Merritt
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 …

Curatorial Chatbot: An Experiment with AI at the Nasher Museum of Art

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By Elizabeth Merritt
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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Museum Philanthropy & Fundraising Tipsheet

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By American Alliance of Museums
Category: Financial Sustainability
This tipsheet summarizes the transcript of a webinar presented by Charles Katzenmeyer, Eowyn Bates, Amy Burt, Shannon Joern, and Ginevra Ranney. It was developed with the help of ChatGPT. …

Speaking the Audience’s Language: A Q&A with James Heaton

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By Adam Rozan
Category: Alliance Blog
At some point in the pandemic, I was working on a project, and I needed a museum-based definition of a term relating to audience development and museum work. I started by flipping through a …

Striving for Excellence in Exhibition Label Writing

By John Russick and Jojo Galvan Mora
Category: Alliance Blog
In just a few months, a quarter of the twenty-first century will be behind us. Much has changed in museums over that time. Some of that change has been brought on by technology and new ways …

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