diversity – American Alliance of Museums

Get about It: Change and Resistance

By Linda Norris

I’d never visited New Orleans before, and my brief but fascinating experience served as a metaphor for this year’s AAM Annual Meeting experience. New Orleans is a city of layers, with old finishes poking through, new ideas still pushing …
Flies in the Buttermilk: Museums, Diversity, and the Will to Change

By Lonnie G. Bunch Ill

This essay originally appeared in the July/August 2000 issue of Museum News, a publication of the American Alliance of Museums. Lonnie G. Bunch III later became the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American …
We Need a Radically Different System

By Kippen de Alba Chu

Prepared Remarks of Kippen de Alba Chu Board Chair of the American Alliance of Museums 2019 Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo May 21, 2019 As AAM’s unprecedented national initiative Facing Change gets underway in five cities across the US, …
Meet Marabou! The furry, friendly creature reimagining the museum

By Megan Elevado

When you visit a museum, do you feel empowered? Do you feel like you have authority and control of your experience? That’s why Marabou is here: to remind us that we all have agency in our museum experiences. Marabou is a rainbow-colored …
Hiring Tips to Create Value and Inclusion for all Disciplines in Museums

By Ayanna Reed

There are qualified and diverse candidates out there who may not be aware that museums are a sustainable career option for them—it’s our job as a field to recruit and retain this virtually untapped market. One important way to achieve this …
A Place at the Table: Developing diversity and next-generation leaders

By Lynn Miller

In 2018, the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) in Ohio named Asmaa Walton, a Detroit native with a master’s degree from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, its first KeyBank Museum Fellow. The announcement brought a four-year process of development, …
A Totally Inclusive Museum

By Cecile Shellman

At the conclusion of a long and productive workshop about inclusion, a museum employee asked: ”How will we know when we have reached our goal of being fully inclusive?” It was a great question, but I’m not sure anyone liked the answer. …
The Power of a Paid Internship: Creating pathways to careers in museums

By Makeba Clay

In 2015, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation issued a report on diversity in art museums that reinforced what is obvious to anyone working in or affiliated with the industry: non-Hispanic white men dominate leadership positions, and there is a …
Access and Inclusion Case Study: Connecting Students to the Museum Field

By Amy Miller and Sarah Sims

In a session at the 2017 AAM Annual Meeting in St. Louis, a look around the room revealed a small sea of mostly mid-career museum professionals with experience and interest in education and interpretation. The presenter posed a question: …
Taking a Stand: Prisons Today, The Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site Award Winner

By Nicole Frankhouser

The Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site’s Prisons Today: Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration exhibition won first place in the 2017 Excellence in Exhibition award presented jointly by the following Professional Networks …