Historic House – American Alliance of Museums

Reflections on the Historic House Summit from Scholarship Attendee Sarah Ortiz-Monasterio

By Sarah Ortiz-Monasterio

On February 3-5, 2019, AAM’s Historic Houses and Sites and Environment and Climate networks hosted a rare convening of experts at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami, Florida, for “Sustainability: Governance, Relevance, and the …
Leading Forward: engaging with complex and controversial topics

By Elizabeth Merritt

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

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 …
Unwanted Water

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 …
Reinventing the Historic House Museum: MJT meets the Civil War

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 …
A Case Study in Survival from the Sacred Realm

By Elizabeth Merritt

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?

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 …
Artists, Art, and Historic Sites: A Revitalization of the Past Through Present Creativity

By Elizabeth Merritt

Kate Laurel Burgess-Mac Intosh is an independent museum professional whoshares her research on contemporary art/historic site mash-ups on theblog Revitalizing Historic Sites and on Facebook. Sheis Chair of the Young and Emerging Museum …
Agriculture Training Symposium for Historic Site and Museum Professionals

By Elizabeth Merritt

Proving yet again that this is the year of all things food, for museums, Kristin Hagar, development and communications coordinator at The Wyck Association shares the following opportunity to explore how food can help museums build …
Saving the Historic House—While Saving the World

By Elizabeth Merritt

This week’s guest post is by Laurie Ossman, director of Woodlawn, a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. As I pointed out in an earlier profile of an historic house, museums can use food to build community and tackle …