A Museum Professional’s Oath for Better Visitor Interactions
Museums serve visitors, both on-site and off. Connecting with others is a grave responsibility, a relationship that can change people and organizations. Funders love engagement, like education and community engagement. Museums seek funding for programs that connect them to others, often raising millions for operating support. This work is essential, basically making the museums’ …
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How do you do Community Engagement
Community Engagement is a commitment. Often organizations need to go through stages to improve their engagement with patrons. At the lowest level of engagement, organizations want to include people in their existing programs without changes. At the highest level of engagement, the organization is willing to make changes and as a result their community changes. …
What is Community Engagement?
Community Engagement is one of those terms that is tossed around in museums but can become encrusted with coded meaning. Often museums use the word community engagement to mean bringing in low-income people, with “community” being a coded term for underprivileged people. Sometimes community engagement might be used as the term for bringing in new …
Thinking about Value: Universal Rights of Humanity & Free Arts/ Culture
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed in 1948 explicitly calls out the importance of arts and culture. Article 27 states “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” This estimable document includes a number of essential …
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Looking into the Well-Reported Statistic about Museums, Starbucks & McDonalds (Data)
A well-reported statistic compares the number of museums to Starbucks and McDonalds. There are 1.5 times more museums in the country than the caffeine and fries purveyors. A friend Michelle Epps got me thinking about what this statistic. (You might know Michelle from her tireless work on the Emerging Museum Professional network). In looking at …
Connecting Experience and Research
Research is the fuel in the engine of the museum’s output. Like a car, which is basically inert without a driver, the museum only fulfills its full mission when drawing visitors. Visitors are now a scarce commodity. Drawing more visitors requires considering our offerings and the way those offerings come to fruition. This does mean …
Interpretation : Focus on Tactile and Kinesthetics
In museum galleries, we signal ideas through a variety of ways. Collections are visible in the galleries. Interpretation adds more signals, like ancillary images, audiotours, and of course text. But, we also omit many stimuli. We often completely exclude two major forms of meaning-making, kinesthetic and tactile. What happens when we do this? And, what …
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The Regional Arts and Culture Ecosystem
No institution is an island. Understanding your part in the greater whole of your community can help, your organization find the best way to work in the community. Large Single-Sited Institutions: ex. Museums Multi-Sited Institutions: ex. School systems, Library systems Event-Focused Organizations: ex. Reader/ Writing Events, musical festivals Small Single-Sited Organizations: ex. Arts centers Mobile/ …
What Museums Can Learn from the Black Panther
Taken from the Marvel Comic Books, the Black Panther is a movie about a fictional African nation that cloaks its advanced civilization as a form of self-preservation. The king of the nation has superhuman strength thanks to serious sumptuary success. The Black Panther’s trail to bring a bad guy to justice starts some even worse …
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Vistor-Centered Interpretation
There is a symphonic aspect to exhibition and museum gallery planning. Many ideas come together to create something coherent and ideally pleasing to the audience. Just as some music is appealing to only a few, and others hit the charts, some exhibitions and museum spaces work for more rarified audiences. That said, museums can …