Racist images pervade our public spaces and mental landscape If you missed the live feed of the symposium, Mascots, Myths, Memorials, and Memory on Saturday, March 3, you can still find the agenda on the program’s Facebook page, and a number of recordings of the talks on YouTube. There is also a great summary of the day…
D’lo, Queer/transgender Tamil Sri Lankan-American Actor/Writer/Comedian Visitors of Color Tmblr Can Museums Be Neutral?, a post by Museum Questions blogger Rebecca Herz, galvanized museum discussions on Twitter and Facebook in December, 2017. The conversation died down over the holidays, but I’ve continued to reflect on some of the important questions that were raised. Earlier…
I’m still gathering my thoughts on the fast and furious Twitter conversation of the week of December 18, 2017, sparked by Rebecca Herz’s post, Can Museums Be Neutral? While I’m working on my response I’d like to add to the discussion by publishing the thoughts of Dan Spock (formerly Director of the Museum at the…
While revealing individual misogynists is hard, uprooting misogyny is much harder. Lozada, When Women Dare to Step Out of Place The Ford and Walton Foundations made big news recently in the arts and philanthropy world, announcing $6 million in diversity fellowships for 20 US art museums. According to the Philanthropy News Digest, Efforts to be…
How to transform museums into places of greater inclusion and equity? This is the key question of the MASSAction (Museum as Site for Social Action) initiative, begun in 2016 and coordinated out of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. A few weeks ago 36 museums (art, history, science) from across the country gathered for…
Where is Part 2? In a post written on March 2, 2017, Stayin’ Alive, Part 1: Advocacy, I described efforts by the American Alliance of Museums, on behalf of the larger US museum community, to advocate for continued government funding of museums and cultural institutions in the face of a proposed Trump budget. As implied…
And now it’s alright, it’s okay And you may look the other way We can try to understand the New York Times’ effect on man. Stayin’ Alive. The Gibbs Brothers Monday, February 27 was training day for the 9th annual American Alliance of Museums Advocacy Day program; two days when museums from all over the…
What is thinking systemically? A system, as we know, is a group of interrelated and interconnected parts, such that what happens to one has an impact on all. I’ve been noticing, in all kinds of media, references to the importance of examining problems from a systemic point of view, i.e. recognizing that a problem is…
As many of you know I often post about The Empathetic Museum (by the way, those of us working on that project now have a new website). At the AAM Conference in Washington, DC in May, I met Laura-Edythe Coleman, a follower of Empathetic Museum posts and a professional involved in both the museum and…
As many readers know I was in India from mid-July to early August this year, teaching a museum studies class for the National Council of Science Museums masters program in Kolkata. My co-teacher Karen Lee of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and I also had a chance to travel north to Dehradun and Mussoori…