Category: Admin Post (Page 5 of 16)

Do Smaller Museums Better Serve Their Communities?

April 26, 2019 / Kelsey L. Petersen / 1 Comment

In conducting my thesis research, I recently came across a quote that really stood out to me and that I think museum professionals can agree on:

“The most promising innovations in museums’ relationships with communities are coming not from the largest, oldest, and best-funded institutions, but rather from institutions once viewed as marginal.” (From “Audience, Ownership, and Authority” in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Cultures, edited by Ivan Karp and Christine Mullen Kreamer).

Why is it that some of the most striking, relevant exhibitions come from museums operating on a much smaller scale than say, the Metropolitan or the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston? That is not to say that larger institutions are not relevant to their communities, but in my experience, smaller museums seem to be a better platform for fostering interpersonal connections and serving the needs of their immediate audiences.

In reading this quote, a few examples of smaller community museums that appear to offer “the most promising innovations” immediately came to mind, including the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire and the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, Washington.

For instance, the Currier Museum is a resonant example of a museum actively engaging with its community by creating outreach programs that reflects its visitors’ needs. Its mission statement clearly supports this idea- “Focused on Art, Centered in Community, Committed to Inspire.” The Currier also curates exhibitions that directly respond to its community, such as the Visual Dispatches from Vietnam War exhibition that involved Manchester’s close-knit veteran community. More relevant, however, is the museum’s current work reflecting on one of the worst epidemics the United States is currently experiencing. Manchester, the largest city in New Hampshire, is unfortunately at the heart of the opioid crisis. In response to this, the Currier has created a program that invites family members of individuals struggling with an addiction to come to the museum and create art in a safe space. This is a beautiful example of a museum “reinventing” themselves to become relevant to their own community, proving that relevance is often more important than even the museum’s collection.

The Currier’s work in successfully engaging with its community reminds me of the transformation that the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle recently experienced. As a result of Director Ron Chew’s decision to create a “community-response” exhibition platform, that is an exhibition “that speaks to the issues happening here and now, and that reach and echo far beyond the museum’s space,” the Wing Luke Asian Museum experienced a spike in museum attendance, fundraised millions of dollars, and ultimately established a “mutually beneficial relationship” within its community.[1] I am impressed with museums such as the Currier and Wing Luke Asian that have taken the (sometimes scary) initiative to amend and improve their relationship with their community, by inviting more voices and perspectives to be heard and recognized.

What are your thoughts? Does the size and budget of an institution matter when it comes to producing relevant exhibitions? Do any other examples come to mind? Please share your thoughts in the comments below and keep the conversation going!

[1] Ron Chew, “Five Keys to Growing a Healthy Community-connected Museum,” 6.

Why we should look towards the hospitality industry to improve visitor experience

April 10, 2019 / Amanda S. Wall / 1 Comment

This post was written in collaboration with second year Museum Education M.A. student Taylor Fontes

When moving to the Greater Boston Area to pursue my Masters degree in Museum Education, I made a hard decision. I chose to continue working in restaurants (a job I’ve done since I was a teenager) instead of pursuing a position at a local museum. I made this decision because restaurant work is a great way to make fast cash. As I move forward into a career in which that will no longer be the case, I wanted to start off strong with as little debt as possible and ample time to complete my course work. Sometimes, I have struggled with this choice as it has meant there is a gap in my resume when it comes to museum work. However, I have recently realized how important working in the hospitality industry has been to my experience in museums. So many of the skills I have learned in hospitality are transferrable to skills needed in museums. I firmly believe that these hospitality skills have strongly informed my ability to provide positive visitor experiences in museum environments.

When Taylor brought up the idea for this post she came from almost the opposite perspective. While she had been working in visitor service positions for a long time, she was new to the restaurant industry. Quickly however, she began to be referred to as a “rock star hostess.” So how did Taylor pick up the restaurant brand of hospitality so quickly? For her, it was so similar to the type of experience she strived to provide for visitors in museums she has worked in.

As museums become more visitor-centered and less object-centered it is important for us to see ourselves as institutions of hospitality. We can look towards the hospitality industry to help inform our practices within the museum. So what are our biggest takeaways?

The vocabulary we use matters: Most hospitality focused restaurants don’t refer to their patrons as customers. It is too transactional. We focus on our guests. Guests are those that we invite in, they are wanted, accommodated, and catered too. In museums we need to think of our visitors as guests as well.
First impressions are everything: From the atmosphere, to the signage, to the person greeting you. In a restaurant, the host/hostess is your first point of contact. They will set the tone for your entire experience, so friendly and personable staff are a must. But what about museums? Is there someone to greet visitors? Are the visitor service staff responsive? What is the tone we are setting?
Restaurants know how to sell their product: Hospitality industry professionals have a lot of experience in selling their product. From the restaurant itself to up-selling the food and drink, this takes lots of knowledge of not just the products but of the audience as well. We need to know our audiences and understand what they want out of their experience. As we know, there are many different types of visitors with varying needs.
Flexibility: Not all guests are looking for the same experience. We have to be flexible and fluid in order to provide satisfying and enriching experiences to a diverse audience. The same approach will not work with a group of millennials out for drinks that will work with an older couple having lunch. The same is true for museum visitors.
Steps of service: Restaurants have very defined steps of service that guide our guests experiences. This does not in turn mean there is no free-choice within it. However, by creating these steps of service restaurants are able to be flexible while still provide superior service. Many museums think about visitor flow when designing exhibits. Creating steps of service within a museum experience can help us to better serve our visitors.
Empathy and Tolerance: Restaurant professionals are highly experienced in empathy and tolerance. While we may use these words differently in the museum field. It is important as museum professionals that we don’t just teach empathy and tolerance but that we live it. In order to provide positive visitor experiences it is important that we can empathize with our visitors to better understand their needs as well as be tolerant to those that have different needs.
The human connection: Hospitality professionals are experienced in creating personal connections in short periods of time. We talk to people from many different walks of life on a daily basis and if we want them to return it is important to create those connections. This, to me, is the biggest transferrable skill to the museum field. We want our visitors to make personal connections to what we are presenting. If museum professionals are not adept in making those connections how can they design and implement experiences that do. These social skills are so important.
Ability to anticipate visitor needs: It is so important in both restaurants and museums for staff to be able to anticipate our guests and visitors needs before they can verbalize, or even know, what those needs are. These can be as basic as providing easily accessible bathrooms and comfortable seating or more complex such as providing for guests with disabilities. We need to anticipate everything our visitors may need when designing programming and exhibitions.

While this is just a short list there are many more things that museums can learn from restaurants as museums become more and more visitor focused.

WEEKLY JOB ROUNDUP!

April 10, 2019 / Amanda S. Wall / 0 Comments

Week of April 9th! Take a peek at the latest national jobs roundup!

Northeast

Public Programming Assistant [Fruitlands Museum- Harvard, MA]

Head of Public Programs [The Clark Art Institute- Williamstown, MA]

Exhibit Designer [Harvard Museums of Science and Culture- Cambridge, MA]

Assistant Museum Preparator [Mount Holyoke- South Hadley, MA]

Museum Educator and Docent Program Supervisor [Wellin Museum- Clinton, NY]

Programs Project Coordinator [Connecticut Science Center- Hartford, CT]

Museum Assistant [Natick Historical Society- Natick, MA]

Mid-Atlantic

Museum Education Specialist II [Space Telescope Science Institute- Baltimore, MD]

Senior Advancement Program Specialist [National Museum of African American History and Culture- Washington, D.C.]

Public Programs and Outreach Manager [Samek Art Museum- Lewisburg, PA]

Education and Program Coordinator [National Museum of Industrial History- Bethlehem, PA]

Southeast

Exhibition Designer [High Museum of Art- Atlanta, GA]

Director of Museum Planning and Operations [International African American Museum- Charleston, SC]

Coordinator of Youth and Community Programs [High Museum of Art- Atlanta, GA]

Midwest

Manager of Curatorial and Exhibits [Harley-Davidson Museum- Milwaukee, WI]

Senior Museum Content Developer [Hilferty and Associates- Athens, OH]

Teen and Community Programs Manager [Ohio State University- Columbus, OH]

Curatorial Assistant [Denver Art Museum- Denver, CO]

Director of Education [Spurlock Museum- Urbana, IL]

Manager of School Programs [Museum of Contemporary Art- Chicago, IL]

Specialist, Interpretation and Digital Learning [Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art- Kansas City, MO]

West

Volunteer Coordinator [Thanksgiving Point Institute- Lehi, UT]

Collections Specialist [Bowman Museum of Crook County- Prineville, OR]

Director of Collections [Nordic Museum-Seattle, WA]

From Monument to Memorial: A Symposium Review

April 2, 2019 / Kelsey L. Petersen / 1 Comment

“We can’t change the past but we can change history.” -Dr. Kymberly Pinder

On Friday, March 29th, I attended Tufts University’s one-day symposium, “From Monument to Memorial: Space, Commemoration, and Representation in America Now.” Organized by the Department of Art and Art History, the symposium invited audiences to consider the role of public civic art in America and its current impact in our present political climate. Discussions on history, heritage, memory, and legacy were the undercurrents of each presentation.

Before the first panel began, Tufts University Art Gallery Director Dina Deitsch discussed the symposium organizers’ deliberate choice to host the event in Tufts’ Alumnae Lounge, a rather contentious space on campus due to the nature of its monumental murals. Commissioned in 1955, the mural’s east wall depicts the historical founding of Tufts on Walnut Hill, while the west wall shows Tufts students, faculty, and deans in an attempt to provide a “snapshot of student life” in the 1950s. Although there are at least fifty individuals painted between the two walls, almost all of the figures are white, Protestant men (except for a few white women). In fact, the only reference to Medford’s diverse population is a small image of the Isaac Royall Slave House, and the artists completely ignore the fact that Walnut Hill is a site of spiritual significance for the Mystic people.

The Alumnae Lounge murals do not portray the diversity of Tufts University, both past and present. (Stay tuned on updates concerning the murals; there is currently a working group determining how best to make the space more inclusionary. An announcement about the murals’ changes to come will be made in the next few months, according to Deitsch.) Considering the ongoing debates concerning the Alumnae Lounge, the space served as a fitting backdrop for the day’s discussants, with Deitsch’s speech further setting the tone for the issues at heart of each panel.

The morning session, “Local Histories/Contested Spaces,” was comprised of four panelists: Danielle Abrams, Professor of the Practice in Performance at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts; Kerri Greenidge, Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts; Diana Martinez, Director of Architectural Studies at Tufts; and Kymberly Pinder, Provost of Massachusetts College of Art.

Each panelist discussed a controversial site, monument, or public art project and the importance of re-contextualizing it in its proper narrative. For instance, Danielle Abrams talked about her research concerning the segregated Lincoln Beach, an amusement park that was open from 1939-1964 in New Orleans. Today, Lincoln Beach is in ruins, and the nearby “whites only” Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park is often more referenced in the archives. Abrams is working to uncover these archives and prevent the complete erasure of Lincoln Beach from memory by collaborating with the last living generation of individuals who used to frequent the park and can speak to their experiences of segregation.

After the morning panel session, symposium participants and audience members had the opportunity to go on a two-hour guided bus tour led by Kendra Field and Kerri Greenidge of Tufts’ African American Trail Project. The Trail Project is a collaborative effort among students, scholars, and community members, intended to interrogate Massachusetts’ white history. With an aim of placing greater Boston historical monuments in their proper context – that is a narrative that also includes the memory and experiences of “historic African American, Black Native, and diasporic communities,” the Project is bringing to light history that has long been negated. The sites on the tour span five centuries and five neighborhoods of greater Boston, including Somerville/Medford, Beacon Hill, Roxbury, and Mattapan. Some examples of tour stops include the Dorchester North Burial Ground, Bunker Hill Monument, Royall House and Slave Quarters, W.E.B. Du Bois House, the Charles Street Meeting House, and Marsh Chapel. Sites continue to be added to the growing list, and members of the public are welcome to suggest or edit any site.

Mabel O. Wilson, Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, led the keynote address, “Memory/Race/Nation: The Politics of Modern Memorials,” in which she discussed the events of the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the University of Virginia’s counter-protesters who shrouded their campus’ statues of Confederate figures in response. While traditionally University of Virginia’s campus tours spoke of Thomas Jefferson’s founding of the school and his legacy, now, thanks in part to increased student pressure, UVA tours highlight a narrative that was silenced for so long, one that acknowledges the approximately six hundred slaves that worked for Jefferson during his lifetime. Furthermore, a coalition of students and staff are “connecting the dots that have been missing,” with a forthcoming Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, a planned campus monument in the shape of a broken slave shackle, on which the names of 660 individuals are engraved along a timeline in a shallow pool of water in “an effort to humanize the unknown.”

As the symposium drew to a close, panelists left the audience with a series of questions to consider. How do we represent highly personal histories, and who do we represent in telling said narratives? How can we reconsider commemoration in light of recent violent events such as the Unite the Right rally in 2017? When should we preserve history, if at all, and what should we do with contentious spaces or monuments? For a room filled with museum professionals, artists, professors, trailblazers, and graduate students, these are timely questions for everyone to think about in our ongoing work of reframing histories.