Working on the National Mall means passing many museums everyday. As we enter the month of June and celebrate the LGBTQ+ community, the museums and many other businesses alike will begin to post their celebratory rainbow-themed posters, flyers, merchandise, etc. Though this wash of rainbow …
I have been fascinated by the history of the early Americas and United States since middle school, and dreamed of one day moving to the Boston area — since American Revolution sites are pretty hard to come by in my hometown on the central coast …
As Museum Studies students, we love to celebrate museums year-round. But did you know that there’s an internationally-recognized day each year when museums get to take center stage? Last week, on May 18, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) hosted the forty-fourth annual International Museum Day, an observance that has taken place every year since 1977. According to ICOM’s website, the primary goal of International Museum Day is to raise awareness that “museums are an important means of cultural exchange, enrichment of cultures and development of mutual understanding, cooperation and peace among peoples.”
The first International Museum Day was observed in 1977, but the idea of setting aside a day each year to honor museums first emerged nearly three decades prior. In 1951, ICOM hosted an international gathering for museum professionals called “Crusade for Museums,” where the necessity of increasing education and accessibility in museums was a hot topic of conversation. Out of these discussions emerged the idea of an annual observance celebrating museums, and during the 1977 ICOM General Assembly in Moscow, International Museum Day was formally established.
The theme of this year’s International Museum Day was “The Future of Museums: Recover and Reimagine.” After a year that has presented museums worldwide with immense economic, social, and political challenges, this theme asks museum professionals and museum-lovers alike to consider how all types of museums can best serve their publics as we move into a hopefully-brighter future. As ICOM President Alberto Garlandini expressed in his message for International Museum Day 2021, it is not enough for museums to simply recover from the difficulties of the past year; they must reinvent themselves “and seize the opportunity to build back a better world.” You can check out the full message in the video below!
But while International Museum Day has a unique theme each year, the overall goals of the observance have remained the same through the decades: to encourage museums around the world to plan fun and engaging events for their publics and to raise awareness of museums’ ever-important role in our world. Accordingly, museums around the world planned a wide range of digital and in-person activities to acknowledge International Museum Day, many of which you can still enjoy via ICOM’s interactive WeMap.
If you missed this year’s International Museum Day, don’t fret—there will be another opportunity to celebrate museums coming up in June with MuseumWeek, an international event slated for June 7–13. MuseumWeek, first established in 2014, will take place virtually across a range of social media outlets, and the theme for this year is Creativity. You can read more about MuseumWeek and how you can participate on the MuseumWeek website, and you can also follow along on their Twitter feed!
Another academic year has passed, and it’s time for three new editors to take the reins of the Museum Studies blog! A huge thank you to Alexandra, Abigail, Eric, and Sayyara for their hard work on the blog over the past year, and good luck …
Last March, the museum world shut down. Closing to the public, many museums laid off staff and shifted into survival mode. It was a scary prospect for students in the museum programs at Tufts—would there be jobs when we graduate? Even more immediately—how could we …
One of the assignments in my Exhibition Planning course is to share about an interesting exhibition that we went to see. Most of my classmates tended to share about the most recent exhibition that they saw, myself included. Whether in-person or virtual, as museums start to open up more and more it’s been wonderful to be in gallery spaces again.
For myself, my last visit in-person was to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts here in Richmond, Virginia to see the Sunken Cities exhibition.
This traveling exhibition was the last stop before these artifacts returned to Egypt and it was focused on the ancient cities of Thonis-Heraclion and Canopus which are located under the sea, along the coast of Alexandria.
I really have enjoyed learning about underwater archaeology in the course of my studies at Tufts, and I had never seen an exhibition that included a focus on how these artifacts were excavated. With Sunken Cities, this was really one of the major aspects that the exhibition focused on. Visitors got to see footage of the excavations and learn about where these cities were and how much is left to excavate. There’s still quite a lot of work to do at these sites, yet there are already enough artifacts to have an entire exhibition! As a visitor, this was really exciting.
I would say the other major focus of this exhibition was the cosmopolitan culture of these ancient port cities, especially the religious ceremonies. An entire section of the exhibit walked visitors through the mysteries of Osiris, religious ceremonies that took place at a certain time of year.
It was really wonderful to go and see this exhibit, and I’m looking forward to going to museums again as things open up now that we are getting vaccinated!
What was your last museum visit? Are there any exhibitions that you are looking forward to visiting in the near future? Feel free to leave a comment below!