Over and over again, zoos and aquariums around the world are making headlines for their same-sex penguin couplings. One of the most iconic couples was Roy and Silo, two male chinstrap penguins who began performing mating rituals at the Central Park Zoo in 1998. After …
The theme for this week of My Home is a Museum project is Balance. The author of the idea is Anuja Jayasekara, he is a PhD student in Physics at Tufts. As many of us try to maintain a healthy balance of work, academic studies, …
If you’re still figuring out your summer plans, I’d like to recommend taking the Revitalizing Historic House Museums HIST 0289 – A course taught by Ken Turino and Barbara Silberman, which I took last summer. This course takes a deep dive into historic house museums: the challenges facing many of these museums and strategies to address them—including deciding if the most sustainable use of the house is not as a museum. I enjoyed the course and wanted to share some insights into why you should consider taking it.
It uses historic house museums as a lens for thinking about creating welcoming, community-centered organizations. The course focuses on themes like community engagement, inclusion, creating relevant experiences, and management of organizations for sustainability. These themes transfer across museum types and are essential for the future of museums.
It stretches you to strategically think and plan at the organizational level. We worked through business cases in class where we analyzed documents to develop plans addressing real-world challenges faced by historic house museums (e.g., dwindling revenue, lack of connection with local communities, managing collections, etc.). This built to a final project where we proposed business models for how to use a historic house property.
You don’t need prior experience working in historic house museums. Most of my experience as a museum professional was in informal science education, having only dabbled in working in history contexts. I was able to keep up and learned a lot about historic sites, small museums, and how different aspects of museums operations interact across the organization.
If you’re interested in helping reinvent museums as welcoming, inclusive, community-centered organizations, please check this course out.
Ann Attwood (2020)
Since Valentine’s Day was this past weekend, I thought that a fitting topic for this week would be LOVE. LOVE is a collection of sculptures created by Robert Indiana (born Robert Clark), an artist from New Castle Indiana. The sculpture is of the letters “L,” …
The past few weeks have been emotionally and mentally challenging for many people. As graduate students, we have to maintain a good work and study performance while juggling our Covid colored social lives and personal care, in addition last week many experienced the stress related …
And happy grand opening day to the National Museum of the United States Army! Here’s the link to watch the opening ceremony, which will be livestreamed this afternoon at 1 p.m.
There are various exhibits set up, including a soldiers’ gallery, which has the stories of men and women from many historic periods. Other exhibits seem broadly organized by period, covering the colonial era and Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Army’s role in WWI, and all the way up to modern warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq. The individual soldier seems to be of particular focus, giving voice to their particular narratives and experiences.
The museum is also in the process of preparing an experiential learning lab, in which visitors must work collaboratively to help the Army solve a humanitarian crisis; this experience helps reinforce geography and STEM skills.
The museum is also ensuring the health and safety of staff and visitors, with efforts such as timed tickets and contactless ordering from the cafe.
The National Army Museum is also offering virtual events, for those visitors who are unable or uncomfortable to visit in person. There are two upcoming (free!) virtual book talks:
Personally, I’m super interested in the Curator’s Corner episodes, which feature artifacts of interest in each episode. The first episode features Sgt. Gary Uchida’s canvas travel bag during WWII. Here’s that episode:
It is certainly interesting to see how the museum is diversifying and offering these events, and the efforts that are being made to ensure that museum visitors and staff can still enjoy the museum safely. It is certainly some good news to see a new museum opening up, and a great way to celebrate Veterans Day. Thank you to all who served, and are serving now!