Museum Boards

This week I had coffee with a former museum director, who spoke at length about his former museum’s Board of Directors. He said that when he began his tenure at the museum, the Board’s approach to finding new members was to invite their friends at the country club.  For him, the challenge was to diversify the board: how do you add representatives of minority groups? How do you have a board that looks like the community you want to serve?

Diversification is certainly laudable. But the issue of looking like the community is somewhat misleading. Most museums nominate board members based on their ability to donate or find large sums of money. So when this director began to diversify his board, he looked for a wealthy African American board member. This former director’s museum is in a city where over 25% of the city is African American, and 40% of the city’s African Americans live below the poverty line. I am not convinced this audience is best represented by someone capable of donating tens of thousands of dollars to a museum.

Continue reading “Museum Boards”

Why Should Schools Visit Museums?

A current project of mine calls for a very specific justification of school visits to museums. I believe strongly that school groups should visit museums, and that museums should provide great programs for these groups, despite the fact that the these visits are time-consuming (for schools as well as museums) and expensive. But this project is leading me to some unanswered questions. WHY should school groups visit museums? And how can the WHY help us shape the HOW?

I can think of five arguments for why schools groups should visit. These are:Continue reading “Why Should Schools Visit Museums?”

Arts Education Elevator Speech: Everything You See Here Was Imagined

At the Face to Face conference last March, Russell Granet urged me to draft an elevator speech – a quick and cogent argument for why the arts matter.  Russell noted that this is something the arts education world has not done very effectively. We can explain how the arts support the curriculum or list the many many reasons the arts matter.  But we rarely offer a memorable, convincing, two-sentence explanation of why the arts are important in and of themselves.

Neil Gaiman’s recent address for the Reading Agency in London offers the best elevator speech I’ve heard.  Granted, he was talking about fiction, not “the arts”.  But fiction writing, like poetry and creative non-fiction (although often left out of our list of art subjects, and co-opted by Language Arts classes where it becomes a dry, testable subject) is an art, and Gaiman’s ideas are broadly applicable. Here are two of my favorite passages from this speech:Continue reading “Arts Education Elevator Speech: Everything You See Here Was Imagined”

Visitor Feedback, By Blog Post

In our socially networked world, posts about museums make the rounds fast.  These posts are often applauded, decried, or laughed at.  But they are useful for something more: we can mine these posts for specific ideas about what’s working or not, and use this as a springboard for reflecting on and improving the work we do.

Jake, a rather amazing 11-year old from Scotland, recently shared a list of “21 ways how I would create an amazing museum.”  A few ideas that grabbed my interest:Continue reading “Visitor Feedback, By Blog Post”

The Everything Museum

As a newcomer to Peoria, Illinois, last week’s Illinois Association of Museums conference was a great way to learn about the local museum landscape.  In particular, I find the “everything” museum of great interest.  In large metropolitan areas such as New York or Chicago, museums generally collect and display artifacts relating to a single discipline.  They are “or” museums: art OR science OR history.Continue reading “The Everything Museum”

Good Questions

charlie brown cartoon

Asking good questions is essential to museum practice.  Exhibitions are explorations of a topic, often driven by a curator’s curiosity, even when not explicitly framed around a question.  Tours explore questions masked as a theme: How do artists explore place? How can we learn about the 19th century through household objects?  Inquiry-based museum education, and participatory practices that solicit visitor feedback, stem from a common goal: We want visitors to ask good questions, to contribute their own ideas, and to learn to pose and contemplate questions for themselves during museum visits and beyond.Continue reading “Good Questions”