International Museum Day 2020 Goes Digital and Spotlights “Museums for Equality: Diversity and Inclusion”
From celebrating tribal traditions in Kenya to reconnecting with immigrant roots in Taiwan, tens of thousands of museums all over the world held International Museum Day activities in 2019. This year, however, the fortieth anniversary of …
Lessons from History: Museums and Pandemics
Support Free COVID-19 Resources for the Field: The current crisis is taking a distressing financial toll on cultural organizations, and AAM is no different. The Center for the Future of Museums is supported by AAM membership and …
Why We’re Covering the Opioid Crisis at the Indiana State Museum
As museums look to the future, it is paramount that we stay relevant to our visitors and continue to meet their needs. Instead of only serving as stewards of the past, museums can put history in context and look to the future and tackle …
Silent No More: The new Lucy Burns Museum speaks to the centennial of suffrage
Suffragists are recorded as the first in US history to use silence as protest, calling themselves “Silent Sentinels.” US suffragists (rather than British suffragettes) were also the first to picket the White House. They stood in front of …
#5WomenArtists Shaping Museum Practice
Museums are among the most trusted sources of information and can use that superpower of trust to nudge society towards preferred futures. Today on the blog, Amy Mannarino, Director of Communications and Marketing at the National Museum of …
What Can Museums Learn from the “American Dirt” Controversy?
As an avid reader of Chicanx/Latinx literature, I’ve been closely following the national conversation about the recently released novel American Dirt by author Jeanine Cummins. The conversation—which highlights issues of race, ethnicity, …
Diving Deeper into Truth, Trust, and Fake News
In this series of posts, EdCom’s Trends Committee is taking a deeper look at emerging phenomena identified in the 2019 edition of TrendsWatch from the Center for the Future of Museums. Previously in the series, they explored how the push …
Social Media Can Transform Your Museum: An interview with Lanae Spruce
I’ll never forget the moment I began to understand the true power of social media. It was 2015 and I was working for a popular online feminist magazine. My job involved reading every one of the hundreds of Facebook comments that would pour …
Archivist of the United States’ Letter to the Museum Field
Many in our field have expressed concern over the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) troubling alteration of a 2017 photograph of the Women’s March. Since that time, the federal agency has removed the altered photograph …
Museums and the Census: How can you help?
The 2020 United States Census is right around the corner, with National Census Day taking place on April 1, and it’s time for museums to start thinking about how they’ll be involved. This once-a-decade process of counting the country’s …
