Posts Tagged ‘museums’
How can the internet change the way that we conduct research in the humanities? This is a question that scholars have been asking since the earliest days of the web, but as our own relationship with the internet develops through the growth of social networks and smart phones, we continue to find new answers to this question. In my February post I discussed the ways that museums are reaching out to involve adults in the exhibition planning process. These efforts usually take place outside of the museum on interactive online platforms. post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe takes these efforts to engage the public a step further. post is a new interactive research platform developed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It was launched just two months ago and the concept is still relatively new, but hopefully the website will blossom into a lively community of amateur researchers working alongside scholars affiliated with the MoMA and beyond. The idea is that users will contribute to bibliographies and research, as well as engage in meaningful discussions about contemporary art. In many ways the idea is an elaboration on the idea of community curation. But rather than solicit the community to help plan an exhibition, post brings amateur art lovers, scholars, and artists from outside of the museum into the conversation at an earlier research stage. The resulting collaboration will then feed back into the work of the museum. Read more.
Over the last few weeks I have been turning over in my mind and bouncing off colleagues the idea of admission fees, pro and con. Museum fees are hot button issue for many reasons. Few museums can claim fees are the sole or even the majority of their budget revenue; they are a part of the funding jambalaya that includes—or should include—membership or similar programs, endowment or investment funds, fundraising event proceeds, planned giving gifts, etc. How big a role fees play in funding varies depending on the size of the organization. Read more.
From NJAM:
Members of the New Jersey Association of Museums are invited to submit nominations for the 2013 John Cotton Dana Ward to be presented Monday, June 10, 2013. The John Cotton Dana award honors professionals who have made significant contributions to the growth and development of New Jersey’s museums. Dana founded the Newark Museum in 1909 and believed that museums could enrich the lives of all people.
Download the nomination guidelines and form (PDF) here. Submissions will be accepted until Friday, May 10, 2013. Send nominations to NJAM, c/o Katie Witzig, GlassRoots, 10 Bleeker St, Newark, NJ 07102 or emailed to kwitzig@glassroots.org.
Information on becoming a member of NJAM is available here.
As a teacher and museum educator, one of my most difficult tasks is helping students move from a mode of passive knowledge consumption to one of critical engagement with information. Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a method traditionally used in museums, and I have found that it gives discussion leaders a way to generate critical thinking. This technique for viewing art was developed by Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine. It was first tested in museums in the early 1990s. Since then, it has been implemented in museums, schools, and universities around the world. The VTS Institute leads periodic seminars and training sessions throughout the country. I first learned about this technique in a museum studies seminar and have since experienced it as a participant in museum tours. I now use VTS as a tour guide in a university museum and was recently challenged to perform the method in a classroom with a slideshow of digital images. This post offers a meditation on the challenges and rewards of using VTS, and especially on adapting the method for classroom use. Read more.
Crowd sourcing has become trendy within the humanities as a means of opening academic projects to the public. In the museum world, community-curated exhibitions have offered a response to this movement, and a number of these exhibitions have recently occurred along the east coast. These special exhibitions grant the community increased access to museum collections and invite sustained conversations between the public and museum staff. They complicate curatorial authority and the spatial hierarchy accorded by privileged access to storage facilities, even though in most cases the public chooses artworks for these exhibitions from a digitized archive. In fact, allowing the community to use digital media to effectively call up works of art from storage to the exhibition space mirrors trends in the way that we (the public) relate to works of art, that is, through digital means. Platforms like Artsy, for example, allow the user to amass a personal, albeit digital, art collection culled from images of fine art physically held by collections around the world. The community-curated projects I discuss below unfold in various combinations of the digital and physical realms. Each offers its own take on the evolving relationship between the museum and public. Read more.
The bar at the Schneiders’ saloon. Visible on the bar is the 19th century version of a growler. Children living at 97 Orchard St. might have come down the stairs on the left to present their empty growler to John Schneider. Once he filled it, a child began the careful climb back home.
Photograph by Keiko Niwa, courtesy Lower East Side Tenement Museum
By Mandi Magnuson-Hung
Since opening in 1992 in what was previously a tenement building at 97 Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum has interpreted the lives of the working-class immigrants who occupied the building during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Now, with it its first new permanent exhibit since 2008, Shop Life, the Tenement Museum is building on its past to move in new directions, opening up new stories and using new media to tell them. Read more.
From njmuseums.org:
The New Jersey Association of Museums is hosting a free networking luncheon on February 15, 2013 from 12:30-2:00pm at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. Expand your professional network, discuss issues, and exchange ideas with your peers.
Registration is required.
From H-NJ:
The Museum of Early Trades & Crafts is seeking proposals for articles to
include in the formal exhibit catalog for the exhibit “Ghosts,Ghouls and
Gravestones: The Trades of Burial” set to run September 2013 through
February 2014. All articles should relate in some way to the theme of the
exhibit and the state of New Jersey.
Abstract for the Exhibit:
The only guarantees in life are death and taxes.- Benjamin Franklin had it
right, death is one of the few guarantees in life and starting during the
colonial period the final phase of life helped to support numerous
tradesmen in the American colonies, later states. Among the several trades
involved were gravediggers, coffin-makers and gravestone carvers. Few
tradesmen could survive solely working these trades, unless they resided
in heavily populated areas during prosperous times, but they honed their
skills while producing similar products. While they may not have plied
their trades full-time these men helped their communities to mourn their
dead and continue with life. New Jersey tradesmen, notably John Frazee and
Uzal Ward, also made several major contributions to the mourning practices
and styles in the Mid-Atlantic region. Examples of these styles can be
found in Bottle Hill/Hillside Cemetery, which also has several prominent
graves. The exhibit will also explore some of the well known ghost stories
from the area that have influenced the way burial trades and mourning
practices are perceived.
Please submit a 150-200 word proposal and C.V, by January 9, 2013.
Notification of acceptance will be made by the end of January.
Articles will be due June 17, 2013.
All proposals and questions should be sent to:
Siobhan Fitzpatrick
curator@metc.org
By Linda Shopes
If buildings define a place, then the structures designed by Philadelphia architect Frank Furness (1839 – 1912) define the Philadelphia region as an industrial powerhouse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ranging from the commercial to the residential, the industrial to the civic, Furness buildings in their form, materials, modes of construction, and aesthetic took inspiration from this “workshop of the world” and shaped notions of the modern. This is the animating vision of the Furness Festival, commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of Furness’s death, currently underway in Philadelphia; and one Festival organizer George E. Thomas hopes will move our understanding of Philadelphia away from the “ancestor worship of 1776” and towards an appreciation of the region as a center of an energetic creativity. Read more.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) presented its 2012 National Medal for Museum and Library Service to ten museums and libraries from across the country. According to the IMLS, “the National Medal is the nation’s highest honor conferred on museums and libraries for service to the community and celebrates institutions that make a difference for individuals, families, and communities.” IMLS Director Susan Hildreth and Domestic Policy Council Director Cecillia Muñoz presented the Medals in a ceremony held today (November 14, 2012). Among the honorees are the Long Island Children’s Museum in Garden City, New York, and the Shaler North Hills Library in Glenshaw, Pennsylvania. Read more.
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