Community Development

By Claire Munoz
As the nation’s largest ethnic minority, Hispanics represent a vibrant source of audience for museums; yet make up less than 9% of museum visitors according to a 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts. The 2010 United States (U.S.) Census reported the national Hispanic population has grown to 16%. The Western U.S. reflects...
By Sarah Bloom and Regan Pro
One of the issues that we often encounter when talking with colleagues about audiences is how often museum education departments silo their youth and family visitors between in-school and out-of-school time. This can often seem like the most efficient approach to meeting different needs at different times, but also seems to be more focused on what is best for the...
By Ami Davis
Art museums, and California art museums in particular, are increasingly tasked with expanding their engagement strategies for the twenty-first century. Demographic shifts in our state are twenty years ahead of the rest of the nation. Youth lack consistent arts education in schools, and thus art museums run the risk of losing the support of future generations. How do we as an art...
By AnnaMaria Paruk
Many STEM trainings are geared toward the teachers or administrators who work with children, but BurkeMobile, the mobile educational outreach program at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, Washington, recently had the opportunity to lead a training with a group that is sometimes overlooked—parents.
In February, we packed museum objects and headed to...
By Meg Clovis
The Monterey County Agricultural & Rural Life Museum (MCARLM) is located at San Lorenzo Park in King City, CA—a rural community of 13,248 people in the southern Salinas Valley. The museum first opened its doors in 1983. The nucleus of the museum centers on large collection of farm equipment and artifacts that reflect over a century of farming in the Salinas Valley. These...
By Adam Mikos
In the last year there have been many seismic changes in the museum landscape of the United States. Ironically, accessibility to collections and information has blossomed through digital channels while access to the actual collections has taken several steps backwards. In this age of constant information these changes surface then seem to slip off the radar very quickly. This essay...
By Jaclyn M. Roessel
In late January 2015, Phoenix was consumed with the Super Bowl. Amidst the gridiron frenzy, the Heard Museum hosted a symposium to discuss an issue important to many American Indian communities around the country. It also allowed us to provide the forum to address an issue that is oftentimes the basis of questions by our visitors.
Using the attention of a high-profile...
By Amy F. Steffian
The Gulf of Alaska is a storm graveyard, a place where low-pressure systems stall against high coastal mountains saturating the landscape with rain and wind. In the Kodiak Archipelago, gales roll metal dumpster, gild sophisticated boats with a disabling coat of ice, and drench even those clad in the thickest rubber rain gear. Here, drowning and hypothermia are always lurking...
By Julie Decker
The changes affecting the landscape and the lifeways in the North have brought increased attention to and interest in the Arctic, ranging across science, art, literature, geopolitics, and cultural history. While persistent darkness and extreme cold will remain, the melting of the ice mass in the Arctic represents, to many, economic and strategic opportunities. Of particular...
By Chelsea Werner-Jatzke
#SocialMedium at Frye Art Museum investigates the new frontier.
Developing an exhibition of late 19th century paintings to be selected by the Internet took Seattle’s Frye Art Museum in many interesting directions. A turning point in the planning process came with the decision to use four leading social media platforms—Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr—to...

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