Arlington, VA – The American Alliance of Museums (AAM), the only organization representing the entire scope of the museum community, today announced 1 first time accreditation and 25 reaccreditation awards made at the October 2024 meeting of the Accreditation Commission. Of the nation’s estimated 33,000 museums, 1112 are currently accredited.

Through a rigorous process of self-assessment and review by their peers, these museums have demonstrated they meet standards and best practices, and are educational entities that are appropriate stewards of the collections and resources they hold in the public trust.

Recognized as the field’s gold standard for museum excellence for nearly 55 years, AAM accreditation signifies a museum’s quality and credibility to the entire museum community, to governments and outside agencies, and to the museum-going public. The Accreditation Program ensures the integrity and accessibility of museum collections, reinforces the educational and public service roles of museums, and promotes good governance practices and ethical behavior.

First time Accreditation

• Avenir Museum of Design & Merchandising, Fort Collins, CO

Reaccreditation

• Adler Planetarium, Chicago, IL
• Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
• Brookgreen Gardens, Pawleys Island, SC
• Chicago History Museum, Chicago, IL
• Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX
• De Saisset Museum, Santa Clara, CA
• Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY
• Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA
• Grout Museum District, Waterloo, IA
• Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives, Honolulu, HI
• Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, MA
• Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, KY
• Mary M. Torggler Fine Arts Center, Newport News, VA
• Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte, San Juan, PR
• National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, OK
• North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum, Bismarck, ND
• Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City, OK
• Paine Art Center & Gardens, Oshkosh, WI
• Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Dallas, TX
• Rochester Museum & Science Center, Rochester, NY
• Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, TX
• The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, FL
• USC Museums (Fisher Museum, Pacific Asia Museum), Pasadena, CA
• Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum, Decorah, IA
• Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Madison, WI

To earn accreditation, a museum submits a self-study questionnaire and key operational documents for evaluation, then undergoes a site visit by a two-person team of peer reviewers which produces a report for the Accreditation Commission. The Commission uses these materials and its collective expertise to determine whether to grant accreditation.

The Accreditation Commission meets 3 times a year (February, June, and October) and can make one of the following decisions:

• Grant accreditation (usually for 10 years)
• Table its decision for 1 year so specific issues can be addressed
• Deny accreditation due to failure to meet multiple Core Standards
• Defer a decision to gather additional information

A museum’s accredited status is not changed during a period in which a decision is tabled or deferred.

Read more about the Alliance’s Accreditation Program.

About the American Alliance of Museums

The American Alliance of Museums (AAM) is the only organization representing the entire museum field, from art and history museums to science centers and zoos. Since 1906, we have been championing museums through advocacy and providing museum professionals with the resources, knowledge, inspiration, and connections they need to move the field forward.

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Press Contact:

Natanya Khashan

media@aam-us.org

Frontline, or front-of-house, staff play a critical role in museums, beyond ensuring guests/visitors have a positive and memorable experience. They are often the first, and sometimes the only, staff a visitor will encounter during their visit. Frontline museum staff face many challenges, including low pay, underappreciation, lack of opportunity, burnout, and stress. Supporting them is essential to ensuring they can successfully perform their duties and represent the museum in a welcoming way.

This tipsheet provides topline guidance on how to best support and train frontline staff.

Providing Ongoing Support:

Developing an engaged frontline staff begins with understanding their individual needs and motivations. Why work in a museum? What areas do they want to grow into? Leaders need to listen, learn, analyze, and implement tools and resources this cadre of staff can use to better serve the visitor.

Provide personalized and ongoing support to frontline staff to help improve their performance and address any challenges or concerns they may have.

For example:

• Treat them as experts in their field. Frontline staff often have useful skills such as verbal and nonverbal communication, problem-solving, technical knowledge, and emotional intelligence. Include them in planning for new exhibitions and events to help prepare for instances with visitors that frontline staff deal with every day.
• If possible, offer flexible scheduling to meet them where they are.
• Offer coverage during a shift so that they can take breaks as needed.
• Have ongoing health and wellness programs available, including mental health support, fitness programs, or access to counseling services, and always maintain open lines of communication.

Recognition and Appreciation:

Implement a formal recognition program to acknowledge outstanding performance. Recognize frontline staff for the work they do to ensure visitors feel welcome and appreciate them for their dedication to their roles in the museum.

For example:

• Introduce an employee of the month award program.
• Ensure public recognition during staff meetings.
• Host an annual appreciation lunch or dinner scheduled during a time when all frontline staff can attend.

Resources and Tools:

• Keep frontline staff up-to-date and in communication with other departments so they can answer visitor questions on upcoming exhibitions, permanent collections, and other museum policies so they aren’t caught off-guard.
• Guarantee that they have access to all of the equipment and technology they need to perform their tasks, such as handheld devices for ticketing or communication tools for emergencies (for example, two-way radios).

Team Building and Collaboration:

Model open communication by being transparent and approachable and foster a culture where employees feel safe to express their ideas and concerns without fear of retribution. This can be achieved through regular team meetings and by scheduling regular one-on-one and team check-ins to discuss progress, challenges, and ideas.

• Foster a sense of teamwork and collaboration by organizing and including frontline staff in team-building activities, group outings, or staff appreciation events.
• Encourage open communication and collaboration among staff members to ease problem-solving and information sharing.

Providing Feedback Mechanisms:

Create feedback mechanisms to let frontline staff give input and suggestions for improving training programs, policies, and procedures.

You can inspire staff to share their ideas:

• During staff meetings
• Through regular anonymous surveys
• Utilizing physical suggestion boxes
• Conduct regular check-ins and performance reviews to discuss their progress, provide constructive feedback, and find areas for improvement.

Developing a Comprehensive Training Program:

Offering hands-on training opportunities covering all areas of the frontline staff’s duties helps them become familiar with their responsibilities and gain practical experience. Keep an updated written handbook with instructions and expectations for reference in their workspaces, if possible. Make sure that frontline staff get the opportunity to visit all the museum’s exhibits and attractions so that they are better able to advise and encourage visitors.

Some areas to cover include:

• Customer service
• Safety procedures
• Other museum policies around diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion
• And other relevant information about the museum

Customer Service Skills:

Train staff on handling and anticipating visitor needs including knowing the location of the restrooms, café, shop, seating, or other areas to rest and reflect. To this end, printed maps and handouts with relevant materials could be a helpful reference for staff to use when explaining or to give to visitors.

Other customer service skills include:

• Effective communication
• Problem-solving
• Being welcoming and inclusive to all
• Conflict resolution, including de-escalation techniques

Safety and Emergency Procedures:

Create safety protocols, including if they must conduct bag checks at entrances to prevent prohibited items from entering the museum.

• Develop evacuation plans, first aid response, and managing emergency situations such as fires or medical emergencies.
• Schedule regular drills and training sessions to reinforce safety procedures and ensure staff are prepared to respond effectively in case of an emergency.

Cultural Competency and Inclusivity:

Provide training on cultural competency and inclusivity to help frontline staff interact respectfully and sensitively with visitors from diverse backgrounds. This includes awareness of cultural differences and the skills needed to interact effectively with diverse groups of people.

• Train staff to recognize and address unconscious biases
• Create an inclusive and welcoming environment for all visitors. There are any number of in-person workshops, online training, and blended learning programs that can serve to teach cultural competency skills.

Dealing with hostility:

Being welcoming does not mean letting others take advantage of your hospitality. To address the issue of some visitors who may not have the same sensibilities or inclusive leanings, leadership needs to be proactive about giving frontline staff the training, support, and resources needed to handle situations where individuals are resistant to what the museum is sharing, and their values are not confirmed by staff.

For example:

• The customer is not always right, but frontline staff need to deal with the situation firmly and confidently without fear of reprisal from leadership.

Continuous Professional Development:

Offer opportunities for workshops, seminars, or online courses, to help frontline staff enhance their skills and stay updated on industry trends and best practices. Make sure they have coverage to take advantage of professional development resources.

• Encourage staff to pursue certifications or other training programs related to their roles in the museum and offer compensation (increased pay, covering costs of certifications) if possible.
• Ask for their help with special projects, from making membership renewal phone calls to redesigning museum wayfinding signage, etc. They can be a real asset due to their knowledge of the visitor experience.

By using these strategies, museums can support their frontline staff in getting the training and support they need. This support can have many outcomes that are beneficial to the employee, the museum, and the visitor, such as increased knowledge, motivation, and employee retention. This way, they are ready to offer top-notch customer service and ensure visitors have a wonderful experience.

Resources

• At the Barnes Foundation, Internal Internships Support Frontline Staff
• Front Line Staff Take Center Stage in Career Advancement
• On the Ground: How Visitor Experience Teams Are Teaching Front-Line Staff to Be DEAI Advocates
• Sharing Human Centered Workplace Practices

Following the Annual Meeting’s theme of “Thriving Museums, Healthy Communities,” the sessions explore ways museums can promote individual, organizational, community, and societal well-being. Here’s what you’ll find:

Impact Investing: Putting Your Museum’s Money Where Your Values Are

Across the United States, museums hold an estimated $58B in endowments, which are a critical source of annual funding and support for special projects. These endowments are managed carefully for financial return, but do our financial investments align with our visions and missions? While endowments that fuel many museums and non-profits often operate independently from the museum’s values, impact investing recognizes that this money itself can help promote social and environmental good while the returns benefit museums. In this session, a diverse panel of nationally recognized investment experts and museum staff will define impact investing and shed light on what it takes to make this type of commitment and where to turn for resources.

Presenters:

• Judy Gradwohl, President and CEO, San Diego Natural History Museum
• Laura Callanan, Founding Partner, Upstart Co-Lab
• Lillie Moreno, Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis, John G. Shedd Aquarium
• Noelle Laing, Chief Investment Officer, Builders Initiative, Builders Vision
• Peter L. Bain, Board President, The Walters Art Museum

Museums and Community Archiving: A Collaborative Approach

In this session, attendees will be empowered and inspired to work more closely with community collecting initiatives in their vicinity and beyond. Learn from staff from the Maryland Center for History and Culture’s H. Furlong Baldwin Library, who are exploring how shared stewardship and flexible agreements in community archiving initiatives across the country provide community groups ongoing ownership, voice, and active participation in the archiving of their words, stories, and images. Panelists will present recent findings from this work and share recommendations for meaningful engagement and collaboration with communities through an equity-based approach to collecting.

Presenter:

• Martina Kado, Vice President of Research and France-Merrick Director of the H. Furlong Baldwin Library, Maryland Center for History and Culture

Beyond Financial Sustainability: Nourishing a Healthy Financial Ecosystem

Financial sustainability has long and rightfully been among the primary strategic goals of museums and their staff and boards–but what if the drive for financial sustainability could also be preventing individual, organizational, or community healing, trapping us in ways that exhaust our resources without achieving intended impacts? What if we were to broaden our definition of financial health beyond our own museum’s budgets, embracing our finances as a connective tissue that drives social change across sectors and communities rather than scarce resources to be “balanced”? In this session, members of a museum’s strategic planning team who, together with staff and Board, recently grappled with these exact questions will provide inspiring insights into what good lies in reframing financial sustainability.

Presenters:

• Mirella Rangel, Consultant, Colibri Collaborative LLC
• Nisha Gulati, Associate Director of Digital Strategy, Oakland Museum of California
• Kimberly Ondreck Carim, Chief Financial Officer, Oakland Museum of California
• Hilda Schmelling, Development Events Manager, Oakland Museum of California

Rematriation of the In‘zhúje‘waxóbe/Sacred Red Rock

The session will tell the story of the “rematriation” of the Sacred Red Rock and the positive effect this effort has had on its stakeholders and surrounding communities.

Presenters:

• James Pepper Henry, Director/CEO, First Americans Museum
• Sydney Brooke Pursel, Curator for Public Practice, University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art
• Diane Lochner, Vice President, PGAV Destinations
• Thomas C. Owen, Vice President, PGAV Destinations

Creating Access, Inclusion, and Belonging through Language

Panelists in this session share how they incorporate Spanish language into visitor and staff experiences. Featuring four case studies from a diverse set of institutions, this session explores the presenters’ motivations and approaches for incorporating Spanish into their work, successful strategies, and challenges they have faced. While the focus of this session will be Spanish, the lessons shared for creating access, inclusion, and belonging are applicable across languages and can shed light on how museums and cultural institutions can effectively communicate with diverse audiences, fostering a more inclusive and accessible environment.

Presenters:

• Eleanor Hill, Senior Evaluation Researcher, Denver Museum of Nature and Science
• Melissa Brito-Alvarez, Manager of Access Programs and Resources, Dallas Museum of Art
• Kerry Butcher, Interpretation Associate, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
• Sean Trujillo, Programs and Interpretation Manager, Museo de las Americas
• Julietta Da Silva, Community and Engagement Manager, Museo de las Americas

F&B/Retail and Rentals that Consider Mission, Community, and DEAI

This well-rounded panel of museum leaders present an engaging presentation regarding food, beverage, event rentals, and retail within their museums. Representing a mix types of institutions, these museum leaders and a leading industry F&B and retail consultant will outline solutions and tactics to address your most common challenges in approaching earned income from ancillary sources through a broadened lens.

Presenters:

• Tracy Lawler, President, JGL Consultants
• Catherine Surratt, Chief Operating and Business Officer, Speed Art Museum
• April Farrell, Chief Advancement Officer, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
• Jillian Jones, Deputy Director, Buffalo AKG Art Museum
• Valarie McDuffie, Chief Financial Officer, Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Natalie Boten, Chief of Staff, Milwaukee Art Museum

Destigmatize Addiction Disorder: Fostering Partnerships for Systemic Change

Through a shared purpose to destigmatize addiction disorder and make social change, in the summer of 2023, a museum, an artist educator, and three organizations serving the recovery community collaborated to impact over 700 individuals. Using this partnership as a case study, this session explores the reciprocal benefits and best practices for supporting road-tested, community-based projects when establishing relationships with new museum audiences.

Presenters:

• Xoe Fiss, Director of Youth & Family Programs, Milwaukee Art Museum
• Patty Bode, Associate Professor & Coordinator of Art Education, Southern Connecticut State University

Healthy Museums, Thriving Careers: Mastering Project Management Essentials

Whether you come from a large institution with a project management office (PMO) or you are an individual contributor who plays a role in shepherding projects of all sizes, there is a wide range of project management methods and tools that can be applied in museum contexts, which can have a transformative impact on the health and well-being of your museum and its mission, business, and employees. In this workshop, learn from a panel of professionals from diverse roles and backgrounds who will share essential project management knowledge that can enhance your professional growth and the organizational health of your museum.

Presenters:

• Kalie Sacco, Director of Member Strategy, Association of Science and Technology Centers
• Barbara Punt, President and Chief Project Manager, Punt Consulting Group
• John D. Shaw, Co-founder, Principal, Museum EXP
• Uma Nair, Management & Strategy Consultant, The Strategic Museum
• Liz McDermott; Head, Digital Media & Content Strategy; Getty Research Institute
• Dean Briere, Interim CEO, Arizona Science Center

Neuroarts 101: How the Arts and Aesthetic Experiences Advance Health and Wellbeing

This workshop provides an overview of neuroarts: the study of how the arts and aesthetic experiences measurably change the body, brain, and behavior and how this knowledge is translated into specific practices that advance health and wellbeing. This experiential and immersive workshop will include lectures, group discussions, and creative activities.

Presenters:

• Susan Magsamen, Executive Director, International Arts + Mind Lab Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
• Karen Alexander, Director of Outreach and Education, International Arts + Mind Lab Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
• Keely Mason, Senior Research and Education Associate, International Arts + Mind Lab Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
• Alyssa Tiedemann, Senior Research Project Coordinator, International Arts + Mind Lab Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Algorithms & Artifacts: Deciphering AI’s Role in Museums

As museum professionals, understanding the basics of AI and its implications to our industry is crucial. If the museum community can approach AI with a balanced perspective, harnessing its potential while being mindful of its implications, ethical concerns, and informational biases, we have the opportunity to revolutionize how we work and foster innovation. This presentation provides an overview of AI and explores the various opportunities, challenges, and serious concerns that we must face together.

Presenters:

• Jack Ludden, Digital Experience and Innovation Strategist, Balboa Park Online Collaborative
• Nik Honeysett, Chief Executive Officer Balboa Park Online Collaborative
• Uma Nair, Management & Strategy Consultant, The Strategic Museum
• Jonathan Munar, Arts Team, Bloomberg Philanthropies
• Jessica Herczeg Konecny; Lead Technical Analyst, Digital Asset Management; The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Not the F Word You Know: Embracing Failure to Move Forward

In the museum field, we work tirelessly to create safe environments where our visitors can explore, build skills, discover, and learn – but how are we creating safety in our workplace for our staff to push themselves and embrace failure as a positive part of the process that helps us to learn about ourselves as individuals and as team members? This session brings the power of hands-on maker learning to build skills and capacity for work processes that foster a culture of belonging and a “failing forward” approach.

Presenters:

• Jacqueline Eyl, Chief Program Officer, KID Museum
• Annalise Phillips, Managing Director of Programs and Learning Innovation, KID Museum
• Cat Scharon, Sr. Manager of Research and Evaluation, KID Museum
• Adam Maltese, Professor of Science Education, Indiana University

Reducing Carbon Emissions in a Complex Environment

In this session, learn about the Heritage Museums and Gardens’ Strategic Sustainability Plan, which outlines the institution’s strategies and tactics as they aim to become carbon neutral by 2040, along with several related initiatives geared toward enhancing the visitor experience through accessibility improvements and new environmental and sustainable systems.

Presenters:

• Anne Scott-Putney, President and CEO, Heritage Museums and Gardens
• Judith Holt; Board Member, Sustainability Expert; Heritage Museums and Gardens
• Kate Scurlock, Sr. Associate, GWWO Architects

Shields Up! Safety, Security, and Inclusion for LGBTQ+ Programming

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and access–these core values are central to museum standards of excellence yet are not always easy to uphold in an increasingly politicized climate that is often hostile to LGBTQIA+ communities. How can museums continue to safely offer queer-centric exhibitions and events? Join Drag Story Hour leadership and the AAM Task Force for Transgender Inclusion in a workshop exploring safety and security practices around LGBTQIA+ programming. This workshop will empower museum professionals to serve in their roles as cultural stewards and defenders of pluralist ideals with confidence!

Presenters:

• Tony Pankuch, Education and Outreach Coordinator, Cummings Center for the History of Psychology
• Samantha Evelyn Eisenberg, Director of Development, JQ International
• Jonathan Hamilt, Executive Director, Drag Story Hour
• Regan Lopez-deVictoria, Program Coordinator & Grant Writer, Drag Story Hour

Strategy, So what? Using the Strategist’s Toolkit to Help Museums Thrive

Strategic planning gets a bad rap. Hours of meetings. Hundreds of post-its. And at the end, all you get is a fancy document that collects dust on a shelf. So why do the words “strategy” and “strategic” seem to appear everywhere, justifying new priorities, now processes, and even new job titles? Join four senior strategy practitioners as they unpack what it really means to be strategic in a museum context, and how necessary it is to build healthier, more sustainable, and more resilient institutions for all.

Presenters:

• Andrea Kalivas Fulton, Deputy Director and Chief Strategy Officer, Denver Art Museum
• Andrew Cone, Chief Strategy Officer, Whitney Museum of American Art
• Erin Prendergast; Chief, Strategic Initiatives; Art Gallery of Ontario
• Hilary Branch, H E Branch Advisors

60 Ideas in 60 Minutes: Small Museums are Thriving!

In this fast-paced and dynamic session, four small museum professionals showcase how small museums–which face unique challenges but are also hubs of innovation, creativity, and community engagement–are thriving in today’s ever-changing landscape. Watch for an exhilarating exchange of 60 actionable ideas in just 60 minutes, all centered on the theme of small and mid-size museums thriving within their communities. Viewers will leave with a treasure trove of ideas to implement in their own institutions, showcasing the resilience and creativity that small museums bring to the cultural landscape.

Presenters:

• Ann Bennett, Executive Director, Laurel Historical Society
• Allison Schell, Director of Public Programs, Marshall Steam Museum and the Friends of Auburn Heights
• Susan Goganian, Director, Historic Beverly
• Kenny Libben, Curator, Cleo Redd Fisher Museum

Leveraging Permanent Collection Objects for Collaboration and Change

Throughout the museum field, institutions have been grappling with how to address problematic objects in their collection, taking various approaches from removing the works from view, deaccessioning them, or leaving them in place as is while they grappled with how to best address them. In 2021, the Chazen decided to take a path uncharted, entering into a partnership with the artist Stanford Biggers and MASK Consortium to undertake the re:mancipation project–an exhibition that sought to recontextualize an overtly racist sculpture in a way that felt authentic to the Chazen’s mission as a teaching museum, but also honest and inclusive. In this session, take a deep dive into the re:mancipation exhibition planning process to learn how the Chazen approached a project fraught with risk and uncertainty and which has influenced organizational change at the museum.

Presenters:

• Amy Gilman, Director, Chazen Museum of Art
• Mark Hines, MASK Consortium
• Kate Wanberg, Exhibition and Collections Project Manager, Chazen Museum of Art
• Katherine Alcauskas, Chief Curator, Chazen Museum of Art

Confronting Colonialism: Intersections of Scientific and Cultural Knowledge

Natural history museums play a unique and urgent role in helping document and understand the world’s plants and animals during the current biodiversity and climate crises. This work is taking place at a time when museums are reckoning with their past; challenging–and being challenged on–their authority to do this work; and aspiring to consider and apply indigenous knowledge in their collecting, research, and interpretive practices. This recorded session explores this topic through two case studies from different sides of the Pacific Ocean and in different cultural contexts.

Presenters:

• Hae Su Oh, Su Oh Consulting
• Amy Gusick; Curator, Anthropology/NAGPRA Officer; Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
• Miguel Ordeñana; Co-Senior Manager, Community Science; Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
• Migoto Eria, Head of Matauranga Maori, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
• Philip Edgar, Head of Natural History, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
• Gabrielle Crowe, Vice Chair & Secretary of Environmental Sciences, Gabrielino-Shoshone Tribal Council of Southern California

Curating Trauma and Violence: Preparing and Caring for Communities and Staff

In this session, museum professionals from various institutions–a museum focused on the Holocaust, a museum telling stories related to terrorist attacks, and a university conservation lab experienced in working with objects where damage is part of their value–discuss the challenges and opportunities that arise when working with populations affected by trauma and violence. Panelists will impart helpful tools, questions, and prompts that attendees can apply within their organizations and personal practice.

Presenters:

• Stephanie Arel, Professor
• Alexandra Drakakis, Chief Acquisitions Curator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Ian Kerrigan; Senior Vice President, Exhibitions; 9/11 Memorial & Museum
• Lisa Conte, Visiting Associate Professor of Conservation, New York University–The Institute for Fine Art

Research Insights from AAM’s Museum Board Leadership Survey

What is the state of museum governance today? Hear the results of AAM’s Museum Board Leadership survey, including critical benchmarking data on governance practices, board responsibilities and performance, board culture, diversity, and more. Drawing from the insights of museum board members and directors across the country, this session will share where museum governance is flourishing and where there’s room to grow, and as well as share actionable takeaways for how museums can help their board, and their museum, thrive for years to come.

Presenters:

• Cory Garfin, Senior Research Scientist, Co-Director, Slover Linett at NORC
• Linda C. Harrison, Director and CEO, The Newark Museum of Art
• Jacqueline Jordan, Senior Vice President and Regional Director, Foundation and Institutional Advisors, Northern Trust Company
• Carys Kunze, Research & Data Specialist, American Alliance of Museums

Money Matters: Creating a Path to Financial Sustainability

As museums compete against a growing range of leisure and educational options, they must reevaluate their approach to pricing to demonstrate value while developing more holistic revenue strategies. In this lively and thought-provoking recorded session, panelists will explore how cultural organizations are leveraging pricing strategies to maximize revenue, prioritize accessibility, engage new audiences, and grow membership. Viewers will take away inspiring ideas and concrete strategies they can apply at their own institution to create more purposeful and sustainable earned revenue strategies.

Speakers:

• Rosie Siemer, Founder + CEO, FIVESEED
• Rehn West; Director of Development & Marketing; Nauticus, Maritime Discovery Center
• Mary Bradley; Director of Membership, Visitor and Volunteer Services; Denver Botanic Gardens
• Spencer Jansen, Deputy Director and Director of Membership and Guest Services, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts

Disrupting the Traditional Narrative: Including Oral Histories in Museums

Museums have been guilty of discounting oral histories as “non-academic” or “inappropriate” methods of historical documentation–a trend that contributes to the erasure of Latinx and BIPOC stories and culture. Through a series of case studies from institutions doing exciting and effective work with oral history, this recorded session explores how to engage community members in oral history projects, advocate for the importance of this work in museums, and share research on how the inclusion and prioritization of oral histories in museums can impact the relationships between the museum and its community and staff members of color.

• Asami Robledo-Allen Yamamoto, Project Manager, Latinos in Heritage Conservation
• Sehila Mota Casper, Executive Director, Latinos in Heritage Conservation

Fostering Resilience in Children through Virtual Mindfulness

In the face of an epidemic of anxiety, depression, and physical disease, many museums have been exploring mindfulness practices to support the health of their communities. This recorded session addresses how museums might develop mindfulness programs that address the developmental needs of youth, a currently underserved population in mindfulness-based museum programming. The goal is to prepare museum educators to confidently incorporate mindful movement into object-based learning programs for youth at their museums.

Presenters:

• Jennifer Reifsteck, School and Teacher Programs Manager, National Museum of Asian Art
• Lisa Danahy, Founder and Director, Create Calm Inc

Toward a More Human Museum: Trust and Well-Being for Staff and Visitors

In the current political climate, the work museums are doing to become more human and empathic may be misunderstood both internally and externally, and the latest data by a leading museum research consulting firm already indicates a lowering of public trust in museums. In this recorded session, panelists and attendees will explore the relationship between public trust and the changes the museum field is making, using examples from various types of museums to understand how we can better formulate policies and communicate while building trust among staff, visitors, and non-visitors.

Presenters:

• Gail Lord, President & Co-founder, Lord Cultural Resources
• Susie Wilkening, Principal, Wilkening Consulting
• Lisa Biagas, Chief Human Resources Officer & Title IX Coordinator, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
• John Hampton, Executive Director & CEO, Mackenzie Art Gallery
• Christy Coleman, Executive Director, Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation

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As the country rebounds from the COVID-19 pandemic, how are museums doing? Who is coming to museums and why, how does attendance compare to pre-pandemic norms? What are the barriers to visitation? In this Future Chat, AAM’s Elizabeth Merritt chats with guest Susie Wilkening, principal of Wilkening Consulting, about the latest data from the Annual Survey of Museum Goers.

Transcript

Elizabeth Merritt:

Hello and welcome to Future chat. I’m Elizabeth Merritt, Vice President of Strategic Foresight and founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums at the American Alliance of Museums.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with CFM, this is the Alliance’s think tank and research lab for the museum sector, and my job is to help you think about the future and learn some of the skills of applying strategic foresight to your work.

Future Chats are a chance for me to share a piece of recent news from my scanning and explore its implications with you.

Normally, when I do a Future Chat, I look at my scanning feed. I pick a story and I share it, and then I bring on stage an expert to discuss it. Its implications and our topic today is museum data. So I went online looking for a recent news story to anchor our discussion but I couldn’t ignore the fact that swamping everything else in my news feeds is the outcome of the US presidential election.

And the elections already influencing how I think about my work how to help museums and museum people over the next 4 years, what data, we’ll need to support that work. So I started thinking about the connection between data and how the election may affect our work.

And here’s one connection, one thing that stresses people out about the future is uncertainty and its partner, fear. And there are a lot of things up in the air right now and that uncertainty may make us anxious about outcomes, it can actually help to identify what we want to know in order to reduce uncertainty and where we can look for that information.

So, we’re going to ground our chat today in a review of some of the data that we collect and share about museums in their audiences. We’ll start by discussing shifts that have happened over the past several years, including emergence, from the pandemic and we’ll talk about how that data can inform our path forward and even in the uncertainties introduced by the election.

With that preamble, I’m so happy to bring on stage, my valued research colleague, Susie Wilkening. She is principal of Wilkening Consulting, trusted research partner of AAM. She helps us and the museum sector understand people’s attitudes and opinions and expectations about museums notably through the data she collects and interprets from the Annual Survey of Museum-Goers [(ASMG)]. Susie has been doing the ASMG for 9 years, 6 years of that, uh, together with me at AAM.

Susie Wilkening:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

Elizabeth Merritt:

I think many of us feel a little bit uncertain now about what the next few years will bring, um,

Uh, can you share with me some of your thoughts as a researcher about how what you’re thinking, as you look at the news and how it might affect your work?

Susie Wilkening:

Sure. I mean we are all feeling that sense of uncertainty. I mean that’s not unusual but I think it’s just been exacerbated by the results of the federal elections last week. So I’m a researcher. And, you know what I want to do is I want to wrap my arms around these patterns that we’ve been seeing for some time and also bring in that new information that we got last week to help us understand the path ahead a little bit better.

And so, what I would love to start with is a poll that I created to gauge how all of you are feeling right now about things, So, I think that poll should be about starting.

Here it is. So, thinking about today’s discussion topic…How are you feeling?

And I think you can answer more than one choice here.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Yes, multiple choice. Pick all that. Apply. And our choices are resolved. Worried, hopeful, was uncertain of the path forward, confused or bewildered, or isolated and alone.

For our results… looking at Susie.

Susie Wilkening:

I don’t I can’t see the results. Can you see the results?

Elizabeth Merritt:

Oh, I can let me tell you what they’re wanting.

Susie Wilkening:

Okay. Yes, please do.

Elizabeth Merritt:

So, so far, our front runner at 35 and a half percent is uncertain of the path, forward followed by worried at about 25%, and trailing behind that is hopeful at 14%. And then running a distant next to last and last are resolved at 9% and isolated and alone at 5%.

Susie Wilkening:

And was anybody saying they thought confused or bewildered?

Elizabeth Merritt:

That was 12%. Sorry, I missed that one.

Susie Wilkening:

Okay. I’m just jotting that down because you have a data geek.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Yes.

Susie Wilkening:

So, yes, there’s a lot of uncertainty here. There’s some worries. The better, maybe some considerations, the pathways that make people feel hopeful too. And I think that kind of wraps up how I feel about things as well. Oh there we are. Okay.

So, what I really want to do to help us think about that, path ahead is to look at some of those significant shifts that have been happening with museum audiences over the past several years because that helps us inform the trajectories of what’s been happening.

So, we’re going to look at some very quick attendance trends, since before the pandemic to today. We’re going to look at some shifts in audiences by race and ethnicity and we’re going to look at political values and that how that affects visitation and how that affects the experience in a museum setting.

So, just for a moment before we start.

There’s a really important question which is how do we know any of this stuff? And it’s a methodology question. The really good news is that over the past several years, as Elizabeth mentioned, we’ve been running the Annual Survey of Museum-Goers and nearly 500 museums have participated in the annual survey during that time period. This provides us with both robust data sets of frequent museum-goers, and a frequent museum-goer is someone who’s on the communications list of a museum receives the invitation to take [the] survey and then takes time to do so. So, they’re having that interaction regularly with at least one museum. And those museum-goers, it’s about 100,000 respondents every year.

As well as, [we field at] that the same time, a demographically representative sample of the broader population. And that’s going to be, uh, casual sporadic and non-visitors to museums. So, we have those two data sets that we have every single year we can look at this stuff.

Because of that depth of data, we know a lot about the public and museums and then the museums that participate in the annual survey have even greater insights into their specific audiences.

So, the first thing I want to start off with was looking at some attendance trends, particularly through the lens of the COVID pandemic. So let me just open up some slides right here.

There we go.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Awesome.

Susie Wilkening:

But that’s okay. I’m going to talk you through it.

So, this is from broader population sampling. This is that demographically representative sample of us adults, it’s the very first question, we asked them in a survey, which is which of the following have you done in the past year?

This is how we assess what percentage of us adults have been to a museum in the past year. So, if we look, over on the far right of this screen or this other right-hand side, you see that museums and you see that result, going from 2021 and 2024, there’s a weird year in 2022, because we actually asked previous two years, I don’t think we would have done that in retrospect. We should have that… just, so kind of take that one with a grain of salt, but you can see for all of these activities there’s kind of a … for the most part. There’s an upward trajectory, right? And we see the same thing for museums. So even before the pandemic, we were typically seeing around 25 to 31% of US adults were saying pretty consistently, I’ve … set foot in a museum in the past year.

The good news is that in 2024 when we were in the field, it was 33%. So, we’re actually exceeding, our pre-pandemic norms. People are back at museums.

However, we also know that half of US museums have not recovered their attendance from the pandemic. So why is that happening, and so, that’s when we’re going to look at the frequent museum-goers. There’s people who are on those communications lists, who take our survey.

And when we look at the frequent-museum goers, we’re looking at this in two different ways.

So first, we’re looking at repeat visitation rates. This is you know they’re thinking of this museum that asked them to take the survey. I’m going to pick on a local Seattle museum, the Burke Museum of Natural History, you know, they are on their list.

They received an invitation to take a survey that I think you have [visited] the Burke. How often do I go to the Burke? Okay, so I live in Seattle. I have kids. I probably go there 2 or 3 times a year and so I would mark that off. Alright so what we’re doing here is we’re aggregating. All those individual museum results and looking at them over time. And what we see if you look at that 2 and 3 times a year, it’s a little bit higher but it’s a little bit lower for that 4 plus. And also, if you look at that less than once a year, it’s a little bit lower than that once a year, but all adds up and away that indicates that frequent visitation isn’t quite back where it was pre-pandemic.

And so, people are back at museums, but they’re not visiting as frequently to their museums. We look at one more way, which is similar. It’s a similar question, but it’s just, but it’s also a very different question. This is not about how frequently they’re visiting a very specific museum. This is asking how many different museums did you visit, in the past year?

And so, you know, personally me, I am on vacation and 3 days, I can knock out, 6 museums, but I know I’m an outlier and probably all of you are too.

Most people don’t visit that many museums.

So, you can see these are the results from these frequent-museum goers. And if you look at these results, especially if you’re looking at the 5 or more, the 3 or 4 categories, you can see it’s a little bit lower still than where we were in 2020, which that’s actually a pre-pandemic sample in 2020 because we were in the field January and February of 2020. And so, we’re just not back. People are back at museums but not as frequently. So, if you add up all those repeat visits and that breadth of museum going all those visits, it actually adds up to a lot of visits that we haven’t gotten back since the pandemic.

So that’s that big ship that we’re still continuing the track and we’ll continue to track in the 2025 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, to see if we have any more gains that happened in the past year.

Okay, Elizabeth. You ready for me to switch to race and ethnicity or do you have any thoughts about that?

Elizabeth Merritt:

Go for it. Yes, please.

Susie Wilkening:

Okay.

But now, let’s think about by race and ethnicity. What’s really interesting is we’ve been tracking this for several years. And we have seen actually a really big shift happen over the past several years, which is really exciting.

So, first off, let’s think about those frequent museum-goers. Those people who are on this communications list, when we look just at that group of people, it’s a small slice of the broader population.

What we find is that the vast majority of them, 83%, identify as white. Now, that is a big skew, right?

But that said, since 2017, it’s a ball of drop of 10%, it was 92% in 2017. So, we’re seeing this slow progression downward and the percentage are identifying as white because we have more people of color responding as frequent museum-goers.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Just pausing … is there a last slide for that because I’m still seeing the historical data slide.

Susie Wilkening:

In a second. Yeah, we’re gonna move the slides in just a second.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Just checking.

Susie Wilkening:

So, we having a slow shift happening what by race and ethnicity among frequent museum-goers, and it’s slow, and it seems to be pretty steady the more things get a lot more complicated and where we’ve seen them, much more massive shift is with the broader population.

And that’s now I’m going to go ahead and change that slide. And let’s look at those casual and sporadic Museum goers.

The big shift that’s happened here is several years ago. Those two categories who have also skewed disproportionately white. But that’s no longer true.

Casual, and sporadic visitors are actually same as casual visitors. They almost exactly matches the US population by race and ethnicity. And sporadic visitors. It’s pretty close. It’s within just a few percentage points.

Elizabeth Merritt:

And there is a question in chat. Susie, how much do these numbers [correlate with education]? Ethnicity reflect education levels. Do we have any data on that?

Susie Wilkening:

So, it’s really kind of tricky to correlate with, with education. When we have our sample of 20,000, we would need a bigger sample to really be able to do that effectively.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Okay.

Susie Wilkening:

But 20,000 is a great sample for the US population sample, so we’re not quibbling with that, but yes, some of it is going to be due to increased levels of educational attainment, among people of color overall, because educational attainment is a strong predictor of museum visitation. So, that’s certainly going to be a contributing factor and it’s one of the most significant contributing factors.

But you know, several years ago, this was not true when we looked at casual and sporadic visitors in terms of race and ethnicity. It was still skewing more significantly white. So, we’ve had this massive shift now but someone… I was a casual and sporadic visitor so we’re not seeing this on our email list as much right now or among our frequent visitors but it’s getting there. Now, it may surprise a lot of people is when we look at this non- visitors, because they’re also skews to proportionately white. So, among the white population, we actually have the split where white people are more likely to be that super frequent museum-goer, but also white people are more likely to be that non-visitor.

And so that’s really interesting as well. So why doesn’t it feel this way when we’re standing in the museum, it’s all those frequent visitors who are making all those frequent visits that we can also skew your perceptions.

Okay. So, the last thing is around political values.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Yes. Actually, before you dive into that data, I want to because there’s been a lot of anxiety about how political values are going to influence attitudes towards museums. I want to remind everybody that overall, we have great news about how the public perceives museums. So, this is all from AAM’s advocacy data. 96% of Americans would approve of lawmakers who acted to support museums, and this is consistently high among respondents who consider themselves liberal, moderate, or conservative.

96% of Americans think positively of their elected officials for taking legislative action to support museums. Three quarters of the public believe, museums are an important part of our civil society.

Republican-led states are among the strongest funders of their own cultural institutions, and museums, and the total economic contributions of museums in 2016 was over 50 billion dollars. Over 725,000 jobs and 12 billion in taxes, on local state and federal governments. And that’s the kind of economic impact that’s appreciated by all across the [political spectrum]. So yeah.

Susie Wilkening:

Yeah, I mean we have some fantastic news at museums are very much perceived as bipartisan organizations.

So overall people love museums, they love having museums in their communities and they think they contribute positively to our society. So, we don’t want to lose sight of that. Yet.

Individual political values do influence museum visitation as well as that visitor experience.

And so, when we look at who’s visiting museums through that lens of frequency, what we see are some really vast differences by political values.

Among frequent museum-goers, the majority of frequent museum-goers actually identify as liberal.

And not that many identify as conservative. But if you look at casual visitors, we’re at parody. Sporadic, visitors skew a little bit more conservative and non-visitors, skew, more conservative.

So, we do see how those political values seem to be affecting how frequently people are visiting museums or how if they’re visiting museums at all. So, we won’t be very mindful of that.

And there’s something else that we want to keep in mind. And I’ve been saying this for about 5 years and that is, the number one thing that happens. The number one thing that affects how people view the content in a museum, regardless of what you share and how apolitical it is or not.

That political lens is how they view their the content that you’re sharing in museums, [it’s] the number one predictor.

And it’s also the number one complaint. We typically have… about museum content, that content has become political even if the only people who think that content is political are the ones who happen to dislike the content itself, which often isn’t perceived as political by most people that seems like a, a little bit of a circular argument, but it’s actually true. So, you have to grapple with this, whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to deal with political values.

Fortunately, we’ve been asking political values and the annual survey since 2021. So we know a lot about how they influence museum visits and how, and museums that participate in the annual survey know their own audiences political values quite well.

Now, we’re not going to go into today. How it affects that visitor experience.

Except to note that about 20% of museum-goers and the broader population really strongly pushed back when confronted with specific kinds of content.

The things that tend to really create that pushback are things around … inclusive content and history, climate change, public health, civics and civil society, as well as outcomes such as empathy and connection.

And hope… So, those are all subjects and outcomes that museums focus on every day, which makes this particularly challenging. Because we have to really know our audiences including politically to effectively navigate that future.

Elizabeth Merritt:

And what I have heard you talk about, and we’ll be talking about this more in the future. Susie is… a lot of it’s about the language you use in talking about those things. So, it isn’t necessarily the underlying concepts are values. It’s the words you use.

Susie Wilkening:

So, we want…

Elizabeth Merritt:

So, what I’m hearing you say just to summarize, repeat visitation is not back to where it was and that reflects shifts in leisure time.

Susie Wilkening:

Yep.

Elizabeth Merritt:

On audiences are getting more diverse and casual and sporadic. Visitors are reflective of us … by race and ethnicity and we’re continuing to work on that.

Susie Wilkening:

Right.

Elizabeth Merritt:

And museums absolutely have bipartisan support. But political values are influencing how people experience with local content. And we need to be aware of how it does this and how it might affect overall perception of museums.

Susie Wilkening:

Yes, exactly.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Awesome.

Okay. Now, we are going to transition to the other regular feature of our future chats, by giving all of you a chance to talk to each other about this topic. So, what we’re going to do is break you out into discussion rooms and give you a couple of questions. They frame your conversations and then at 3:40, we’re going to bring you back in to compare notes and share some thoughts. Now, both of [the] things before we do this.

First of all, please remember the number one role of future chats is, what is said in chat remains in chat. So please, hold anything that is shared by your fellow attendees in confidence, and don’t [share their] remarks without attribution.

Before we go out into breakouts, a couple of notes. First of all, we’re going to send you out into rooms of 8 people.

But uh, if you find yourself in a room by yourself, or if only a couple of other people, their want to be a big bigger group, you can use the join another feature to move yourself into a room with more people.

Please enable… to allow other participants [in]. See, you can hear … in the rooms.

And warning. If you’re joining us via a mobile device, or you’re using Safari as your browser, it may not support participation in the breakout rooms and you’ll be going, I can’t get in.

If that’s the case, I encourage you to step away for a little while, come back at 3:40, when we reconvene to share thoughts, that’s when Susie, and I are going to discuss our concerns by advice for your museums in the next few years, as well as hearing from you so many things that happen in the chat rooms. Okay? With that online. Sure, there are the assignments. We’re giving you for a breakout rooms.

When you get there, go around the circle and make it a production. Say this is who I am, I’m with this organization and in your introduction to share, 1 thing, that feels uncertain about how the election may affect your museums and your communities.

Then second time, I’m going around the room.

[And] share one thing. You’d like to know something that would help you manage those uncertainties in the next 4 years. So, a piece of information or a piece of data that would help you feel less uncertain about what’s going to happen.

Okay.

We’re gonna break you into breakout rooms now and we will see at 3:40.

Hello, Susie. Welcome back. I you were in one of our many chat rooms with some of the participants.

Susie Wilkening:

I’m back.

I crashed a chat room. It was fun. I had three friends in there. It was awesome.

Elizabeth Merritt:

That’s great.

So, I noticed before we went into breakouts that we had some very vigorous participation going in in the chat, which is a sidebar on your screen. So, I’m hoping that you’ll use that to start sharing some of the ideas that surfaced in your discussion rooms. So please tell us some of the uncertainties you identified and tell us what data would help you manage these uncertainties.

Now, I know it usually takes a few minutes for people to begin to wait in the chat. So, while you’re doing that, we want to feel a second poll and what we want to do is gauge how talking over this with other people. May have changed how you feel. So, maybe if we could put that second poll up,

And it’s going to take a minute to go live. All right, and you’ll see it’s asking you now that we’ve talked about things, how are you feeling? And it’s the same voice choices. So, you’re going to say are you more resolved? Having talked about it, are you more worried, are you more hopeful? Are you more certain of the past forward? Are you more supported or feel more supported or part of a community? So, let’s get a little read on how to discussing it with people. Change may have changed how you feel and Susie, I don’t know if you can see these or should I read out the results to you.

Susie Wilkening:

You should read them out. I am ready with my pen and my paper.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Okay. So, the front runner at 45%, bopping up and down but it’s over. 40% is people saying they feel more supported and part of a community, and trailing behind that at about 25% are people who say they feel more worried. That’s sad. I feel bad about that.

Susie Wilkening:

Oh, okay.

Elizabeth Merritt:

About 11% though, feel more hopeful that’s great. Uh 10% feel more resolved. About 6% feel more, a more certain path forward, and about 7% are more confused or bewildered.

Susie Wilkening:

Okay. So, it sounds like feeling of support is growing that you’re not alone.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Now.

Susie Wilkening:

But those worries are still persisting. And the because that lack of certainty is still kind of persisting.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Yes, and I’m going to close the poll, which I think we bring it up for you.

Susie Wilkening:

Yeah, I see it.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Okay. It’s very interesting. Well, so it seems like a lot of positive but some negative, uh …

Susie Wilkening:

Yeah. Influence from talking to other people around this.

Susie Wilkening:

Yes.

Elizabeth Merritt:

And looking on the right, I’m reading some of the certainties that people are reporting like the impact of tariffs and other economic policies on disposable income uh concerns about how to present inclusive history. That’s something you’re going to be able to speak to.

Susie Wilkening:

I can.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Well, these are jumping. There’s so much coming in, I’m having trouble focusing before it jumps around, ah, help …

Susie Wilkening:

Okay.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Uncertainties about how the impact will trickle down to education. Will federal funding to public schools be cut. I think federal funding to public schools is only about 10% of the total, is …

Susie Wilkening:

It’s not very much and I think some states are already thinking through like okay, what happens if we just eliminate federal funding, so.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Yeah.

Susie Wilkening:

We could do it on our own. I know that’s the conversation that’s happening in Washington state right now.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Awesome. Um well, Susie with the new administration and the shifts in Congress. What are your concerns for museums? What are your anxieties?

Susie Wilkening:

So, I have 3. And Monique Davis at the Mississippi Museum of Art. She and I had a conversation that’s really helped me kind of solidify what my three big concerns were she was like you need to tell me what my you’re the top 3 are, the first 1 and this is by far the biggest 1.

It is what I call The False Consensus Effect and the empowered far, right? So this is not, specifically, what politicians might do? This is not the political stuff, it’s the empowerment of the far-right.

And what I fear, is going to happen is that they’re going is going to be a narrative that’s created. Where the far right? Says we have a mandate on these 10 issues.

Or 15 issues or whatever many, we have a mandate on anti-DEAI because that’s how the voting came out. We have a mandate against climate change, shifts or or adoptions, because we have a mandate because that’s how the voting turned out. Or, you know, we have a mandate that to ban inclusive history in schools because that’s the voting turned out, alright? And that’s not actually true.

And we know that’s not true. Most people actually want museums to do these things in schools to do these things. And for us to do take climate action because people were not voting in terms of all of those issues, they were voting on what their number 1 priority was, which was …

Elizabeth Merritt:

Yes. Which must have been some might have been something else entirely.

Susie Wilkening:

And for many years, probably their family and their family economic future.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Yeah.

Susie Wilkening:

And what they perceive to be the better choice in that sense.

So that False Consensus Effect is basically when a small group of people projects, the image that most people agree with them on a topic when the opposite is actually true.

And so, we have to be then double down and really focus on what does the data tell us about what people think about these certain topics that are controversial.

Find you know, what we learned is that most people want to do this stuff and then we need to talk about that really visibly.

So that they can take that rug out from underneath them before they even start with that False Consensus Effect.

Because it’s going to be chilling if we let that happen. So that’s by far my number one.

My number 2 – and this one is a much smaller one, even though it’s actually really big – is the power of executive orders and legislation to restrict what schools people families museums educational institutions everything can do and so it’s not just, you know, within the museums it’s also you know, public health and vaccines, it’s also climate change action, things like that but you know, things like you can’t get this IMLS grant unless you agree to banish, you know, any inclusive Dei content or positions in your Museum. So, there might be some ties and executive orders things like that and they may or may not hold up in court, I don’t know.

But thinking through what are those possibilities that might tie our hands or tie the hands of others or affect us all. So that’s number 2.

And then number 3 is, of course, Very specifically, the future of IMLS, NEA, NEH and those kinds of things. And that’s where we have to really again come together.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Yeah.

Susie Wilkening:

And advocate.

And join us in February and go storm Capitol Hill in a good way for museums.

Yes.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Well, these are all big things to be concerned about.

Susie Wilkening:

Yes, they are. All huge.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Definitely advocacy day. I will have more information about that, but do you have any other thoughts on things museums can be doing to prepare?

Susie Wilkening:

So, we can prepare we are. This conversation is like a great start for preparing. There are lots of things that we can do to think about these things and be proactive and be ahead of them. So, the first big one is to know your audience.

And to figure out, you know, what, where are their values, what are those shared values that you have as a community that you at the Museum can build on? , you know, most people did seem to vote on their economic issues and they don’t agree with the far right on everything. So we want to understand how that’s playing out in your community.

And look to that data and in terms of how people are responding in your community on this issue. So you know and are prepared on those issues before you even put that that information forward in the museum.

Think through in advance and be tactical about The False Consensus Effect and how it will be likely deployed by the far, right.  there’s not a mandate on these issues, remember that and be on the offensive about it. There is a process called disinformation inoculation which you can go through with your leadership with your colleagues. You can do it with your board. You can do it with your volunteers. You can even do it with donors. Even do it with the public where you’re getting ahead of misinformation. You’re getting a head of The False Consensus Effect in a way that you can, then support you doing the work that you want to do. That’s true to your mission and it’s true to history science and art.

Calibrate, calibration is incredibly important.

You want to be effective and think through what that most effective path forward is on lots of issues. And so, and that most effective path isn’t necessarily straight calibration does not mean backing down.

It means being caring. And means being thoughtful. And making this individual choices as museums of what’s going to be it that path for. But remember, the tortoise won the race.

So, we’re going to all, you know, kind of champion tortoises when we’re going to win the race on so many of these issues.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Yeah.

Susie Wilkening:

And advocate for museums.

Elizabeth Merritt:

We have a couple of, uh, comments in chat. I wanted to pull forward, someone’s asking. Can you say that list of topics that we see more push back on, one more time.

Susie Wilkening:

Sure. So, there’s right now. We have a bucket I think of it is bucket of topics. Three are topics and two are outcomes. Basically, that seem to be really sensitive to that 20% on the far, right? Who just don’t like them climate change, for sure. Inclusive efforts inclusive, history, inclusion, and art museums.

Sequence. Now we’ve never tested on public health, but I would assume that that’s going to be another one.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Well, okay, but to this point I want to back up and remind people and push back if I’m getting this wrong. Susie, even on those topics, the vast majority of people may support music like climate change. The vast majority of people whether they’re a conservative or liberal support. Museum is teaching about climate change and taking action. So, when you say, it’s a trigger point, it’s a trigger for a very small percentage of highly vocal people. And one of your excellent data stories that I would recommend to people is about how not to give too much weight to a small. Number of people who are very loud. So maybe you could say a word about that.

Susie Wilkening:

Of course. Yes. Yes. About 20%.

Yes, so there’s a data story called, Amplification versus over-amplification. And it talks really specifically about how do you pay attention and make sure you’re amplifying. Push back, that’s valid. And not over amplifying. Push back this coming from a white supremacist position or, or, or anti-science position, things like that. So you can then assess it more fairly and also consider and think through your own emotions as you are dealing with push back, because emotions for yourself, come into big play. As you’re dealing with push back and criticism because we all kind of go when we get criticized about something. So that, that can be really helpful. There’s also another data story. It’s about The False Consensus Effect specifically. And if you go onto the data stories website and search for False Consensus you can…

Elizabeth Merritt:

Yeah. Yeah.

Susie Wilkening:

… find that one really easily as well and it also takes you through those steps of this information inoculation and how to do that, with your teammates or or your leadership or whomever,

Elizabeth Merritt:

Yeah. I also noticed my former CFM, colleague, Phil Katz is saying, there may also be a False Consensus on the left and middle assuming attitudes about political opponents.

Susie Wilkening:

So…

Elizabeth Merritt:

First of all, yes, I’ve been going through a lot of research that says 1 of the problems that’s causing what political polarization there is in the US is people tend to put a label on the other, whether that’s saying, ooh, your conservative or your label and then the your label fill in here liberal. So therefore, you believe all these things, and it’s way more complicated than that and until that you have a real and open listening conversation with somebody, you don’t know what they believe on, all these different points. And then…

Susie Wilkening:

Absolutely. Well, thank you to another valid point that we tend to make assumptions based on demographic characteristics.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Yes, yes. Yes.

Susie Wilkening:

And that we shouldn’t do that, too. I mean, we can, we can understand that big picture. There are certain demographic characteristics, excuse certain way but we can never make that assumption about a person standing in front of us until we start understanding who this person is.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Absolutely. Absolutely. The other point that Phil made is you’re not going to change somebody’s mind by yelling at them.

Susie Wilkening:

Mm.

Elizabeth Merritt:

And one of, I think, one of the skills we have to learn in the in coming years is what is an effective way of reducing polarization and really communicating in a lot of that starts with listening. It’s not going to help to yell at people and say all the same things and think that if we say for the tenth time, they’re suddenly going to hear it, it’s going to be more listening, it’s going to be more understanding. It’s going to be being sensitive to our language. And knowing when certain words or trigger points for somebody else, and the fact that a word means one thing to, you doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean something, uh, else to somebody.

Susie Wilkening:

Yeah, and civics is a great example of that. We tend to use it as a, as a dictionary describes it. But, on the far right, they use the word very differently and …

Elizabeth Merritt:

So, this is an example of there’s good research out there. Again, we’ll be sharing this in blog posts and talks and coming months about what language is less triggering. So, for example, I was just reading that civics has a negative connotation as you say to some people, but the word community, for them means the same thing and has fewer negative connotations. So fine, I’ll say community, not a problem.

Susie Wilkening:

Right? And but saying, ahead of these language shifts, I’m going to be honest is is very exhausting.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Yeah.

Susie Wilkening:

And the good news is that we tend to be ahead of it, through our coding of, open-ended responses in the annual survey to really help us. Get ahead of like, oh, we start noticing trends.

And we try to share those with you. And through those data stories that y’all are already aware of them. Before it starts percolating up more commonly…

Elizabeth Merritt:

And I will say, for those of you who will be joining us at the am annual meeting in Los Angeles and met Susan. And I do an annual data session where Susie previews, the as yet unpublished data from the current Annual Survey of Museum-Goers. So that’ll be a great place to preview some of the next results.

Susie Wilkening:

And we’ve got some really great themes in this year’s survey that fit in really well with this entire discussion, because one of the big things we’re looking at, is our responsibilities to community.

Curious about is a question about what you know as a responder you’re thinking, here’s this random person who’s taking your survey.

What does that person think that other people in their community?

Think are important. And looking at those Community shared values more perceived to be those shared values.

So, then we can route our work in that a little bit more effectively and then start rebuilding again.

Elizabeth Merritt:

One of the questions in chat. Uh was would we be offering some resources for advocacy am over the coming months and yes, we will. And let me tell you a little bit about that first of all.

Here’s what I hope. You all are taking away from the session. First of all, you are not alone. We’re all in this together when it comes to navigating disruptions I hope that 1 thing you learned from your discussion groups is a lot of other people share these concerns.

And I hope what you’re hearing from Susie from me from a am, is there are things that might help us collectively and maybe you individually feel more in control. One thing you can do is sign up for Advocacy Alerts from AAM. There’s one coming out tomorrow about what the election means. For museums, we’re going to drop in chat, I’ll link you can use to sign up for Advocacy Alert. But the other thing is if you sign up too late to get that one, they’re posted on the Advocacy Alerts page so you can read that, that’s a beginning … series of things that we will be pushing out and coming months about ways that you can engage, information you might need, and how you can help influence your legislators in appropriate ways and [move] things forward.

Susie. How about you any closing thoughts for our participants?

Susie Wilkening:

Well, they should absolutely go to [Museums] Advocacy Day. It’s fun. It’s actually a lot of fun. I actually …

Elizabeth Merritt:

Hey, so there are people who haven’t participated, just give them a little preview of what it would be like and people who have been to advocacy day, could you, could you drop and chat some comments?

Susie Wilkening:

Yeah. I mean it feels it can’t be like very intimidating like oh my gosh, I’m going to Capitol Hill but it’s but there’s a whole day of training.

We give you lots of information, we give you data, we give you lots of ways to make your case.

To your legislative offices and then you get to go wander around Capitol Hill. How cool? Is that? I mean, how amazing is it that we live in this country, we can go walk in the door of our legislator’s office and say what we think.

And so, it’s an amazing experience of democracy. And people are so nice up on the Hill, even when you go into office and they’re like, they’re not, maybe a little bit not as, you know, excited to see you as maybe what I get in Washington state. But, you know, it’s still great experience and you’re advocating for something you care about and lots of people care about, so it’s fun. You should totally go do it.

Elizabeth Merritt:

So, two days here in Washington, DC, Ariel could you find and drop a link into the chat about museums advocacy day, sorry we didn’t have that pre lined up, but when you come, as Susie said, you’ll get training, you’ll get support. You’ll get practice on how to do this and then AAM sets up all these appointments with you. So, we’ll group you… with other people who, also are in the same legislative district for Congresspeople. Or for Senators, you’ll have an appointment. You’ll go to the office building. You’ll be welcome in. You are sat down, and you often talk with aides. Sometimes you actually talk to the legislators and it’s like the best part of participatory democracy after voting.

Susie Wilkening:

Yes. It’s easy. And new friends.

I bring my kid because I want them to learn about it too. It’s awesome. Okay, the other thing you can do is you need data on your organization because how are you going to navigate all these different values that people have? If you’ve never asked them about their values,

And so, you know if you haven’t already participated in the annual survey Museum goers which we do in partnership with AAM, you know, this is a great year to go out and do that. The survey instrument has been vetted by people. It’s a bipartisan survey instrument, we vet across the political spectrum. Before it goes out into the field and, signups are happening right now. It’s the base fee is 1,250, so it’s not very expensive. You can probably do it on a budget. [W]e’re going to put the link in the chat, … and it goes out in the field in January and February my colleague, Jessica does an amazing job, helping every single museum to participate to get their survey out the door and get some good data reports into their hands. By the middle of … spring, so you can then have that information that you need to navigate this effectively and to calibrate for your audience and your community.

Elizabeth Merritt:

And we often write about it, we share it through AAM so that you can benefit from the overall data whether or not your participating.

Susie Wilkening:

Yeah, absolutely.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Okay, well that’s our chat for today, Susie, it was a pleasure working with you always I’m value. You so much as a research partner and thank you for all you do for the field.

Susie Wilkening:

Well, I love doing this for the field and I love working with everyone at AAM because I love museums. So, we’re going to get through all of this over the next few years together.

Elizabeth Merritt:

Okay, great take care. Be strong and look forward to working with you in the coming year.

Arlington, VA—The American Alliance of Museums (AAM), the only organization representing the entire scope of the museum community, today released findings from the latest iteration of an annual survey assessing the current state of museums in the United States.

Over 400 museum directors responded to the survey on their organizations’ behalf, representing a broad cross-section of the field in geography, size, and discipline. The survey, conducted by AAM and Wilkening Consulting and fielded in August of this year, tracked key metrics the Alliance began to collect in June 2020 to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on museums and, more recently, gauging new opportunities and challenges for the sector.

“Museums across the country are critical to the economic vitality of communities, education and workforce development, and preserving our cultural heritage,” said Marilyn Jackson, AAM President & CEO. “While museums strive to fill important gaps in their communities, they face significant challenges. The findings of this year’s report paint a clear picture that the museum field is still on the path to recovery from the impacts of the pandemic and will continue to be vulnerable to significant disruptions.”

The 2024 report shows encouraging improvement from 2023 though recovery remains uneven, and many museums have not yet returned to their pre-pandemic attendance or financial health:

• Four years after the pandemic’s start, only half of museums (51 percent) have recovered to 100 percent or more of their pre-pandemic attendance levels. This is an improvement from 2023 when only one-third of museums had fully recovered to their pre-pandemic attendance levels.

• Museums support a broad range of American jobs in their communities, from security and administrative positions to educators and exhibition designers. 89% of museums have maintained consistent staff sizes or grown their staff over the past year.

• Financial recovery from the damage of the pandemic has been inconsistent, with 19% of museums seeing decreases in net operating performance as compared to 2019, 57% experiencing increases, and 24% seeing no change.

• Looking forward, 46% of respondents project their bottom line will increase this year compared to 2023, 17% expect decreases in their bottom line, and 37% expect no change.

• While charitable donations are up, 61% of museums report that the number of individual donors to the museum has stayed the same or decreased in the last five years. This indicates a sustainability challenge that comports with the broader nonprofit sector and demonstrates the need to provide the charitable deduction for the vast majority of taxpayers who do not itemize.

• When asked what they anticipate to be the most significant disruptions to their business strategies in 2025, almost half of respondents identified shifts in philanthropy (48%) and financial/market instability (46%), followed by a reduction or elimination of government funding (33%).

This research makes clear that disruptions to philanthropy, market instability, and threats of reduction or elimination in government funding have the potential to radically impact an already fragile sector. While the museum field’s recovery from the pandemic is improving, significant support is still needed to secure this vital sector.

Download the full report.

About the American Alliance of Museums

The American Alliance of Museums (AAM) is the only organization representing the entire museum field, from art and history museums to science centers and zoos. Since 1906, we have been championing museums through advocacy and providing museum professionals with the resources, knowledge, inspiration, and connections they need to move the field forward.

###

Press Contact:

Natanya Khashan
media@aam-us.org

The 2024 Annual National Snapshot of United States Museums survey, conducted by AAM and Wilkening Consulting, was fielded in August 2024. It tracked key metrics the Alliance began to collect in June 2020 to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on museums and, more recently, gauging new opportunities and challenges for the sector.

This is the sixth “snapshot” report of the museum field that the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) has produced since 2020. In that time, the purpose of these reports has shifted from monitoring the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on museums to helping us track recovery from those impacts, and more recently to gauging new opportunities and challenges for our sector. The data collected for these reports has become critical to national advocacy efforts, especially when advocating for funding for US museums.

Over 400 museum directors responded to the survey on their organizations’ behalf, representing a broad cross-section of the field in geography, size, and discipline. This year, thanks to more robust participation, the data has been disaggregated by geographic region, museum discipline, operating expenses, and governance type.

Read the full report.

Key Findings

This year’s report offers a window into the state of the museum field in 2024, with information on attendance, employment, finances, disruptions, DEI backlash, cybersecurity, and exhibitions. The data shows positive trends in employment and individual giving, but illuminates challenges in recruitment and growing concern around shifts in philanthropy. Four years after the pandemic closed museums across the United States, the field’s recovery is trending upwards, though it is still incomplete.

In the face of these and other challenges, it continues to be critical to advocate for funding and policies that support the museum sector. During the height of the pandemic, AAM’s advocacy work helped secure billions of dollars of federal relief funding. As we recover from this global catastrophe, our collective efforts will be required to help our sector thrive for years to come.

The findings show encouraging improvement over the statistics reported in the 2023 Snapshot report. Still, recovery remains uneven, and many museums have not yet returned to their pre-pandemic attendance or financial health:

• Four years after the pandemic’s start, only half of museums (51 percent) have recovered to 100 percent or more of their pre-pandemic attendance levels. This is an improvement from 2023 when only one-third of museums had fully recovered to their pre-pandemic attendance levels.

• Museums support a broad range of American jobs in their communities, from security and administrative positions to educators and exhibition designers. 89% of museums have maintained consistent staff sizes or grown their staff over the past year.

• Financial recovery from the damage of the pandemic has been inconsistent, with 19% of museums seeing decreases in net operating performance as compared to 2019, 57% experiencing increases, and 24% seeing no change.

• Looking forward, 46% of respondents project their bottom line will increase this year compared to 2023, 17% expect decreases in their bottom line, and 37% expect no change.

• While charitable donations are up, 61% of museums report that the number of individual donors to the museum has stayed the same or decreased in the last five years. This indicates a sustainability challenge that comports with the broader nonprofit sector and demonstrates the need to provide the charitable deduction for the vast majority of taxpayers who do not itemize.

• When asked what they anticipate to be the most significant disruptions to their business strategies in 2025, almost half of respondents identified shifts in philanthropy (48%) and financial/market instability (46%), followed by a reduction or elimination of government funding (33%).

This research makes clear that disruptions to philanthropy, market instability, and threats of reduction or elimination in government funding have the potential to radically impact an already fragile sector. While the museum field’s recovery from the pandemic is improving, significant support is still needed to secure this vital sector.

Read the full report.

96% of people across all party lines want their legislators to support museums. Museum funding is not a partisan issue. Museums support all communities across our country regardless of political affiliation.

Together, we will chart a path forward that builds on our history of working with both political parties. Now is the time to join us because when we come together as an Alliance, there is no stopping what we can do. This was demonstrated clearly during the current and past administrations when we collaborated with legislators from across party lines to:

• In 2018, signficantly increase the budget for the Institute of Museum & Library Services for the first time in the nine years prior, despite repeated calls to eliminate IMLS, NEA, and NEH.
• During the COVID-19 pandemic, earmark more than $200 million in financial relief for these agencies.
• Include museums in PPP and SVOG relief programs and received billions in financial support that saved thousands of museums and museum jobs.
• Increase appropriations to the Office of Museum Services (OMS) by 80% in the last ten years.

These wins would not have happened without the strong allies and bipartisan support that we have been building in Congress and around the country for years.

Together as a field, we’ve defeated several attempts to eliminate or de-fund federal agencies supporting museums. To ensure these threats don’t become a reality, we must keep speaking up for museums and the roles they play in the economic vitality of our communities.

We will keep fighting for funding for museums of all types and sizes and ensure that all legislators know the value of the work that you do.

What’s next:

Our government relations and advocacy team is working hard to provide you with a deeper analysis of what the election results could mean for museums, so be on the lookout for our next Alliance Advocacy Alert in the coming days.

Museums Advocacy Day registration opens soon. As this event has grown larger over the last several years, we’re moving venues to accommodate even more museum people who want to make the case for our field.

What you can do now:

If you do not currently receive Alliance Advocacy Alerts, sign up for them.

Use our quick template to urge your legislators to support FY 2025 OMS funding.

Share Your Connections: The AAM Government Relations & Advocacy staff looks forward to working with the new Congress. We know that you may already have connections with your new or returning members of Congress and hope you will share that information with us by filling out our Washington Connections Contact Form, so we can work together on outreach.

Join the Alliance. Your membership with AAM supports the work we do.

This is a recorded session from the 2024 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. In the current political climate, the work museums are doing to become more human and empathic may be misunderstood both internally and externally, and the latest data by a leading museum research consulting firm already indicates a lowering of public trust in museums. In this recorded session, panelists and attendees will explore the relationship between public trust and the changes the museum field is making, using examples from various types of museums to understand how we can better formulate policies and communicate while building trust among staff, visitors, and non-visitors.

Transcript

Gail Lord:

Welcome, welcome, welcome. Well firstly, thank you very much for joining this session. The goal of this session is not just to have us talk, although we have incredible speakers, it’s true. Oh my god, it’s silent all of a sudden, but we want to have the last half hour be conversations and storytelling with you all. So, we have a room with a lot of tables, but what I we’ve had a little high-level conversation among the panel and this is what we suggest eventually, we’re going to form groups of like discussion groups.

This is just to say stay where you are now, but this is like a preview of what we’d like to happen after everyone makes their presentations about eight minutes each so that works out to about 58 minutes depending on how long I talk now actually. We’re going to use this row if you think of each think of these as rows. So, row one is going to be a themed and John Hampton is going to be the facilitator of this row and you’re going to hear him speak so you know you’ll know. This row is help me here Yvonne please help me what’s number two?

You’ll see you don’t have to remember to remember, but just think about, and you don’t even have to know now where you want to go, this row is going to be the second thing that we’re talking about. Building trust.

So, ah, this row is all about trust, right? Now, you’re going to ask you before to try and have Gadot on two tables. If you ask me about that, it’s early for me, too, by the way. Okay, So this row is going to be the basic building trust and that is going to be facilitated by Susie Wilkening. The problem is she can’t facilitate a row, so we like people who are interested in that topic to gather around the front two tables and maybe you’ll push the tables together TBD we’ll see how many people it is and this area, so the front two tables now are going to be for community and that’s going to be facilitated by Yvonne Tang. You don’t have to stay where you can move wherever you want.

Oh, you can move wherever you want. And it’s– yeah, I don’t know what I can do. I’m having enough trouble with this. God forbid when I start to talk. So, the thing is that just to tell you that you will be moving somewhere– or this is kind of good, it’s OK. I’m not one of these people who is trained to speak with a microphone and wander around. I was trained in the era where if you get to talk, you stand at the podium and you do your best. Okay. And then a different generation.

So — and then the fourth row, which will be the front two tables of the fourth row, is the theme of staff and visitors. So again, if that’s where you feel so moved to go, you will move to that row. This may not be clear, but it will become clear. Just saying, you know, when you get comfortable, it’s really horrible to be asked to move. I am somebody who will sit in the same place at the same table day after day after day. That’s my job as a consultant, that’s what I do. So, I know it’s not comfortable to move, but it’s gonna be great because we’re gonna have a discussion.

So firstly, let me welcome you to this session. You can sort of see this in somewhat crazy, oh, where’s the clicker thing? Thank you. You can see how.

A lot of symbolism here. If this looks like 1984, there is a symbol of somehow, i.e. the movie or the novel, depending on your taste. This is kind of, we’re moving in this session from a kind of faceless mass to a highly individual perception and conversation about our experiences with the subject of trust and well-being. So, we chose something will take us from this kind of neutral blend territory.  So, Anna’s not here, our designer, but she found this picture at the last minute, and I somehow thought it was shocking enough to actually like.

So, this is, oh, I should have shown you this before. I’m sorry. So, this is the order of speaking. Some of you will have seen the promotional material that we put out. So, I’m the facilitator, my name is Gail Lord. I’m going to introduce the panelists, and I’m going to tell you for about two minutes why trust and well -being are connected and why this is such an important topic, and why we’re so glad that you’re here.

And I really need to thank you, 8.30 on the last day of the conference isn’t easy.

John Hampton, pardon me, is going to be speaking about, you can see, more human museums, and that is going to be the theme of this row. Got it. Okay. The third area is Susie Wilkening. I’m going to introduce her in a minute. Yeah, thank you. And then the fourth on our agenda is putting you into community. That’s Yvonne Tang.

Susie, have a one, two, three, four, and then finally towards civility and belonging for both visitors and employees and that is what Christie is going to be talking about and then facilitating the tables about that. Now, if you think it’s easy to find a place for water here, it’s not. It’s all, it’s all like, it’s okay, I’ll be fine. Okay, so that’s what we’re doing and thank you very much for coming.

So firstly, I want to introduce our panelists and I’m going to introduce myself a little bit, then I’m going to speak for two minutes, and then we’re going to get going. So firstly, I’m overwhelmed by the attendance. Thank you all for being here.

So, you can see this. This is, I’m not going to read this, but this is why we’re here.

So, museums clearly are all about empathy and humanity. We try to be very, very hard, but there are challenges. And so today what we’re going to do is really explore those challenges, and we’re going to share experiences about them. And at the core is, of course, the theme of this conference, which is well-being, and we’re adding this word trust. And there’s a reason for it, which I’d like to talk to you about.

It’s said by philosophers that first and others like anthropologists too and other experts. The trust is one of those aspects of life that is uniquely characteristic of our species. Now, of course, I think you all know as good museum workers, that every time human beings come up with, oh, communication is unique to our species, we find out that a lot of other species, if not all of them, communicate. And then we say, OK, well, work is what’s really unique to our species, and then, of course, research shows that, no, indeed, a lot of other species work, and so on and on and on.

Well, the latest thing is that trust is unique to our species. I don’t know if it’s true or not. Most likely, we’re going to find out that whales, especially because they’re the mammals with the biggest brains, also experience trust, but that research hasn’t been done yet. Trust is really an important, relatively new arena of research. But let’s say that it is very important to our species. And it’s said to be essential to both our well-being and our survival. And I’m not going to rehearse all the information. I’m sure you’re going to find it. But what I thought was extraordinarily interesting for us, because we’re here to talk about trust and museums and well-being of museums, trust among our staff and ourselves, if you’re a staff or you’re a manager, you’re a leader, and trust with the public. We’re interested in what is the museum situation, that’s why we come to this conference.

And then of course, we’re interested as individuals and also for our staff and our visitors, how does this relate to well-being? Because that’s why we came to this conference in the first place. And I think that What I’ve deduced from my little bit of research is that in trusting, and this is where perhaps it’s very especially human, we are showing our vulnerability to others. Trust and vulnerability go hand in hand.

And that’s tough. And I think we’re all experiencing that in our work, how difficult that is. This trust vulnerability access, if you like, is essential to our capacity to work together, to live together, to solve problems together and that is a very great superpower of human beings, our ability to work together to solve problems. So today we’re all here as museum people, we’re going to explore the relationship between trust, our institutions, and maybe our vulnerabilities as well, and certainly our well-being and I welcome you to it and I especially welcome having such a brilliant panel.

So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to introduce each member of the panel, and we’ve given cards at your table so you can see their pictures. My picture is 15 years old. No, this is a good one. My picture on the book leaflet is 15 years ago, those are the days, and my picture on the card is actually, I believe, as I look today, but everybody else is really as they look.

So, the first person is John Hampton. John is the executive director and CEO of the McKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. They entered the arts through studio practice and then started their career in the Artist Ron Center community as a curator at Neutral Ground. He was an artistic director at Trinity Square Video, so he has a great background in the arts and technology. Then they previously served as curator-in presidents at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto and Executive Director of the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba. Now some of you may not know where those places are. I myself live in Toronto, so I know where those places are, but as John will tell you, someone who lives in Toronto doesn’t know where any of those other places are, so just feel comfortable. Most of them are in Western Canada, which you might call Central U.S., I don’t know, but It’s a slightly different world from the one that we’re in right now, and an important one.

Hampton is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, and he examines in his work the intersections of Western and Indigenous culture through his practice, policy, and theoretical writing. So, John, we’re so pleased to have you here, but you don’t get to speak because I’m gonna interview everybody, I’m gonna talk to everybody at once, and then you just kind of follow along so that we’ll be the maximum efficiency of our time.

I think Suzie Wilkening requires no introduction to most of you. She does the most interesting research, in my opinion, most valuable, on the museum sector, has been doing work of this type in our sector for over 25 years. The thing about Suzie that’s so amazing is that she actually makes data understandable. And for people like me, that’s actually a big challenge, and she’s going to present some amazing slides that take us through all the situation today, which is changing all the time about trust in museums and the importance of it. So, Susie, I’m not giving you a full introduction, but it is so impressive and so wonderful.

Yvonne Tang is a colleague of mine at Lord Cultural Resources. Yvonne is the director of our visitor experience group work that we do which includes interpretive planning which is the weirdest word of all because what does it say it says that we museums for all the trust people having us we still think of our work as translation we have to find  another word for it but anyway that’s something that might come up today she’s had 25 years of experience in museums including nearly 20 years leading custom projects for museums and groundbreaking national research on the role of museums in communities. And her focus, and she’s also in the book, is all about museums and communities. And she calls it putting the you in community.

And that’s great. And then, and I know, I wanna talk a little bit about Christy Coleman. We think we met each other, but in fact, I’m such a big fan of hers, and I was so thrilled that she could make time to be on our panel. And she accepted right away. And Christie has spent over 35 years in museum and cultural work. She served as the chief executive officer of some of the nation’s most prominent museums. She’s a tireless advocate for the power of museums. Narrative, this is a good one, narrative correction. And I think what you do always, what you used to do on, I don’t think, are you active on Twitter still? Somewhat, less. Yeah, I know we all feel the same way about it, but what’s the replacement? Anyway, it’s so corrective. I think that that’s really fantastic. She’s always correcting the record with real research. She’s a tireless advocate for the power of museums and diversity and inclusiveness. And we’re just thrilled that she’s part of this panel.

So, I think that we have an amazing group of people, but we’re about to meet. We’re going to each speak for like six to eight minutes so that we can have your insights and I think probably you’re even more amazing. So, I’ll just say, oh my God, that wasn’t too bright. I was supposed to do that when I introduced the people. 8:30 is not my favorite time, guys. No matter what time zone I’m in. So, there we all are. And you see, it’s not a bad picture of all of us and you’re gonna meet us all.

Okay, I have to say a worried about my company, Lord Cultural Resources. Many of you will have heard of us. These are where our offices are. We started in the log cabin. It’s really true. 42 years ago, my husband and I, and we have grown. And thanks to so many people in this room, we are quite successful in our goal, which is to make the world a better place through culture, which includes city planning, urban planning, cultural planning. But our big focus always has and from day one, and always will be the museum sector.

And we contribute books to the field, and those are some of the books. And yes, there is a new book. And yes, you can get it online. And yes, you can get a 30% discount. And no, we are not publishers. And no, we don’t earn our income by selling books. But we write books because we love the sector. So that’s me. And I’m going to ask John to please come up and start us off. And We’re going to proceed with this wonderful meeting. Thanks. I don’t follow.

John Hampton:

Oh, there’s the book plug there. [LAUGHTER] Can I just say one thing?

Gail Lord:

Yeah. All right. Everybody now knows I’m left-handed. That’s my big excuse. And I have a real problem coordinating things. But I somehow managed. OK. (audience laughing)

John Hampton:

Okay, thanks, Gail. (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) That means, the last one means I look after art. That’s our translation for being an executive director, a curator, any role, really, within an art gallery. So, I’m very grateful to be here, thanks you all for coming. I say them pronouns and I’ve been asked to start us off with a little bit of a story as well.

So, I feel like about maybe two or three of you know this story but because I’m from way up in Canada then there’s plenty of people won’t have heard of it, but so I call it the Northern Great Plains, and my nation’s from the Southern Great Plains there, and looking at that unity across Turtle Island and that continent is how I like to think about that territory.

So, this is where I’m situated, it’s the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, in Oskanika, Zategi, which means pile of bones, named for the genocide of the buffalo there in the forced starvation of the local nations there.

But my story starts with a site visit from an artist that was coming to do a studio visit — or coming to do a visit for their solo exhibition looking at the West’s simultaneous obsession with defining and consuming the other. The artist is Divya Mera, based out of Winnipeg, Manitoba. And while she was there, she wanted to do a little research into our collection and the site and get some context for the exhibition.

And she came across this peculiar item in the collection, which was labeled Vishnu knew and people who might recognize that this is maybe not a male deity up there depicted and so she her interest was struck by that so she started doing some research and then she came we went for dinner that night and she came just all fired up and then shared what she had found and she had gone through our big leather tomes, which I’m sure many of you have around your early acquisitions.

This was from — this object was from the original bequest from our namesake, Norman McKenzie, and he had dictated the story in the book, in his own words, talking about how he came by this object. And so, he said that, you know, like a lot of his contemporaries, he had these high ideals of gathering the culture from around the world and sharing it with the local community in Regina and building a museum one day. And so he traveled mostly to British colonies and collecting objects as well as European artworks and he was visiting India and traveling down the Ganges River and they pulled up to a got and saw an active shrine there where there were three idols that people were currently worshiping at. And he told his guide, “I need an idol, just like one of those.” And he got in an argument, and they said, “No, no, I think the word’s here that a Hindu will never part with their God.” And so, after that he saw somebody had overheard and knew what they were talking about. So, he went and talked to the shadowy figure, and later that night that that man showed up to his hotel room with a box and then revealed the very three idols that were in that shrine.

And he said, “No, very benevolently said, ‘No, I can’t possibly take these.’ This would be a great affront to the British government for he to take these idols. And so, then if you take them all back, go return to the shrine, reinstall two of them, and then if I see those two installed, I’ll buy the small one. And so that’s how this ended up in the McKenzie collection.

And so, she told me this story and shared the documents over ramen and said, “For the exhibition, I would like to have that object return to India.” And I said immediately yes, because I was naive. I wasn’t CEO at the time. I was director of programs, so without much experience with repatriation. And so, I immediately said, “Yes, that’s amazing.” And we started thinking about impossible scenarios of finding the original shrine where it was and reinstalling it. So, then we got into the actual work of that.

What’s my next slide? Oh, there’s Divya there. And so, Divya, through her research, she talked to Sadatasha who helped identify that No, this was not Vishnu, this was Annapurna, who is actually the queen of the city from which the idol was taken, Varanasi, which made it even a worse offense. And then I started doing the back behind the scenes work, got an updated appraisal. The appraisal came back at 1500 Canadian dollars, is what they said that this idol was worth. And it’s an object, we haven’t exhibited it much, but we had it a couple times, but it primarily lived within the vault. And so, we said, does anyone really even want this back? But we persevered and said, this is important. And then the artist was producing our work around this process too. And boy, we were just completely wrong about that assessment would anybody want it, because when we went through that process and talked, oh here, automatically changed.

[Background noise] So here it is upon the return to India that 24/7 media coverage happening around this, millions of people gathered to pay respect. It traveled on the Silver Palaquan here. A four-day journey, visited 12 communities, and they renovated the Annapurna Shrine at the most sacred area near the original site of where it was taken, and then they reinvested her into the idol because upon breaking that idol, then you lose that presence of the God there, and it was just fundamentally profound to see this disconnect between the different ways of valuing these objects.

So Prime Minister Modi made a national address there saying It was a proud day for all Indians.

And then– and we had our exhibition. And Divya produced, as part of this project, this new artwork called There’s Nothing You Can Possess, Which I Cannot Take Away, Not Vishnu, New Ways of Tarasana. And this is– that’s it. On the left in the exhibition, she exhibition, she purchased that sack from a

Hollywood memorabilia store and put it on the shrine and then filled it with sand.

That’s the equivalent weight of that statue. And there it is in storage in the drawer, in the outline of

where that’s idol used to be kept. And so, it retains the links to those records. It still has the same accession number from the original piece, but then it has that full story and holds that space to cover that history and that story and allows us to talk about our institution’s founding and those movements through time.

And one of the things that’s, I find really interesting about this work is that the idol was displayed 15 years before this project in an exhibition called Raiders of the Lost Vault. And so, it wasn’t a secret that that same story was included in there as well. And it was, but it was displayed under a different context.

It was an adventure. It was Mackenzie buying things from Edgar Banks, who supposedly the influence for Indiana Jones was put as an exciting story to tell.

And I’m sharing it like an interesting story. But so, the object hadn’t changed. The story hadn’t changed, but how we view it had. And so, we no longer were viewing it from that objective distance of the museum effect, but we had new eyes on it that hadn’t been conditioned to view it in that detached theme, but approach, but then to see the human elements within that, and that it was a sacred idol stolen from an active shrine, mislabeled and undervalued for over a hundred years.

And so, in these types of processes and movements within our institutions and these individual actions, there can certainly be fears about loss of objects, about loss of reputation around using, you know, the name of our institution, for example. And sometimes there’s just that momentum of business as usual that can blind us, but we’re all charged with caring for culture at our respective territories. And sometimes that means that we are in the business of giving things away, giving things to others who can care for them better than we can. And when we are able to do that, then we can see audience engagement at a level that’s more profound than we were able to do for that object in any iteration of our institution.

And with that, I want to say this artwork, originally it was just going to be an individual artwork, but Divya, just right before they and realized she wanted to conceptualize it as an addition of 10. And so, one has been sold, that’s this one here. So, there’s still nine available.

That’s the end. Thank you.

Susie Wilkening:

Does it sound good? Can y’all hear me in the back? Okay.

So, we’re going to change gears a little bit, but we’re still thinking about trust. And one of the things we really want to think about too is all this polarization, how that might be affecting the trust that individuals have with our organizations. And when that trust, some people may feel it’s violated, how that may end up affecting you and your staff and those of you who are individuals who are close to your organization.

So, let’s just look at the numbers because, you know, I’m a numbers person. This is from 2021, this was the last time we were in the field looking at trust specifically with the American Alliance of Museums. And the question we asked was how trustworthy do you find, and then we asked about all these different things on a scale from 0 to 10. And we have some good news, museums do really well. We have an average score of 6.4, this is a broader population sample of U.S. results around the country. 6.4 were number two to friends and family. Not really sure how I feel about that, but, you know, that can be trustworthy, too. But we do better than practically everything else.

A lot of questions why. This might be some, as a whole another conversation, not in eight minutes, but we have some, it seems to be some resilience here. So, this is some 2021. So that So that was now three years ago.

This is brand new data. This is from the 2024 Annual Survey Museum Goers. This was in the field this winter, and this is from the broader population sample we did concurrent with all of y’all’s museum samples that were collected during this winter. And what we found was that 92% of U.S. adults think museums are nonpartisan providers of educational content.

So, this feels kind of good in some ways too, right? That we have resilience. There are so many things out there are feeling not so resilient when it comes to trust. When we think of media, we think about libraries and we think about K-12 education. Museums are proving fairly resilient for now.

So, then we go and look at the data over and over and go, okay, what we tend to find consistently is that most people want us to do really good work in our communities. They want us to share science. They want us to build healthy communities. They want us to connect us to one another. They want us to explore shared history. They want us to be thoughtful and maybe return things if we need to. Most people are on board with that.

So, what’s stopping us? And I think we all know what’s stopping us. And it’s a segment of the population that we’ve started calling the resistance because they resist a lot of the things that we may be trying to do as institutions. And so here are some numbers, these are mostly from the 2022 and 2023 annual survey museum goers looking at the blue here is frequent museum goers going across and the red here is U.S. adults in the broader population and looking at who’s resisting content around climate change?

Who’s resisting content about inclusion, you see that one’s highest of those.

Who’s resisting us talking about civil society and civics? There they are.

Who’s resisting us talking about and cultivating a connection to humanity?

It’s a lot. I mean, as the majority of people no. But we’re all kind of in this 20% range. We’re adding a new one this year. Resisting us talking about hope. So, what happens when there’s about 20%? Oh, sorry. I have to have this quote first. They say things like this.

Stop catering to woke people who only impose their thoughts and not the majority. And this is a really clever little trick that this resistance malice 20% percent groups do, which is they are trying to project that they are the majority mainstream opinion.

They’re not, but they’re trying to project that. I think some truly believe they are, because they’re in their bubbles, and some know they’re not, but they’re trying to project it. This is called the false consensus effect. And it’s, I like how I word it, so I’m going to read it. This is when a small group of people projects the idea that their values and attitudes are shared by the majority of people. Typically, in our modern discourse, it’s used to shut down conversations that a small segment doesn’t want us to have or to stop a behavior they don’t approve of. And it’s clever. Oh my gosh, it is very clever and it’s insidious.

So how do we know when the false consensus effect is coming into play? And how do we assess whether a topic is likely to be polarizing or to start a controversy? Because I’m going to keep talking about that 20% number. That’s a certain critical mass that ends up being important. How do we know?

So, this is something that I’m playing around with in this kind of framework where we’re looking at the content that we’re sharing and assessing, is it neutral or not neutral, and what we mean by neutral or not neutral in this particular case is neutral as in facts, not neutral as in values. So that’s kind of a narrow definition for this. So, we have what’s neutral and what’s not neutral, facts, values, and then what’s partisan and what’s nonpartisan.

And so, here’s the theory that broadly accepted facts when about 95% people are more agree, those are neutral and nonpartisan, but the facts that are not as commonly held where you get that 20% pushback, those are partisan facts.

And then for values, commonly held values, those where virtually everyone agrees, those are not neutral but they’re nonpartisan, and then partisan values is where you have that critical mass pushing back. So, you may still have 80% saying that is a great thing but you have that 20% pushing back. So here are examples.

Nonpartisan neutral fact would be germ theory. The Earth’s round or it could be historical facts. You know Civil War began in 1861, historical fact. It can also be things like aesthetics around ideas and what is beautiful. Because you know pretty much most people think that Monet painting is pretty beautiful, and that’s pretty much fairly agreed on as a kind of fact.

Partisan facts, though, are around whether the evidence around racial disparities in our society, or around vaccines, or climate change, civics and hope, I put in this category too, just whether those are things that should be supported even if we’re not saying what to do with those civics and hopes ideals.

And then for values, creativity, imagination, education, and do no harm, those are commonly held values. They’re nonpartisan. Most everybody agrees with those things. And then the partisan values are inclusion, climate action, connection to humanity, abortion, immigration. You can probably come up with other things. Those would all be partisan values. So, you kind of get the sense of thinking through, okay, what is a value? Is it partisan? Is it non-partisan? Where is the controversy going to come? And the controversy is going to come in this partisan column overall.

So, what happens is when we have a challenge around the trust issue and when people get angry, particularly is when we as museum staff, of whom 70 percent of us identify as liberal think oh well here we have this topic and we might put it in one quadrant but there is a segment of the population that would put it in a different quadrant and then the messaging is a little off right and then we’re surprised when there’s controversy.

So one of those exercises we’re starting to recommend is you know when you have a new topic coming up, take a moment and assess where it’s going to fall on that chart, that framework, and if you think that the public might put it in a different quadrant or even a segment of the public, think about why that is and be ready and thinking through in advance what that pushback might look like and how you’re going to prepare for it.

We don’t want that false consensus effect to scare you from topics that we all need to talk about. Most people want us to talk about climate change and want us to be inclusive and want us to support civics and all of those things. But instead, we want you to think through the best approach to be effective and

prepare your staff and your stakeholders for pushback. There’s a process called disinformation inoculation that you can go through before you have a program, before a four-year exhibition to prepare everybody for that pushback so that it minimizes the conflict.

Keep in mind that goal posts shift really quickly. What may be considered non-partisan today may be partisan tomorrow. Things we asked about four years ago that 20% segment of the population, we’re like, we want museums to do this, now they’re telling us are to woke. So those goalposts shift really quickly. So, we are always constantly looking for what we call canaries in the coal mine for things that might end up becoming issues that are okay today.

So, it makes it really hard for y’all to be brave, right? especially when you’re thinking something big might come up. How do you be brave? But what does it mean to be brave? It’s understanding your audiences and their values, practicing disinformation, inoculation with staff and stakeholders, assessing and calibrating content to bring your audiences along with you, which I would love to have that discussion with you at some point. How did you do this stuff?

Practically caring for your colleagues and yourself and preparing and having all that in place before something happens. And that’s what’s going to really enable you to be effective and serve your audiences, your community, and broader society. And I’m going to leave you with a quote from a museum goer because it’s just so lovely. And this is what we get a lot more of because most people are agreeing with us on this. “Museums should be a social gathering place, oh there’s a type of there, so

people can build relationships with those in their communities, so we can care more about those we live and work with building a stronger community.”

And that’s a geeky methodology thing. Okay, passing on.

Yvonne Tang:

Thank you, Susie. Perfect segue. Appreciate it. So, I just wanted to talk a little bit about putting you in community and what that means. And before I start, I’d really like a few people if you can raise your hand and let me know what you think your community is or who you consider your community.

Anyone?

No? You don’t know who your community is? Okay, please. Thank you.

Audience member:

But in a very democratic bubble in a very grand state. And we are in a disinvested downtown environment. And our population is majority, I would say, High school educated in a crumbling infrastructure making under $40,000 a year with 2.3 children they’re caring for in one-parent households.

Yvonne Tang:

Thank you very much and being brave for speaking first. Anyone else? Okay. Thank you so much. So, before I get into my few slides and my few minutes, I am going to thank my community, who I worked with to develop this chapter in the Manual of Museum Management and part of my talk today. It was co-written by Munna Faisal Elgerg, who’s the CEO of the Museums and Heritage Sector at Dubai Culture and

Arts Authority. It was also co-written by Terry Nyambé, who’s the curator of ecology at the Copper Belt Museum in Zambia, and who’s also the vice president of ICOM.

I also interviewed Ilana Altman from the Bentway in Toronto, Jessica E. Banks, who’s formerly from the National Gallery of Cayman Islands, Lance Wheeler, who’s formerly at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. Laura Van Brooke-Hivind, who’s the director of the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University. Leewee Gracioso, who’s the director of the Museo Miraflores in Guatemala City.

And Orit Sarafati, who was formerly at the Evergreen Brickworks also in Toronto.

So, they are my community. And so really wanted to think about what puts you in your community and how we can center ourselves. And to me, thinking about community is much more than the people that are around you in your institution. If you think about it, our community is also other institutions that have the same topics and types and themes and stories that we also tell. It’s all the people that come into your institution. It’s all the people that talk about you when they leave. It’s everyone that you work with every day. And so, I think really thinking about your community much broader than just your locale but all the connections you have in the world and also all the different partners and institutions that you surround yourself.

And so really having a visitor forward community is important to first of all create a welcoming environment and all of that is you know from making sure there’s proper signage to washrooms and seeing people feel comfortable walking in your doors to feeling like even before they walk through their doors that they’re welcome and available and part of your story. And so also includes, you know, I say visitor forward, but I mean visitor in terms of anyone that walks through your doors. So that’s your staff, even before you hire them. So, the children that come in, it’s your volunteers, your docents, And really every interaction is the potential for your future.

You don’t know if that four-year-old is going to, you know, staring at the mummies of the dinosaurs is going to be up on stage one day giving talks at the AAM. And so really investing in a lot of the things in your community, whatever that community is, and embracing those multiple stories and multiple ways to do it and really thinking about communal growth. You know I wrote this about a year ago and I am still growing and learning and thinking and considering and making a larger community for myself and the people that I work with.

So, there are ten ways to incorporate community that are listed up here but I’m going to focus on the

first four.

So shared visioning a visioning is something I really like to do with my clients and think about From the beginning of your project from the beginning of your museum from the initial thinking of things making sure you’re inviting a variety of voices to the table, and that’s not necessarily just for new institutions Or new projects or new ideas, but making sure There’s a lot of people from education all the way to directors, really having that sense and a chance to be heard and a chance to share. Then also collaboration and co-creation, ensuring there’s a lot of collaboration and opportunities to be integrated. it really gives you a chance to humanize your co-workers and the people you work with and sharing stories.

And through those, you build stronger relationships, making sure that then you understand where people’s strengths are, maybe their interests that you didn’t know before, potential for, you know, moments of healing or moments that you need to reach out to certain communities that you hadn’t really thought about or considered at the time.

And finally, creating a connected sense of purpose and a goal to accomplish. And it doesn’t mean, you know, you can’t make mistakes along the way, but maybe making sure that there’s a fortified sort of idea and a goal you’re working towards and that each time you’re learning and each time you’re building from that.

And key to every great relationship is communication, and it’s exactly the same here. So, it’s not just information gathering, taking the information from people and gathering it and using it in your institution, but making sure that these stories are continually reciprocal. It’s always happening. It’s a circular conversation. You’re hearing what they say, reflecting, changing on what you want to do at your institution and then pushing it back out again and so that’s totally part of that trust building process and creating a sense of belonging that way they really feel like they’re part of your institution, you as individuals, as representatives and everywhere you go out in the world and making those connections is so key.

And finally, empowering youth. I think, you know, no matter where you are in the world, it’s such a significant portion of the of the population and really they can flourish by developing skills you can create opportunities for them to create their own programs to their peers but also to provide insight to any of the products that we’re putting ahead giving us hope, Susie for the future and really building

future museum goers, future museum donors, future staff, and giving them that opportunity to really become invested in what we are doing. They might not know the process, but you can help them through that, but they can for sure do a lot of amazing things if you allow them to participate.

And then I’m going to hand it over to Christy?

Christy Coleman:

Okay, I’m often known for my candor in talking about some of these interesting things. I went the wrong way. Okay, so I have to start by talking about my institution. I joined the Jamestown Yorktown Foundation in January of 2020. And this organization is a state museum. We have a budget of roughly 25 million. We have 400 plus staff and 900 plus active volunteers, operating two museum sites and a central support facility. This institution had a reputation of being rather insular. In fact, those of you who may have been around for a while may not have seen very many JYF people that would come to AAM. There were a few that would show up at ALFAM or AASLH, mostly they hung out in Virginia at VAM.

On top of that, the institution for 25 years marketed itself as historyisfun.org and then wanted to know why others didn’t take their work seriously. And so, when I came in in January of 2020, six weeks into the job, the pandemic hit. And it was interesting because, as a state institution, there are a lot of compliance, a lot of state-mandated training that I had to do as an agency head, as they call me. And all these other things that needed to happen, of course, that didn’t happen. And It enabled me to — I had to make a choice. I could seize the disruption caused by COVID and try to reinvent the place really fast.

And I kind of tried to do that.

And because what was interesting is all of these state people around me who had been in the system. I mean, my leadership team had an average service of something like 29 years, right? So, their instinct was to lay everybody off immediately and shut the place down. And I said, “Oh, we’re not doing that. Well, how are we going to pay them?” I said, “With that million-dollar surplus we have. Figure it out. Well, what about the wage staff? The wage staff in particular. Until we have some instructions about how to move, this is what we’re gonna do. And then I realized I really was gonna have a challenge with my leadership team, which I don’t have anymore.

And it was interesting because one of those leaders who had created history as fun as the marketing, right, told me in my first meeting with her that she set the agenda, that she would tell me what my talking points were wherever I went and that the vision belonged to her.

So anyway, she was the first, and so, like I said, this disruption piece, right? So, what I decided to do, I knew that, like I said, use the disruption to disrupt the institution, to try to stir some things up. The board had told me in the hiring process that the staff really was looking for some innovation. The staff was really looking to feel more engaged in the institution in a very different way. My predecessor had been there 32 years. And so, I decided that strategic planning was not going to involve anyone in a supervisor, manager, or director level.

[Applause]

Now, that was — you can imagine, right? The response to that. Because I set up these sessions where it was just me, and we did this in August because we reopened in late June. Everybody was trying to get their mojo going and we started having these strategic planning sessions and I really wanted to know what the staff wanted to do.

And you know, the managers and leaders were really put back. I mean, they were like, “What do you mean we’re not involved?” I said, “Not yet. Not yet. I need to hear from them. I need to hear what they want, what they see, because I can guarantee you these folks see far more than you do on any given day. Because I used to be an interpreter, I mean I know what I saw versus what my leadership saw.

And so, we did that, roughly 15 sessions with staff members from every level of the organization except, right? And when I say every level, I mean the housekeepers, the landscapers, the interpreters, the museum gift shop, the ticket sales, reservationists, everybody that did not have that title was in that room in 15 different segments over the course of, so basically five sections for each phase of the strategic planning. And then as we got past phase two, where they had identified three pillars that they wanted us to work on and that we were refining what we were going to focus on. That’s when I brought the directors back in. And their job wasn’t to change what the staff had done. Their job was to figure out how to make it happen.

And so that’s how we operated for the first three years. And the pillars for us were people, program and communication. And it’s been uneven at different points in time. In the two areas that I think that we’ve struggled—I just want to say struggled– that we have to revisit. Because now, I’ve been here now four and a half years. It’s time to revisit. Does this still work for us, et cetera?

But what we are discovering and what I am learning is that because there has been change in personnel, and I will say this to anybody that’s a leader or aspires to be a leader, whenever there is change in your top leadership, there is at least three phases of organizational change, okay? And that first phase is when everybody’s still excited, you got some skeptics, you got that person, occasionally that’ll say, “Well, I’ve been here longer than– and I’ll be here when they’re gone. We’ve got those, right? So that first phase is really like people trying to– it’s kind of honeymooning. OK, let’s see how it all works. And then you, as a leader, get to that point where you have to make some decisions. And those decisions are determining who can cut it, who doesn’t want to cut it, right? Right and who’s trying to undercut it. And you have to make some decisions right away and so Fortunately enough in the first real phase of things a lot of people self-selected themselves out They chose to leave the organization, which is really lovely.

You know there were a few people that I was disappointed pointed to see go, but at the end of the day, it was the right thing to do. The people who are can’t cut it are the hardest, because you really have to do

everything you can. At least, I feel like I have to do everything I can to help them be successful, which meant part of our people pillar was rethinking HR instead of being just compliance and termination into HR and professional development.

And so, we did things like instead of each department having memberships in various organizations, we consolidated the ones that were most impactful, and we created institutional memberships that then allowed every single employee to take whatever workshop, training, et center, either for free or at reduced cost. And we built that into the budgets.

But there’s still going to be the person who can’t cut it. Now the undercutters are really a challenge because they’re often the longest serving. They often feel like they know better than anybody else how the place works. And they know the system exceptionally well, especially the state system, really,

really well, and they are the most dangerous to growth. Because these are the individuals, I could give you some, cite you some examples that are just mind-numbing, but nonetheless, the Commonwealth of Virginia does have civility in the workplace as a policy has always had it. It was not always practiced in this institution. And in fact, this institution had different pockets where active bullying of other employees took place, threats of physical violence, actual physical violence, that had just been looked the other way because the person committing it was a good employee.

I mean, do y’all tolerate toxic in your space? Of course you do. You know who they are. I don’t. I try really hard to get rid of that in the space. Because, again, the undercutter can poison so much. And like I said, we’re really uneven right now. Some areas are doing really while other areas are not. And we’ve been diversifying.

And that’s another thing about JYF, right? When I came into the institution, 12% of our employees were people of color– indigenous, African, Asian Pacific Islander, 12%. 90% of them were in housekeeping or landscaping. Today, well, we’ve had a little modification because of some toxic behavior, but we were up to 23 percent and represented at top leadership all the way through.

So, all, you know, we were intentional about where we were recruiting, how we were recruiting, how we were trying to build an environment that would be welcoming and then the undercutters show up again. We have one area of our institution right now that we’re working through where an individual was hired into a director role, came to us with lots of experience, a black male, coming into a department that was all white. And they immediately said he was unqualified for the role because they liked the other guy. The other guy who couldn’t keep two sentences together during his interview, as far as I was concerned, right? You know, talented, yes, but not the best candidate.

But these staff members, because this black man was now their boss, and they did everything, literally did everything like actually saying to each other, oh, and the previous director who had moved on, one of those people who needed to move on, was telling the staff at my institution, “Well, just don’t help him. Make him figure it out for himself.” I mean, still was him putting themselves into the environment. I mean, this is real stuff that happens in museum space.

And I’m telling you that as we look at these questions about what civility looks like the staff did tell us some things about how they wanted to work together but they also said we also have some issues with visitors who come through here and we’ve always been told the visitor is always right we’ve always been trained to this idea and so our new museum senior director of museum operations and education came she said yeah we were having these conversations on staff and they would like us to think deeply about this idea of civility so going back and looking at you know how we were presenting ourselves to the public and all of that we completely rebuilt our marketing materials a couple years ago we actually brand by our name JYF museums org instead of historyisfun.org. We completely redid the website to make it more navigable. I mean, the website was a hot mess. You know, on the very first page, you could click on hotels, and it would take you right off the site. And then they wanted to know why they couldn’t sell tickets.

And then, so we put up onto our website and very easy right up front what we are, right? Educational Agency of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Our mission, which I remind people, this was around before I showed up. I’m just amplifying certain sections that you’ve ignored. Right? So, the mission is to foster through its living history museums, and we’re changing that to museums, programs, and outreach.

Right? Jamestown Settlement, American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, an awareness and understanding of the early history, settlement, and development of the United States through the convergence of American, Indian, European, and African cultures, and enduring legacies bequeathed to the nation.

Now, there were some who were like, “Well, that’s just the rah-rah, we say, “Pledge of Allegiance, we do that.” No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s, the legacies of this are really quite complex and beautiful and troubling and an opportunity in all of that and so our programs have been more reflective of that but the question that the visitors of visitor behavior especially in the environment that we’re in where staff were sharing with us especially like indigenous staff were sharing with us you know visitors saying to them calling the females Pocahontas and the males calling them chief and just being just disrespectful and them not feeling like they had a recourse that management didn’t have their back.

So coming out of Moe this was created and we the manage the leadership team we talked through these and tried to refine it and what kind of imagery that we want. And we aren’t the first to do this our neighbors at Colonial Williamsburg, they have these little placards where they have like 15 things you shall not do right, we did our we wanted ours to be different we wanted ours to be more about more about sort of again this idea of belonging collaboration etc.

And so it’s real simple and that’s that visual that you see on the side is on every door every major entry point into our museum spaces it’s on our website. And we ask that visitors be open to learning in a shared space, create an environment free of harassment and threatening behavior, engage in dialogue without discriminatory language, show respect to staff, fellow visitors, and museum property. And then we say, we will not tolerate racist, sexist, or homophobic comments, vandalism, physical contact, or harassment of any kind at our museums. Guests who cannot comply with our Code of Conduct will be asked to leave the museum premises.

And we will put you out. And you have to. If you’re talking about really protecting your staff and other visitors, you have to be willing to take that step. And if they want their money back, give it to them. Because guess what? That builds trust for the people who are there, both who are working there and who are visiting because they will know not only, we met what we said but I’m safe here.

And safety is sort of the first thing that we’ve been trying to focus on. How do we create safe space and you got to do that before you can really talk about welcoming space. And this is something that I don’t have the answers to, I will tell you. I mean, I’ve seen things in this institution that I haven’t seen in others. And I think, again, I think it’s part of it as a nature of its size.

I can’t be everywhere all the time. And so, there is a reliance. And there’s also a recognition that over time — remember when I said management came in to figure out how to make those things happen for the staff? Well, the staff aren’t feeling as empowered anymore in some spaces, because the managers in a super price. So, I’ve got to now go back as we go into this next phase of strategic planning to say, OK, we’re all at the table now, and we need to hear each other.

One thing that we just completed is our first– well, that’s not our first — our first independent, independent staff evaluation to let us — and it’s independent, it’s anonymous and all those things, and it allows me to see things across areas that are working and really dig into the details of things that are not, and that’s really lovely. So that’s where we are, that’s who we are, and now it’s time for you all to turn things over back to Gail to put you in your rows.

Are you doing it? Yeah. Okay, so for the rows, right? So, thank you very much.

Gail Lord:

Wow. [Applause]

Well, well, I want to just thank the panelists for doing the impossible, which is to stick to time so that we can have some time talking to one another. So, I’m supposed to move this forward. There we are. So, you replace the concept of table with concept of row, and you could just choose where you’d like to begin your conversations. I just want to say this is about sharing experiences. Maybe we’ll solve some problems. Maybe we won’t. And so, wow, this is an incredible group. Thank you all. And really, let’s give our, let’s give our panelists just another hand.

[Applause]

Well, I hate to do this, but we have the trust of the AAM to leave the room when we’re supposed to and many of you will want to go to other sessions. So, if I wonder if I could just ask, pretty much everyone has a microphone and if I could just ask the group leader, just a facilitator, speaker, or panelist to just maybe report back on a couple of the ideas that came out of each session, out of each table and then we’ll say goodbye and meet again next year. I believe it’s in Los Angeles.

Okay, I know we have a lot of problem-solving happening. Thank you so much everyone. Can I just ask you? Okay, so if I could just, just in the interest of getting people together again, you don’t have to go back, stay where you are.

Let’s see. Yvonne, can you do a quick report? Yvonne, can you just do a quick report with your microphone on, just say any ideas that came out of this session, 30 seconds and we’ll go around in that. No problem.

Yvonne Tang:

Thanks, everybody. So, my table was about community, and we talked a lot about dealing with hate or pushback or negativity in the community. Which really kind of pushed off Susie’s talk as well, and also Christie’s, which was fabulous. And so, we talked a lot about providing hope and feedback from visitors, from your staff, from within. Potentially pre-populating some controversial or difficult topics within your trusted partners.

We talked about potentially using marketing ahead of time so that all that hate, and disparagement and negativity will be received ahead of time and by the time your institution institutions ready to go, it’s everyone that is willing to pay and willing to come. And know that it is the 20 percent that you’re speaking to and including them, but there’s still 80 percent that are behind you. They might not be right there all the time, but they will come out and they will be there.

And then finding support to strengthen and rebuild and potentially look at either mediation or a civil discourse within the institution from outside help to be able to do that. And so, I really wanted to thank everyone at my table for sharing, being really open about their issues and talking about community.

Gail Lord:

Thanks so much. Sounds like maybe you’re next at the back.

Susie Wilkening:

Hi, okay, yeah, here I am. Okay, so there are four things we talked about, fairly similar overall up here. We talked about frontline staff, museum shop staff in particular, but people who are getting that pushback and how to help them.

So that segwayed into talking through the disinformation inoculation process of how do we prepare people. It’s all about that element of surprise. How do we think about that element of surprise and diminish that role in sparking those reactions.

So, we went through disinformation inoculation. We also talked about how we articulate our values as institutions, which included thinking through what our own individual biases and how we translate that to organizational values that we then then share with the public, asking them to then consider what their values are before they go into an experience and how that might be affecting their intake of information.

Which also means we have to practice radical curiosity and courageous empathy with that group that pushes back and creates that challenge because they’re coming from somewhere. If we’re radically curious about figuring out where they’re coming from and empathizing them to understand their pathway, even though knowing that does not mean we have to agree, that’s going to help us be more effective in our communications and conversations.

Gail Lord:

Fantastic. Thanks so much. John, if you just want to just tell us about your group, every discussion was fantastic.

John Hampton:

I don’t have a microphone over there.

So, our group, talking about decolonizing museums, talked about how to communicate that, and about it’s, you know, maybe the city of it’s just the right thing to do came forward as that, but then also the difficulties within some states around navigating government relations about doing that work and then trying to maintain governments that maybe aren’t on side with those goals as well.

And then we went into just a rapid fire, things of practical steps around that, which were really about connecting with community. About sometimes that’s hiring Indigenous staff, but then recognizing what relationships that you’re expecting from them, about how to value those, about building professional development for all staff within there, whether that’s through language lessons, which is one thing we’ve done at the Mackenzie Art Gallery that would bring in people to teach Indigenous values and cultures by teaching them language so that they can speak some key words especially around like, you know, to articulate hello and welcome or any Indigenous languages that you use within your institution. But also creating those professional development opportunities for Indigenous staff to be able to learn more about their own culture and relationship and that can be non-Indigenous staff, too. If you’re asking for people to come with connections and knowledge about their culture, then value their connection with culture as that work time, as paid professional development opportunities.

But I won’t go into all of our steps here because we’re — (inaudible)

Christy Coleman:

Real quick, we talked about staff and visitors. What do they need? And it came down to how are we training, educating them? How are we building cohorts for them to be able to understand, and then how do we address those in both cases who may be more toxic to the organization and trying to deploy empathy first to get them to understand the values of the institution and the goals of the institution moving forward. And then doing a cost benefit analysis. Is it worth keeping them?

Gail Lord:

Thanks so much. Thank you, everyone. [APPLAUSE]

This is a recorded session from the 2024 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. In the face of an epidemic of anxiety, depression, and physical disease, many museums have been exploring mindfulness practices to support the health of their communities. This recorded session addresses how museums might develop mindfulness programs that address the developmental needs of youth, a currently underserved population in mindfulness-based museum programming. The goal is to prepare museum educators to confidently incorporate mindful movement into object-based learning programs for youth at their museums.

Additional Resources

Fostering Resilience in Children slides

Fostering Resilience lesson plan

Fostering Resilience Rebalancing Big Energy

Fostering Resilience Mindful Moving and Breathing Techniques

Transcript

Jennifer Reifsteck:

So, welcome to Fostering Resilience in Children Through Virtual Mindfulness. So, my name is Jen Reifsteck and I manage school and teacher programs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian art. That’s my day job. And by night and by weekend, I am a yoga and qigong teacher, and I’m joined in this session with Lisa.

Lisa Danahy:

Hi, I’m Lisa Danahy, and I’m the founder of Create Calm, a non-profit organization that brings yoga and mindfulness programs to schools and communities. I think I just have to be closer.

I’m Lisa Danahy, and I’m the director and founder of Create Calm, a nonprofit that brings yoga and mindfulness programs to schools and the community. And I have been really honored to work with Jen for the last several years to create a program that is able to work with schools, support schools, but also supports community spaces in bringing social-emotional learning to kids from birth up through young adults.

So, I’m really excited to be here and then to play today.

Jennifer Reifsteck:

So, our organizations together developed a program called Artful Movement and Artful Movement is a virtual field trip program for children in grades pre-K through sixth.

And our goal for this session is for you to leave with tangible tools that you can take back to your institutions to develop your own slow-looking and mindfulness programs with your audiences. Together we will practice and then workshop ways to interpret projects, through inquiry practices of guided looking, and through interpretive practices through movement.

We’ll learn how the practices of slow looking and mindfulness are connected, and how they foster skills such as self-awareness, self-regulation, and perspective taking.

So please be sure you have something to write with. You can take notes on your phone if you wish as well. If you want to follow along on the app, we have the slides in a PDF format and all the handouts available if you’d like to pull up those resources while you participate in the session today.

So, we’re going to jump right in with a brief demo of the Artful Movement field trip program of course modified for an in-person audience.

And so, Lisa’s gonna get us started with a mindful moment and to go over our community agreement.

Lisa Danahy:

Okay. Oh, okay. I don’t know if this is gonna work. I like to have a headset so I’m gonna try to do this with the microphone maybe sort of in front of me I will see I’d like to just stick it under my arm.

So, we asked you to take out pens and paper and all of your handouts and I’m actually gonna ask you to put them aside for a second.

I’m gonna ask you to notice as you’re sitting there in your space, if you feel like you have space to move around, if you feel like you have space to really be comfortable and adjust yourself, either slide your chair away from the table a little bit or slide further away from, yeah, from your things.

So, allow yourself to start to get a little comfortable and then place your feet on the floor and just notice what it’s like to connect your feet with the floor. You can even stomp your feet a little bit. Yeah, just feel that connection and then as you press your feet into the floor sit up a little taller stand up a little taller.

Take a big breath in through your nose or your mouth and as you breathe out open your mouth and say. That felt good. Let’s do that again. Big breath in and say, “Ah.” One more time. Big breath in. “Ah.”

Now just take a moment to notice how that feels. To connect a little bit more on the inside and then feel your connection to what’s going on around you. And if your eyes are closed you can open them just a little bit and we’re going to create some reminders of how to be part of a community.

So, yoga means union coming together. And we find that sometimes we feel more comfortable coming together if we know sort of what the plan is. So, we have some really simple agreements that we’ve initiated that we’re hoping are gonna keep you feeling really comfortable, really safe, and allow you to have a really fun time.

So, the first agreement that we have, I want you to reach your arms out to your sides, and if you don’t have room, slide yourself somewhere where you have room. Take both arms out to the sides. Take a big breath in, stretch your fingers, open your heart a little bit, and start to feel as if you’re bringing in all kinds of goodness and love. And then wrap your arms around yourself as you breathe out and love yourself.

And it’s the last time you gave yourself a hug. All right, now extend it out, take a breath in, and love everybody else. Feel that connection you have with everybody else. And then hug it in and love yourself. Love everybody else and love yourself.

Start to notice keep going how this feels to open yourself up and then at the same time keep yourself feeling really nice and snuggly So this agreement reminds us to respect ourselves to respect each other to move in safe and positive ways and to bring our best to what we do from the inside and the outside. Next time your arms wrap around yourself Give yourself another big hug, and in your mind, or out loud, say, “I love me.”

Good. All right. Now bring your arms out to the side, sparkle your fingers, and imagine you’re a balloon. Fill yourself up like a balloon. Bring both hands together and breathe out and bring them down to your heart. Let’s do that two more times.

And take a moment to check in with yourself. And our second reminder our second agreement is to listen so take your thumb and your first finger rub it on the top of your ear the top cartilage. There’s an acupressure point here that helps to simultaneously wake up your brain for focus and activate your parasympathetic nervous system to calm you down. So about three o ‘clock in the afternoon or when you come to a session after lunch on the last day of a really long conference, you may want to rub the tops of your ears to help you wake up and to also feel secure.

This is a reminder as we do our agreements to listen, you’re gonna listen on the inside to your inner knowing and you’re gonna listen to your colleagues that are here with you. So, drop your fingers down into your lap take another big breath in. Breathe it out and let it go.

Just notice how you feel. So, if at any point in our practice today You start to feel a little lost you start to feel like you need a little bit of grounding or a little connecting. Remember to love yourself, remember to listen. All right.

Jennifer Reifsteck:

Thank you, Lisa, and that, I think we’re ready to look at a work of art together.

So go ahead and let your eyes wander all over this image. Notice the colors that you see, the shapes, the textures, the lines. Now going to your writing tools.

What did you see? What did you notice as you looked at this work of art? Write down five words or phrases and now we’re going to take a second look. So putting your pencils your pens down. Let our eyes wander all over the image again this may have come up in your conversations, but what questions came up? What do you wonder about this work of art?

So, I saw a lot of animated conversations, lots of smiling and gesturing. Thanks so much for sharing out with each other. Now to share some information about this work of art, so the name of this work of art is Thunder God, and it was painted by the Japanese artist Hokusai. It’s over 170 years old, and it’s about as tall as a love seat is wide, and it’s a hanging scroll. And I bet you’re wondering what that shape was on the back of the figure. And this is how the thunder god makes the thunder. You might notice now the drumsticks in the hand here and the really stylized laser beams of lightning. And perhaps you were wondering about the writing in the bottom corner. It’s signed by the artist who’s also added man mad about painting. Hokusai was 88 years old when he painted this work of art.

Now I am wondering what a thunderstorm might feel like in our bodies and Lisa is gonna guide us that way.

Lisa Danahy:

Can you hear me? Okay So I want you to consider whether as you were looking at this piece of art at any point you felt any energy present, or any emotions present or felt like a sense of a connection to movement in the piece of art and because very often that’s what makes art so powerful for us Is this visceral relationship we have with it.

So, we’re actually going to embody some of what we felt and sensed as we connected with the piece of art. So, I’m going to give you the option to take a spot along the sides if you’d like to stand up and really move or sit on the floor or to stay right where you are in your seats, but make sure you’ve got room to move behind or in front of your chair.

We’re going to be in all kinds of little positions, but it will be completely accessible, and you will be able to move in whatever way feels really good for you.

All right so we’re gonna get started with just a big breath in. Take a breath fill up like a balloon and breathe it out.

Another big breath in and breathe it out. Let your arms reach up overhead, fill up, stretch, and bring your hands down in front of your heart. Now consider what it might feel like to be a cloud, to be a puffy little light cloud floating in the sky and put your body in whatever position feels like a cloud. So, you might wanna ball up on the floor, you might wanna stretch out, make a shape of your body that you can hold for a couple of breaths that feels like a cloud. Good.

Feel free to grab a chair or the floor if you’d like. And then pause here for a few breaths and just feel into what it’s like to have the energy of a cloud. To be contracted and drawing inward. Now slowly start to bring your body back to a standing position. Reach your arms out and take another big balloon breath. And breathe it out.

Now start to rumble your feet. Start to imagine your cloud is building energy. Feel your feet rumble. I’m shaking the whole stage here If we fall down you keep going all right rumble those feet rumble your legs get your whole-body rumbling.

Feel as if you are that cloud now starting to churn, starting to maybe gray or fill denser. Let your head get into it. Let your arms get into it.

Really start to build that energy. Really get it rumbling. Good.

Maybe you want to make a little grrr sounds. Yeah, feel it, feel it, feel it, let your cheeks shake. All right, now, plant your feet. Take a big breath in, reach down. As you breathe out, explode up. Yeah, do that again, come down with a little tiny tongue. Wow, one more time.

Wow.

Now let your arms come down by your sides. Take a moment to pause and notice how you feel.

Is there tingling? Is there a shift in your breath? Are you noticing any change from a moment ago?

You can feel how it shifts so quickly. Clouds are always moving. Energy is always moving. All Alright, so now, take a big breath in, reach your arms up in front of you, step your feet wide, and as you breathe out, make a chopping motion, like lightning. Make whatever sound you want. And if you really want, you can take your hands and hit them on the ground. Yeah. Make that lightning really big and bold. One more time.

All right, now come back up, take a big balloon breath. Breathe it out.

Put your hands on your heart. Notice if there’s been any change. Notice your breath and your body.

Alright.

So, you’ve been expanding and contracting your energy. Take your hands and make fists. And then bring just your fingertips to the tops of your head and make rain. Can you hear it on the inside?

Bring your rain down your head and your shoulders and down onto your belly and your back. Make rain on your arms. Maybe you want bigger rain now.

Maybe you want really big rain. Make some rain on your bum and all the way down to your toes make rain all over your body wherever you want and if you want you can make some thunder let me hear it keep going and if you want you can make some lightning now.

One more time, and come back and make some more thunder, and make some more rain, tapping your whole body, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, anywhere you want on your body, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Alright, now slow it down.

Make little tiny raindrops on your cheeks, taking your fingertips to your cheeks and then to the forehead. Make little taps on your forehead. And then let your arms reach out to the sides. Take a big breath in, fill up like a balloon and breathe it out. Bring your hands to your heart and notice how you feel.

Now step your feet wide. Reach your arms out to the sides. And we’re going to make a little bit more energy move in the storm. We’re going to make some wind and some clouds moving by crossing the midline like this.

And then come up and start to make your arms twist and make a wind the sound.

Start to slow it down and now imagine you’re dragging your fingers through water. Just the tips of your fingers are dragging through the surface of the water.

Notice how your energy is changing.

Notice how, sometimes your energy seems big, and sometimes little. Sometimes it feels calm, sometimes it feels maybe even angry.

There’s no good or bad in your feelings, because it’s all just the energy and you can always move it.

Now slow your arms down, take a big breath in, breathe it out, and then find your way back to where your chair is and put your hands on the seat of the chair or the back of the chair. And you’re gonna let yourself hang a little bit upside down so it looks like this. Letting the last rain drip out just sit extend out through your back stretch back. Hands on the table or hands on a chair, extend your arms, put your head between your arms, and just take a few breaths, spend your knees a little bit to stretch.

Sometimes it helps to go a little bit upside down to change your perspective on how you feel, to shift the energy in your body. Take three more breaths like this. At the end of that third breath. Make your way back into your little cloud that you started with or find a seat in your chair and be a little cloud like this.

Notice what your body wants and what you need.

Give yourself the opportunity to become light, to float, to notice the sensation of movement and stillness at the same time. And to notice that your energy is always shifting, it can be interpreted as positive or negative or good or bad or scary or fun. It’s all just energy.

The emotions can shift as easily. And sometimes if we know how to move the energy in our bodies, we know how to move, how we feel. Just like with the storms, the biggest storms bring rain that waters the plants. The biggest storms move rivers, shake leaves from trees and help them grow.

Clear spaces that are overcrowded. And so even when a storm seems big and scary, it’s just a space for growth. Take one more breath here in your little cloud and then gradually come back to sit. And if you’d like, take out your paper and your pen or your notepad and just make a little note about how that felt for you.

Jennifer Reifsteck:

So, let’s come back together as a group.

So, what we just experienced was a modified version of the Artful Movement virtual field trip. And it’s rooted in the pedagogy of slow looking.

So, what is slow looking? Shari Tishman, she’s a researcher at Harvard Project Zero and she defines SLO looking as taking the time to carefully observe more than meets the eye at first glance. And Shari goes on to say that slow looking is a quote rewarding feedback loop so the more you look the more curious the you are and the more you want to see and keep looking.

So, you may all be familiar with timing and tracking studies of visitor experiences in the galleries and we know from these studies that visitors aren’t necessarily slowing down. If they’re spending any time in front of an object it’s they’re spending most of their time actually reading the label reading the interpretation of the object.

So how can we get visitors to slow down?

With the Artful Movement virtual field trip program and other programs at the National Museum of Asian Art, we use Project Zero Thinking Routines. So just by a show of hands in the audience, who’s a fan of Project Zero thinking routines and uses them in their practice. Excellent, great.

So, if you’re new to Project Zero, Project Zero comes out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and was founded in the late ’50s by a philosopher who wanted to study the arts as a cognitive science. And when Nelson Goodman went to research how the arts are studied as a cognitive activity, as any good researcher, he wanted to start with the body of research that already existed. And he found absolutely no research that existed. And so that’s why it’s called Project Zero.

It’s studying the arts as a cognitive science. And I first heard about project zero actually at AAM in 2011. And so today we experienced a combination of two thinking routines. So, thinking routines are a way to scaffold the learning, to really deepen the engagement of looking at a work of art through guided discussion. And it’s working to build these skills or thinking dispositions. And so, we experienced to modify looking 10 times 2. Instead, we looked 5 times 2. And this develops descriptive language, your vocabulary skills, your observation skills. And we used that as the C and C think wonder in our conversations.

So how does slow looking and mindfulness overlap? Quite literally, in the slide we put in, It’s the inquiry. So, at the root of these practices is the slowing down, taking the time to notice. And that noticing comes from a place of non-judgment.

What you see is what you see. What you feel is what you feel.

And when you slow down and inquire through mindfulness practices, And you do that in a non-judgmental way. You are developing curiosity. You’re developing wonder.

And you’re able to notice different perspectives.

And these are practices for a reason. They take time. They take concentration. These are learned dispositions.

So, Lisa, do you want to talk about inquiry, awareness, and connection and get us into the energy component?

Lisa Danahy:

Yeah. So, I have all these little notes in my head rushing around, and I’m not sure what I want to share with you first. But I’m going to start with inquiry and this notion of curiosity. Recent studies have come out that have shown that imagination is key to accessing the higher functioning in your brain. And when you are curious, when you are able to question and use your imagination and creatively experience your environment, you are able to create more positive quick synapses. You’re able to build new neuro pathways. You’re able to connect with your brain, getting it out of a limbic response and getting it into that more executive functioning space.

And when folks are coming to the museum, a lot of times it can be very cognitive and it can be really connecting and we can share a lot of really academic beautiful history and it can help to engage imagination and movement to get into that space to bring them really into that very comfortable place of not judging, not feeling unsure of themselves or feeling really more stable. The way we can do that is through being aware. I’m aware of what I’m doing, I’m aware of what you’re doing, and I’m aware of how I’m connecting in my space.

When I connect, I can be more curious. When I’m more curious, I can be more aware. When I’m aware, I can be connected. The one thing that really works with bringing the movement into this program, bringing that awareness into the mind-body connection is that there’s a book called Spark. I don’t know if any of you have read the book Spark by John Raddy.

John Raddy has, he’s a psychotherapist and researcher, and he has pulled together all this research on the value of movement in building the brain and actually wiring the brain. It is said that when you play, it takes approximately, I think it’s four minutes of play to implant a new experience as a memory. It takes 4,000 times of rote memorization to plant the same experience. So, we want to get away from just talking and providing information, and we want to get it to be a little bit more of a felt experience. And so that’s where the movement really starts to help.

So, when we start to move, we get into this energy inquiry. And you did these things today. You were able to connect. We started actually with the connection to the breath. We connected to the breath because it’s usually a pretty quick space to get into, and you start to very quickly feel that you can adjust your states of being. And from that connection, you get into the focus, the inquiry, the exploration, the imagination. You’re starting to move the body and activate the nervous system.

The nervous system is one of the primary ways that we can shift our experiencing and we can engage social-emotional learning. The nervous system is a key to our self-regulation, and that’s where once we can tap into that nervous system, we can start to recognize through the awareness how we can calm ourselves down, how we can rebalance.

So, the key is not to always stay here, right, even though a lot of us want children to stay here especially Because they have big energy, what we really want is to play with and move. We want to play with and move the energy, we want to play with and move ourselves, and we want to play with and move our minds, right? We want to engage in this slow looking, the project zero thinking routines to really get out of the standard answering and responding and waiting for someone to tell us about our experience.

And that’s the same with the movement, you know when I had you create your own movements. When I had you feel your energy when I had you doing that you were controlling your experience And so it’s really important as we’re developing Social-emotional skills is to empower everybody we’re working with to have a sense of ownership of their experience an agency a Voice to be seen to be felt to be heard without any judgment, any expectations.

Jennifer Reifsteck:

So, to bring it all together and recap, so Artful Movement, again, was a virtual field trip developed between National Museum of Asian Art and Create Calm. It started in 2021 as a virtual field trip for students in pre-K through sixth grade but has since evolved into on-site trainings for teachers. And as you experience today, it starts with a centering breathwork practice, classroom agreements.

We go into looking at one work of art with a project zero thinking routine, and then a movement from instructor from Create Calm guides us through a movement and experience to interpret the work of art. And then we conclude with a relaxation and time to reflect together and check in with the students. You know, how are you feeling right now?

The program fosters social and emotional skills, such as self-regulation, self-awareness, perspective taking, and it’s culturally responsive because we intend to create a learning experience that’s based on trust. We value the students sharing their unique perspectives, their unique experiences with us.

And now we’re going to turn it over to you all. It’s time to workshop. So, what we’ve prepared for you, we prepared six works of art coming from the National Museum of Asian Art Collections, and we provided a link to Project Zero Thinking Routines.

So, the goal of the workshop is you’re going to be working in your groups of three or groups of two, and you’re going to pick one work of art of the six we prepared for you. You’re going to pick one projects you’re thinking routine that you would use to examine the work of art and then you’re gonna work together as well to create a movement or a sequence of movements and I know Lisa has some tips on sequencing movements.

Lisa Danahy:

So how many of you were able to get a sense of whether energy was rising or lowering as you were moving earlier today. OK. All right.

So, the idea here is that when you look at a piece of art, you may tune right into a type of energy that you want to capture in that piece of art that you want to play with. And in that case, you can take just one thing and you can move with just that one thing.

You’re going to want to breathe your way into it and breathe your way out of it, but you can come up with just one movement. So, in your handouts, the things that we did today are listed on a handout that kind of focus on whether they were high energy or low energy, what they did. So, you can actually use this handout to help you to pick a movement to match your piece of art or you can create your own.

But the idea is that you want to feel an energetic space and find a way to embody that energy so that you are relating to the energy of the piece of art as well as your experience, your personal experience.

Jennifer Reifsteck:

I think it’s the next. I think the lesson plan template also takes you to the Google Drive, right?

Lisa Danahy:

I think so, maybe. Yeah, I think that might. I think so.

Jennifer Reifsteck:

Yeah, so the lesson plan template is also, the Google Drive link.

Lisa Danahy:

Where you’ll find your handouts.

Jennifer Reifsteck:

Where you’ll find the handouts about moving energy. The middle link takes you to the website of Project Zero, specifically their menu of thinking routines related to exploring art, objects, and images. And then the final QR code takes you to a link of the six works of art from National Museum of Asian Art Collections.

So again, you’ll pick one work of art from that six, one thinking routine from the menu of choices from Project Zero, and then create your movement piece.

Lisa Danahy:

So, let’s go back to that template in its form that you’re going to find in your Google Drive if you want. And you don’t have to use the template. We just put it together for you, so you have it. But the idea is, you’re going to pick your object, the piece of art, and then you’re going to do a slow looking yourself at that piece of art, determine a movement so that you’ve got your project zero thinking routine on the bottom which one you’re going to use or if you’re familiar with them you can pick one, otherwise you can pull from the QR code on the next page. And then you’re going to create your movement and you can pick one of these movements that’s already there or you can create your own.

So, you can pick one movement and let that be the whole experience or you can pick a series of movements. So, what I did with you is when, so we lead an institute that is a three-day exploration of this lesson planning, so we’ve really tried to boil it down into something really quick for you all. But the idea is to create a bell-shaped curve of an experience of movement.

So, you’re going to start with breath and then you’re going to come into the body. So, you may want to come into the body with a smaller movement and then with a bigger movement and then you’re going to come back down on the other side. You don’t want to leave folks hanging up in the big energy. You’re going to come back down with a breath or another movement and then breath. And so, the chart that you have here, you’ve got things like crossing the midline. You’ve got things like making big movements, bringing you upside down inversions, and then these cross-body movements that help to settle.

So, you can use those as the center of it. You can also use them as either pieces, like the down dog and what we call turtle shell, what I call cloud for you today are very centering and help you find the energy or come back to the neutral energy.

So, we really just want you to play with it. There’s no right or wrong here. You don’t have to use these. You don’t have to there’s really there’s no way you can do this wrong because it’s your embodiment of the piece of art that you’re working with.

[In the background] I tried to get on water, but I had a leader train and by the time they come to the area the network is super flowing. There’s a way to sit. There’s a great deal of conversation. And then the other networking kind of stuff, it was all super fun. But it’s ideal to do that in the middle.

Lisa Danahy:

So, how’s everybody feeling?

Do you all feel like you have movements sort of tracked out or do you need another minute or thumbs up if everybody’s good to go or…Okay.

All right so let’s pull up the art.

Jennifer Reifsteck:

We could either do this by art or we can just take volunteers.

Lisa Danahy:

Let’s go by art.

Jennifer Reifsteck:

Let’s go by art, okay. So, did anyone pick the ancient Thailand vessel? The spiraling, okay.

Lisa Danahy:

Okay, we have spirals.

Jennifer Reifsteck:

So, let’s all stand up and let’s move again. So, we’re going to learn from you friends how to move to this work of art.

Lisa Danahy:

You can move out into the sides too if you want.

That’s fine. [laughs]

[Audience 1]

So, we’re feeling what that feels like in our ankles, maybe some static feelings in our arms. Yeah, are you holding water like that? Can you slowly come to a standard position? Maybe start moving our arms in some circles. Start out small. We’ll slowly get bigger. Incorporate some knees, start to make those circles really big.

That’s a good question.

Yeah

Yeah, the trust in the breathing. The autonomy yeah, there’s no right way to breathe in this. Let me slowly make them smaller again. You feel how that changes your breathing?

Yes, and then we’re still breathing. (laughing)

[Audience 2]

Those are fairly similar. Yeah, good job. OK, I’m going to lead you through a similar thing, I suppose. First, start standing with your feet together. Raise your hands up over your head and touch at the top.

Imagine you are very strong, but with strength comes the component of being brittle. And someone drops you and you crack. And so, imagine now that you go limp, you can even lay on the floor if you want. You’re a bunch of little shards. Oh, no.

But somebody picks you up. Inhale, stand.

And similar to how you were formed on a pottery wheel, you can spin in your body very slowly, don’t get dizzy, and you can exhale very deeply as you go.

That’s all I got.

Lisa Danahy:

Thank you. So, for those who were experiencing being guided through that, any thoughts, any comments on the different types of movement causing different energy sensations?

[Audience 3]

Even though we were moving, it really made me actually focus more on the object and the first glance glancing at us swirls face and then really like feeling that energy even though we were moving at the same time.

[Audience 4]

And I thought with the second set of instructions I was really cognizant of the fact that that is a piece of pottery that has a history and age and so that was really cool.

Lisa Danahy:

Yeah, to think about the material, your construction, right, that was really neat. So, was there any point in the energy that you felt it go higher or lower?

Where was a high energy point? Was there a high energy point?

Yeah, big arms yeah how about a low energy point yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so can you see how you can sort of put them together there.

[Audience 5]

I was just gonna say that you know just examining the vase you have the circularity as Noah pointed out when it was on the wheel or around. But you also have the circularity in a different plane, which is vertical, on the actual vase. And each of us, even though we didn’t coordinate, and you explored one of those, and we explored, I think, primarily another.

So, I thought that was really interesting.

Lisa Danahy:

And when you tie that in with the Project Zero Thinking routines of what do you see? What do you wonder what’s going on and you’re getting the descriptions and the feelings both from the movement and from the visual it’s pretty cool. You can go…

[Audience 6]

They start with, you know, myself, you know, the small circles where you started and then they talk about my community and then they talk about me. So, I think you could really embody it with that.

Lisa Danahy:

Thank you.

Jennifer Reifsteck:

Okay. Did anyone pick the Chinese court robe, the Shelfu, by chance. I thought I saw birds, so I’m curious if there was anyone picked either the Korean face? Yeah, yes, the blue and white, yes.

[Audience 7]

Everyone please start seated. We are calling this crane waking from slumber. So with you all started seated I want you to imagine yourself a crane just waking up and you’re just starting to feel the weight of the sleepiness on the base of your feet.

I’d like you to breathe in and breathe out, feeling the weight below your feet.

And now slowly start to lift one foot and then the next foot lightly tapping on the floor. Lift one foot and then the next. Take a deep breath in and breathe out. And now bring your feet both back down to the floor and cross the right foot over the left foot and back, then the left foot over the right foot and back. Slow movements, you’re just waking up from a long sleep.

And now bring your feet back to the floor, resting. Take one deep breath in, let it out. And now we need to wake up our head and our neck, which has been curled. You need to uncurl your head. So, start to turn your head to the left and then to the right, to the left, to the right, down towards your chest then back up again to the left to the right, towards your chest and up again. Take one deep breath in. Let it out. So, the second time when you take, you’re going to take a deep breath in and when as you start to let your breath out, I want you to realize or think about your arms, the position of your arms, also known as wings.

Start to raise one arm, one wing, and lower while breathing in and out. Raise one, the other wing, lower. Raise one wing lower, the other wing lower. And now put your two wings back down towards the middle and we want to sort of stretch, get ready to stand up. So, you’re going to stretch out your core a little bit so stand or while you’re sitting just kind of lift your head extend your chest while breathing in and then breathe out and when you feel comfortable stand up and now raise both wings to the side breathe in and breathe out one big breath in as you raise your wings and breathe out.

Now we’re ready, we’ve woken up and now we want to take a little flight. So, you want to take your two wings out to either side and start to twist your body as though you’re floating through those swirly clouds, no they’re not swirly, through those clouds that are above them. Great. Yeah, they’re kind of curved.

And I want you to start to look at the ground and look for a beautiful marsh landing where you’d like to, a marsh spot where you’d like to land. While you’re slowly start starting to slow down your flight just a little bit when you feel like you’ve found a landing spot. Then very slowly and carefully sit back down. Kind of pulling your wings down. Either side of you I don’t know how to explain that.

What are we doing next oh.

Yeah, yeah, we’re going back to feet. Okay, so we’ve landed now. We want to make sure that this this marsh land is strong enough to hold us. It’s not too marshy So you want to take your feet and tap them on the floor again? Bringing your breathing down. Back to the center. And then to sit tall and that’s all we have…

Lisa Danahy:

Thank you, that was great, so anybody have any observations from that?

Any, yeah…

[Audience 8]

When you asked us to look down after we were in the air. I honestly felt like this strange like perspective as if I was like actually like up higher than I usually am. So that was really interesting how I really got caught up in that story and those movements to the point where look down at my feet I’m like whoa my feet are so small. And I was also imagining maybe being in a group, especially of like much younger children. I know that it’s nice and it’s soothing to be caught up, but if, say, the lesson was about perspective or being high up in the sky, asking what you might see below or something like that.

Lisa Danahy:

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point because one thing we want to, it’s always fun to have a story and to tie a story to our movement and our art, but sometimes it’s nice just to be a little bit outside of the story too. So, you’re flying high, you look down, find a place to land, right? And so, because then we don’t have to question whether they know what a marsh is or what a, right?

You know, I mean, no, no, no, this is, we’re all learning this together. And I do the same exact thing. I create these really fabulous stories. We go to the beach and then half the class goes, I’ve never been to the beach. And so, then I go, oh, yeah, that’s right. So just allowing yourself to not have such a story that was really beautiful, that perspective. Because that’s exactly what we’re trying to do is create a space of curiosity and open learning. So, you land where you wanna land.

And it’s nice too because in that piece of art you can’t really tell where they are, you know, whether they’re coming or going or, you know, they sort of seem like they’re on land, sort of seem like they’re kind of in floating, so that was really great. So big energy, where was a big energy moment?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the flying was big energy. Yeah.

I agree. I agree. And then a low energy.

Yeah. So, this is crossing the midline. It’s the quickest way to connect the right and left hemispheres of the brain and body. Any time you cross over the midline with a hand, a leg, a head, anything that you’re doing, it’s the quickest way to enhance the mind-body connection. So, I always like to see cross-binding. Oh, out of curiosity, what was your Project Zero thinking routine?

I noticed.

>> [INAUDIBLE]

Jennifer Reifsteck:

I think we just have time for one more group to share if anyone wants to volunteer.

Thank you. So, So if you guys cool awesome. All right.

[Audience 9]

So, we are taking a look at the piece in the upper left of this screen these two birds here which is actually a full wall, correct?

Yes, this is a full wall quick tidbit we chose this piece because it moved from two blocks away from my museum to inside of their museum. So, we had a connection there. We thought it was pretty cool. But yeah, so, we’re not gonna do the full extended version of this, but take a moment to look at the work of art. That’s our moment.

Now, I want you to think of a couple of things you see here. Just what do you notice? And you can shout one thing out and then I’ll repeat it into the microphone. What do you see? What comes to mind?

Feathers, spread wings, Ooh, conversation, confrontation, dark, flying, a few different words here, all right, gold, excellent, all right. So what I want us to do is we’re going to imagine, very similarly to our last group, a day in the life of these creatures here. The way that I’d like for us to begin is just waking up our morning. So, I’m gonna have us all stand up and we are gonna take a moment to stretch our wings as we’re waking up.

So, what I’d like for you to do and I’m wanting to put the microphone in my armpit here too, is stretch your wings out and then pull them back in.

And again, I might forget to mention the breathing here but please continue to breathe. Maybe take a deep breath in as you’re stretching out. And then out as you pull them back in. In as you stretch out. And then out as you pull them back in.

Excellent. So now that we’ve had a moment to stretch our wings to wake up, I want us to imagine what it would look like for these birds to move throughout their day.

We mentioned some conversation, some confrontation, maybe something’s going on here. So now that we have our wings all stretched out, I want you to begin to move your wings around a little bit. Start to feel what it’s like to have these wings, to have these feet beneath you. And as we’re moving specifically, I want us to make some big movements with those wings so we can imagine spinning around. I’m seeing some up and down, some side to side, some big movements. As we’re getting into those big movements, I want us to add some bigger movement, some moving around the space. Feel free to use those feet, move around. And I want us also to imagine what it would sound like to be these creatures. Add a little sound to your movement as well, whatever feels right to you. What would it sound like?

Excellent, lots of big sounds here, big sounds, little sounds.

Awesome, and then much like our last group, take a moment to find your way back to your nest. And once you’ve found your nest, we’re gonna fly back in, drop back down. Feel free to take a seat on your chair. And we are going to settle in for the night. So, take a big breath out. Maybe another in and out, and we’re gonna curl ourselves up within our wings. Curl up into a nice little ball, and again take a few more nice deep breaths.

So now that we’ve settled in, now that we’ve nestled into our nests, I’m wondering, do you have anything more that you’re wondering about these works of art now that we’ve put ourselves into the shoes of these animals here? Do we have any more questions that are still in our minds? Again, I would leave more time for this, but you can shout one out if one comes to mind.

I know I’m still wondering what they’re doing. What’s their relationship? And we can end it there.

Lisa Danahy:

Awesome.

Big energy? Where was the biggest energy?

Yeah, yeah. One of the biggest secrets in creating movement experiences, especially for kids when you’re not used to cueing breath, is to make sound. Because you need to exhale to make sound. So, when you invite sound, you don’t have to guide the breath. And sound creates more visceral experience of the movement, too. So yeah, that was lots of really nice big movement. And then did you feel the shift of the energy after you moved, and then you came back down into your nest?

Yeah. And how many of you saw the piece of art differently after the movement, right? Yeah. That was the whole point of doing this, so thank you for modeling that so well. Any questions or comments from folks on that experience?

Yeah. Yeah.

Awesome.

Jennifer Reifsteck:

I know, we’re at time.

Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us in this workshop and participating. We’re going to put up our contact information up here. If you want to drop your contact information, we do have a sheet in the back. We’d love to hear from you and continue workshopping together if you’re interested. So safe travels, enjoy the rest of your conference. Take care.

This is a recorded session from the 2024 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. Museums have been guilty of discounting oral histories as “non-academic” or “inappropriate” methods of historical documentation – a trend that contributes to the erasure of Latinx and BIPOC stories and culture. Through a series of case studies from institutions doing exciting and effective work with oral history, this recorded session explores how to engage community members in oral history projects, advocate for the importance of this work in museums, and share research on how the inclusion and prioritization of oral histories in museums can impact the relationships between the museum and its community and staff members of color.

Transcript

Sehila Mota Casper:

And we started out as a very, very grassroots organization in 2014. We were a lot of museum professionals, curators, academics, historic preservationists, anyone in the heritage field. And realized that when we would go of conferences, there really wasn’t sessions solely dedicated to Latinx history or heritage.

So, we just came together trying to support one another within our work. And we became a 501 (c)(3) three years ago and have staff now. So, we’re very excited that a lot of the work that we’ve been putting into this over the last 10 years is finally coming into fruition. So that’s what we’re going to share with you day. We are a national organization. We focus on places, stories, and cultural heritage in the United States. And I will say that our work centers on racial and social justice for inclusion. And I will pass it on to Asami.

Asami Robledo-Allen Yamamoto:

Sorry for the random caps. That did not look like that on Canva. So, this is a quote from Michelle Obama on the dedication day of the Whitney Museum of Art new building. It’s no secret that museums have a history of excluding stories and representation of marginalized identity groups like people of color, disabled people, the LGBTQ + community, and so many other identities. Traditionally museums have prioritized the white male abled body lens and that is often the art that that hangs in the walls, the histories told in the exhibition, and the perspectives shared throughout the one’s museum experience.

While the needle is moving slowly, museums are often instituting change and diversifying their collection and approaches to museums, but a lot of this work is internal. So once again, community is being left out and not really seeing all the very important change that’s happening inside.

So, our presentation is going to focus on oral histories and how conducting oral histories and integrating them into exhibitions and galleries can help amplify community voices and transcend the boundaries of traditional community involvement.

There’s a lot of research that has been published and being expanded on that explores the impact that belonging has on human development, societal relationships, and challenging stereotypes and narratives. All histories can promote belonging in museums. So, on the next slide I have to do my museum educator hat. I’m gonna show you a work of art with the museum label next to it. So, we’re gonna sit with it for, I don’t know, a minute. And then I’m gonna challenge you to act like this work of art is in a gallery, not on a projection screen, you’re walking through the Smithsonian.

And this painting is called Braceros. Does anyone know what a Bracero is? Okay, we have some folks that are saying, yeah. So, a Bracero is a person that they were a Mexican — it was part of a Mexican labor program in the 1940s to 1964. So I’m just going to leave you with that information.

I’m sure y ‘all know this, but the average person only spends 22 seconds per work of art in a museum, so I know that this minute is feeling like 10.

Okay, so now I’m going to do something a little different. I’m going to interrupt the presentation for a second and I’m going to play a little fragment of an oral history. Now, I want to recognize that this– I wanted to find an oral history of a Bracero. Now, so many of these aren’t Spanish. So, in terms of language equity, I wanted to share one that’s in English. But if anybody wants to hear a Spanish one, you can come up after, or I can play both of them, either way.

Maybe I’m gonna play it.

– ‘Cause we’ve had Brassettos there.

– I see, so one that they would come in, you would be at your little, by your machine or let’s say by your station ride and then they would—

– They would bring ’em on in and shoot ’em through and in fact, I think we would X-Ram, check ’em and then they went and shouted, because I remember that now, that you had your hands were just completely dirty, dirty, dirty, you know. And smell, man, when those poor guys got off those boxcars and those cattle cars, poor guys. I mean, it was…

– I know I talked to a woman who was, she was a clerk typist, which I think I believe would have been across the compound from where you where you all were. And she said she almost fainted once from one of the first times she was there, and they would line up in front of her and she said it wasn’t necessarily their fault because they hadn’t had a chance to.

– And they were jammed. We went down and literally we would open sometimes, open those boxcars and let them come out. God, I mean they were. How they survived, how They survived coming up, you know, and I you know a lot of people used to criticize Us over here how we treated them what I said.

Okay?

If anybody is feeling like they have the emotional and brave capacity does anybody want to share how? Listening to the oral history while looking at this work of art made you feel It’s okay if you don’t

Yeah Yeah that it’s allowed me to connect with our telling story that maybe within that context. Thank you so much for sharing. Yeah.

It just sort of gives a sense of the reality of the experience.

>> Yeah. Thank you! So much for sharing.

>> Oh, I see one more in the back. Awesome.

Okay, yeah, go ahead.

>> Especially having — with multiple faces emphasizes the–

Thank you. So, it sounds like, in general, we kind of had a good feeling about integrating these oral histories.

Now, I’m going to pass it off to Ms. Sehila.

Sehila Mota Casper:

Yeah, just to support on this and work a little bit further on this. I’d like to share a video clip that was put together by one of our dear partners, University of Texas, at El Paso, the Oral Histories and Borderlands Department. Over the last nine years, I’ve partnered with them to help conduct oral histories, document Braceros stories, because we just helped save, and we just designated Briovista Farm, which is a Braceros site, as a national historic landmark. Last week we did the unveiling, it was pretty exciting. So, they put this together for a Bracero History Summit that I organized and again just think about that artwork and context and here you will listen to three Braceros and it is in Spanish. We have closed captions at the bottom, and I had no control about how big it could be so If you wanted this, I could email it to you also following today’s talk.

Here we go. So, this is an oral history taken from the Bracero History Archive that Asami just showed. This is Juan Rosa. And these three gentlemen actually received their contracts at Rio Vista Farm outside of El Paso, and they’re going to share their experience in receiving their contract and also the interview process but also being out in the fields.

“If I could work in Mexico, I could work in the United States.”

Y ‘all, thank you for your patience.

I think I’d be better off with the clicky thing instead of trying to use the PC.

Okay, here we go.

“Al economía y a la vida de esta nación. Mis expectativas solamente eran de que si yo podía trabajar en México, yo podía trabajar en Estados Unidos y que de allí yo podría darle una mejor vida a mis hermanos, a mi madre. Cuando entré de Brasero estaba allá en mi pueblo y no vine a Chihuahua porque ahí estaban contratando, ahí en Chihuahua porque caerán miles de braseros y ahí no reunieron, era cantidad de gente, en aquel tiempo era la oportunidad para que la gente viniera del sur de México a Tratarse para Brasero. Miren, la batalla empezó en Chihuahua.

Allí en Chihuahua agarraban, había una estación, que le decía, una estación vieja de tren. Era muy amplio ahí el terreno, estaba fuera del pueblo, en Chihuahua. Y no había sanitarios. Ahí pasaba un río. y ahí iban a hacer sus necesidades, hí íbannos, y allá toquemos mucha gente, total es que ahí empezaba la batalla.

Había una oficina fuera de Shubahua y allá tenía uno hacia línea, todo un día, como la primera vez fue muy duro, como yo creo que más de mes, durmiendo en un cartón en la banqueta, cuando ya me contraté y llegué ahí con los americanos, yo lo vi de la diferencia, con mucho, le miraban uno las manos, los ojos así fijos y le miraban las manos a uno, ya cuando le tachaban que sí, ya vete que te hayan comido, ahí estaba un comedor, ya por cuenta de la agricultura.”

So, these oral histories of these gentlemen are actually being used to create the very first Bracero Museum in the United States. It will be at Socorro, in Socorro, Texas, which is about 20 miles outside of El Paso. And it’s the last remaining historical site associated with the reception and contracting site on the United States side for Braceros.

So, we wanted to share this, just giving a little bit more context to the experience of what these individuals underwent and actually hearing from their own perspective and it was based on these oral histories that we were able to document everything and get the site listed as a National Historic Landmark and then also to help identify what we would be telling at the story through the museum.

So, what is an oral history? An oral history, it’s a primary source, and I can’t stress that enough so many times, academics, like we just think that oral histories are not, and they are, such as a recorded spoken interview, that aim to capture and preserve narratives about the past through life histories, oral histories, and they generate valuable insights into the construction of historical narratives.

So, through the museum, we learn from these Braceros, and we will be taking their own words and also allowing for them to share their stories with visitors throughout the exhibit. We will also, instead of having curator speak, we will have an audio, you know, having the Bracero speak instead.

So, it’s really been kind of a guiding light for us as we begin to think through this, and I will pass it over to Asami.

Asami Robledo-Allen Yamamoto:

So oral histories, they’re usually conducted on a one-on-one setting, but there have been group histories and those can also be effective It’s in collaboration with a well-prepared and empathetic interviewer. The narrator may be able to recall information that they might not notice that they recall and draw conclusions about their experience that they would not have been able to produce without the interviewer. Oral histories, we showed you two different ones. So, mine was only a voice recording. And Stela’s had video, and both are common, although voice recordings are usually better, because they take up less space. Recording preserves the interview for use by others, removed in time and/or distance from the interviewee.

Oral histories also preserve the entire interview in its original form, rather than the interpretation of what was said. So, if you go to the UTEP oral history site, you’ll find everything is transcribed. And oral histories are used to seek new information, clarification, or new interpretation of a historical event. During the interview, the interviewer should ask the narrator for first-person information. These are memories that the narrator can provide on a reliable basis in which they participated or witnessed or decisions in which they took part. Oral histories can convey personality, explain motivation, and reveal inner thoughts and perceptions.

Okay, so these are the six R’s to keep in mind while conducting oral histories. So, research, be prepared. You know, these are moments in someone’s life. Be prepared with as much background information as you can. And that’s really going to help them remember as well. Rapport so it’s a pre interview call is going to go super long. It’s going to start establishing that relationship. Often folks are really nervous like if someone came and asked me about a event in my life. I’d be like why so being welcoming and being empathetic. It’s incredibly important.

Restraint. An experienced interviewer maintains rapport by effectively managing equipment conducting the interview chronologically, asking open-ended questions, listening attentively, following up on details, respectfully challenging questionable information, and fostering an atmosphere where the interviewer feels comfortable and truthful.

Retreat, so making sure that oral histories do not make, are not long, are not to a length where the interview becomes fatigued. Also, acknowledging that oral histories can readdress trauma and knowing that the interviewer is not a therapist. And also, there’s some form of care for both the interviewer and the interviewee that needs to take place.

Review, so interviewers should immediately check that everything is being recorded. And then once everything is transcribed, the power should be given back to the community. So, they should have the power to say, actually, I want to omit this, or I want to take this out because of this. Actually, I don’t even need to give you a reason. But it’s just giving them that control back.

And respect. Always begin and end with respect and honor. These are their memories, and they can carry a lot of emotions. These shared moments are their truths and need to be treated with respect.

So additional terms that I wanted to address with oral histories– community healing. So, community healing consists of three key psychological dimensions– connectedness, collective memory, and critical consciousness. There are integrated to define community healing as an ongoing multilevel process, whereby oppressed groups in their connectedness and collective memory through a culturally symbiotic process in which in ways they promote critical consciousness to achieve optimal states of justice. That was super academic-y.

But essentially just saying that oral histories can really cultivate the space for community healing. Also, through and they’re the definition for collective memory.

Storytelling. So, a collective narrative is a common story about, I jumped something, so storytelling not only facilitates an understanding of human behavior, it also functions as a tool for resisting oppression, fostering healing, and promoting spiritual communion. In community settings, storytelling has contributed to restoring cultural identities, building a sense of community, and serving as a counter-hegemonic stories to refute negative stories about oppressed groups.

And in there, I also threw in community narrative and dominant cultural narrative, which is meaning a community narrative is a common story about the group in a particular setting, consisting of personal and paralleling stories among group members. Whereas the dominant cultural narrative is what’s, you know, commonly said by major socializing institutions.

And also wanted to address how interviews are different from oral histories.

Interviews typically are shorter and they’re looking for a specific point to address, whereas oral histories are really about honoring and collecting somebody’s memories and preserving the events that they lived through.

Sehila Mota Casper:

So, who should be documenting history? Who should curate stories? History isn’t just about what happened, it’s about who gets to tell the story, and we allow communities to share their own experiences through oral histories and community-led documentation.

We ensure that the voices of those who lived it are heard and honored. This isn’t just about preserving the past, it’s about empowering people to define their own narratives and ensure a richer, more inclusive record. And back to what Asami was saying was really focusing on empowering community, allowing their voice to be heard and honoring their own experiences is so important whenever we are documenting someone’s history.

And here’s another example about just preserving the past.

Imagine the difference between a textbook or museum exhibit of the civil rights movement written solely from the perspective of white citizens and politicians. Now let’s compare that one to one that includes the voices of activists, like freedom writers and everyday people who participated in sit-ins.

Just think about that for a moment, you know, if we are as academics just reading from a textbook or taking accounts from that one lens, you know, how linear that history could be. But thankfully we were able to document and continue to document the civil rights movement.

Asami Robledo-Allen Yamamoto:

So, the history of storytelling traces back to the prehistoric era when we had cave paintings and petroglyphs depicting hunting scenes and daily life. From there, civilization evolved to written stories like the epic of Gilgamesh, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Greek mythology, and Hindu epics. Today we have TikTok.

Now, it’s great. We have TikTok, YouTube, social media, podcasts, even video games and VR as methods of storytelling. These platforms have democratized storytelling, allowing diverse voices to share narratives globally and multimodally. Storytelling and oral histories are methods of documenting historically used by communities of color, especially black, Latinx, and indigenous communities. Historically, this has been a primary source of knowledge sharing for these communities. However, we’re often discounted as non-academic, inappropriate methods of documentation therefore contributing to the erasure of BIPOC stories and culture.

Minoritized groups have used storytelling to preserve culture and identities through oral traditions such as indigenous communities using oral history, oral storytelling to preserve their languages, traditions, and histories in the face of colonization and cultural erasure. Native American oral traditions encompass creation myths, historical accounts, and moral tales that sustain cultural continuity.

Another example comes from West Africa. Griots have served as historians, storytellers, and musicians preserving the history and culture of their people through oral narratives. Through storytelling oppressed communities have also challenged dominant narratives through autobiographies such as those written by formerly enslaved black people in America, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, who wrote narratives detailing the brutal realities of slavery, thereby countering pro-slavery propaganda and humanizing the enslaved population.

Additionally, writers from formerly colonized countries have used literature to critique colonialism, reclaim indigenous histories, and highlight the complexities of post-colonial identities.

Testimonials, which means testimonies, invite survivors and community members to resist internalized name through the first person testimonial counts with the community bearing witness first person accounts include pre trauma experiences that can provide emotional release validate and document the storytellers lived experience and facilitate post traumatic meaning making.

An example of that is a project that was done with Mayan children in Guatemala which was designed to encourage participants to engage in cultural activities such as making masks and weaving. And the workshops were well documented, and it showed to not only help children but their parents to better understand their collective trauma and inspire feelings of safety, acceptance, and respect in both ways.

So, museums typically follow suit by not including or highlighting oral histories during exhibitions or throughout the overall collection. So, I encourage everyone here to ask your curators, how is their research done? How are the labels written?

What about the introductory text? Where is this history coming from? The cultural erasure and colonized tendency to discredit and not include oral histories is one of the inspirations for the Abuelas project.

Sehila Mota Casper:

So, the Abuelas Project is really centered on exactly what Asami just said, is that Latinx and indigenous voices have been written out of history, out of heritage, and there really isn’t any type of archival source to help tell these stories through grassroots efforts, such as creating and collecting and amplifying these stories through crowdsourcing. We’re really excited to share that the Abuelas Project just launched this year and we’re going throughout the United States, and we will be collecting a lot of individuals’ own experiences through location so we can get historical sites that are important to individuals in that community so we and understand what cultural practices they do there within these cultural landscapes.

We’re also going to be able to capture new media as well as oral histories, of course, photographs, videos. We’ve already have a few up, so we encourage you to take a photo, check out the Abuelas Project, and learn more on things like conjunto music. Learn more about Braceros and the farm workers.

Through these efforts, we will be documenting community voice. It’ll be an open archive free to the community, and we will be going throughout the country, having workshops and sharing with community and educators, how you actually conduct oral histories, how you can preserve your own history, and what’s the 101 on historic preservation? How do we of our own culture, cultura, latinidad. And it’s going to be through these workshops that we, again, help create and empower individuals to then take back and claim their own history and retell it.

Asami Robledo-Allen Yamamoto:

And we would love to partner with any museum that wants to integrate the Abuelas Project into their galleries. It really just invites community to be involved in preserving their own histories.

So, we’ve talked a lot about what museums aren’t doing. I do want to highlight just four examples of museums that are doing the work and are integrating oral histories or have a portal for oral histories. So, starting off with the MoMA, they actually have two programs.

In 2011, the Artist Oral History Initiative was started, and that’s when artists were filmed in their galleries and they discussed works of art in the collection with museum curators and scholars. Then they also have the institutional oral history project, which is founded in 1990. The program produced interviews with select interview individuals affiliated with the museum, and this one really focuses on capturing the museum’s institutional memory.

Now, I put this out of order. I don’t know why. So, we’ll just go to the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum. So, they also have a program that started in the mid-1990s. The systemic collection of living people’s recollection of their experiences with farming, ranching, and rural life is a major component in researching and interpreting these subjects for their visitors. And on their website, they ask wouldn’t you rather hear about history from people who were actually there.

Then we have the National Museum of African American History and Culture. If anybody works there I think y ‘all are doing a great job. They actually have the oral histories available to the public which I think is a really wonderful way to also share it back with the community.

So, it says, “The mission of the initiative is to document, preserve and interpret African American stories through the art and practice of oral history. We collect and preserve oral histories from iconic elders of African Americana and other ways and others who have shaped the culture in significant ways. They have also developed oral history projects that support the research and exhibition goals of the museum.”

And lastly, we have the National World War II Museum, which strives to preserve the legacy and lessons of World War II through the stories of those who experienced the war. And they’re open for submissions. So again, I just want to highlight that the National Museum of African American History and Culture is the only museum here that has the databases available for the public.

So, if you want to do it, I have these questions that I think that I challenge you to answer before moving forward.

It’s not easy to get oral histories done, it’s not easy to do community engagement. There’s been a lot of trauma, especially for communities of color and marginalized communities. And we can’t just be like, “Hey, sorry, I traumatized you. Tell me your life story.” That’s not going to go well. So there has to be a lot of patience and there has to be a lot of persistence from the museum side and really thinking about what it means to create that safe space for them to come in and tell their stories.

So, at LHC, we learned to avoid certain phrasing over vocabulary when asking folks to participate in the Abalas project. We also learned to make the pitch really fast. We kind of aimed for like less than 30 seconds, and then we’re also learning to accommodate for multi-modality.

So, some folks are going to be more comfortable with creating a work of art about an event or writing it themselves. Whereas other folks are gonna say, I want you to do the work, I’m just gonna talk to you and you’re gonna transcribe everything I say.

And that’s okay. So being open to different ways of recording their history is important. And then another important lesson is to not only focus on the bad. Oftentimes when light is shed and minoritized communities, only suffering is highlighted when in reality we are much more than our suffering.

Suffering and losses have been thoroughly recorded throughout white history, whereas oral histories can allow minoritized community members the opportunity to shed lights on victories and joys, providing the avenue for them to empower themselves.

So, the benefits.

This personalizes history, so kind of thinking back to the activity from the beginning. It kind of made it feel a little bit more connected in a different way, made it feel more personable. Oral histories provide personal perspectives and first-hand accounts, making historical events and narratives more relatable and engaging for visitors. It preserves voices, literally and figuratively. They capture the voices and experiences of individuals, especially those from underrepresented or marginalized groups, ensuring a more inclusive historical record.

It enhances emotional connection. Hearing stories directly from people who experience events fosters a deeper sense of empathy and emotional connection among museum visitors.

I have a quote here. When personal healing is embedded within a communal framework, there is a greater transformational process facilitated by a shared collective memory, which can help shift bodies, minds, and spirits from a status of suffering to repair and create opportunities to evolve.

So, meaning that this is really the possibility to start communal healing. It enriches exhibits. They add depth and richness to exhibitions, providing multiple viewpoints and enriching the overall narratives presented by the museum. Encourages engagement. So, this is engagement in a different way. What if we were to ask each of you to record your reaction to that work of art, you would react, you would engage with that work of art very differently. It promotes cultural understanding, and it documents everyday life.

Sehila Mota Casper:

So, we just wanted to share some guidelines if you’re interested in learning how to do oral histories. I think the biggest thing that I would say is preparation and research. Before we go in and conduct an oral history with an individual, we not only research, see if there’s any type of documentation on them, the context, the historical context to which we are researching around also the community. We look through newspapers, we look through books, we look through other oral history archives just to prepare for that.

We also need to think about ethical considerations, such as Asami was talking about with trauma, that tends to be one of the largest ones that we try to stay away from. And just being very considerate of one’s experience, when we were conducting Bracero oral histories, that was something that we really had to think through and really consider exactly what questions we were going to ask and in what order.

You usually start out with, you know, easier questions. As we said, open-ended questions. We don’t ask yes or no questions and you allow people to then talk. If they choose to walk into that space, then we allow that. If we recognize that it’s getting emotional. It’s okay, we can take a pause, see if they want to continue or move on.

We also want to build rapport. We typically, as Asami said, a phone call is great. I typically like to go in person as well, meet them face to face, let them get to know me, let them get, I get to know them. Typically, I like to share questions ahead of time, so that way someone, especially a community member, will be aware as to what type of information we’re hoping to collect. This is very important whenever we have elders whose story has never been documented. Some of these histories, let’s say last weekend we had a gentleman who was 95, a bracero, and we shared with him the types of information that we were hoping to gather from him and thankfully going through old photographs, he was able to recollect a lot of the information that we were hoping to document and that he was willing to share with us for his own experience.

Also, I want to make sure that you record the interview. This is so important. I cannot stress enough, check your batteries, check the audio levels, do a test a few times and just make sure that the record button is on. It has happened before that you just did an incredible interview, and it was amazing and you learn so much from this individual and unfortunately it was not documented. So, check that as well as video and audio when we go on the road and we’re doing video recordings. It’s always important to see how much space we have on the memory card because you don’t want to have it cut off like a quarter of the way then if we were in the middle of a really important story that was being shared.

And then also conducting the interview. As we said, you know, you want to prepare. You have your questions ready. you’ve practiced the questions out loud, and you’re actually conducting it and remember that the star of the show is not the interviewer, it’s the interviewee, so we ask questions, and we stop speaking and we listen, and we learn. If there is a follow-up question that just came to mind that you didn’t have on your sheet, just write it down, jot it down and get back to it at the end of the regular interview and ask them to go back to that. But I would say that the biggest learning lesson is learning not to step into that conversation the way that we do in everyday conversation.

Documentation and take notes. A lot of times when I’m taking an oral history, if they said something like I was just saying, I just jot down a phrase quickly to remind me that I want to go back to that topic and ask them to expand more on that.

And then post-interview process. A lot of this is just making sure that you are extremely organized. If you’re taking multiple oral histories in one day or on a road trip, Asami’s about to go on a crazy 10-day road trip and taking oral histories. And we talk through the organization, the documentation, how that’s being written down and jotted down, especially if you are traveling, and especially if there are multiple different individuals that are in charge of various things, from photo documentation, to audio, to video, to the interviewer, and the notes that were the follow-up notes that we want to make sure that we document and collect those as well.

Archiving and preservation, Latinos and Heritage Conservation, we really believe in open access to information. The work that we do is strictly for community. It’s for them and anything that we provide, whether it’s photographs, video, audio, we gift them back to the families, get things printed, get them recorded, and give them however many they want. Many times, people want ten because they want to share them with their families and it’s a really lovely way to help just document their own history and genealogy.

So that’s the access in use and then reflective practice. A lot of times at the end of the day we sit down, and we go back and think through what we just listened and what we learned through this individual. Sometimes we don’t cover everything and for me that is the part where it’s like, oh goodness, I forgot that part, but it’s okay. I can go back and I can give them a phone call, we have a great rapport now and can say to them, you know, I forgot to ask you this. Do you mind, you know, sharing more on this or writing on this?

It’s also good just to take a moment to learn and process a lot of what we heard. And I think as individuals, whether we’re historians, you know, folks working in anthro or heritage fields, a lot of what we take from community or when we’re hearing oral histories, can also take a lot from us individually. So, during this reflective process, I always like to just understand that this was a moment in time and I was so grateful to have sat down with them. But also, it’s preserved, it’s there, and I’m able to step away from it if I can.

Asami Robledo-Allen Yamamoto:

I wouldn’t be a museum educator if I didn’t end with an activity, so I have two options depending on how we’re feeling. If you’re feeling a little bit more introverted, I’m going to challenge you to think about your museum’s collection and think about what themes you would conduct an oral history over. And then you can start listing a couple questions and we’ll be up here and if you want to bounce those questions back and forth, although that’s not really solo, but you don’t have to do that part. And if you want to be more extroverted and you feel like chatting with strangers, find a partner and take turns conducting an oral history about a recent historic event. For example, COVID, 9/11 Hurricane Katrina, um, not to only focus on the trauma.

If you also want to, I don’t know, I don’t know who won yesterday, somebody who won a baseball game, if you want to talk about that.