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There have been a lot of changes in how people live their lives over the past five years, largely (but not exclusively) due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While some of these shifts may benefit museums, others mean museums have more competition and barriers, resulting in greater pressure on attendance.

To find out how these shifts are affecting museum-goers, we asked them to consider how their visitation to museums has changed in the past few years, including:

• The activities they are doing more of, and why
• The activities they are not doing as much of (or at all), and why
• Other concerns they have about visiting museums

For the most part, respondents were not that forthcoming about what kinds of activities they are doing more of. There was really only one thing that stood out: spending more time outside. It may have started as a result of public health precautions they were taking during the pandemic, but for these individuals, going outside has become an enjoyable habit.

“I am spending much more time in public parks, forest preserves, public events when there are fewer other visitors.”

When it comes to the things respondents are not doing as much of…well, it’s like we didn’t even ask the question.

That is, hardly anyone answered it. Why not? We don’t know. Maybe because it was the middle question and got skipped over. Maybe it’s because people don’t want to admit they have pulled back on some things. But the most likely answer is that most people don’t really think their own habits have changed that much/they have gone back to what they think of as “normal,” so they had no answer here.

So what did respondents want to talk about instead? Their concerns.

Nearly half of respondents (42%) shared concerns that are resulting in fewer museum visits. These concerns largely fell into four equal categories:

• Cost of visiting (or, perhaps, doing anything discretionary)
  • “Too poor to do anything fun now :(“
• Crowds
  • “Crowded spaces still make us uncomfortable, so we try to wait until the buzz of an exhibit has died down a bit before seeing it.”
• Personal health concerns
  • “For folks who are immunocompromised, the pandemic is still a reality.”
• And everything else.
  • There were a lot of other concerns, but they were a mishmash of things and nothing else stood out as significant.

Fortunately, museums can address most of these concerns through things like coupons and discounts, sharing when “less busy” times are, and even having special hours for those who have health concerns.

Interestingly, respondents also wanted to give museums some advice. 21% wrote in something we considered “advisory,” and their advice covered a wide variety of things. But only one theme stood out as significant:

They want things to be happening at museums.

“Alternative hours of operation such as evening events, ‘date nights,’ happy hour. After COVID, I want to engage more with people with the backdrop of a zoo, museum, etc. Also, anything new for kids is helpful such as experientials, learning opportunities. These places need to be opened up in a way that people feel they can just sit and be somewhere other than the four walls of their own home!”

While this advice of “more” may feel like we need to double-down and do more exhibitions and programs, that’s not necessarily a sustainable choice for many museums. (We’ll be looking at this tension in the 2024 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers).

What’s heartening about all of these comments is that they virtually all come from a place of care. Museum-goers care about museums and want them to have a more vibrant and impactful future for all of us.

“It’s critical for a museum to support robust curatorial missions and risk takers. I hope that the museum can find the courage to make gains and take risks and bring work that isn’t already canonized elsewhere. Otherwise, the museum will lose the next generation of philanthropists. We cannot be places where everyone is over 70 and remembers the good ol’ days. We need to create the good days for today’s aware and informed citizenry.”

Annual Survey of Museum-Goers Data Stories are created by Wilkening Consulting on behalf of the American Alliance of Museums. Sources include:

• 2023 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, n = 107,187; 228 museums participating
• 2023 Broader Population Sampling, n = 2,002
• 2017 – 2022 Annual Surveys of Museum-Goers

*Data Stories share research about both frequent museum-goers (typically visit multiple museums each year) and the broader population (including casual and non-visitors to museums). See the Purpose and Methodology (Update) Data Story from September 12, 2023 for more information on methodology.

More Data Stories can be found at wilkeningconsulting.com/data-stories.

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It’s been 3.5 years since the COVID-19 pandemic devastated museum visitation. For some museums, visitation is back to normal. For others, well, not yet, as AAM’s spring 2023 “National Snapshot of United States Museums” survey indicates:

• 2/3 of U.S. museums have not yet returned to pre-pandemic attendance.
• Museums are experiencing an average of 71% of pre-pandemic attendance.

The good news is that incidence of museum-going seems to be back to pre-pandemic norms. Prior to the pandemic, we typically saw somewhere between 25% and 31% of U.S. adults reporting they had been to a museum in the past year.

In 2023, 28% of U.S. adults reported having been to a museum in the past year. That fits right in with those pre-pandemic norms.

So if incidence isn’t the primary issue, what’s responsible for ongoing attendance challenges? When we examine results from the Annual Survey of Museum-Goers over the past few years, shifts in frequency of attendance appear to be the culprit. Let’s take a look.

First, let’s time-travel back to winter of 2020. That year’s Annual Survey was in the field, and we began pulling the data for analysis in the middle of March … pretty much the exact moment everything began shutting down and the pandemic began. That was bizarrely fortuitous in terms of data collection, because it meant we had established a clean baseline for documenting pre-pandemic norms.

Our 2021 Annual Survey thus captured the first year of the pandemic (mid-March 2020 to mid-March 2021), 2022 captured year two, and now our 2023 survey has captured year three.

The Annual Survey asks frequent museum-goers two questions about museum visitation.

1. Self-reported repeat visitation rates at “their” museum.

The first question of the Annual Survey asks respondents to report their previous year in person visitation of the museum that invited them to take the survey.

When we aggregate responses by year, we can clearly see the devastating drop in attendance from pre-pandemic highs (March 2020) to pandemic lows (March 2021). 2022 saw some substantial recovery, but that slowed in 2023 … and there is still a significant gap in frequency from pre-pandemic norms. Repeat visitation simply isn’t where it was four years ago.

2. How many different museums they visit.

We also track how many different museums a respondent reports visiting in the course of the previous year. Once again, we find that visitation at museums in general plummeted from 2020 to 2021. There was substantial recovery in 2022, and this continued in 2023, putting this breadth of museum-going close to pre-pandemic norms … though we are not quite there yet.

Additionally, we are estimating that 4% of pre-pandemic frequent visitors are still sidelining themselves, and have not yet returned to museums at all.

While the results to this question are generally more promising, as we do seem to be approaching pre-pandemic norms, the reduction in frequency of visitation from our most avid visitors can really add up. Thus, it’s not that surprising that many museums have not yet reached 100% visitation recovery.

The good news overall is that yes, people are returning to museums, and things are getting better for most museums. But the return continues to be bumpy, with some people remaining “COVID cautious” and others returning in full force.

Individual museums also vary widely, with some still reporting low levels of visitation, while others may be exceeding pre-pandemic visitation.

As we head into 2024, new external forces are arising that may also affect leisure time and museum visitation. Inflation and severe weather are factors for many, which may help some museums attract more local visitors … or reduce visitation from other potential visitors. The 2023 Annual Survey checks in on these trends, and we’ll be sharing those results later in the fall.

Annual Survey of Museum-Goers Data Stories are created by Wilkening Consulting on behalf of the American Alliance of Museums. Sources include:

• 2023 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, n = 107,187; 228 museums participating
• 2023 Broader Population Sampling, n = 2,002
• 2017 – 2022 Annual Surveys of Museum-Goers
• 2023 National Snapshot of United States Museums (American Alliance of Museums)

*Data Stories share research about both frequent museum-goers (typically visit multiple museums each year) and the broader population (including casual and non-visitors to museums). See the Purpose and Methodology (Update) Data Story from September 12, 2023 for more information on methodology.

More Data Stories can be found at wilkeningconsulting.com/data-stories.

To better understand this history of endurance, I reached out to UMass Amherst history professor Samuel Redman, who in 2022 published a book on the subject called The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience.

The following are excerpts from our conversation about how the museum field has met, responded to, and moved forward following periods of disaster and crisis:

Adam Rozan (AR): You’ve written several books, including Bone Rooms, Prophets and Ghosts, and The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience, which came out last year. While each book is different, they all discuss aspects of museum history. What’s your interest in museums, and how would you describe the kind of museum-based storytelling you do?

Samuel Redman (SR): I’ve always been fascinated by museums, and I became seriously interested in the history of museums as an undergraduate. At around the same time, I worked in a variety of roles at the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Field Museum of Natural History, and History Colorado. During my journey as a museum professional, I learned a good deal about museum methods, all while becoming even more compelled by the story of how these places came to be. Eventually, I left my work in the museum world to pursue additional training as a historian.

In graduate school at Berkeley, I had access to an extraordinary museum archive as well as a stand-alone anthropology library. This allowed me to continue to dive deeper into museum history and the history of anthropology. I’ve become fascinated by working to understand how museums and other cultural institutions speak to important themes in American life. This includes stories about colonialism, science, popular education, and civic life. During my time in graduate school, I was also fortunate to work in museum archives in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. By exploring these archives and drawing stories with objects, newspapers, fiction, oral histories, and a host of other sources, the story of how people in the United States have thought about museums becomes much richer and more complex than people often understand it to be.

AR: In your latest book, The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience, what historical moments do you explore?

SR: The book opens with a terrible 1865 fire at the Smithsonian Institution. I note that the fire, while devastating in part, also provided an impetus to modernize the museum in all sorts of important ways. From there, the opening chapter of the book, and the story that inspired the entire investigation, is the history of museums during the 1918 influenza epidemic (more commonly known as the “Spanish Flu”). The second chapter explores the Great Depression’s ramifications on the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (then the University Museum). The next chapter traces the story of the Smithsonian as it responded to the Second World War. From there, the book takes a look at the 1970 Artists Strike, an event where artists in New York City banded together to stage protests at museums across the city, especially The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s, with many flashpoints surrounding museums, felt deserving of a chapter of its own. And finally, a chapter on recent museum controversies and disasters, from the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing racial reckoning, brings the story closer to the present day.

AR: This may be an obvious question, but let’s ask it anyway, what are the lessons for the modern museum in exploring the 1970 Artist Strike, for example?

SR: In May 1970, a group of protesters (led by a vocal group of artists) came together in New York City to voice their frustration with a host of important issues. The artists and their supporters hoped to protest how art was exhibited in New York, as well as the ongoing war in Southeast Asia, the unthinking displays of sacred Native American artwork, and sexism in museum settings. At the time, many museum leaders largely shrugged off the protests. Many activists only felt further alienated by the outcome.

The press covered the event in New York City. Much of the debate foreshadowed the discourse surrounding museums in the decades to follow. The Met’s response to the protest was deemed to be especially tone-deaf and poorly considered. The museum’s reputation was damaged as a result, and a series of public relations fiascos followed. The episode represents a valuable object lesson in leadership based in humility and an ability to listen to a broad array of constituents, from school groups to artists and major donors. The concerns put forward by vocal activists can highlight the direction the broader community might be going in the future. It certainly spotlights the concerns of at least one group of constituents.

The Second World War is another remarkable example. Until recently, few writings connected the war and museums in the United States. It turns out that the Smithsonian made critical choices in working with war agencies throughout the conflict’s duration. Not long after the US entered the war, the Smithsonian began voluntarily coordinating surveys to better understand what resources they might offer to the war effort. The museum also coordinated the publication of an oft-forgotten booklet series called the War Background Studies. Museums elsewhere around the country were largely isolated from the conflict, but the Smithsonian became intensely involved. Given that we have recently witnessed debates about the place of heritage preservation through archaeology, anthropology, and US government agencies in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, a closer look at this history seems warranted. The Smithsonian maintains connections to the State Department to the present day.

AR: In your research, were you able to learn how those museums were able to respond to the crises and what they were thinking?

SR: One lesson that became clear to me in studying these moments is that crisis events are rarely singular. The era of the 1918 influenza was also marked by racial violence and labor unrest in addition to radical economic uncertainty. The Great Depression was clearly an economic and jobs-related crisis, but museums were struggling with space issues at the same time. The 1970 Art Strike was partly defined by the Vietnam War as well as being about the concerns artists had about museums and the history of their collecting practices. Museums are often forced to confront challenges they can only partly anticipate. Museum leaders sometimes find themselves focused on one challenge, when another unanticipated problem emerges. Thinking about problems broadly and creatively, therefore, becomes a valuable asset.

In recent years, the Getty Museum responded to unprecedented threats presented by growing wildfires by enlisting a team of brush-clearing goats to reduce the threat of fire. The Museum of Chinese in America in New York raised more than four hundred thousand dollars through crowdfunding online in response to a devastating fire. This isn’t to say that a fire or another catastrophe is desirable—of course it is not—but the events surrounding a crisis moment can serve as a clarifying call to action. It may not always be the approach that public relations professionals want to follow, but museums are generally strengthened through transparency and collaboration.

AR: Okay, fast-forward, as a historian, how are you interpreting the responses from today’s museums throughout the pandemic?

SR: Museums are facing both new constraints and opportunities in the COVID-19 pandemic’s long wake. Economically, the first year of the crisis was a disaster for museums, with attendance figures plummeting to the floor. In the maelstrom, there were also valuable opportunities to reach new audiences online. Things have stabilized some since the pandemic’s earlier stages, but challenges related to high inflation and supply change issues remain difficult. Perhaps most important, however, were the long-overdue public conversations about racism, colonialism, and the history of museum collecting. These threads were tied together, in many respects, but they were also part of distinct conversations that have been taking place around museums for some time. Many museums find themselves thinking anew about these challenges and offering both important public statements and plans of action to follow. My sense is that people are still thirsting for these kinds of conversations, as well as a desire to seek out experiences that go beyond the digital platforms where we already spend so much time.

And yet, important questions about museums and society remain unresolved. How should museums respond to present-day challenges, be they public health related, as a result of political polarization, or some other thorny issues? How might museums better prepare for economic uncertainty? Again, most importantly, how can museums work to do better in addressing the legacy of colonialism, scientific racism, and inequality in the contemporary context? So much more work remains to be done. Recent work with artists and other community partners offers compelling clues about how museums can grab hold of a new place in American life. But this will only be possible if museums continue to strive to have more open and transparent conversations about the challenges they face moving forward.

AR: It’s common for museums to participate in some form of civic-based activity, be it blood drives, food and clothing donation sites, voting (polling stations), or even naturalization ceremonies. But this seemed to ramp up during the pandemic, particularly with some museums becoming testing sites and vaccine clinics. How does this fit into our understanding of museums today?

SR: In some ways, this is an important new innovation. In other ways, of course, there are important precedents for museums becoming less isolated and more community-oriented in their operations.

To me, an important turning point in this story takes place around the 1918 influenza epidemic. People often forget that there was a series of deadly epidemics circulating around that time, from influenza to tuberculosis, polio, and infantile paralysis. In response, the American Museum of Natural History organized one of the first public health exhibits truly geared around practical, contemporary concerns. An exhibit on airborne diseases, famously advertised with signs reading “DON’T SPIT,” captured attention and led to long lines stretching outside the museum.

The existing literature on museums often points to cultural institutions as spaces where elites work to control the lower classes, shaping their lives and their views in a way that only benefits themselves. My view is somewhat less cynical in that I see many groups as historically seeking out museums for education and entertainment purposes. Not merely passive recipients of a museum agenda, museum visitors partially shape and define the experiences offered to them. Furthermore, museums have evolved to include a whole range of civic-based activities. And yet, many museums have long clung to a self-image as an isolated, neutral outsider. This is an outmoded and inaccurate view of reality, and museums can continue to engage on a deeper level with their communities. This starts with listening to the needs of the community and taking a more holistic view of the assets that museums might make available to the wider populace.

In the run up to World War I, the entire textile department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art volunteered for government or military service. In 1918, the Oakland Museum of Art was also temporarily shut down in order to become a hospital ward for those sickened by influenza. In the 1940s, museums in San Diego’s Balboa Park were temporarily shut as a result of the war. Museums have made enormous sacrifices in the past to benefit the public good. During the same World War II upheaval, many museum leaders advocated, I think rightly, that the museum should not just engage in wartime-related subjects, but should also create space for a healthy respite from the ever-present challenges of warfare. I’m sure many readers, while remaining vigilant and safe, recall feeling some level of “COVID fatigue,” where many of us (myself included) became tired of simply thinking about COVID all the time. At a certain point, I was ready to mask up and go look at some interesting fossils or stare at a beautiful painting.

AR: Are our modern organizations shaped by past moments of crisis and disaster?

SR: Most definitely, yes. Some of the ways in which past crisis moments have influenced museums are vestigial and hard to fully see. For example, few people had written about, and it is frequently forgotten, how museums turned to addressing current events and ongoing public health issues during the 1918-1920 era, a pivot that we are still witnessing today as museums balance efforts to position themselves as “neutral” spaces while also feeling compelled to address current problems head on.

Another example is the Great Depression era, where museums positioned themselves to benefit from hundreds of thousands of person hours laboring through New Deal programs. During this time, museum exhibits were updated, catalog cards created, and entire crews were even hired to engage in large-scale archaeological expeditions. These programs all had their limitations and flaws, certainly, but when we walk through many museum galleries or explore their collections, we are subtly benefiting from the past work of temporary New Deal workers who were likely just glad to have a job during the Great Depression.

Beyond just economic uncertainty, most of us can recall major fires, floods, and earthquakes and other disasters potentially impacting museums. In recent years, the Mellon Foundation has launched pilot programs for improving emergency preparedness in museum settings. They also sponsored Disaster Relief Recovery Funds for museums as well as COVID-19 Emergency Grants. Recent fires and floods only serve as a reminder that museums must be prepared for similar events in the future, as well as threats faced by earthquakes and global climate change.

The Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts recently announced a partnership with Cencor Puerto Rico to preserve paper, books, and photographs through a collaborative conservation effort. In other words, there is a lot happening in this space. My book argues that museums and these non-profit organizations committed to making museums more resilient would be wise to take a critical and fulsome look at museum history. Ultimately, this will help make museums stronger and more effective in the future.

AR: Any final thoughts?

SR: Museums will again be reinvented in the future, but this will not happen as if by magic. It takes jostling and commitment from both those within museums as well as passionate outsiders pushing the museum to change for the better.

Adam Rozan: Let’s start by looking back to 2020, when the museum reached out to the public, to understand better how it could serve and help the people and community of San Diego and beyond. What did you all do, and what did you learn?

Micah Parzen: [The pandemic has] been a new beginning. It’s been a powerful springboard for many institutions to rethink who they are and what they stand for. At the Museum of Us, it was less about pivoting in a new direction and more about doubling down on the anti-racist and decolonial work we were already doing. The pandemic spurred us to fully commit to that work internally and in a far more public way.

Early in the pandemic, we struggled with, “Is my family okay?” “Are the people I’m responsible for at work okay?” “Am I okay?” We knew our community was not okay and felt compelled as an organization to ask, “Can we help in some way?” We remembered how, during World War II, the museum had been converted into a military hospital. We thought, “We have this space. We have this wonderful team who knows how to serve our community. What can we do?” Like every other museum, we were closed, so business as usual wasn’t an option.

Learn more about the museum’s decolonizing work and anti-racist work.

AR: Intuitively, we know that our communities have needs and often assume that we know, as practitioners, what’s best. But that’s not what the Museum of Us did in 2020. I think it’s also interesting that at that moment, the museum paused, knowing that your community was struggling. Rather than filling the void with online exhibitions, programs, etc., the museum paused and reached out.

MP: That’s right. Our years of community-centered work have taught us that we aren’t the experts. This was especially obvious relative to the high-stake unknowns of the pandemic. We didn’t know what was needed most nor what role, if any, we could play, so we asked our community for guidance. We called it our “Proposal to Serve Community Needs.” It was a one-page letter offering the museum as a community resource and asking for ideas about how we could best help.

We distributed the letter on various platforms and received hundreds of responses. Ideas ranged from serving as a morgue or a hospital again to a center for unsheltered folks, a mask-making facility, and everything in between. Ultimately, given our centralized location in the city, we decided that we could play a positive and productive role by serving as a food distribution site. So, we contacted the San Diego Food Bank, which had expertise in that space. We proposed a partnership, and they eagerly accepted.

AR: So, you put the call out, you get positive responses, and you try to move forward as a food distribution site, but unfortunately, you hit a roadblock. Can you share what happened and how the museum resolved it?

MP: Yeah, when we shared with the city that we were ready, willing, and able to serve our community in this way, they flat out said, “No.” Hard stop. The city had officially closed Balboa Park due to health and safety concerns, and no one from the public was allowed in—no exceptions. It was very frustrating and only reinforced that sense of helplessness.

But rather than giving up, we went back to the drawing board. We had created a “Pivot Planning Working Group,” consisting of board and staff, and we asked, “If we can’t open our doors to serve the community, what else can we do?” That’s when someone suggested we use our building and historic tower to share messages of support with the community. That weekend we began lighting up the California Tower in a dramatic blue with a projection of the words “THANK YOU.” It was a sight to see.

Later on, after the park finally reopened, the community had different needs than early in the pandemic. So, we partnered with the San Diego Blood Bank to become a much-needed blood donation site. And then, as vaccinations came out, we partnered with the Nursing Education Department at San Diego City College to serve as a COVID vaccination site. Our ability to be nimble became a superpower of sorts.

AR: Around the same time, the name of the museum changed from the San Diego Museum of Man to the Museum of Us. How does that storyline fit into all of this?

MP: Well, we had started down the name change path in earnest back in 2018, but due to a very prickly reaction from some in the community, we had put the project on an indefinite pause. We were paralyzed and couldn’t find a way forward. However, during the first few months of the pandemic, everything was so topsy-turvy, and people were dealing with so much change. It felt like a long-closed window had momentarily opened up, and we decided to go through it while we had the chance.

So, we worked with the staff and the board over several months, gathering input, figuring out how to address community concerns as best we could, and readying the organization for such a monumental change. Then, on August 2, 2020, we announced our new name, the Museum of Us, along with a new branding system, which included community members crossing out the word “Man” and writing in the word “Us.”

It felt like we had been standing at the edge of a cliff—harnessed up to our hang-glider, trying to muster the courage to jump—forever. When we finally took the leap and announced the new name, there was this incredible groundswell of love and support. We received hundreds of comments of heartfelt gratitude, from community members expressing how much the change meant to them and why.

And then Breitbart picked up the story. Soon after, Tucker Carlson highlighted the name change on national news as an example of political correctness run amok and woke cancellation culture at its worst. Then, the juggernaut of hate started, which led to quite the rollercoaster. But all that love and support buoyed us, and the dust eventually settled. Now we have a name that, yes, is part descriptive of our journey to date but, even more importantly, it’s aspirational. It challenges us to constantly ask what it means to be a museum not just for some of us, but for all of us. That’s the work ahead.

AR: What did you learn from all of this?

MP: Be clear about who you are and what you stand for as an organization. Whatever that may be will connect with some and not with others, but it will invariably lead people to ask themselves who they are and what they stand for. And that’s an invaluable role for any organization to play in its community. For a long time, we were a museum of people pleasers. We tried to make everyone happy, and it diluted our ability to truth-tell, apologize, and hold ourselves accountable for doing better. That lessened our ability to make an impact.

I don’t recommend this, but sometimes, I’ll read our social media reviews when I can’t sleep late at night. You have to take them with a massive grain of salt, but you can also learn a lot. With the Museum of Us, we generally get either five-star or one-star reviews. The five-star reviewers often share how we challenged their assumptions, got them thinking differently, and transformed them for the better. On the other hand, the one-star reviewers often lambast us as politically correct propaganda. What’s interesting, though, is that there is very little in-between. People seem to either love us—and can’t get enough—or they hate us and can’t get away fast enough.

I recently shared this observation with a colleague I respect and admire, and he said, “Micah, I think the Museum of Us is doing something right. Your work is either deeply resonating with visitors or touching a sensitive nerve. Either way, people are responding in passionate ways. Isn’t that exactly what museums should be doing these days?” That made a lot of sense to me.

AR: Fast forward, what does this mean for the museum, and how does this practically impact the San Diego community?

MP: Well, the goal is for everything to line up. We are constantly asking, “Does who we say we are on the outside match up with who we are on the inside? Where are the disconnects? Where are we coming up short?” Our team demands it. They let us know when we act in ways inconsistent with our values. They do it respectfully and productively, but they let us know. And I’m so grateful for that. It’s how we do better. We still make mistakes, of course, but our mistakes today differ from yesterday. That’s the definition of progress, not perfection.

Our community sees that, too. They see how we’ve changed. They see how we are trying to improve, even if we’re far from perfect. They see us as an organization that wants to be part of the solution instead of continuing to be part of the problem. They see us as an organization that wants to be an ally and is learning what that might look like. As a result, they are willing to extend us an extraordinary amount of grace in sharing their knowledge and lived experience as we continue down the path.

AR: How has your anti-racist and decolonial work translated into the organization and staff rebuilding?

MP: We are convinced that sustainable transformational change has to emerge from the inside out. That’s why we began to rebuild the museum from the people up. We knew the devastating suffering we had caused our team through the layoffs we instituted early on in the pandemic, and we wanted to make sure we emerged on the other side as a better version of ourselves.

So, when we reopened, we decided to hire back far fewer people, but at much higher wages and only on a full-time, fully benefitted basis. We established an entry-level salary of twenty dollars per hour, with guaranteed increases for our lowest-paid team members of 5 percent per year for at least three years and a 6 percent retirement contribution. That way, we stay ahead of the pay equity curve over time. We also established a salary cap wherein the highest-paid employee (namely, me) cannot earn more than six times the lowest-paid employee (namely, our forward-facing staff). Not so coincidentally, team member engagement and retention are the highest they’ve ever been at the museum.

Learn more about the museum’s staffing policies.

AR: Can you share more about the business side of the equation? How do you pay for it all?

MP: Well, we believe that if our business model has to cut human corners from the get-go to survive, then maybe we shouldn’t exist as an organization. Whereas most institutions are based on the premise that “more is more” on the outward-facing front, we have embraced a “less is more” approach. While it means we don’t turn over our exhibits as often and don’t have as many public programs as we might like, it allows us to take a “more is more” approach to investing in our staff and organizational culture. It may seem counterintuitive, but it’s critical when you are playing the long game.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for transformational exhibit experiences, too. But I also think museums are often overly focused on the visitor at the expense of their internal constituents. Think about it. Even the hardcore fans of your museum likely visit once a year, or maybe a handful of times, at most. On the other hand, our staffs, trustees, donors, and partners are in it deep. They show up at, and for, the museum regularly, if not every day. We are exponentially better positioned to impact them in transformational ways. And we see this all the time at the Museum of Us. Doing the work is—in and of itself—transformational in ways that transcend what our day-to-day visitors experience. So, we invest in the relationships with our staff, our board, and our community partners first and foremost. And it pays off in the long-run.

AR: We’ve discussed the museum’s staff; can you share what these changes mean for your audiences and the broader San Diego community?

MP: Okay, here’s an example. Before the pandemic, we’d long struggled with the very idea of museum membership. It always felt antithetical to our anti-racist and decolonial values. The more you pay to become a member, the more benefits you receive. It’s a hierarchical model where one’s degree of wealth directly translates into increased access and privilege.

So, when we reopened, we decided to turn that model on its head by creating a new program called Membership on Us. Now, anyone who comes into the museum and buys a day ticket can opt into a free program to visit whenever they want, however many times they want, over the course of a year. In other words, they become members on us for free.

We also have partnerships throughout San Diego County where students, teachers, and staff can become members on us without even purchasing a ticket. The same is true for Indigenous community members and financially disadvantaged folks. They are all welcome for free anytime.

Membership on Us has exponentially increased community access to the museum. Before the pandemic, we had one thousand members; today, we’re north of thirty-five thousand. Our next step is finding productive ways of bringing all those new members deeper into the fold of our anti-racist and decolonial work. It’s an exciting opportunity for us and for the community.

AR: I know we spoke about this before, but can you share more about how all this translates to your bottom line?

MP: Well, it’s really hard to make values-driven decisions that negatively impact your bottom line, that’s for sure. But there’s also something very uplifting about it. It reinforces those values in a way that brings even more clarity to the work.

So, if we need to end a revenue-generating loan agreement that dishonors the wishes of our Indigenous partners or “bless and release” a donor who bristles at our anti-racist and decolonizing initiatives, that’s what we do. We may have to press pause on a new exhibit or public program, delay the purchase of new gallery furniture, or wait on hiring for an open position until we can find a way to make it work, but it’s worth it.

Some funders have stopped giving to the museum because our values are no longer a fit with theirs. And that’s okay because so many others wholeheartedly believe in what we are doing and are doubling down on their support for our work. It hasn’t happened overnight, but we’ve bridged that gap, and then some. We’re always looking at emerging trends in the museum field, in philanthropy, and in society at large. Sometimes it feels like we are getting a little too far out on the limb, which can be scary, but we’d rather help create the future than react to it.

Lengthy closures and stay-at-home orders unmoored us from the buildings and collections that normally anchored our work.

Suddenly, we saw one another in new ways—with the Zoom window as our looking glass. Looking so directly at one another (in some cases for the first time) brought home the powerful realization that museums are made of people.

This strange, unanticipated intimacy generated an intense focus on who we are, not just the work we do. As individual lives blended more visibly with professional capacities, museum workers at all levels developed a keener awareness of how we support and care for one another.

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We’re pleased to share the release of Reopenings: What Museums Learned Leading through Crisis, a special series of in-depth reports with case studies and multimedia examining some of the long-term lessons, mindsets, and practices museums have learned and adopted from their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Explore the first report in the series, titled Reboot, and its accompanying case studies, to discover how museums accelerated their digital transformation over the past several years and the lessons they will carry forward into our hybrid future.

– American Alliance of Museums

Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for its support of this project through its Sustaining Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (SHARP) program.

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I was recently encouraged to read several of the Q&As in the resulting book, The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues, and I was glad I did. Later, I had the chance to connect with András, and over a series of emails, we discussed the book’s themes, his interviews, and his upcoming project. Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

Adam Rozan: Please introduce yourself, and can you share what you do?

András Szántó: My colleagues and I, through the work of András Szántó LLC, advise museums, cultural and educational organizations, foundations, and companies on strategic initiatives in the arts, especially the visual arts. And whenever I am able, I write about the art world, which has been an academic interest of mine since earning my doctorate in sociology at Columbia University in the 1990s.

AR: Your book, The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues, was published in 2020, and while already three years old, it still feels fresh and new. If I understand correctly, these interviews originate from a series you held while a staff member at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Is that correct?

AS: That’s right. The book appeared in late 2020. It was a product of the pandemic period. We’re already getting ready to launch the sequel with museum architects.

I was involved with the Met, though not strictly as a staff member, but close to it. The Global Museum Leaders Colloquium was a series of invitational gatherings organized by the Director’s Office of the Met, with me serving as its lead moderator, to provide a platform for international museum directors to engage with each other and Met colleagues around the myriad challenges of museum leadership. It opened my eyes to the global diversity of museum culture, which is reflected in the twenty-eight conversations with museum directors that fill this book.

AR: Any hints about some of the architects we can look forward to reading about in your forthcoming book?

AS: I don’t want to give too much away. Buy the book! I will say that for American museum colleagues, it might be especially interesting to hear from architects who are currently engaged in some of the more prominent projects over here in the US. Frida Escobedo and Kulapat Yantasast, for example, are both designing sections of the Met. David Adjaye is working on major museum commissions, including the Studio Museum in Harlem. Liz Diller has been transforming American cultural institutions for quite some time, as has David Chipperfield. But other up-and-coming studios featured in the book, such as the Brooklyn-based SO-IL, are destined to leave a mark on the landscape of museums in this country. Having said that, the book is not about the US at all, but about museum architecture and museum culture worldwide.

AR: Let’s talk about the first book with museum directors! Multiple themes are woven throughout the interviews, such as the need for museums to respond to change and the future of museums and the museum industry. I also see a thread around alternative business models and types of museums and an overall reimagining of what a museum is, what it does, and who it is for. 

AS: Correct. The book, as I noted, originated during the pandemic lockdown. It was a natural moment to stop and ask: What will the future bring? It was a before-and-after moment, a threshold, a starting point. Everyone perceived that whatever came next would be different. And it was a perfect time to talk with museum directors who are usually on the move. However, I want to point out that the book is not about the pandemic per se. In fact, these changes predated the pandemic. And they were accelerated by it.

As much as I was aware of how much the museum field was shifting, even I was taken aback to discover the consistency of the answers, calling for a thorough reevaluation of the art museum’s purpose and modes of operation. That moment was heavily influenced by the protests of 2020 and the many reckonings they entailed. There was a collective sense of a pivot. Museum leaders were embracing new aspirations and ways of working—especially the idea that a museum operates in the service of all of society. This aspiration became enshrined in ICOM’s recently adopted definition of the museum.

AR: Who are some of the twenty-eight individuals you feature, and why this group?

AS: The easy answer is that I already knew many of them as colleagues, conversation partners in various events, leaders in the field, and in some cases as friends. But some key organizing principles were shaping the book.

One was that I wanted a truly global range. We talk a lot about globalization. It is arguably the most important transformative process shaping the museum field. Yet it is still all too rare to hear these voices foregrounded. I am especially pleased that the book has attempted to get such a cultural and geographically diverse pool of directors involved.

Another goal was to reflect the changing gender composition of the field. Museum leadership is gradually—albeit much too slowly—shifting to women. I wanted half my interlocutors to be women, and they were.

Most importantly, regardless of gender or location, I was interested in talking with people who are working to change institutions and thinking in original ways about them. This is not to say other directors are not doing those things. I could easily have filled another book with conversations with equally fascinating museum directors.

AR: ICOM introduced a new museum definition in 2020, which you also commented on in your introduction to the book. You asked many of your interviewees to share their definitions of a museum. From those discussions and your take, how do you now define a museum?

AS: ICOM failed to get an agreement in 2019 on its new definition, which already attempted to enshrine the aspirations of a new museology. Several participants in the book noted that while the definition was overwrought, they agreed with its overall intentions. ICOM gave it another go in August 2022. This time they succeeded. It’s a pretty good definition, as far as these exercises go. I have a few quibbles with it, but it has evolved a great deal. Yet even the 2019 definition seemed to work for many, at least in spirit.

Rather than attempt my definition here, I suggest the reader look at how the directors grappled with it and, more recently, how architects grappled with it in Imagining the Future Museum. It’s not as easy as you think, by the way.

AR: You write in your introduction, “Perhaps the most striking aspect of that future is its global range . . . Some of the most exciting, paradigm-smashing experimentation now happens in Africa, Latin America, Australia, and parts of Asia.” Can you elaborate?

AS: If this book has one major thesis, it is that we have moved past an era in which the concept of the museum was, by and large, dictated or exemplified by the Global North. As museums proliferate worldwide, we are entering a new, pluralistic era for museums, where museums are more free to reflect their local roots. And in this context, some African museums, for example, offer highly original takes on what a museum can be or what sort of activities happen there. Who says a museum must be perfectly air-conditioned and humidity-controlled enclosed space for showing pictures and sculptures? It can be so much more.

AR: I was also struck, again, in your foreword, by the historical writings of Alfred H. Barr and Alexander Dorner, the latter of whom wrote, “the new type of art institute cannot merely be an art museum as it has been until now, but no museum at all. The new type will be more like a power station, a producer of new energy.” And, of course, Stephen E. Weil, in his essay, From Being About Something to Being for Somebody, writes, “in the emerging museum, responsiveness to the community must be understood not as a surrender, but quite literally, as a fulfillment.”

This is our history in the museum space, yet we’re in a perpetual cycle of forgetting and then reminding ourselves of this. What’s the takeaway here, and what is the message?

AS: I was reminding the reader of these quotes to illustrate that the museum looks back on a long history in which its elitist and democratizing impulses have continually clashed. We are in a democratizing phase right now. But this strain has long been with us. Generations of thinkers and practitioners have tried to pry open the museum and make it available to a wider spectrum of society. There are many shoulders to lean on. Even so, the museum is still an aloof, closed, exclusive space in the eyes of a vast swath of society. Much work has to be done programmatically, staffing-wise, in governance, even in the physical embodiment of the museum to convince people that the museum is, in fact, an open institution.

AR: Each interview offers a unique perspective, and each is worth a read; still, a few standout, such as Marie-Cécile Zinsou’s from the Musée de la Foundation Zinsou. A first-time museum director who describes building her museum from inception and willing the museum to happen. Can you share more on this story?

AS: This is an excellent example of a museum not having to copy its traditional European-based institutional form. First, Marie-Cecile built an art space in Benin, perhaps the first in the country, and that became a popular destination. Then she created a proper museum that conformed to all the codes for displaying artwork. It was able to exhibit an impressionism exhibition, meeting all criteria for loans. The French president cut the ribbon. But she realized it was not really an African museum. It used up a massive amount of expensive electricity. Now she is thinking about her third museum. It may not have a roof or air conditioning.

AR: In the book, you discuss with several of your interviewees that the future of museums is in Asia. Can you elaborate?

AS: That is simply a fact. European and North American museums tracked the ascent of cities on those continents and the great fortunes accumulated there. Now, much the same is happening in Asia. Not long ago, China was opening one museum-like facility daily, thousands over a decade. India is on the move. What’s interesting in this story is that Asia will leave a cultural imprint on the museum field, just as North America did in its heyday. It will be fascinating to see what that imprint will end up being.

AR: After working on this project and sharing the voices of twenty-eight leaders from the field, what’s your message to the broader museum community, and what do you think the future looks like for museums?

AS: The way I have been thinking about this is that these dialogues demonstrate that the museum, as it were, is running new software. There has been an operating-system upgrade. But that upgrade is not a rejection of what came before. No one is kicking the objects to the corner and turning the museum into some community dance hall. We are seeing a field-wide effort to build on the museum’s strengths, to make it better and more in tune with society’s current and constantly evolving realities and needs.

This is why I just finished the follow-up to the book, in which I speak with architects about the “hardware” that might reflect, complement, and enable the new software. The book is coming out in the US in January, titled Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects. And what these two books, taken together, suggest is that the museum—despite the many crises that have been roiling inside of them and the tempestuous social and political dynamics swirling around them—is alive and well. This is a resilient institutional form. And yes, one that is open to improvement.

The best of these institutions are meant to stay around forever. Not many organizations could make that claim, or even have that aspiration. Therefore, the museum will always be in flux, experiencing a constant push and pull between old and new, tradition and modernity, constancy and adaptation. I believe museums are demonstrating they are capable of change. For this reason, it is a very exciting time to be around them.

AR: Thank you, András, and I look forward to picking up our discussion again when the 21 Dialogues with Architects comes out.

Since COVID-19 vaccines were authorized for children under twelve in late 2021, immunization rates have lagged behind expectations, leaving children and their families at risk. This public health challenge has called for innovative strategies to improve vaccine education and access. Recognizing the critical role of school nurses as trusted health professionals within this population, our organizations—The Franklin Institute and the National Nurse-Led Care Consortium (NNCC), through support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—partnered with them to launch the School Vaccine Education Program (SVEP) to build vaccine confidence in undervaccinated communities.

With complementary skill sets in public health, education, and patient care among the partners, this collaboration felt like an opportunity to tackle different challenges we’d all been facing individually. At NNCC, we’ve built a strong network of support and advocacy for nurse-led care, but wanted to explore new approaches to public health communication that could better reach people where they are. At The Franklin Institute, we had developed educational tools for sharing information about COVID-19, but they didn’t always align with the urgent needs of community health organizations primarily focused on crisis response services. And we learned that school nurses, at the front lines coming off the surge of the Omicron variant, were looking for resources relevant to their community’s needs to sustain their vaccine education and communication efforts.

The SVEP was born out of our vision that, by working together, we could build the capacity of community-based leaders to apply best practices of informal science education to improve long-term health in their local neighborhoods. At The Franklin Institute, we value our partnerships across Philadelphia in allowing us to be part of the community in a way that our building by itself can’t do—especially when it comes to something like vaccine confidence. We know from research on vaccine communication that the messenger matters. By partnering with NNCC to empower school nurses to be the messengers, we hoped to have an impact that we could never have on our own.

For COVID-19, the goal of the SVEP was to strengthen nurses’ expertise in educating elementary school students about the science of how the SARS-CoV-2 virus can make them sick and how vaccines work to protect them. We piloted the program in spring 2022 by recruiting a cohort of ten nurses from schools in underserved communities. This cohort guided development of useful, relevant, and effective resources, delivered programming in schools, and evaluated their impact. Thanks to their collaboration and feedback, we can share learnings that we hope will be informative to other museums while also laying the ground for future expansion.

Through early conversations with our cohort, we gained a deep appreciation of the different roles and responsibilities that nurses take on in their school communities. We knew that we needed to develop a flexible set of tools that could be adapted for diverse environments and communities, including those with limited English proficiency. We also knew that time was critical, given the urgency of building vaccine confidence as well as the practical realities of the school calendar. Luckily, thanks to the wonderful spirit of collaboration in the museum field and connections such as the Communities for Immunity Initiative and the National Informal STEM Education (NISE) Network, we didn’t have to start from scratch. Drawing on The Franklin Institute’s existing work as well as projects shared by the Pensacola MESS Hall and the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health, and Technology, we assembled five types of tools, with print materials in seven languages: 1) hands-on activities, 2) letters to families, 3) videos and scripts, 4) a one-page flyer, and 5) graphic communication assets.

We also asked the nurses about what skills and information would be most helpful for them to feel comfortable and confident in delivering the toolkit programming. Their highest priorities were facilitation techniques for interactive learning as well as conversation strategies for addressing misinformation. Accordingly, our training session included not only a review of all the toolkit materials, but also time for the nurses to learn evidence-based techniques of vaccine communication and The Franklin Institute’s “Core Four” facilitation strategies. As we watched the nurses practice with each other, it was clear that giving them their own experiential learning opportunity was valuable—and fun!

With tools and training in hand, the nurses went on to deliver an impressive variety of programs. We loved hearing about the creativity and diversity of formats and how they adapted the content to the needs of different audiences. “The toolkit allows you to engage the child and parent,” said one nurse. Some examples of the cohort’s programming include:

• Leading programs in classrooms
• Displaying materials at the nurse’s station during the end-of-year Field Day
• Encouraging hands-on exploration in the nurse’s office during routine health screenings
• Sending home flyers or holding assemblies prior to school vaccine clinics
• Filming their own version of the videos to share with families

In reflecting on their experience, the nurses valued the novelty of using toys to explain science, the visual and tactile elements of the interaction, and the connections between the materials and science concepts. One nurse reported, “Students hear the words ‘vaccine’ and ‘virus,’ but don’t have anything to visualize. After the How Vaccines Work lesson, students had an ‘aha’ moment with COVID virus and vaccines and actually commented, ‘Now I get it.’” Even outside of formal programming, the eye-catching materials and interactivity sparked “mini lessons” and organic conversations, both among students and adults, when nurses displayed them in their health rooms or other locations.

Most importantly, the nurses felt that they helped build community vaccine confidence at a critical time. While community tensions over lockdowns and the workload of daily contact tracing had eased, COVID case counts were rising in May and June, bringing the issue to people’s attention once again. The toolkit offered an opportunity to renew the conversation in a way that was grounded in experiential STEM learning. One nurse observed that “when kids are engaged, they go home and report what they learned and talk about vaccines.” Two others who held vaccine clinics at their schools during the implementation period felt that the communication channels opened by their programs directly influenced families’ decisions to get their children vaccinated at the clinic. One nurse even got questions from unvaccinated staff members who heard her presentations for students, and subsequently decided to get vaccinated themselves.

The significance of local community connections has been evident at every stage of the project. At NNCC, our initial idea for collaborating with The Franklin Institute was sparked by our previous involvement with its city-wide network for climate change education. Once we learned that The Franklin Institute was involved with Communities for Immunity, a new partnership seemed like a natural fit. The SVEP’s pilot cohort came from our local community as well. While the opportunity to participate was promoted to nurses across Pennsylvania through NNCC’s statewide networks, most of the applicants were from the Philadelphia area—likely reflective of The Franklin Institute’s local audience reach. That familiarity with the museum helped the educational programs resonate with students too. “So many of them have been to the museum, they were excited to hear that we were doing activities from The Franklin Institute,” shared one nurse.

We’re excited to expand the project to a larger cohort of nurses in the coming year with continued support from CDC. Now that vaccines have been authorized for children under five, we’ll be refining and adding to the toolkit to broaden its use for early childhood audiences. As we look to the future, the outcomes of our pilot encourage us to think about how to strengthen connections between nurses, schools, museums, and public health organizations. Our previous work has shown that informal educational programs are effective tools for building understanding and cultivating dialogue about the complex interrelationships between the human body, the physical environment, and social structures that shape health outcomes. An SVEP nurse shared, “One of the strongest tools a school nurse has is having opportunities to talk and educate.” By building the capacity of school nurses and other leaders to reach children and families with innovative health education, we can create a foundation for making informed lifelong decisions that advance community wellbeing.

Communities for Immunity is an initiative of the Association of Science and Technology Centers, Institute of Museum and Library Services, American Alliance of Museums, and the Network of the National Library of Medicine, with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and in collaboration with the American Library Association, the Association of African American Museums, the Association of Children’s Museums, the Association for Rural and Small Libraries, the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums, and the Urban Libraries Council.

“Bad libraries build collections. Good libraries build services. Great libraries build communities.”

Libraries are often lauded for going beyond their expected role of loaning out books, developing themselves into one of the few safe havens and “third places” (social environments separate from the home and the workplace) in their communities.

One library system leading the way on this, designing programs with social impact top of mind, is the Richland County Public Library System in Columbia, South Carolina. Comprised of thirteen libraries serving a population of over 416,000 people, the Richland Library System employs 276 full-time and 84 part-time staff members.

One of those staff members, Sharita Sims, never imagined working in a library. As a social worker, the thought of building her career in one never occurred to her, but one day, as she scrolled through her local library’s website looking for a book, she saw a job posting for a social worker position. “It had to be fate,” Sharita said. “I love this library. I used to come to this library as a little girl with my father, who has since passed away. He used to bring me here for story time and when I had book reports back when it was the Dewey system.”

In 2016, she was the second person to join the social work department at Richland Library. She’d take phone calls or in-person visits from library patrons, helping them navigate services like FAFSA, legal assistance, veterans’ benefits, SNAP, and housing programs. Six years later, due to growing community need and her department’s success, it had grown to six employees.

While libraries have long been hubs for community programming, a social work department is still not the norm. But Richland Library, as Sharita explains, prides itself on its innovation. Staff regularly form special cross-departmental teams for community needs like elections and online schooling. When the pandemic hit and the library shuttered its doors to the public, twenty-five employees banded together to form a public health team providing trusted information during a period drenched in uncertainty.

With libraries holding a high degree of public trust (similar to museums), Richland Library’s public health team felt a heavy responsibility to provide objective and vetted information to their patrons. They scoured CDC guidelines on how to answer questions about viruses. The marketing team enlisted the help of local social influencers long embedded in their community, like Tashenna Ticer of the parenting blog The Cinnamon Mom. Richland staff members also wrote their own blog posts about pandemic topics, starting with a post in the first weeks of shutdowns called “Pandemic Parenting.” Dozens of blog posts later, and two years down the road when businesses, schools, and other institutions were deliberating what COVID policies and procedures should stay and go, library staff continued to address lingering questions its patrons had with posts like “How to Talk to Your Kids About the Pandemic.”

When the Communities for Immunity grant opportunities were announced, the library’s grants team immediately drafted an application, because, as Grants Manager Sara Jane Salley said, “A lot of what they were asking we were already doing.”

With the funding from this successful application, the public health team expanded their existing efforts into more ambitious initiatives. They hosted a virtual town hall moderated by Fraendy Clervaud, a morning news anchor for Good Day Columbia on the local FOX network, where 566 residents tuned in. A panel comprised of an epidemiologist, internist, pediatrician/psychiatrist, and family physician all fielded questions on the safety behind getting a vaccine, including why children should receive the vaccine and what it meant to take the vaccine while pregnant.

Richland Library’s marketing team also bought their first-ever streaming radio spots on Spotify for three different campaigns focused on Black men between eighteen and thirty-four. Local storyteller and stage performer Darion McCloud voiced some of the ads, saying, “Making the decision to get my COVID-19 vaccine wasn’t easy. I had lots of questions. Richland Library had answers.”

Richland Library also partnered with Cooperative Health—an agency dedicated to finding and providing services for those uninsured, underinsured, or having difficulty navigating their insurance—to host fourteen vaccine clinics at three different library locations.

While the vaccine clinics have come to an end, the partnership has continued and evolved. Now, every Thursday, Cooperative Health sets up shop at the central library location to host a virtual health care center. Patrons can come in and find help connecting with healthcare providers for everything from getting blood pressure checks to finding insulin meters and locating mental health services.

The library’s community outreach work has stretched beyond public health. In January 2019, when a local public housing complex suffered multiple gas leaks, resulting in the death of two residents and the evacuation of more than four hundred people overnight, the library became a source of hope. Staff helped residents navigate having their lives uprooted by connecting them with agencies offering relocation assistance and groceries.

Many people had only begun to settle from the impacts of this crisis when the pandemic hit. They were faced, suddenly, with housing and food insecurities. Library staff promised themselves they would continue to do what they could do. So, when the South Carolina State Housing and Finance Development Authority received $22 million from the U.S. Treasury for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, the team of six worked to help those people apply to the county to get funding for their needs. They guided residents through the complicated filing processes, including helping locate tax forms and translating bureaucratic jargon.

Richland Library’s work continues with its next project on the horizon, Do Good Columbia, a community problem-solving workshop that brings seventy-five to one hundred community members together over two days to help brainstorm how to address and react to community issues once they arise, especially during emergencies. “Our community has had a lot happen in the past seven years,” Sara Jane shared, explaining that the end goal of Do Good Columbia is to create a more resilient future. During the workshop, those community members—ranging from local government employees, educators, and business owners to people experiencing housing insecurity or homelessness—will debate, plan, and create roadmaps for addressing some of the most pressing needs in Columbia.

Other libraries across the nation have taken notice. Calls from Kansas and New Mexico have come in, asking how to implement social services at their own libraries. The most common question Richland Library staff receive is, “What does your typical day look like?”

“We say, ‘Well, it’s really like a box of chocolates,’” Sharita said. “There’s not a typical day, but there are a lot of good bites in the day.” Richland Library has open-sourced its projects, reports, and activities, including its Communities for Immunity final report detailing how the library approached its outreach efforts, so that other libraries can start with a basic foundation on how to plan and implement their own community outreach projects, possibly through social work departments. Sharita sees this openness and generosity as only right for a library, stating, “We are an information hub. It would be wrong to keep it to ourselves.”

Communities for Immunity is an initiative of the Association of Science and Technology Centers, Institute of Museum and Library Services, American Alliance of Museums, and the Network of the National Library of Medicine, with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and in collaboration with the American Library Association, the Association of African American Museums, the Association of Children’s Museums, the Association for Rural and Small Libraries, the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums, and the Urban Libraries Council.

The National Blues Museum was one of ninety-one museums, libraries, and cultural or tribal organizations that leveraged their position as trusted community partners to help bolster vaccine confidence in their communities as part of Communities for Immunity. From hosting vaccine clinics to combatting misinformation, each awardee took its own customized approach through this work. In this post, Erin Simon, Deputy Director of the National Blues Museum, shares how she and her museum’s staff tied tackling the public health crisis to their mission, framing the issue around bringing live music back into their community.

–Vida Mikalcius, Marketing and Communications Coordinator, American Alliance of Museums

Since its founding, the National Blues Museum (NBM) has seen preserving the historical legacy of blues music as going hand-in-hand with championing the blues musicians of today. This philosophy informs every aspect of our programming as both a museum and music venue, and was a guiding force behind our participation in Communities for Immunity. We recognize that, across the blues’ centuries-long history, hard-working musicians have always kept the music and its community thriving. Our relationship with local musicians constitutes the museum’s most meaningful connection to our community in St. Louis, Missouri. So, when grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Blues Museum focused its programming on serving the community and supporting local musicians.

COVID-19’s impact on the music industry hit the blues world especially hard. In an era dominated by inequitable music streaming models, musicians of all kinds require the income from live music and touring to sustain their livelihoods. Yet blues music, in particular, has always held a distinctly communal role, creating the soundtrack to nights of celebration and togetherness at clubs, venues, and community events across the globe. For the musicians who dedicate their time and resources to providing this joy to audiences, the pandemic threatened their vocation and sense of purpose.

Confronted with this reality, the National Blues Museum made operating a safe venue for music a priority and set the pace for other venues in the St. Louis area. The museum started Blues on the Block, a free outdoor concert series in the summer of 2020 for musicians to safely reach their audience. As soon as St. Louis’s city government issued the permits to close the intersection perpendicular to the museum each Saturday, we were able to bring accessible, family-friendly outdoor performances to the walkable streets of downtown St. Louis, easily reachable by public transit. As the pandemic progressed, the National Blues Museum was one of the first local venues to require vaccination cards at concerts. Our audience members encouraged these measures, and the museum continues to look to its community for guidance when taking safety precautions and programming events.

When the opportunity to be a part of Communities for Immunity arose, the National Blues Museum saw it as a perfect chance to further our goals for the future of live music and a healthy entertainment ecosystem in the United States. As part of our project, we began multiple initiatives to promote vaccination and educate ourselves and our audiences about the connections between live music and public health.

One of these initiatives was the creation of Pandemic Blues, an exhibit exploring how a different pandemic rocked the music world. Over one hundred years ago, the 1918 influenza pandemic dramatically impacted a modernizing, urbanizing United States and the new culture of public entertainment that it supported. At this same time, the blues and other styles of African American music came to prominence in popular culture, despite the systemic violence Black communities faced nationwide in the wake of Reconstruction and Jim Crow segregation. Blues musicians even wrote songs about the flu, with “1919 Influenza Blues” entering the blues repertoire and spreading across the country throughout the 20s and 30s:

“It was nineteen hundred and nineteen;

Men and women were dying,

With the stuff that the doctor called the flu.

People were dying everywhere,

Death was creepin’ all through the air,

And the groans of the rich sure was sad.

 

Well it was God’s almighty plan,

He was judging this old land,

North and south, east and west,

It can be seen,

It killed the rich, killed the poor,

It’s gonna kill just a little more,

If you don’t turn away from the shame.”

The parallels between the 1918 pandemic and COVID-19 are astonishing, particularly in the music world. Much like in 2020, the way Americans listened to music was rapidly changing in 1918. Radio was not yet commercially available, and recorded music—played on Phonographs and “Talking Machines”—was a brand-new invention. Sheet music was the industry’s primary medium, reflecting a simple truth that now seems mind-boggling: if you were listening to music before 1918, it was most likely being played live by a musician. As in 2020, live music and entertainment came to a halt throughout the United States, leaving thousands without work. Musicians faced heartbreak in their personal lives as well. The foundational blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson—whose innovative style and recordings with Louis Armstrong inspired generations of musicians—returned from a tour in Europe to find that both of his parents and eight of his nine siblings had died from influenza.

Despite major setbacks, the music world rebounded from influenza, and researching the progress made in combating infectious disease throughout the twentieth century gave us hope for the future of music in the 2020s too. Before and during the 1918 pandemic, infectious disease played a much more significant role in American life than it does today. Between 1900 and 1910, infectious diseases like tuberculosis, diphtheria, and pneumonia (frequently caused by influenza) caused around 50 percent of all deaths in Americans ages 5-44. By the 1970s, infectious diseases caused only 3 percent of deaths in this age group. Vaccination was a leading factor in this tremendous progress, shedding light on how widespread COVID-19 vaccination rates are essential for a thriving musical ecosystem.

Building on the research and curatorial work of Pandemic Blues, the National Blues Museum’s second Communities for Immunity initiative made use of our capacity as a music venue and arts presenter. To encourage vaccination and raise awareness around the safe foundation of public health that professional musicians need for their craft, the museum hosted a free outdoor concert and museum open house for kids where community members could get vaccinated for COVID-19. Partnering with Affinia Healthcare and the St. Louis Regional Health Commission, the museum provided free vaccination for both children and adults. At the Open House, kids had opportunities for art- and music-making, and families could visit the museum at no cost. Alongside the Pandemic Blues exhibit that had recently opened, the event gave community members an opportunity to attend the exhibit and listen to quality live music, kicking off our summer season of free music in downtown St. Louis.

Our Communities for Immunity event and other free concerts held by the National Blues Museum reflect how a healthy music and entertainment ecosystem can bring people together for positive impact. As an oral tradition, blues music is a medium through which communities can reflect, share their experiences, and feel a cathartic release of joy. These traits align with the National Blues Museum’s mission within its own community and make our museum a space where St. Louisans from different backgrounds can have affirming interactions with one another.

These same properties of music enabled us to spread valuable information about vaccination as part of Communities for Immunity. In fact, there is literature to support this theory. Researching performers who promoted polio vaccination in The Gambia, ethnomusicologist Bonnie McConnell witnessed how “more than just information transfer, musical participation can involve people socially and emotionally, creating the conditions necessary for deeper levels of engagement.” Framing their educational efforts through music, these performers showed McConnell how “integrating unfamiliar information into familiar participatory forms enables people to establish a sense of coherence and meaning.” Holding vaccination events around the participatory form of blues music, the National Blues Museum harnessed music’s ability to unite groups through emotion and rhythm to work toward this shared cause.

The National Blues Museum’s community-informed approach to presenting music is part of what’s made our programming so cherished by local audiences. Celebrating locally significant styles of Black heritage music like blues, R&B, and soul, the museum attracts majority-Black audiences who are often underserved by mainstream arts programming. Our dedication to local musicians sits at the center of this community engagement, and the museum gives musicians regular, equitable opportunities to reach their audiences.

Without the equitable compensation, public resources, and opportunities for engagement professional musicians deserve, the music/entertainment world and the unity it is capable of fostering will fade away. Vaccination and safe presentation practices are key to this, but so are business models which reflect musicians’ essential place in our society and don’t take their contributions for granted. Time and time again, we are reminded of how crucial professional musicians are to our culture. We were reminded during COVID-19, and we must remember what the pandemic taught us to support them in the future.

Communities for Immunity is an initiative of the Association of Science and Technology Centers; Institute of Museum and Library Services; American Alliance of Museums; and the Network of the National Library of Medicine; with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and in collaboration with the American Library Association; the Association of African American Museums; the Association of Children’s Museums; the Association for Rural and Small Libraries; the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums; and the Urban Libraries Council.