Download or read book The Participatory Museum written by Nina Simon and published by Museum 2.0. This book was released on 2010 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visitor participation is a hot topic in the contemporary world of museums, art galleries, science centers, libraries and cultural organizations. How can your institution do it and do it well? The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to working with community members and visitors to make cultural institutions more dynamic, relevant, essential places. Museum consultant and exhibit designer Nina Simon weaves together innovative design techniques and case studies to make a powerful case for participatory practice. "Nina Simon's new book is essential for museum directors interested in experimenting with audience participation on the one hand and cautious about upending the tradition museum model on the other. In concentrating on the practical, this book makes implementation possible in most museums. More importantly, in describing the philosophy and rationale behind participatory activity, it makes clear that action does not always require new technology or machinery. Museums need to change, are changing, and will change further in the future. This book is a helpful and thoughtful road map for speeding such transformation." -Elaine Heumann Gurian, international museum consultant and author of Civilizing the Museum "This book is an extraordinary resource. Nina has assembled the collective wisdom of the field, and has given it her own brilliant spin. She shows us all how to walk the talk. Her book will make you want to go right out and start experimenting with participatory projects." -Kathleen McLean, participatory museum designer and author of Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions "I predict that in the future this book will be a classic work of museology." --Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums

Download or read book Museum Matters written by Miruna Achim and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museum Matters tells the story of Mexico's national collections through the trajectories of its objects. The essays in this book show the many ways in which things matter and affect how Mexico imagines its past, present, and future.

Download or read book Museum Activism written by Robert R. Janes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only a decade ago, the notion that museums, galleries and heritage organisations might engage in activist practice, with explicit intent to act upon inequalities, injustices and environmental crises, was met with scepticism and often derision. Seeking to purposefully bring about social change was viewed by many within and beyond the museum community as inappropriately political and antithetical to fundamental professional values. Today, although the idea remains controversial, the way we think about the roles and responsibilities of museums as knowledge based, social institutions is changing. Museum Activism examines the increasing significance of this activist trend in thinking and practice. At this crucial time in the evolution of museum thinking and practice, this ground-breaking volume brings together more than fifty contributors working across six continents to explore, analyse and critically reflect upon the museum’s relationship to activism. Including contributions from practitioners, artists, activists and researchers, this wide-ranging examination of new and divergent expressions of the inherent power of museums as forces for good, and as activists in civil society, aims to encourage further experimentation and enrich the debate in this nascent and uncertain field of museum practice. Museum Activism elucidates the largely untapped potential for museums as key intellectual and civic resources to address inequalities, injustice and environmental challenges. This makes the book essential reading for scholars and students of museum and heritage studies, gallery studies, arts and heritage management, and politics. It will be a source of inspiration to museum practitioners and museum leaders around the globe.

Download or read book Museum of the Future written by Cristina Bechtler and published by Jrp Ringier. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museums of contemporary art are expanding and in crisis. They attract ever-larger audiences, architects constantly redesign them, and the growing number of artists is producing more massively than ever; at the same time museum funds are dwindling in the economic crisis and an overheated art market. This text gathers together interviews with international artists, architects and curators of the contemporary art world.

Download or read book Museums in Motion written by Edward Porter Alexander and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2008 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1979, Edward P. Alexander's Museums in Motion was hailed as a much-needed addition to the museum literature. In combining the history of museums since the eighteenth century with a detailed examination of the function of museums and museum workers in modern society, it served as an essential resource for those seeking to enter to the museum profession and for established professionals looking for an expanded understanding of their own discipline. Now, Mary Alexander has produced a newly revised edition of the classic text, bringing it the twenty-first century with coverage of emerging trends, resources, and challenges. New material also includes a discussion of the children's museum as a distinct type of institution and an exploration of the role computers play in both outreach and traditional in-person visits.

Download or read book Museum Worlds written by Sandra Dudley and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-07 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museum Worlds: Advances in Research' is a new, multidisciplinary, refereed, annual journal from Berghahn Journals that will publish work that significantly advances knowledge of global trends, case studies and theory relevant to museum practice and scholarship around the world. It aims to trace and comment on major regional, theoretical, methodological and topical themes and debates, and encourage comparison of museum theories, practices, and developments in different global settings. Each issue includes a conversation piece on a current topic, as well as peer reviewed scholarly articles and review articles, book and exhibition reviews, and news on developments in museum studies and related curricula in different parts of the world. Drawing on the expertise and networks of a global Editorial Board of senior scholars and museum practitioners, the journal will both challenge and develop the core concepts that link different disciplinary perspectives on museums by bringing new voices into ongoing debates and discussions.

Download or read book Museum Studies written by Bettina Messias Carbonell and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2003-11-03 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts provides a comprehensive interdisciplinary collection of approaches to museums and their relation to history, culture, philosophy and their adoring or combative publics. Brings together for the first time a wide array of texts that mix contemporary analysis with historical documentation Includes five sections that highlight central themes in museum studies: issue-oriented contexts in museology; states of "nature"; the status of nations; history, memory and other locations; and arts, crafts and visitors Addresses the development of museums, the role of the museum in society, and issues central to contemporary museum studies Opens with an introductory essay that situates museum studies in a truly interdisciplinary context and includes an opening essay for each section that guides the reader through the selections Includes a bibliography and list of resources devoted to museum studies that makes the volume an authoritative guide on the subject

Download or read book Museum Innovation written by Haitham Eid and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-18 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museum Innovation encourages museums to critically reflect upon current practices and adopt new approaches to their civic responsibilities. Arguing that museums have a moral duty to perform, the book shows how social innovation can make them more equitable, relevant and impactful institutions. Including contributions from a diverse group of international scholars, practitioners and researchers, the book investigates the innovative approaches museums are taking to address contemporary social issues. The volume focuses on the concept of social innovation and individual chapters address a range of crucial issues, such as climate change; the COVID-19 pandemic; diversity and inclusion; the travel ban; and the repatriation of museum collections. Exploring the impact that organizational structures have on museums’ aspirations to act as agents for social change, the book also unpacks how museums can establish sustainable relationships with minority communities. Proposing steps that museums can take to affirm their relevance as viable community partners, the book breaks down silos and connects ideas across different areas of museum work. Museum Innovation explores the role of contemporary museums in society. It is essential reading for academics, students and practitioners working in the museum and heritage studies field. The book’s interdisciplinary nature makes it also an interesting read for those working in business studies, digital humanities, visual culture, arts administration and political science fields.

Download or read book Museums and Social Change written by Adele Chynoweth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museums and Social Change explores the ways museums can work in collaboration with marginalised groups to work for social change and, in so doing, rethink the museum. Drawing on the first-hand experiences of museum practitioners and their partners around the world, the volume demonstrates the impact of a shared commitment to collaborative, reflective practice. Including analytical discussion from practitioners in their collegial work with women, the homeless, survivors of institutionalised child abuse and people with disabilities, the book draws attention to the significant contributions of small, specialist museums in bringing about social change. It is here, the book argues, that the new museum emerges: when museum practitioners see themselves as partners, working with others to lead social change, this is where museums can play a distinct and important role. Emerging in response to ongoing calls for museums to be more inclusive and participate in meaningful engagement, Museums and Social Change will be essential reading for academics and students working in museum and gallery studies, librarianship, archives, heritage studies and arts management. It will also be of great interest to those working in history and cultural studies, as well as museum practitioners and social activists around the world.

Download or read book The Care and Handling of Art Objects written by Marjorie Shelley and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive collections of works of art from antiquities to modern and contemporary material. Their preservation is a responsibility shared by the many individuals employed at the Museum who oversee and have direct contact with the collection on a daily basis. The Care and Handing of Art Objects—first published in the 1940s and continually updated—offers a guide to the best practices in handling and preserving works of art while on display, in storage and in transit. It explains many of the fundamental principles of conservation that underlie these methods. One of its goals is to make the complexities of caring for a collection readily accessible. The first part offers basic guidelines for the preservation of the diverse types of materials and art objects found in the Met. Each chapter addresses the physical characteristics specific to the particular category, and the environmental, handling and housing factors to which one should be alert to prevent damage and ensure their preservation. Written by experts in the respective specialty, it addresses the Museum’s vast holdings summarizing the most critical preservation issues, many of which are amplified by photographs. As the table of contents makes evident these range from paintings on canvas and works on paper and photographs to furniture and objects made of stone, wood and metals to arms and armor, upholstery, ethnographic materials and many others. Part II succinctly describes factors that affect the collection as a whole: among them, current environmental standards for temperature, relative humidity, light exposure, storage and art in transit. Based on Museum protocols it addresses emergency preparedness and response, and integrated pest management. For easy reference, it includes charts on storage and display conditions, on factors contributing to deterioration, and a glossary of conservation terms, principles, and housing materials referenced in the individual chapters. Drawing upon the knowledge of conservators, scientists, and curators from many different departments, as well as technicians and engineers whose expertise crosses boundaries of culture, chronology, medium and condition, The Care and Handing of Art Objects is primarily directed to staff at the Met. It is, no less, an invaluable resource for students, collectors, small museums, museum study programs, art dealers, and members of the public who want to enhance their understanding of how works of art are safeguarded and the role environment, handling and materials play in making this possible.

Download or read book Museum Frictions written by Ivan Karp and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-07 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This third volume in a bestselling series on culture, society, and museums examines the effects of globalization on contemporary museum, heritage, and exhibition practices.

Download or read book The Presence of the Past written by Roy Rosenzweig and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some people make photo albums, collect antiques, or visit historic battlefields. Others keep diaries, plan annual family gatherings, or stitch together patchwork quilts in a tradition learned from grandparents. Each of us has ways of communing with the past, and our reasons for doing so are as varied as our memories. In a sweeping survey, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen asked 1,500 Americans about their connection to the past and how it influences their daily lives and hopes for the future. The result is a surprisingly candid series of conversations and reflections on how the past infuses the present with meaning. Rosenzweig and Thelen found that people assemble their experiences into narratives that allow them to make sense of their personal histories, set priorities, project what might happen next, and try to shape the future. By using these narratives to mark change and create continuity, people chart the courses of their lives. A young woman from Ohio speaks of giving birth to her first child, which caused her to reflect upon her parents and the ways that their example would help her to become a good mother. An African American man from Georgia tells how he and his wife were drawn to each other by their shared experiences and lessons learned from growing up in the South in the 1950s. Others reveal how they personalize historical events, as in the case of a Massachusetts woman who traces much of her guarded attitude toward life to witnessing the assassination of John F. Kennedy on television when she was a child. While the past is omnipresent to Americans, "history" as it is usually defined in textbooks leaves many people cold. Rosenzweig and Thelen found that history as taught in school does not inspire a strong connection to the past. And they reveal how race and ethnicity affects how Americans perceive the past: while most white Americans tend to think of it as something personal, African Americans and American Indians are more likely to think in terms of broadly shared experiences--like slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the violation of Indian treaties." Rosenzweig and Thelen's conclusions about the ways people use their personal, family, and national stories have profound implications for anyone involved in researching or presenting history, as well as for all those who struggle to engage with the past in a meaningful way.

Download or read book Museum Storage and Meaning written by Mirjam Brusius and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond their often beautiful exhibition halls, many museums contain vast, hidden spaces in which objects may be stored, conserved, or processed. Museums can also include unseen archives, study rooms, and libraries which are inaccessible to the public. This collection of essays focuses on this domain, an area that has hitherto received little attention. Divided into four sections, the book critically examines the physical space of museum storage areas, the fluctuating historical fortunes of exhibits, the growing phenomenon of publicly visible storage, and the politics of objects deemed worthy of collection but unsuitable for display. In doing so, it explores issues including the relationship between storage and canonization, the politics of collecting, the use of museum storage as a form of censorship, the architectural character of storage space, and the economic and epistemic value of museum objects. Essay contributions come from a broad combination of museum directors, curators, archaeologists, historians, and other academics.

Download or read book Connecting Museums written by Mark O'Neill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-16 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Connecting Museums explores the boundaries of museums and how external relationships are affected by internal commitments, structures and traditions. Focusing on museums’ relationship with heath, inclusion, and community, the book provides a detailed assessment of the alliances between museums and other stakeholders in recent years. With contributions from practitioners and established and early-career academics, this volume explore the ideas and practices through which museums are seeking to move beyond what might be called one-off contributions to society, to reach places where the museum is dynamic and facilitates self-generation and renewal, where it can become not just a provider of a cultural service, but an active participant in the rehabilitation of social trust and democratic participation. The contributors to this volume provide conceptual critiques and clarification of a number of key ideas which form the basis of the ethics of museum legitimacy, as well as a number of reports from the front line about the experience of trying to renew museums as more valuable and more relevant institutions. Providing internal and external perspectives, Connecting Museums presents a mix of applied and theoretical understandings of the changing roles of museums today. As such, the book should be of interest to academics, researchers and students working in the broad fields of museum and heritage studies, material culture, and arts and museum management.

Download or read book Objects of Culture written by H. Glenn Penny and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-10-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, Germans spearheaded a worldwide effort to preserve the material traces of humanity, designing major ethnographic museums and building extensive networks of communication and exchange across the globe. In this groundbreaking study, Glenn Penny explores the appeal of ethnology in Imperial Germany and analyzes the motivations of the scientists who created the ethnographic museums. Penny shows that German ethnologists were not driven by imperialist desires or an interest in legitimating putative biological or racial hierarchies. Overwhelmingly antiracist, they aspired to generate theories about the essential nature of human beings through their museums' collections. They gained support in their efforts from boosters who were enticed by participating in this international science and who used it to promote the cosmopolitan character of their cities and themselves. But these cosmopolitan ideals were eventually overshadowed by the scientists' more modern, professional, and materialist concerns, which dramatically altered the science and its goals. By clarifying German ethnologists' aspirations and focusing on the market and conflicting interest groups, Penny makes important contributions to German history, the history of science, and museum studies.

Download or read book 2016 written by Andrea Fraser and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both institutional critique and reference work, documenting the intersection of politics (in the form of political donations) and art museums. 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics examines the intersection of electoral politics and private-nonprofit art institutions in the United States at a pivotal historical moment. In a massive volume that is both institutional critique and reference work, the artist Andrea Fraser documents the reported political contributions made by trustees of more than 125 art museums, representing every state in the nation, in the 2016 election cycle. With campaigning that featured attacks on vulnerable populations, the vilification of the media and “cultural elites,” and calls to curtail civil rights and liberties, the 2016 election cycle and its aftermath transformed national politics. It was also the most expensive election in American history, with over $6.4 billion raised for presidential and congressional races combined. More than half of this money came from just a few hundred people—many of whom also support cultural institutions and serve on their boards. 2016 is organized like a telephone book. Contribution data is laid out alphabetically by name of donor. With this and other data filling more than 900 pages, the book offers a material representation of scale of the interface between cultural philanthropy and campaign finance in America. It also provides an unparalleled resource for exploring the politics of the museum world. 2016 includes an afterword by Jamie Stevens, the former curator and head of programs at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, who traces the book's development; an introduction by Andrea Fraser elaborating on the links connecting cultural philanthropy, campaign finance, and plutocracy; a section on each museum represented; and a section including data summaries and additional data. The book presents a powerful argument that supporting the arts must involve more than giving donations to museums; it must also include defending the values, social structures, and political institutions of an open, tolerant, just, and equitable society. Copublished by Westreich Wagner Publications, the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and the MIT Press

Download or read book Whose Muse written by James Cuno and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the economic boom of the 1990s, art museums expanded dramatically in size, scope, and ambition. They came to be seen as new civic centers: on the one hand as places of entertainment, leisure, and commerce, on the other as socially therapeutic institutions. But museums were also criticized for everything from elitism to looting or illegally exporting works from other countries, to exhibiting works offensive to the public taste. Whose Muse? brings together five directors of leading American and British art museums who together offer a forward-looking alternative to such prevailing views. While their approaches differ, certain themes recur: As museums have become increasingly complex and costly to manage, and as government support has waned, the temptation is great to follow policies driven not by a mission but by the market. However, the directors concur that public trust can be upheld only if museums continue to see their core mission as building collections that reflect a nation's artistic legacy and providing informed and unfettered access to them. The book, based on a lecture series of the same title held in 2000-2001 by the Harvard Program for Art Museum Directors, also includes an introduction by Cuno and a fascinating--and surprisingly frank--roundtable discussion among the participating directors. A rare collection of sustained reflections by prominent museum directors on the current state of affairs in their profession, this book is without equal. It will be read widely not only by museum professionals, trustees, critics, and scholars, but also by the art-loving public itself.