Gallery One at the Cleveland Museum of Art

How can art museums use interpretive technology to engage visitors actively in new kinds of experiences with works of art? What are the best strategies for integrating technology into the visitor experience? In 2012, the Cleveland Museum of Art responded with Gallery One, an interactive art gallery that opened to stakeholders on December 12, and went through a six‐week testing period before its public opening on January 21, 2013. Gallery One drew from extensive audience research and was part of a major building and renovation project in which CMA reinstalled and reinterpreted the entire permanent collection in new and renovated gallery spaces. The end result was an innovative and robust blend of art, technology, design, and a unique user experience that emerged through the collaboration of staff across the museum and with outside consultants.     

澳大利亚堪培拉国家恐龙博物馆的互动教育

位于堪培拉的国家恐龙博物馆是一个寓教于乐的互动式博物馆,供成人、儿童和学生游乐。尽管博物馆规模相对较小,但通过提供最大化互动、参与和教育机会,博物馆已能够得到较高的参观人数,并通过使用脸书或微信等社交媒体推广业务,使游览变得愉快而有趣。专注于有效的零售已使国家恐龙博物馆能够产生稳定的盈利,这些盈利继而被用于增加馆藏、展示和储备。     

Curating Queer Heritage: Queer Knowledge and Museum Practice

Abstract Important work in the last decades within the museum studies field has laid bare the implicit nationalist, evolutionist, and patriarchal narratives of the traditional museum. So far, though, only a few writers have discussed the museum’s role in supporting “heteronormative” narratives that consolidate heterosexuality as a norm within social and cultural life. This article is a critical discussion of methodological aspects of a queer perspective in interpreting, exhibiting, and organizing museum collections. Two shows with LGBT / queer perspective that were exhibited in Stockholm, Sweden during EuroPride 2008 are the focus of this article’s analysis. They consist of the photo exhibition Show Yourself! at the Nordic Museum, and Queer: Desire, Power, and Identity at the National Museum of Fine Arts. The author himself was the curator of the latter exhibition. This article offers personal reflections on the methodological challenges of translating an abstract queer perspective into museum practice in order to envision online and on‐site museum encounters that can mobilize various kinds of pluralistic passions.     

The Denver Community Museum

Abstract This essay recounts the story of the Denver Community Museum, a pop‐up institution which operated for almost a year in downtown Denver, Colorado. This temporary museum was designed to be short‐lived. It prompted experiments with audience participation and questioned past versus present, fact versus fiction, and the museum “voice.” This article gives an overview of the space and its operations. Using personal accounts, the article explores the value of participation for the museum’s audience, as well as for the institution itself. These narratives are used as a springboard for a larger discussion of museum practice and creating opportunities for personal connection within the museum.     

哈萨克斯坦共和国国家博物馆

哈萨克斯坦共和国国家博物馆是中亚地区最年轻、规模最大的博物馆。本文介绍了该馆的基本情况,并详细介绍了该馆的古代与中世纪历史展厅、历史展厅、民族志展厅、黄金大厅等重点展厅展示的历史文化遗产以及创新的展示技术等。     

Strategies against Architecture: Interactive Media and Transformative Technology at the Cooper Hewitt,Smithsonian Design Museum

After being closed for three years, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum reopened at the end of 2014 a transformed museum in a renovated heritage building: Andrew Carnegie's former home on the Upper East Side of New York City. New galleries, a collection that was being rapidly digitized, a new brand, and a desire for new audiences drove the museum to rethink and reposition its role as a design museum. At the core of the new museum is a digital platform, built in‐house, that connects collection‐ and patron‐management systems to in‐gallery and online experiences. These have allowed the museum to redesign everything from object labels and vitrines to the fundamentals of the “visitor experience.” This paper explores in detail the process, the decisions made—and resulting tradeoffs—during each stage of the process. In so doing, it reveals the challenges of collaborating with internal and external capacities, operating internationally with online collaboration tools, and rapid prototyping.     

The Via Media of American Museum Practice: Henry Watson Kent and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Speculation about the character and purposes of American art museums has occasioned intense debate since their inception—never more so than today. Whether to be elitist or populist, object‐based or audience‐based forms the crux of many heated arguments. This article asserts that, in the midst of competing philosophies, the successful American art museum has in reality grown from an amalgam of ideas that form a via media or middle path, far more inclusive and pragmatic than is usually noted. This comprehensive philosophy is most effectively demonstrated in the work of Henry Watson Kent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during the first decades of the twentieth century. The work of Kent and his colleagues at the Metropolitan Museum is here examined as a paradigm for the via media museum practice that speaks to the aspirations of America's current art museum leadership.     

From Period Rooms to Public Trust: The Authority Debate and Art Museum Leadership in America

A recent lecture series at the Harvard University Art Museums titled “Art Museums and the Public Trust” marked the eightieth anniversary of the founding of Harvard's famed Museum Course. A graduate seminar begun in 1921 by the Fogg Art Museum's associate director, Paul J. Sachs, the Museum Course became the primary training ground for art museum leadership in the first half of the twentieth century. The 2001 commemorative lecture series was intended to foster a healthy debate on the place of the art museum in Anglo‐American culture. Instead, the speakers, veteran directors of America's and England's most prestigious art museums, invariably returned to one concern: authority—theirs and that of the art museum itself in contemporary society. Authority was at the heart of the Museum Course decades earlier, tellingly explored in annual debates around two significant topics. The first debate involved the pros and cons of including period rooms in American museums. In the second, students argued about whether America's established art institutions should collect the work of living artists. Questions of how museums should respond to the interests of audiences and communities, their responsibility to contemporary artists, and the meaning of a public trust trouble America's museum leadership now as then. This article explores the common ground between the Museum Course debates of the 1930s and Harvard's recent commemorative “debates” by America's contemporary museum leaders and comments on its significance for today's museums.     

Visitor Meaning‐Making at Grand Canyon's Tusayan Museum and Ruin

Abstract Meaning‐making describes a process by which visitors transform museum experiences into new knowledge and memories. Meaning‐making is influenced by visitors' leisure motivations, prior knowledge, socio‐cultural context brought to the experience, personally‐guided interpretation, and events since the visit. In this study, visitors' long‐term recollections included contextual references to how and why they remembered what they experienced. Forty visitors were interviewed by telephone six months after attending a Native American interpretive program at Grand Canyon National Park's Tusayan Museum. Two patterns associated with a constructivist view of meaning‐making were discerned: a) visitors' integration of indoor and outdoor exhibits and b) visitors' comparisons of modern family and community with a more ancient culture. The presence of contextual indicators within visitor recall suggests that new knowledge may be constructed from factors carried forth from the meaning‐making process. Evidence within the data suggests that exhibits made more relevant to visitors' socio‐cultural identity may enhance on‐site experiences.     

Collecting Culture and the British Museum

Abstract This article explores the act of collecting from a postmodern perspective by examining the influences of changing times, places, and persons. Considering the British Museum's stages of development and progress, it discusses the life of Sir Hans Sloane and how his actions helped determine the museum's original goals for its collection. The early days of the British Museum provide a clear view into the values of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century British society. The focus of the museum's collection has changed over the years with the changing views of academics and society. The museum today still strives to hold knowledge of all things, yet tempers this goal under the pressures of modern theorists and politics. While still desiring to communicate information about the world from vast and complex collections, the museum has shifted its focus to answer questions of ownership and entitlement. Explaining national and world heritage views, the article concludes with a discussion of the ethics of collecting as a primary factor in today's British Museum collection.     

A Jewish Museum in an Arab Country

Jews have lived in comparative peace with their neighbors in North Africa for millennia. In the last century, however, political forces have altered an ancient live‐and‐let‐live ethos. A Peace Corps volunteer who began work at the Museum of Moroccan Judaism—the only Jewish museum in the Arab world—just before the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York describes the shock waves engulfing her small museum and the Jewish communities whose artifacts it shelters.     

“Ferry Me O’er”: Musing on the Future of Museum Culture

Abstract Museum professionals face unprecedented challenges in the digital world of the twenty‐first century. How will we meet those challenges and who will lead us to the new shore of our future? We need museum professionals who act as ferrymen, guiding the museum community and its constituents through the troubled waters of our age to cultural reform that leads us to the essential purpose of art: love.     

Welcome to Art City: Place‐based Education through a Local Museum

Abstract The town of Springville, Utah, has a multi‐faceted relationship with its Museum of Art. The museum reflects and preserves the ethnic and cultural identity of the area, including its history, its landscapes, and its philosophy/religion. Through place‐based education—including observation and activities—k‐12 children and youth are given opportunities to experience their local culture on multiple levels. As museum artifacts are carefully chosen and lessons are purposefully structured, students receive cognitive, creative, and social benefits as well. Museum educators collaborate with local school personnel, along with educators from nearby Brigham Young University, to produce cross‐disciplinary lesson plans and teaching materials. Benefits Springville educators are finding in place‐based education are included in this article, along with specific ideas for lessons and activities.     

Considering the Museum Experience of Children with Autism

This article reports on a study that was designed to provide insight about the barriers that limit families with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from visiting fine arts museums. Parents (N=54), and staff and volunteers (N=62) at the museum completed a questionnaire about their perceptions of the participation of children with ASD in museum activities. Some significant differences in responses were found between parents and museum staff and volunteers. Parents reported being thankful for the sense of community that Autism Awareness Family Celebrations provide, but were frustrated with reactions from others during typical museum experiences. Museum staff and volunteers expressed that museum participation was important, but responses were split between those who desired to learn more about ASD in order to create an optimal museum experience, and those who preferred not to take on this initiative. Studies such as this help museums become more inclusive.     

中国人创办的第一家综合性自然科学博物馆——中国西部博物馆

1943年7月,中国科学社等六个学术团体在重庆北碚举行年会,共同发起在北碚筹备自然科学博物馆。同年12月,中国西部科学院会同迁碚的十二个国内顶级学术研究机关,推翁文灏、卢作孚为正副主任委员、组成筹备委员会。经一年筹备,1944年12月25日,中国西部博物馆正式成立并于次日开馆。中国西部博物馆的宗旨为推广科学教育、提倡专门科学研究。这是中国人创办的第一家综合性自然科学类博物馆。     

Building a Community-Based Identity at Anacostia Museum

A historian explores the construction of Anacostia Museum's identity from the 1960s to the present by examining the history of its exhibitions. Direct community accessibility was part of the museum's founding mission, but Smithsonian administration, museum staff, and community residents all seemed to have different ideas about the meaning of the “neighborhood museum” concept. Designated a “Smithsonian outpost,” and intended to draw African-American visitors to the Smithsonian museums on the Mall, the new museum's mission was instead shaped by community advisory groups to focus broadly on African-American history and culture. Staff efforts to “professionalize” and upgrade museum operations later threatened community access to the exhibition-development process, and most community/museum interaction was relegated to the program and outreach activities of the education department. The 1994 Black Mosaic exhibition provided an opportunity to devise new ways of integrating the perspectives of a changed community into the exhibition-development process.     

The Exhibit as Planned Versus the Exhibit as Experienced

Is it even possible to design museum exhibits that have an above average chance of engaging visitors in meaningful experiences? Museum‐based researchers and designers, working over the past several decades, have endeavored to address this and other questions. Recently, a promising Ideas‐People‐Objects (IPO) model of the visitor experience, subsequently elaborated on to include Physical (IPOP) has been used in the design and subsequent study of visitors' museum experiences. Here I briefly describe the model and introduce three papers featured in this issue of Curator: The Museum Journal that offer new insights and perspectives for understanding the theory behind the model, as well as features of the IPOP model that have been used in the design and interpretation of exhibitions, and a comparison of analytic techniques that produce results that can be used in IPOP‐related research.     

The 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition

Abstract The 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in education and interpretation within the museum environment. The report is based on conversations and dialogues with technology and museum professionals from more than two‐dozen countries.