When the American Writers Museum (https://americanwritersmuseum.org/) opened in Chicago in 2017, it became the first museum in the US to celebrate all genres of writing. Early in the planning phase, founder Malcolm O’Hagan made a couple of key decisions: no artifacts and no single curator. In this episode, the museum’s programs director Allison Sansone (https://americanwritersmuseum.org/about/staff/) explains how these decisions continue to shape the museum, from a timeline of 100 significant au...
Sep 17, 2018•10 min
The campus of the Bulgarian National Museum of Military History in Sofia is defended on all sides by a garden of missiles and tanks . But as Director of Public Relations Deyana Kostova points out, many of the exhibits inside focus on the consequences of war rather than the tools of warfare. One of these exhibits, called 'The Little Man in the Great War' , explores the Bulgarian World War I experience through overarching emotions. In this episode, Kostova gives a tour of the exhibit, explains how...
Sep 03, 2018•10 min
Ariana Lee and Palace Shaw create The Whitest Cube , an excellent new museum podcast about people of color and their experiences with art institutions as artists, visitors, workers, activists, or casual admirers. The podcast interrogates the city of Boston and its museums through the lens of race. In this episode, Lee and Shaw talk about the reasons for starting the podcast, what diversity in museums really means, and how to pressure cultural institutions to change. If you’re interested in museu...
Aug 20, 2018•12 min
High in the Bulgarian mountains, Buzludzha monument is deteriorating. Commemorating early Bulgarian Marxists , it was designed to emphasize the power and modernity of the Bulgarian Communist Party . Buzludzha is now at the center of a debate over how Bulgaria remembers its past . Some people want to destroy it, some people want to restore it to its former glory, but Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova has a better idea . Ivanova wants to turn it into a museum, and she founded the Buzludzha Project ...
Jul 23, 2018•10 min
There were no children’s museums in the Balkans before Muzeiko opened in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2015. Days before Muzeiko’s historic opening, I interviewed Vessela Gercheva, the museum’s Programs and Exhibits Director. Gercheva talked about the challenges of opening the museum, not the least of which was how few people actually knew what a children’s museum was. Today, almost three years later, Gercheva says things have changed. Muzeiko is packed with kids, careening through exhibits designed just f...
Jul 09, 2018•10 min
Margaret Middleton is an independent exhibit designer and museum consultant based in Providence, RI, USA. Middleton recently completed the design of the children's exhibits at the Discovery Museum in Acton, MA, USA. Driven by a background in industrial design and queer activism, Middleton is passionate about creating visitor-centered museum experiences , and writes and speaks about inclusion in museums. In 2014 Middleton developed the Family Inclusive Language Chart , now widely used in museums ...
Jun 25, 2018•11 min
The Bulgarian National Polytechnical Museum is a science museum that also tells the story of Bulgarian and world history. The building itself once housed a museum of a Bulgarian communist leader, and the technical artifacts on display , from simple machines to Bulgarian-made computers from the 1980s present both scientific concepts and the political contexts in which they were developed . In this episode, curator Vassil Macaranov describes how the increasing role of technology in our lives under...
Jun 11, 2018•11 min
In episode 36 of this podcast , Bill Bradberry, Chair of the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Area Commission , described encountering the glaring lack of cultural diversity within and around the museum industry, particularly in leadership. He cited the new Museum Studies program at Lincoln University as an example of a program that addresses the problem directly. Blake Bradford is the director of that Museum Studies Program, a partnership between Lincoln University and the Barnes Fou...
May 28, 2018•12 min
Until a few weeks ago, one of the only places in downtown New Orleans acknowledging the city’s slave-trading past was a marker in Congo Square , erected in 1997. The New Orleans Committee to Erect Historic Markers on the Slave Trade has since put up two new markers, one on the transatlantic slave trade along the Moonwalk and another on the domestic slave trade at the intersection of Esplanade Avenue and Chartres Street . Author and historian Freddi Williams Evans and activist Luther Gray are the...
May 14, 2018•13 min
View Shownotes As the oldest site of human habitation in North America, the Meadowcroft Rockshelter has a challenge: how to convey its mind-boggling timescale, spanning from prehistory to the 19th century? David Scofield, director of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Historic Village, describes how the museum is designed to connect the big changes in how people lived through 16,000 years of history. The Meadowcroft Rockshelter opens for its 50th season on May 5th, 2018. It is part of the Senator J...
Apr 30, 2018•10 min
View Shownotes Jenny Mathiasson and Kloe Rumsey started The C Word: The Conservators’ Podcast to broadcast their friendly and professional discussions about conservation. Each episode features a different hot topic in the conservation world, and the podcast stands out for its hosts willingness to tackle complex topics. In this episode, the hosts discuss whether photos are data or objects, the Digitized Photograph Project at the Rwandan Genocide Memorial Centre , and museums asking people to brin...
Apr 16, 2018•10 min
Over the course of his long life, Hans Sloane collected tens of thousands of items which became the basis for what is today the British Museum. Funded in large part by his marriage into the enslaving plantocracy of Jamaica and the Atlantic slave trade, and aided by Britain’s rising colonial power and global reach, he assembled an encyclopedic collection of specimens and objects from all around the world. James Delbourgo , professor of History of Science and Atlantic World at Rutgers University, ...
Apr 02, 2018•13 min
Image: Sanchita Balachandran. Photo Credit: James Rensselaer. Sanchita Balachandran , Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum , hopes to see the field of conservation develop into more of a social process, rather than simply a technical one. From her 2016 talk at the American Institute for Conservation’s Annual Meeting , to teaching her students how to interrogate an object in person, to her Untold Stories project , Balachandran has thought critically about the role of cons...
Mar 19, 2018•14 min
It would have been much easier to build the National Public Housing Museum from scratch instead of retrofitting it in the last remaining building of the Jane Addams Homes, the first public housing development in Chicago. But doing so would have undermined one of the core principles of the museum: that place has power. Robert J. Smith III , the associate director of the National Public Housing Museum, describes the mission of the museum as preserving, promoting, and propelling housing as a human ...
Mar 05, 2018•13 min
Bill Bradberry, the President and Chairman of the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Area Commission , thinks of the entire city of Niagara Falls, NY as an open crime scene from “the crime of holding people in bondage, and the man-made crime of trying to escape.” With Canada just across the Niagara river, the Commission conducts research on the Underground Railroad as it relates to Niagara Falls and the surrounding area — for some, the last terminus in the United States. The Commission ...
Feb 19, 2018•13 min
Attendants View is a blog of hand-drawn, single page cartoons that capture a slice of a museum attendant’s day. The comics show confused visitors, tourists asking the same questions over and over again, and museum board members flouting the rules. The writer and illustrator behind Attendants View has been creating comics about her experiences in museums for the past seven years. About 60% of the comics are about something that has happened to her or around her personally, and the rest come from ...
Feb 05, 2018•10 min
The Las Vegas Erotic Heritage Museum is the largest erotic museum in the world. Sex scholar Dr. Victoria Hartmann has been the museum’s director since 2014, and her mission is to create a space for people to safely explore and engage the topic of human sexuality. Dr. Hartmann thinks museums too often tell the visitor what to think. She would rather use visitors’ responses to the galleries as a starting point to further discussions. At the Erotic Heritage Museum, there is a lot to react to: a sta...
Jan 22, 2018•8 min
Iceland has many more museums per person than the UK and the US. The country is also in the middle of a massive tourism boom: there are several times more tourists than residents. Hannah Hethmon , an American museum professional and Fulbright Fellow living in Reykjavík, was interested in this abundance of museums and the nature of museum tourism in Iceland. Her Fulbright project is the podcast Museums in Strange Places , which explores these and other Icelandic museum topics. In each episode, Ha...
Jan 08, 2018•12 min
Image: The Lower Half of the Apollo 17 Lunar Lander in a debris field in the Taurus–Littrow valley. This view was captured minutes after the last humans left the moon and it would look exactly the same today. What humans left behind on the moon are part of our human heritage, on par with Laetoli and Lascaux . Unlike human heritage sites on earth, the lunar landing sites are pristine, completely untouched by natural erosion or human disruption. But the lunar landing sites are also unprotected. On...
Dec 25, 2017•13 min
Habemus is a Spanish-language radio program about museum topics broadcasting out of Bahía Blanca, Argentina. Every Friday from 9 to 11pm, team members interview museum people and promote an ideology of fun and hacks in museums. The title is a play on words — linking the Spanish word “museos” with the Latin verb “we have.” Since the show is on a popular radio station, Habemus team members Romina Frontini and Christian Díaz say it’s up to them to introduce museum topics to a general audience. In t...
Dec 11, 2017•11 min
Dr. Porchia Moore , Inclusion Catalyst at the Columbia Museum of Art , started Visitors of Color with nikhil trivedi in 2015. Visitors of Color is a Tumblr project that documents the perspectives and experiences of marginalized people in museums. It is a record of what the museum experience can be like for people who are often discussed but whose voices are rarely privileged, people that don’t feel welcome in museums, and people that don’t feel like nearby museum spaces are for them. In this epi...
Nov 06, 2017•11 min
Image: An example of a digital mapping tool, Mapbox Studio Classic. Everything happens at a time and a place. In a museum, that coordinate system can help keep a story straight, even if it is not at the forefront of a gallery. And when designing maps for museums, we should keep in mind how humanistic digital tools are — and how helpful they can be to museum visitors. We should pay close attention to mental map matching. Museum visitors have a sense of geography marked by their own lived experien...
Oct 23, 2017•4 min
Executive Director of the Cambridge Historical Society Marieke Van Damme affectionately calls anyone working in the museum field “Museum People.” On her excellent podcast of the same name, she interviews museum people every episode. Many museum people are museum workers. In 2016, together with other noted museum professionals (Sarah Erdman, Claudia Ocello and Dawn Estabrooks Salerno), Marieke asked why museum workers leave the field. Last month, they published a summary of the findings titled, L...
Oct 09, 2017•12 min
Yo, museum professionals: exhibitions aimed at kids should not include interactive screens in galleries. You're undermining your mission! — Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) September 4, 2017 Notably missing from discussions like these is a willingness to defend the interactive screen. The defense is simple: concepts that museums are tasked with teaching aren’t tangible anymore. Today’s students learn complex concepts that kids weren’t exposed to a generation ago. Even basic knowledge of science today req...
Sep 11, 2017•4 min
Image: Arab American National Museum photo by knightfoundation CC BY-SA 2.0. Before the Arab American National Museum opened in Dearborn, MI in 2005, there wasn’t a singular museum telling the Arab American story. The museum defines the Arab World as 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Southeast Michigan has the highest concentration of people from the Arab World in North America, and much of the social, religious, cultural, and commercial enterprises are centered in Dearborn. In t...
Aug 28, 2017•12 min
After the fall of communism in Bulgaria in 1989, statues of Bulgarian communist leaders, idealized revolutionary workers, and Lenins were taken down all over the county. Some of these statues are now in the Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia. Bulgaria doesn’t have a history museum that explores its communist past. The Museum of Socialist Art doesn’t fill that void, exactly: it is an extension of the Bulgarian National Gallery of Art. In this episode, museum director Nikolai Ushtavaliiski and art h...
Jul 17, 2017•8 min
Elon Cook created the College Hill and the International Slave Trade Walking Tour in Providence after researching the crucial and massive role that Rhode Island played in the history of slavery. The walking tour covers an an area of about one square mile in and around Brown University. Here, wealth and stability were created off of the buying and selling of enslaved people in Rhode Island and elsewhere. The built landscape of Providence serves as a museum without walls, and Elon considers each o...
Jul 03, 2017•11 min
Image: An early rendering of the Serdika station in Sofia, Bulgaria, displaying Roman ruins on the first level underneath the street. During the planning stages for the Sofia Metro in Bulgaria, ruins of an old Roman fortress and city wall were discovered at the network’s proposed Serdika station . This wasn’t a surprise. People have been living in what is now Sofia for at least 4,000 years, and when you dig a tunnel, you’re bound to find something. The agendas of archaeologists and metro builder...
Jun 05, 2017•6 min
I met interpretive planner Lisa Brochu in Akagara National Park in Rwanda. I was there as a tourist, and she was there as a guide trainer. Lisa’s teaching stresses that the best way to communicate with the visiting public is by having strong, central theme. At Akagara National Park, park-employed and community freelance guides are the ones doing that communication. By working with them, Lisa hopes visitors’ experience in Akegara will stick with them longer. Lisa teaches that instead of rattling ...
May 15, 2017•10 min
Even before I started working in the museum field, I was thinking about the future museum at the Apollo 11 landing site at Tranquility Base on the moon. The site is special. No matter how the human experiment turns out, the site will represent the first step off earth. Now Tranquility Base is a pile of historical artifacts in their original context. Even the astronauts' footprints in the delicate, powder-like dust of the lunar surface are still there. How should we treat this well-preserved hist...
May 01, 2017•5 min
