The British Museum’s South Asia Collection is full of Indian objects. Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum, does not want visitors to overlook the violence of how these objects were brought to the UK to be held in a museum. So for the 2017 renovation of the South Asia Collection, Jansari, who is the first curator of Indian descent of this collection, made sure to create unexpected moments in the gallery. She highlighted artifacts bequeathed to the muse...
May 04, 2020•15 min
The modern museum invites you to touch. Or it would, if it wasn’t closed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. The screens inside the Fossil Hall at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC say “touch to begin” to an empty room. The normally cacophonous hands-on exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco sit eerily silent. Museum exhibit developer Paul Orselli of Paul Orselli Workshop says he’ll be reluctant to use hands-on exhibits once museums open up again. But he hopes that futur...
Apr 20, 2020•14 min
Museums across the globe are now closed because of Covid-19. Some of those shuttered galleries presented the science behind outbreaks like the one we’re living through. As Raven Forrest Fruscalzo, Content Developer at the Field Museum in Chicago and host of the Tiny Vampires Podcast points out, the fact that museums are closed is an important statement: they trust the scientific information. In this episode, Forrest Fruscalzo discusses the people that make up public health, how museums can be a ...
Mar 30, 2020•13 min
The statue of George Washington in New York City's Union Square commemorates him on a particular day—November 25th, 1783—the date when the defeated British Army left Manhattan after the American Revolutionary War. The statue celebrates the idea that Washington brought freedom to the country, but professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro researched how many people of African descent that Washington was enslaving on that same date: 271. Representing these people formed...
Mar 16, 2020•15 min
Sometimes, a historical event is all about the branding. And the brand of Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts as the spot where the Mayflower pilgrims first disembarked 400 years ago this year is pretty strong. The branding is strong enough to override the fact that the Mayflower actually first landed on the other side of Cape Cod, in what is now Provincetown. The Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum commemorates that site. And even within a museum that’s trying to correct an inaccuracy...
Mar 02, 2020•13 min
Proprietary technology that runs museum interactives—everything from buttons to proximity sensors—tends to be expensive to purchase and maintain. But Rianne Trujillo (http://www.riannetrujillo.com), lead developer of the Cultural Technology Development Lab (http://www.cctnewmexico.org/ctdl/) at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU), realized that one way museums can avoid expensive, proprietary solutions to their technology needs is by choosing open source alternatives. She is part of the team ...
Feb 17, 2020•10 min
Every time an Apollo astronaut said the word Houston, they were referring not just to a city, but a specific room in that city: Mission Control. In that room on July 20, 1969, NASA engineers answered radio calls from the surface of the moon. Sitting in front of rows of green consoles, cigarettes in hand, they guided humans safely back to earth, channeling the efforts of the thousands and thousands of people who worked on the program through one room. But until recently, that room was kind of a m...
Jan 13, 2020•14 min
The field of conservation was created to fight change: to prevent objects from becoming dusty, broken, or rusted. But fighting to keep cultural objects preserved creates a certain mindset — a mindset where it’s too easy to imagine objects and cultures in a state of stasis. Sanchita Balachandran, Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, founded Untold Stories to change that mindset in the conservation profession. Through events at the annual meetings of the American Institut...
Dec 02, 2019•15 min
Museums tend to be verbal spaces: there’s usually a lot of words. Galleries open with walls of text, visitors are presented with rules of do and don'ts, and audio guides lead headphone-ed users from one piece to the next, paragraph by paragraph. But Speechless: Different by Design, a new exhibit at the Dallas Art Museum and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, guides visitors as far away as possible from words with six custom art installations. In this episode, curator Sarah Schleuning and graphic...
Nov 18, 2019•15 min
Museums are seen as trustworthy, but what if that trust is misplaced? Chicago-based independent curator Elena Gonzales provides a solid jumping off point for thinking critically about museums in her new book, Exhibitions for Social Justice. The book is a whirlwind tour of different museums, examining how they approach social justice. It’s also a guide map for anyone interested in a way forward. In this episode, Gonzales takes us on a tour of some of the main themes of the book, examining the str...
Oct 28, 2019•15 min
To the extent that there was a Communist capital of humor in the last half of the 20th century, it was Gabrovo, Bulgaria. Situated in a valley of the Balkan mountains, the city prides itself on its unique brand of self-effacing humor. In 1972, the Museum House of Humor and Satire opened here, and the city celebrated political humor with people in Soviet block countries and even some invited Western guests. Today, three decades after the collapse of Communism, the Museum House of Humor and Satire...
Sep 30, 2019•12 min
From Apollo Mission Control in Houston, Texas, to the field in southeastern Russia where Yuri Gargarin finished his first orbit, there are many sites on earth that played a role in space exploration. But Hutchinson, Kansas isn’t one of them. And yet, Hutchinson—a town of 40,000 people—is home to the Cosmosphere, a massive space museum. The Cosmosphere boasts an enormous collection of spacecraft, including the largest collection of Soviet space hardware anywhere outside Russia. How did all of the...
Aug 26, 2019•12 min
Akomawt is a Passamaquoddy word for the snowshoe path. At the beginning of winter, the snowshoe path is hard to find. But the more people pass along and carve out this path through the snow during the season, the easier it becomes for everyone to walk it together. endawnis Spears (https://www.akomawt.org/about-us.html) (Diné/ Ojibwe/ Chickasaw/ Choctaw) is director of programming and outreach for the Akomawt Educational Initiative (https://www.akomawt.org). She saw a need to supply regional educ...
Aug 05, 2019•15 min
Cité de l'Espace (https://en.cite-espace.com/) in Toulouse, France is a museum in the middle. It is in the middle of France’s Aerospace Valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerospace_Valley) and the European Space Industry. But it is also geographically in the middle of the two competing superpowers in the Space Race that ended with Apollo 11. From its vantage point in the middle, Cité de l'Espace has its own story to tell. The museum features a mix of Soviet and American space hardware, like a...
Jul 15, 2019•8 min
The most-visited room in the most-visited science museum in the world reopened last week after a massive, five year renovation (https://extinctmonsters.net/2019/06/14/deep-time-is-a-masterpiece/). Deep Time, as the new gallery is colloquially known, is the latest iteration of the Fossil Hall at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. It might not seem like much in geologic time, but the Smithsonian Fossil Hall has been welcoming visitors for more than 100 years. O...
Jun 17, 2019•15 min
Everything decays. In the past, human heritage that decayed slowly enough on stone, vellum, bamboo, silk, or paper could be put in a museum—still decaying, but at least visible. Today, human heritage is decaying on hard drives. Sarah Nguyen (https://twitter.com/snewyuen), a MLIS student at the University of Washington, is the project coordinator of Preserve This Podcast (http://preservethispodcast.org/), a project and podcast of the same name that proposes solutions to fight against the threats ...
Jun 03, 2019•11 min
The Space Shuttle Atlantis Experience, which opened at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Space_Center_Visitor_Complex) in Cape Canaveral, Florida in 2013 brings visitors “nose to nose” with one of the three remaining Space Shuttle orbiters. The team that built it used principles of themed attraction design to introduce visitors to the orbiter and the rest of the exhibits. Atlantis is introduced linearly and deliberately: visitors see two movies about the...
May 13, 2019•14 min
The Museum of Old and New Art (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Old_and_New_Art) opened in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia in 2011. With a name like that, MONA (https://mona.net.au/) could include any type of art. But looking at the collection, it’s clear that its creator, millionaire gambler David Walsh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Walsh_(art_collector)), has a fascination with sex and death -- and bets that the rest of us do too. Walsh himself calls MONA a “subversive adult Disneyla...
Apr 29, 2019•10 min
The displays at the Tiagarra Cultural Centre and Museum (https://tiagarra.weebly.com/) in Devonport, Tasmania, Australia were built in 1976 (https://tiagarra.weebly.com/tiagarra-opening-and-timeline-1975---1979.html) by non-indigenous citizens and scientists without consulting Aboriginal Tasmanians. David Gough (http://www.utas.edu.au/community/naidoc/community-bio-david-gough), chairperson of the Six Rivers Aboriginal Corporation, (https://www.facebook.com/groups/434417366698696/) remembers vis...
Apr 15, 2019•15 min
Penal transportation from England to Australia from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s was used to expand Britain's spheres of influence and to reduce overcrowding in British prisons. The male convict experience is well-known, but the Cascades Female Factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascades_Female_Factory) in Hobart is at the center of a shift in how Australians think of the role that female convicts played in the colonization of Tasmania. Dr. Jody Steele, the heritage interpretation manager...
Apr 01, 2019•15 min
The fight for racial diversity in museums and other cultural institutions is not new: people of color have been fighting for inclusion in white mainstream museums for over 50 years (https://amzn.to/2udBIYZ). Dispose these efforts, change has been limited. A 2018 survey by the Mellon Foundation (https://mellon.org/media/filer_public/e5/a3/e5a373f3-697e-41e3-8f17-051587468755/sr-mellon-report-art-museum-staff-demographic-survey-01282019.pdf) found that 88% of people in museum leadership positions ...
Mar 18, 2019•14 min
There’s a new tool in young-Earth creationists' quest for scientific legitimacy: the museum. Over the past 25 years, dozens of so-called creation museums have been built, including the Answers in Genesis (AiG) Creation Museum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum) in Kentucky. Borrowing the style of natural history museums and science centers, these public display spaces use the form and rhetoric of mainstream science to support a belief in the literal truth of the Bible, including the ...
Mar 04, 2019•14 min
Joe Galliano (https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephgalliano) came up with the idea for Queer Britain (https://twitter.com/queer_britain), the UK’s national LGBTQ+ museum, during the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalization of homosexual acts in England and Wales (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Offences_Act_1967). Discouraged by the focus on male homosexuality and on legislation, he launched a bid to preserve histories that have been ignored or destroyed. If all goes well, the museum ...
Feb 11, 2019•14 min
In American history most often told, the vitality of Black activism has been obscured in favor of celebrating white-lead movements. In the 19th century, an enormous network of African American activists created a series of state and national political meetings known as the Colored Conventions Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_Conventions_Movement). The Colored Conventions Project (http://coloredconventions.org) (CCP) is a Black digital humanities initiative dedicated to identifying...
Jan 28, 2019•16 min
Lana Pajdas (https://twitter.com/LanaPajdas) is the founder of Fun Museums (http://funmuseums.eu), a heritage and culture travel blog with a radical idea: museums are fun. It is the guiding principle of her museum marketing, consulting work (http://funmuseums.eu), and even her photographs (https://www.instagram.com/funmuseums). In this episode, Pajdas describes Heritage Sites in her native Croatia, from the interpretation of the 1991 Battle of Vukovar at the Vukovar Municipal Museum (https://en....
Jan 07, 2019•11 min
Barbara Hicks-Collins grew up in a Civil Rights house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_%22Bob%22_Hicks_House) in Bogalusa, Louisiana. In her family breakfast room in 1965, her father, the late Robert “Bob” Hicks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_%22Bob%22_Hicks), founded the Bogalusa chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justice). The armed self-defense force was formed in response to local anti-integration violence that th...
Dec 03, 2018•15 min
High in the Balkan mountains, Buzludzha monument is deteriorating. Designed to emphasize the power and modernity of the Bulgarian Communist Party (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7I65bs_HH4), Buzludzha is now at the center of a debate over how Bulgaria remembers its past (http://www.buzludzha-monument.com/archives/). Architect Brian Muthaliff (http://cargocollective.com/bmuthaliff) wants the building to evolve along with Bulgaria. His master’s thesis on Buzludzha describes a re-adaption of the ...
Nov 19, 2018•14 min
The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum (https://www.ahtahthiki.com/), on the Big Cypress Reservation in the Florida Everglades, serves as the public face of the Seminole Tribe of Florida (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/16). But the museum collaborates with the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office (http://www.stofthpo.com/) (THPO) next door to preserve the tribe's culture, working for and with the community through various shared projects. One of the projects is ca...
Nov 05, 2018•13 min
By day, Paula Santos (http://www.culturaconscious.com/about/) is Community Engagement Manager at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County_Museum_of_Art). By night, she hosts the excellent Cultura Conscious (http://www.culturaconscious.com) podcast. On Cultura Conscious, which just celebrated its one-year anniversary, Santos interviews cultural workers on their work with justice and equity. The discussions dive deep into what Santos calls the "nuts an...
Oct 15, 2018•10 min
The Jewish Museum of History in Sofia, Bulgaria (http://www.sofiasynagogue.com) is housed on the second floor of the Sofia Synagogue in the center of Bulgaria's capital, just steps away from an Orthodox Church, and Sofia's Mosque. This clustering of places of worship — it's hard to find another example of this in Europe — is part of the unique story of Jewish people in Bulgaria. While the museum tells the full story of the Jewish people in Bulgaria (http://www.sofiasynagogue.com/index.php?conten...
Oct 01, 2018•13 min
