The Civic Value Of Museums

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This call to action from AAM's Museums and Community Initiative challenges museums to pursue their potential as active, visible players in community life. Essays and reflections offer food for thought on the complex process of changing the terms of engagement between communities and museums.

Museums have long sought to maintain relevance in the daily lives of their communities. Over the past several decades, museums have shifted, as a field, from a focus on collections to a focus on connecting with audiences. More recently, museums must confront political polarization and a decreasing sense of trust in nearly every public institution. As a result, few institutions are better positioned to serve the country than museums. In fact, polls show that museums rank among the most trusted institutions in the country, regardless of political belief. During tumultuous times, this trust means that museums have a unique and important responsibility to fulfill their civic mission. A century ago, John Cotton Dana argued that the most important thing a museum can do is “produce a public benefit.” The Civic Mission of Museums argues that museums play an essential role in the cultivation of engaged and informed citizens. The book outlines a spectrum of civic learning that includes: civic knowledge, civic mindset, civic skillset, and civic action. It offers concrete examples of impactful civic programming, exhibits, and public engagement from a diverse set of museums. It ends with a practical toolkit, gleaned from across the country, for museum professionals to utilize.

In today’s diverse societies, museums are the primary institutions within the public sphere in which individuals can both engage critical thought and celebrate community. This volume uses the lens of rhetoric to explore the role these societal repositories play in establishing and altering cultural heritage and national identity. Based on fieldwork conducted in over sixty museums in twenty-two countries across six continents, Museum Rhetoric explores how heritage museum exhibits persuade visitors to unite their own sense of identity with that of the broader civic society and how the latter changes in response. Elizabeth Weiser examines what compels communities, organizations, and nations to create museum spaces, and how museums operate as sites of both civic engagement and rhetorical persuasion. Moving beyond rhetorical explorations of museums as “memory sites,” she shows how they intentionally straddle the divides between style and content, intellect and affect, and unity and diversity, and why their portrayal of the past matters to civic life—and particularly studies of nationalism—in the present and future. Deeply researched and artfully argued, Museum Rhetoric sheds light on the public impact of cultural and aesthetic heritage and opens avenues of inquiry for scholars of museum studies and public history.

The Value of Museums makes the case that the niche museums has always been public well-being. This guide shows museums how to assess and communicate that essential public value.

This research project seeks to understand how the Departments of Education and Public Programs in three art museums across Spain and the U.S are changing to promote equitable dialogue, collaboration, and programming that is relevant to citizen and community organizations. The aims of this project are to identify the differences and commonalities of the emerging practices in each cultural institution, to engage in a cross-cultural dialogue about the strategic lines that the museums have developed in both countries, and to disseminate the outcomes of this research to art education and art administration communities globally. There are two main reasons for the development of this research. Firstly, I believe this research is timely for the current museum education field in US and in Spain as in both countries visitor-oriented trends in cultural institutions are gaining presence and relevancy across practitioners and academics. This is of major importance for the field of museum studies and also for art education. There are crucial conversations and debates taking place in US and Spain around issues of civic engagement and equity. These dialogues are mainly being sprouted by civic organizations and grassroots movements that are showing a deep understanding of the transient, multi-cultural, intersectional nature of our society today. I believe citizen movements are reaching a mature state, but is seems to me that some institutions, governmental and otherwise, are not rising to the occasion. In this context, if museums do not pay attention to the current conversations, they risk becoming irrelevant, not mattering to the people, become outdated in their representation of a society that was, but that no longer exists. Relevance is at stake. Secondly, my professional experience working in participatory arts and social practice in a project-based fashion has allowed me to have a vast and varied experience in program design and implementation as well as has taught me that there is just so much that can be achieved through temporary collaborations. For this reason, I am presently interested in the ways that collaborative work amongst cultural intuitions and civic organizations can be founded on non-hierarchical and long-lasting sustainable relationships as we as in the risks this entails. Moreover, I have been attentive to the current adoption of skills native to the fields of participatory arts and social practice by museums as abilities desired and needed in the positions responsible for the development of collaborative practices in the cultural institutions. This project has been guided by the following research questions: • What is, in the eyes of museum professionals, the emerging role of the art museum of the 21st century? • What strategies are three Departments of Education and Public Programs across Spain and the US developing to foster civic engagement? • What determines successful participation in each context and what conflicts have manifested? Moreover, in my data collection I have also paid special attention to the following categories: Strategies, Work Culture, and Nature of Collaborations. In Strategies I look at the methods, programs and strategies developed in order to promote and sustain partnership and collaboration. In Work Culture, I focus on the shifts that, influenced by the development of collaborative practices, are taking place in the mission, internal organization, and job descriptions within Departments of Learning and Public Programs. Lastly, in Nature of Collaborations I pay attention to the ways in which museum staff and community members experience collaboration and what they identify as successes and challenges. As a way to explore and analyze the experiences of professionals and collaborators at each of the three museums, I employed a case study methodology. For collecting data, a residency of three to seven days was accomplished at each of the three participating museums: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid, Spain), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, U.S), and Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (Santa Cruz, U.S). At each museum, interviews with staff from the Departments of Education and Public Programs were recorded on video or audio. Data were also collected using photography and journal reflections. The result of this project is this website that represents the interviews, excerpts from video and audio interviews, a description of the research project, and conclusions. The reasons for choosing these museums are multiple. Firstly, I believe a portion of US and Spanish art museums are going through a similar moment in their history in which collaborating with civic organizations is opening the path for testing the role of these cultural institutions as social agents as well as for democracy experimentation. Secondly, these museums are very different in size, nature, and location. This diversity has promoted the gathering of a wide representation of museums which I believe has strengthen the final aim of Becoming Civic Museums which is to create international dialogue around the various visitor-oriented strategies that art museums are implementing in US and Spain. Lastly, this selection supports my intention of collecting ideas, experiences and opinions from practitioners and community members in this online platform with the hope it will work as a handbook of practices and also as inspiration for students, academics and practitioners in the field worldwide. Lastly, in my conclusions I determine that each of the participating museums is facing a similar challenge of creating ways to place the experience and participation of diverse audiences, community groups, and activists at the forefront of their agenda. These cultural institutions attempt to accomplish this aim through the creation of stable and equal relationships which collaterally question the structural functioning of the organization, its power as an institution, and its potentials to be a transformative social agent. Ideas such as educating the institution, relationship building, care, and new methods of assessment are common values and concepts that all participating museums are questioning and addressing.

This book presents a critical analysis of the power and opportunity created in the implementation of community engaged practices within art museums, by looking at the networks connecting art museums to community organizations, artists and residents. The Art Museum Redefined places the interaction of art museums and urban neighbourhoods as the central focus of the study, to investigate how museums and artists collaborate with residents and local community groups. Rather than defining the community solely from the perspective of a museum looking out at its audience, the research examines the larger networks of art organizing and creative activism connected to the museum that are active across the neighbourhood. Taylor's research encompasses the grassroots efforts of local groups and their collaboration with museums and other art institutions that are extending their reach outside their physical walls and into the community. This focus on social engagement speaks to recent emphasis in cultural policy on cultural equity and inclusion, creative place-making and community engagement at neighbourhood and city-levels, and will be of interest to students, scholars and policy-makers alike.

American art museums of the Gilded Age were established as civic institutions intended to provide civilizing influences to an urban public, but the parochial worldview of their founders limited their democratic potential. Instead, critics have derided nineteenth-century museums as temples of spiritual uplift far removed from the daily experiences and concerns of common people. But in the early twentieth century, a new generation of cultural leaders revolutionized ideas about art institutions by insisting that their collections and galleries serve the general public. Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era tells the story of the civic reformers and arts professionals who brought museums from the realm of exclusivity into the progressive fold of libraries, schools, and settlement houses. Jeffrey Trask's history focuses on New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which stood at the center of this movement to preserve artifacts from the American past for social change and Americanization. Metropolitan trustee Robert de Forest and pioneering museum professional Henry Watson Kent influenced a wide network of fellow reformers and cultural institutions. Drawing on the teachings of John Dewey and close study of museum developments in Germany and Great Britain, they expanded audiences, changed access policies, and broadened the scope of what museums collect and display. They believed that tasteful urban and domestic environments contributed to good citizenship and recognized the economic advantages of improving American industrial production through design education. Trask follows the influence of these people and ideas through the 1920s and 1930s as the Met opened its innovative American Wing while simultaneously promoting modern industrial art. Things American is not only the first critical history of the Metropolitan Museum. The book also places museums in the context of the cultural politics of the progressive movement—illustrating the limits of progressive ideas of democratic reform as well as the boldness of vision about cultural capital promoted by museums and other cultural institutions.