Museopunks

On September 11, 2018, the Board of Directors of the Mountain-Plains Museums Association unanimously voted to require that any jobs or paid internships posted to the MPMA Job Bank would include the level of compensation– whether salary or hourly rate. The MPMA’s move was in line with a move by a number of museum associations to end salary cloaking, or the habit of hiding compensation levels rather than being transparent about them at the start of the hiring process.

In this episode, we’re joined by Will Stoutamire and Lauren Hunley (both on the Board of the MPMA), and Michelle Epps, President of the National Emerging Museum Professionals Network, for a discussion about salary transparency in the museum field–what it it, why it matters, and why your institution should be disclosing salaries early and often.

In early 2019, experience designer Ed Rodley asked the hivemind what they saw as the biggest issues facing ppl who make museum experiences in 2019? The answer from Jay Rounds, E. Desmond Lee Professor of Museum Studies emeritus at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, was “A surfeit of virtues.” Rounds proposed that, “There are so many demands for what an exhibit ought to be or do, or how it should be made, that they can paralyze us. Many of these demands seem virtuous in isolation, but some are in conflict with others, and it is impossible to do all of them at once and end up with an exhibit worth visiting. But we have no overarching principle for prioritizing among them, and thus we become so dedicated to being virtuous that we forget how to be good.”

In this episode, Museopunks explores this idea of the surfeit of virtues with both Rodley and Rounds, and discovers a moment of paradigmatic change in museums within the USA.

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OF/BY/FOR ALL is a global movement and a set of tools to help community institutions around the world become more representative OF and co-created BY their communities. In this episode, we’re joined by OF/BY/FOR ALL founder Nina Simon and Rohini Kappadath, General Manager of Immigration Museum (Australia), to find out how to create a museum for everyone.

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Museum collections in established institutions come with long histories. So how do you change a museum’s canon? In this episode, we speak with Christopher Bedford, the Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director of The Baltimore Museum of Art, about the BMA’s decision in early 2018 to deaccession seven works by blue chip artists in the contemporary collection in order to strengthen its holdings of contemporary works by women and artists of colour.

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Since the mid-1990s, it has been received wisdom that museums are, or should be, “safe spaces for unsafe ideas.” But is this true? Are museum safe spaces? And do they really deal in unsafe ideas? In this episode, Elaine Heumann Gurian, who is credited with first expressing this idea, helps us unpack whether it continues to make sense in museums today.

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How can museums participate in transitional justice, which seeks to address massive human rights violations? In this episode, Suse is joined by Omar Eaton-Martínez and Dr. Karine Duhamel to explore the implications of truth and reconciliation in museums. Dr Duhamel has written that reconciliation “as a process based on hope, remains the core animating principle of a collection of stories that brings together the importance of Indigenous worldviews, the need to acknowledge violations as shared history, and the priority we place on empowering communities to share their stories.” In a time when truth has been greatly complicated by politics, there is still significant value in the act of truth-telling.

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In this special two-part episode, Suse and special guest co-host Desi Gonzales, explore virtual reality in museums. In part two, we take a deep dive into Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s academy-award winning virtual reality installation CARNE y ARENA with VR film-maker Paisley Smith.

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Museopunks is presented by the American Alliance of Museums.

If there is a hot technology in museums right now, it is virtual reality–a technology sometimes credited as being the “ultimate empathy machine.” But can VR live up to the hype for museums? What happens when VR technologies are used to recreate or invoke traumatic experiences? What kinds of scaffolding do museums need to provide when preparing a visitor for these kinds of embodied experiences? And how can museums use VR promote representation and inclusion?

In this special two-part episode, Suse and special guest co-host Desi Gonzales, explore the realities of working with the virtual. In part one, Michael Haley Goldman speaks on the prototyping being done at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to experiment with VR, while Kai Frazier discusses the work she is doing with her VR start-up CuratedXKai to provide inclusive opportunities and increased exposure in cultural settings for people of colour.

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Museopunks is presented by the American Alliance of Museums.

With a reticence towards partisan politics, museums are sometimes perceived to be neutral institutions, many avoiding taking a visible stand on issues. But can they really avoid being political when making choices about the allocation of resources, time, and energy? #MuseumsAreNotNeutral is “an initiative that exposes the fallacies of the neutrality claim and calls for an equity-based transformation of museums.” In this episode, LaTanya S. Autry and Mike Murawski break down the #MuseumsAreNotNeutral campaign, while Kaywin Feldman, Nivin and Duncan MacMillan Director and President of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), discusses what it’s like to run a museum at a time of crisis.

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Museopunks is presented by the American Alliance of Museums.

Graphic Design of the Museopunks logo is by Selena Robleto.

Website: Museopunks.org

Twitter: @museopunks

The vision of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine, describes how the museum “will reflect and realize the values of decolonization in all of its practices, working with the Wabanaki Nations to share their stories, history, and culture with a broader audience.” But what does it take to decolonise a museum? How does it change the governance structure and the practices of the board? What kinds of frameworks and internal work are necessary to shift the balance of authority within the institution, and turn theory into actionable change?

In this episode of Museopunks, Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, President & CEO of the Abbe Museum, delves into the complexities of decolonisation.

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