Museum Relationships

Article #57 -- Partnerships in Museums: A Tribal Maori Response to Repatriation by Paul Tapsell

This article honestly made me think more about the stucture of this class more than the actual relationships of museums with the public. The article made a good point - know your audience, know what is going to be important to them. In the case of these indigenous tribes, they really wanted to know that their objects, traditions, and histories were being respected. So an up-close-and-personal partnership with the indigenous people is something that is important, especially for this museum.

The Auckland Museum was a good example in itself to use and articulate this point.  So that got me thinking... and I think it would make sense to go museum by museum, using different institutions as examples to drive a certain point or explore a certain topic as you go through this course (I'm thinking for future classes, of course). These articles in Museum Studies do that somewhat, but I had the thought that it would be cool and engaging to go museum by museum. For example one museum could have a history of being extremely pedagogical in their approach. Discuss - is this good? when is it good, when is it bad? talk about curators who don't have good stewardship over the history they are displaying/representing, and other curators that do. Another could be a good example of a museum that has a very specific acquisition policy, and follow their specific process of bringing in new works. We sort of talked about that last time we met.. you gave examples of how things happened in museums you have worked in. That helped me a lot to bring some of these principles to life.

For example the Auckland Museum had a specific and unique set of characteristics that made it useful for driving the point of needing to establish connection between the museum and the society it represents. Going through the semester, highlighting the most important things to know about museums in general.

An example of engaging the class in their own research: "Next week we're going to be learning about the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Your homework is to go on the website and find as many distinctive characteristics of this particular museum as possible. Bring them into class on Monday, and we'll see what trends you identify." They can try and guess what you are going to highlight by researching the museum and identifying what is does well, or what it does poorly, or what it does because of its unique society. Then as the teacher on Monday you could reveal what type of museum or characteristics the IMA is a good example of, and give the students more information than they could have found just on the website. Throughout the semester you could, as a class, visit one or two museums that you have learned about in class.

I'm sure that my theory has holes, but it just came to me that going institution by institution would be more exciting for me than reading museum peoples' theories (often they seem to be theories), and trying to read between the lines about what this means for museums in general.

Would love to hear your thoughts tomorrow when we meet. :)
Til then!
J