Curator

Nick Martinez surveys the history of the relationship between museums and communities of color in the United States, particularly those identifying as Black and African American.

The authors compare the prevalence of LGBTQIA identities in the general public and the museum workforce with the lack of funding for exhibitions and programming around LGBTQIA topics.

Alice Anderson and Michelle Mileham’s Virtual Issue examines how museums have embraced people with different identities (or not) in the last few decades.

Cataloging an evolving definition for museums and what that could mean for the future of ICOM’s new definition.

The museum field has addressed illness, disability, death, and overall health with a variety of techniques.

Whether museums want it to be or not, their audiences are composed of diverse social categories that must be embraced and represented.

In July 2019, Curator: The Museum Journal published a special issue called Sonic. As part of that issue, we explored our archives and uncovered seven papers where sound experience in museums was a central subject of scholarly study. These papers were made open access from July 1st, 2019 – December 31st, 2019.

I saw the first major survey of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s work at an exhibition organized by the Hirshhorn in Washington D.C., at the end of 2016. The talk of the exhibition was Woman in E (2016), featuring a succession of live performers rotating through a perpetual strumming of that single note on an electric guitar.

As a museum educator who has spent two decades thinking about object-based education, I found the shift to children’s museums challenging. Where are the objects? Why is this a museum? What allows us to claim special educational status for these charming play spaces? To find answers, I turned to the literature. This virtual issue contains findings of my search: nine articles, selected from the Curator archives, on the topic of children’s museums.

Beverly Sheppard, Marsha Semmel, and Carol Bossert David Wildon Carr (1945–2016) was recognized in the international cultural community as a scholar and instigator whose critical thinking challenged museum practitioners to reflect on the purpose and responsibility of their work. In his recent papers and lectures, he argued that those discussing museum experiences are late to enter into a dialogue already in progress—a dialogue which carefully considers the whole person in a community, and wherein thinking with a museum is an enterprise embedded in the learner’s experience.