Curator: The Museum Journal最新文献

The museum field currently and historically has centered on the needs of White, educated, privileged, and affluent people, and changing that reality requires new ways of conceptualizing, organizing, and assessing our core practices. Practice-based models—including specific stories of how museums and communities work together—are still needed in our field, both as guidance for structuring future projects and as inspiration for what is possible. We share a case study of a 10-year makerspace design process and identify key features for sustaining community–museum relationships over an extended period of work, which we call community-informed design. We describe five key aspects that promote sustainability in terms of community–museum relationships and the creation of high-quality experiences: naming values and assumptions, emergent planning, flexible and distributed staffing, organization-to-organization relationships, and layered data.

We do carry an impression of the places where we grow up or the places we touch in our daily life—somehow it gets mapped in our minds. That is how we create a sensory bonding with the place via our perception; how it smells, how it tastes, or what kind of a phonic place it is. But somehow, with the rapid pace of urbanization and mechanization of age-old occupations, these senses are being lost to the citizens in an urban area which we get to hear from our fore generations. “Tracing the everyday Sensory Heritage of Kolkata Streets”—“Sohorer Songbedon” is an attempt in a form of an exhibition from a group of enthusiastic geographers for the city of Kolkata (Calcutta) to bring back some iconic hereditary sounds and smells of the city to the mass. While visiting the exhibition, we interacted with the organizers and a group of visitors through some semi-structured interviews, and simultaneously some observations were also made. The purpose of the visit lied in experiencing how our city and its various pockets can emerge through its sensory scape without one being physically present there and also let the people know about such an initiative which was staged for the first time in the city. The aim was also to witness if these sensory components from the city perceptible could evoke any repercussions among the visitors or not. In museology, with the gaining importance of intangible expressions of heritage objects and interpretation of the visitors of the flowing information in the event, this one could have been used as a profound example of such kind in the future.

How do art museums illuminate patriarchal ideologies for the general public? In this article I share my experiences with critical pedagogies developed for the exhibition Like Betzy (2019–2020) by Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum (Northern Norway Art Museum). The art museum intervened in its exhibition and monuments in public spaces to attract engagement with local communities, critically question, and instigate dialogue and debate on the persistence of gender inequality. Using institutional critique as a theoretical and methodological framework, this analysis demonstrates a case of art museum activism. Additionally, I address the implications of transgression in the art museum's normative modus operandi. Although this case study is specific to a local context, I argue that monuments can serve as a site for public vulnerability, a place where museums step beyond their walls and outside their echo chambers to incite positive social justice-oriented changes in communities.

Invented by journalists, the “Bilbao effect” label has no clear meaning, but it undoubtedly refers to outwardly radiating waves of influence beyond the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Its architecture and urban impact, with trickle down economic returns, has drawn international attention and many emulators. Its museological novelties have inspired great changes in Spanish museums and in Basque cultural policies. However, the external effect of this institution beyond its headquarters should be tracked most particularly along the Abandoibarra district, which is now a thriving curatorial landscape, typifying an outdoors version of Svetlana Alpers's “museum effect.” Are we experiencing a paradigm shift? Outliving all sort of setbacks, the epitome of postmodern museums remains faithful to itself and new kinds of cultural clusters are being promoted beyond it. The current climate crisis has called into question previous assumptions of success based on massive international tourism, which is perhaps unsustainable. But the cultural district of Bilbao is booming and expanding down the Nervión river.

This study examines the history of legislation on the subject of curation in Israel and the state of the country's training programs for curators. Israel serves as a representative case study: While many museum activities and curatorial studies programs worldwide were initiated in order to ensure a trained museum staff, today, the scope of those who meet this criterion far exceeds the demand. Furthermore, as happened frequently in other countries, Israeli legislators in the 1980s did not understand that contemporary curation and museology are two very different fields, and a system to train the staff of museums was built together with the flourishing of contemporary curation. Hence, in legislation, these two fields are today bound together. This article builds on the Israeli case study to ask if separating these two fields will create more up-to-date programs.

With this issue, Curator: The Museum Journal has now implemented a policy requiring that all images contained in manuscripts published in our journal will require AltText descriptions in the main manuscript. The format for these descriptions should appear after figure location recommendations and figure captions in the main manuscript, indicated by capturing the beginning and end of the text with specific code for the typesetting team, and highlighting all text to be included in the HTML file in a red highlight as follows:

<alt text>Statue of Lincoln</alt text>

The guidelines for developing AltText can be found on the journal's Author Guidelines <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/21516952/homepage/forauthors.html> section of the website. This editorial provides a short description of the work that led to this new policy, the principles of access and inclusion that support this new policy, and offers detailed guidelines for authors to support their development of manuscripts.

Dixon, C.G., Hsi, S., Doren, S.V. (2022), Keeping voices in the room: Values clarification in codesign for equitable science and technology education. Curator: The Museum Journal, 66: 9–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12529

There was an error in omission in an acknowledgment that the material and publication is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2053160.

We apologize for this error.

This paper examines a collective identity shift among unionizing art museum workers. Pulling data from an action research study of museum union members, I argue that museum workers today are explicitly aligning themselves with working classes in building wall-to-wall labor unions and embracing the collective identity, or membership within the group, of “museum worker.” In analyzing this identity label, I draw from Bruce Lincoln's theories on discourse as a mechanism for constructing or dismantling affective social boundaries. The shift from “museum professional” to “museum worker” signifies a redefinition of creative labor and museum work rooted in cross-class solidarity and bears implications for effective grassroots organizing and coalition-building for institutional and social change.

We report on how we integrated smell into the classic children's story ‘The Three Little Pigs’ to enhance a public children's museum exhibition. The study employed Wenger's (1998) social theory of learning as its conceptual framework. It aimed to enhance children's sensory experience in a local Norwegian museum through a collaboration between academia and the industry. We used five abstract smells that were included in five wooden boxes and strategically placed around an adventure trail inside the museum (science factory). In this article, we reflect on the exhibition choices and findings, and recommendations for future children's exhibitions combining odors and narrative.