One Of The Most Famous Prison Museums Addresses The Mass Incarceration Crisis
The Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, built in 1829, gets hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. “Talking about the
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Author: ArtsJournal Issues
This Museum Handles One Of The World’s Touchiest Subjects
“How do you memorialize a holocaust that even now, seven decades after it took place, may still not be entirely safe to talk about?” India’s Partition Museum, which opened in 2017 in Amritsar, in Punjab state and hard by the border with Pakistan, uses documents, photographs, and eyewitness testimony — carefully — to do the […]
The Campaign Against Sackler Family Cash In The Arts World May Have Reached A Turning Point
“The debate over how organizations should handle donations from members of the Sackler family has intensified in recent weeks after the revelation that specific individuals like Richard, former chairman and president of Purdue Pharma, played a f…
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Were The Arts Impacted By The American Government Shutdown?
Bob Lynch tries To Add it up: “A specific example of the chilling effect of the shutdown’s impact on arts organizations and local businesses comes again from the Smithsonian, which reportedly lost $1.5 million in revenue during the first 10 days of the shutdown. According to the Secretary of the Smithsonian David Skorton, the roughly […]
English Arts Orgs Are Becoming A Bit More Diverse, But Too Slowly: Report
“An annual statistical report, published on Tuesday by Arts Council England (ACE), showed slow progress in representation of people from a black and minority ethnic (BME) background, and barely any progress in the area of disabled employees.R…
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With Arrival Of Social Justice And Inclusion Movements, Museums Have To Question Everything About Themselves
“Recently, activists have begun to apply increasing pressure on a number of leverage points in museum systems: leadership and curatorial staff, financial backers, and the institutions’ narrative habits, as well as the provenance of institu…
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Classic Hubris? The Rise And Fall Of The Newseum
“The distress sale of its building to Johns Hopkins University … has become a cautionary tale of bloated budgets and unrealized ambition. The museum has been weighted down by crushing debt and beset by management upheaval, and its downfall has long been foretold, but it is still a gut punch to an industry labeled the […]
First Issue: When A Museum Wants To Be Relevant To Its Community – What Does Relevance Mean?
“Our breakthrough moment was when we took ownership of the fact that we didn’t need to write a “social impact statement” (which might be seen as competing with our mission statement). Rather, we simply needed to articulate the problem our community is facing that we are uniquely suited to address, the best solution we believe […]
Americans For The Arts Expands Programs For Cultural Equity And Diversity In Arts Leadership
This year the organization will extend its 25-year-old Diversity in Arts Leadership program beyond New York City to New Jersey and Iowa,
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‘Unnerving Kitsch’: The Problem With The New KGB Museum In New York
The flyer says the place offers a “journey back to socialism.” You can get a picture taken in an old restraining chair, or at a commissar’s desk in his coat; you can dial-a-dictator on an old rotary phone and hear Stalin or Brezhnev give a speech. It’s all “blithely morally neutral,” writes Masha Gessen. “In […]