July 15

Today we just had a short class session centered on innovation in the museum world. We spent the first hour of class hearing about the different places people traveled and some of their experiences. A significant portion of our cohort had spent the weekend in Brussels or Paris. As a group, we talked a lot about some of the patterns of gentrification and racialization of homelessness in the context of these two cities. Many of us noticed that the homeless population seemed to be predominantly people of color and in areas that were outside of the city center. I think it is a trend that we see in Seattle, but it is definitely more prominent and visible to the public in Europe. The amount of people that were rough sleeping or selling things on the street to make any form of money was a little bit astonishing.

After we spent about an hour discussing and debriefing the weekend, we moved onto the second hour of discussing the three readings that were assigned for class. My favorite reading out of the three was the last one that was assigned that centered around getting stagnant museums to be more progressive. The article talked a lot about how the fact that museums tend to be stagnant is in part due to the fact that there is an understanding of a false political and power structure within the museum that prevents them from implementing progressive ideas. This idea that museums believe that cannot change things limits their ability to act as agents of positive social change. Museums need to shift their focus towards being human-centered, community based and focus on the decolonization of their work.

Our group also got into a discussion of some of the challenges that exist in the context of changing this narrative. One of the biggest ones that we identified was the challenge behind empowering museum employees to push forward with progressive ideas and present them to museum administration. We also wondered if museum employees were already trying to do this, or if it was curators and museum administration who were pushing or not pushing progressive ideas through. I don’t think that there is probably a single answer in how to best empower museum employees to push forward innovative and progressive ideas. I think the first step to really reshaping the narrative around political and administrative culture in museums is to have an administration that clearly supports and respects idea generation from all levels of the museum. In that case, it may help to empower employees to share their ideas because they know they will be listened to and that some of their ideas may even be implemented.

When we came back together as a class, one of the ideas that came out of the discussion surrounding these articles was how we define success in a museum. Someone with a traditional view of this metric might argue that it is the number of people buying tickets and visiting the museum. However, this does not measure the experience that these individuals have inside the museum, which I would argue is a far more important metric of success and one that is incredibly difficult to track. It isn’t practical to have everyone fill out a survey at the end of their museum visit, nor will the response rate probably be that good. While there may not be an immediate and obvious answer to measuring the success of a museum, questioning and rethinking the ways that we measure success is a start in the right direction to measuring success in a more meaningful way.