Beyond Economic Impact: Are We Building Sustainable Museums?

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Maryland’s new museum economic impact study raises important questions about workforce compensation, organizational sustainability, and public value.

The Maryland Museums Association recently released its Economic Impact Study of Maryland Museums, prepared by Parker Strategy Group using data from fiscal year 2025. It’s an impressive report that provides museum advocates with valuable evidence of the contributions museums make to Maryland’s economy. The report also includes case studies of four museums and recommendations for strengthening the field.

But what caught my attention wasn’t the economic impact figures. It was the report’s discussion of three issues that deserve greater attention from museum boards, staff, funders, and policymakers: the challenges of building and retaining a professional workforce, the financial vulnerability of museums, and the importance of demonstrating public value beyond economic activity.

These issues are closely connected. Museums cannot fulfill their missions without capable people, sustainable organizations, and meaningful relationships with the communities they serve.

Are We Investing in the People Who Make Museums Work?

One of the report’s most troubling findings concerns compensation and career advancement. Drawing on national workforce studies and interviews with museum professionals, it describes a field struggling to retain experienced employees and develop its next generation of leaders.

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Beyond Mary Surratt: Interpreting the Women Who Shared Her House

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Surratt House Museum, Clinton, Maryland.

How do you interpret a historic house associated with a well-known woman while also telling the stories of the other women who lived and worked there?

At the Surratt House Museum in Clinton, Maryland, the question is particularly interesting. Mary Surratt is infamous for her involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, but that story largely unfolded elsewhere. By 1864, Mary had moved to a boardinghouse she owned in Washington, D.C., and rented the Maryland property to tavernkeeper John Lloyd. The Washington boardinghouse became a meeting place for John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators. The Maryland house played a different role: weapons and other supplies were hidden there and retrieved by Booth and David Herold as they fled Washington after the assassination.

Our guide made that distinction clear. Booth never entered the house, and we were essentially told to “check your Booth at the door.” Instead, the tour concentrated on the house and the people who had lived and worked there.

Mary and her husband, John, lived here with their children from 1852 to 1864. Their home also operated as a tavern, post office, polling place, and lodging place for travelers. In addition, the Surratts enslaved men, women, and children whose labor supported both the household and its businesses. The tour was most effective when it used the house itself to show how differently women experienced the same place.

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Taking the 19th-Century Cast Hall Into the 21st Century?

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I recently organized a field trip for the Museum Studies Program at George Washington University to take students back into the history of museums and its potential future. We visited the temporary studio of George Morton, an artist in residence at the the National Gallery of Art and Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, who is exploring the use of 3D printing to “activate the collections” and “look at collections anew.”

Cast court at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC ca 1920. The frieze from the Parthenon survives.

Morton is an accomplished painter who has been investigating the history of cast halls, once a familiar feature of art museums and art schools. During the nineteenth century, institutions purchased plaster casts of important sculptures so that students could study works they might never have an opportunity to see in person. The casts were used to teach drawing, painting, and art history, allowing students to learn by closely observing works by recognized masters.

The Corcoran itself once had an extensive cast collection. Like many such collections, however, it largely disappeared in the early twentieth century as museums and schools increasingly favored original works of art over reproductions. A few major cast collections survive. In the United States, one of the most extensive can be found at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, while the Victoria and Albert Museum in London preserves two monumental Cast Courts.

Morton is now asking whether 3D scanning and printing might offer a contemporary version of the cast hall.

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Finding Mary Williams: A Providence Tour That Asks Different Questions

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Mary Williams exhibit at the Rhode Island Historical Society’s John Brown House Museum. Photograph courtesy of Ken Turino.

How can a historic site interpret a woman when no diary, letters, or other substantial body of her writing survives? While attending the joint AASLH/NCPH conference in Providence, Rhode Island, I joined a three-site tour, Mary Williams, Making History in Providence, that demonstrated one approach: return to the available evidence and ask different questions of it.

Historian Charlotte Carrington-Farmer led the tour with National Park Service Ranger Andrew Schnetzer. We began at the Rhode Island Historical Society’s John Brown House Museum, where we viewed an exhibit Carrington-Farmer created from her research into Mary’s life—the first public history exhibit to tell Mary’s story. From there, we traveled to the Charter Museum at the Rhode Island State House and then to Roger Williams National Memorial, which encompasses part of the original settlement, including the Williams house lot and the site where Roger was first buried. Together, the three sites helped us explore the Providence Mary knew.

Banished from Massachusetts Bay for his religious dissent, Roger Williams founded Providence in 1636 as a place offering greater religious liberty. Mary Williams was his wife of nearly half a century and often headed their household during his long absences. Historical accounts of Providence and Rhode Island have long focused on Roger’s ideas and accomplishments. That emphasis has left Mary at the edges of the story, in part because most of the surviving documents concern him.

The absence of Mary’s own writings does not mean there is little to say about her. The problem may not be missing evidence but the questions historians have asked of it. What I found most important about the tour was seeing Charlotte put that idea into practice. She had not discovered a new collection of Mary’s papers. Instead, she approached familiar records with questions centered on Mary rather than Roger.

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Field Notes: Shifting the Narrative at the Portland Art Museum

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I recently visited the Portland Art Museum following the completion of its major renovation, which connected its two historic buildings with a new central Mark Rothko Pavilion as its main entrance. Among the exhibitions that caught my attention was Shifting the Narrative: 21st Century Acquisitions, which provides an unusually direct look at how a museum is reconsidering the interpretation of Native American art through collecting, exhibitions, and relationships with Native artists and communities. The Portland Art Museum holds more than 3,500 Native American objects representing approximately 200 Indigenous cultural groups throughout the Americas.

Opened in November 2025, Shifting the Narrative is partly an exhibition about art and partly an exhibition about changing museum practice. The temporary exhibition includes both contemporary and historical works in photography, sculpture, fashion, basketry, painting, and printmaking. Organized chronologically by acquisition period, the exhibition begins with its collecting of Native American art in 1918, with major additions of Northwest Coast objects in 1948. It then turns to its efforts to actively expand the collection through contemporary acquisitions since 2000 to better reflect the region and amplify diverse Native voices, including Wendy Red Star, Will Wilson, and Julie Buffalohead.

The second half of the exhibition focuses on the history of the museum itself. It outlines the museum’s relationships with artists, visitors, students, and Native communities. It initially acquired works as opportunities arose, then in 1991 created a dedicated curator of Native American art, which help build relationships with contemporary artists. A diagram shows how the collection grew and changed over time, including through sale and repatriation. This section of the exhibition also invites visitors to discuss their experiences with Native American art and test their knowledge of Native American art.

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Why Strategy Is Not a Long-Range Plan: The Big Idea in “Playing to Win”

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I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking and writing about mission statements, strategic plans, and how museums decide what matters most. One persistent problem is that cultural organizations are very good at identifying worthwhile things to do—and much less comfortable deciding what they won’t do. Reading A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin’s Playing to Win gave me another way to think about this problem. Their basic argument is deceptively simple: strategy is not a plan; it is an integrated set of choices.

That connects closely with something I’ve argued before on EngagingPlaces.net: a mission statement should do more than describe the work of an organization. Ultimately, we need to ask, “To what end?” Lafley and Martin push that question further with what they call a “winning aspiration.” For museums, I don’t think “winning” needs to mean beating another museum. It means being clear about the difference we intend to make—and for whom. A museum can have an admirable mission to preserve, educate, inspire, and serve the public, but those aspirations still don’t tell staff and board members what they should actually do Monday morning.

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Field Notes: Places of Pride at the Architectural Heritage Center

The main permanent exhibition at the Architectural Heritage Center in Portland, Oregon.

During a summer visit to Portland, Oregon, we stopped at the Architectural Heritage Center to conduct research but also visited their exhibitions, including When Doors Open: Places of Pride, which examined places associated with the city’s LGBTQ+ history. These places are often overlooked in museum exhibitions and historic preservation, which makes this exhibition especially useful as a reference for museums and historic sites thinking about how to interpret communities whose histories may be embedded in buildings, gathering places, businesses, and neighborhoods rather than conventional museum collections.

Opened in July 2025, Places of Pride explores the relationship among identity, place, and memory. The exhibition focuses on homes, gathering places, businesses, and other spaces that served not simply as physical settings but as places of belonging, support, activism, and community formation for LGBTQ+ Portlanders. It also highlights LGBTQ+ preservationists and activists who worked to protect buildings and places important to the city’s history.

The subject has a particularly strong connection to the Architectural Heritage Center itself. Its origins lie with Ben Milligan and Jerry Bosco, a gay couple who began collecting architectural elements salvaged from Portland buildings during the 1960s as professional partners. Together they accumulated stained glass, doors, hardware, tiles, mantels, lighting, and other architectural fragments while also acquiring and preserving historic properties. After both were diagnosed with AIDS in the 1980s, they developed plans for the Bosco-Milligan Foundation so that their collection could continue to support preservation education. The Architectural Heritage Center eventually opened to the public in 2005.

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The Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office: Choosing the Story This Place Can Tell

Museum entrance at street level with a reproduction of the original Missing Soldiers Office sign.

In 2013, Max and I visited the Washington building where Clara Barton had lived and worked during and immediately after the Civil War. At the time, its third floor was still being restored. The rooms were largely empty, the walls and floors exposed, and worktables and construction equipment reminded us that this nationally significant historic place had come remarkably close to disappearing.

Max wrote about that visit in “Sneak Peek at Clara Barton’s Office and Warehouse,” describing the discovery of the rooms and the materials that had survived in an attic crawl space for more than a century. The building had been slated for demolition when documents and other objects connected to Barton were found above the third floor. Their discovery eventually confirmed that these were the rooms where Barton had lived, stored supplies during the Civil War, and operated the Missing Soldiers Office.

I recently returned to see the completed Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum. Walking through the building brought back memories of that earlier visit, but it also raised a different question: What story should this particular place tell?

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Field Notes: “Experience Oregon” at the Oregon Historical Society

Most of us see only a small fraction of the exhibitions being produced by museums around the country. Experience Oregon, the permanent exhibition at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, offers one example of how a state history museum can combine collections, media, immersive environments, and interactive experiences to tell a broad and complicated story.

Opened in February 2019, Experience Oregon occupies the museum’s entire third floor and explores Oregon history from human settlement to the present. Rather than relying entirely on a chronological narrative, the exhibition makes connections across time through subjects such as home, movement, and water, while emphasizing the relationships among people, communities, and the land. More than 300 objects and archival materials from the Oregon Historical Society’s collections appear throughout the exhibition.

The exhibition offers many different ways to encounter that history. Visitors begin with a panoramic theater introducing Oregon’s landscapes, people, and major themes. Elsewhere they can walk through a covered wagon, explore maps, listen to personal narratives, encounter historic photographs and artifacts, participate in debates about historical issues, and learn about subjects ranging from Indigenous cultures and treaty-making (or treaty-breaking!) to migration, racism, immigration, civil rights, industry, transportation, politics, and social change. OHS described more than twenty interactive stations when the exhibition opened, including sensory experiences that use smells associated with salmon, hazelnuts, and wheat.

The exhibition was designed by The Design Minds and fabricated by 1220 Exhibits. Digital media is integrated throughout rather than concentrated in a single area. North Shore Productions developed the exhibition’s media, including the panoramic introductory film, archival documentaries, audio narratives, and a film about the revitalization of Chinuk Wawa. Upswell developed several of the interactive experiences, including map-based explorations, stations where visitors consider issues from Oregon’s past, and a digital “Memory Blanket” that allows visitors to assemble a personal record of their experience.

The exhibition received a 2020 Leadership in History Award from the American Association for State and Local History and a 2020 Special Achievement – Informed by Community Voices Award from the American Alliance of Museums.

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Rethinking Historical Significance at Historic Sites: More Than A Person, Event, or Design

Williams Avenue YWCA Branch building built in 1926. Courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society.

What makes a building important to a community? Sometimes it is place. Sometimes it is architecture. Sometimes it is the famous person who lived there or the event that happened there. But sometimes a building becomes important because people keep using it year after year, generation after generation, to meet the needs of their community. That is what happened at the building now known as the Billy Webb Elks Lodge in Portland, Oregon.

Built in 1926 as the Williams Avenue branch of the YWCA, the building has served Portland’s Black community for a century. During that time, the organizations occupying it and the activities taking place inside have changed repeatedly. But one thing has remained remarkably consistent: Black Portlanders have used the building as a place to gather, organize, advocate, celebrate, and care for one another.

Its story began before the building itself. In 1918, Cynthia A. Jenkins began the effort to establish a YWCA program for Portland’s Black women and girls. A branch finally opened in 1921, at a time when segregation and discrimination limited where Black Portlanders could live, work, socialize, and participate in civic life. Five years later, the YWCA opened a permanent building at Williams Avenue and Tillamook Street in Portland’s Albina neighborhood.

Although operated by the YWCA, the new building was never simply a place for women and girls. It included a gymnasium, auditorium and stage, lounge, and other spaces that allowed it to serve a much broader community. The branch provided programs for men and boys as well as women and girls. Community organizations held meetings. The NAACP gathered there. The building hosted interracial discussions and programs addressing civil rights.

That breadth of activity is important. In a segregated city, having a place to meet was itself significant. Black Portlanders were creating organizations and institutions to serve the needs of their community and the Williams Avenue YWCA became one of those places. Its role continued to evolve as the needs of the community changed.

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