Category Archives: Museum

The Women Who Shaped the Baltimore Museum of Art

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The BMA’s display evokes the Cone sisters’ Baltimore apartments, showing how they lived with art, furniture, and textiles they collected.

On a recent visit to the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), I encountered something I have seldom found in the art museums I visit: gallery labels devoted to the collectors whose choices helped build the institution. The collector labels I encountered all focused on women. They described women appraising antiques, buying from dealers, studying artists’ work, and assembling collections that became part of the BMA.

That attention matters for women’s history. These women helped determine what the museum would hold and what generations of visitors would see. The labels explain the knowledge and decisions behind their gifts, connecting women’s influence to the objects on display.

The Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta, receive particular attention through a display evoking their Baltimore apartments, with modern art alongside furniture, textiles, and personal possessions. The introductory label identifies Claribel as a physician and Etta as an accomplished musician. It also explains that each maintained her own finances and made her own purchasing decisions. The familiar name “Cone Collection” brings together the choices of two individuals.

Claribel acquired some of the collection’s best-known works. Looking at the BMA’s online records afterward, I found that she purchased Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude at auction in Paris in 1926.

Etta’s interest in artists’ creative processes informed her purchases of drawings, prints, and sculpture alongside paintings. She also acquired works by Matisse’s nineteenth-century predecessors to place his art in context.

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Beyond Economic Impact: Are We Building Sustainable Museums?

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Infographic displaying the total annual economic impact of Maryland's museums, highlighting $702.8M economic contribution, 4,495 jobs supported, $504.6M visitor-driven economic output, and $6.35 returned for every $1 spent.

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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Field Notes: Shifting the Narrative at the Portland Art Museum

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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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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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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Join Me in Providence at AASLH/NCPH 2026

I’ll be in Providence, Rhode Island, September 16–19 for the 2026 joint annual meeting of the American Association for State and Local History and the National Council on Public History. This year’s theme, The Work of Revolution, seems particularly apt at a moment when museums and public history organizations are reconsidering how we work, whom we serve, and how we sustain public trust.

I’ll be participating in several conversations during the conference, and I hope you’ll join me for one—or find me in the halls and say hello.

Wednesday, September 16, 5:30 p.m. — History Leadership Institute Reception

I’ll start the conference at the History Leadership Institute reception. If you’re curious about HLI, thinking about applying, or are one of its graduates, please join us. The reception is an opportunity to meet alumni, facilitators, current participants, and others interested in leadership in the history field.

HLI has long been one of the profession’s most distinctive opportunities to step away from day-to-day responsibilities and think more broadly about leadership, organizations, and the future of our field. I’m always glad to talk with people considering whether it might be right for them.

Thursday, September 17, 8:30 a.m. — Love the Mission, Fix the Job: Rethinking Museum Work

Thursday morning I’ll be part of a facilitated discussion about museum workplace culture. Debates about museum work have flourished online and through worker-led movements, while our formal professional literature has often struggled to keep pace.

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Beyond Chronology: Interpretation at History Museums in Switzerland

A period room at the Bern History Museum in Switzerland.

We recently returned from a two-week visit to Switzerland, where we visited more than fifty museums and historic sites across the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking regions. In the art museums of German-speaking Switzerland, I noticed a strong tendency to organize galleries around named private collections, or Sammlungen. In the history museums and historic sites, I noticed something different: interpretive practices in transition.

Some sites still rely on familiar approaches: chronological narratives, object identification, and basic descriptions of place. But many museums are clearly rethinking their exhibitions. They are experimenting with new interpretive layers, broader contexts, difficult histories, and more ambitious questions about identity, science, colonialism, and national memory.

The results are uneven, but they are worth attention. Swiss history museums seem to be moving beyond “what happened?” and “what is this object?” toward more complex questions: What systems produced this wealth? How did a person’s life connect to larger social and technological changes? How is national identity constructed? What should be done with inherited installations that no longer speak clearly to visitors?

For museum professionals elsewhere, the Swiss examples offer several useful lessons.

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Walking Through Two Eras at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio, following completion of its 2 Era Restoration. The project interprets both the Beecher family residence and the later Edgemont Inn period, revealing the building’s evolving role in the community across generations.

When I visited the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio this February, I expected to learn more about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s years in the city and how her experiences there influenced the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. What I did not expect was to come away thinking as much about the building itself as the woman who once lived there.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House recently completed what it calls a two-era restoration, interpreting both the Beecher family period (1840) and the later Edgemont Inn period (1940). At first, I wondered whether trying to tell two stories in one house might feel confusing. Instead, I found it to be one of the project’s greatest strengths.

The tour begins with Harriet Beecher Stowe, her family, and the Cincinnati she encountered in the 1830s and 1840s. Visitors learn about Lane Seminary, debates over slavery, the city’s free Black community, and the experiences that shaped Stowe’s understanding of freedom and injustice. These stories unfold in rooms restored to the Beecher era, allowing visitors to imagine the world she experienced as a young wife, mother, and writer living in Cincinnati.

What impressed me most, however, was how the restoration itself became part of the interpretation.

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Rethinking Board Governance in a Post-COVID World

At the recent Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums (MAAM) conference in Pittsburgh, I attended “Headwinds and Tailwinds: A Panel Discussion about the Financial and Operational Impacts on the Museum and Arts Management Field.” One of the panelists, Hayley Haldeman of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, offered particularly insightful observations about board governance in the post-COVID landscape. Her comments confirmed what many of us have observed firsthand—museum boards are facing more challenges and opportunities than ever before.

A Changing Landscape—But Familiar Structures

Despite the upheavals of recent years, Haldeman noted that few organizations have made major changes to their board structures. Most boards remain large, and many governance documents have yet to be updated. The notable exception has been a growing emphasis on board diversity—though progress toward real inclusion varies widely.

At the same time, museums are experiencing significant leadership transitions. Many long-serving executive directors have retired, while others are navigating the aftermath of the “Great Resignation,” which has affected both staff and board leadership. These changes can be destabilizing, but they also open the door for renewal.

New Pressures on Museums and Nonprofit Organizations

Board service today comes with new (and sometimes unexpected) responsibilities. Museums and other nonprofit organizations are grappling with a range of threats, both real and perceived:

  • Drops in individual giving and shifts in foundation priorities
  • Greater community expectations for accountability and transparency
  • Political and legal questions (e.g., DEAI initiatives, exhibition content)
  • Cybersecurity and AI-related risks

Meanwhile, board members are harder to recruit and retain. COVID-19 reshaped personal and professional priorities, making time an even scarcer resource. For organizations, that means it’s harder than ever to fill board seats, onboard new members, and keep them engaged—especially when board work happens virtually.

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