WestMuse Blog

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December 10, 2009
by Megan McIntyre

White Chocolate Bread Pudding at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA. Photo by Joanne G. on Yelp.

I love going to museums - who doesn’t? One thing about many museum trips that I have come to love is the food and dining experience. The bread pudding at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the view during brunch at the Wichita Art Museum, a fabulous...
December 9, 2009
This is the second part of a multi-part video series documenting our October 25 pre-conference workshop on visitor comfort at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park, San Diego.
Participants role-played as visitors with either learning differences or physical disabilities. They based their roles on brief, half-page profiles, written by Paul Gabriel (differences) and Beth Katz (disabilities...
December 2, 2009
From disease and death to land loss and forced subjugation, native museums often have the daunting task of exploring difficult issues and events. Too often, as museum planners and exhibit designers, we talk around these subjects without fully confronting them. Three museum professionals from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. and Bishop Museum and 'Iolani Palace in...
November 25, 2009
This is the third and final in a series of posts.  Read Part I and Part II.
Interviews
During the course of this project, I conducted a series of interviews with administrative and/or front-line educational staff at most of the science centers I visited.  The interviews allowed me to gauge professionals’ everyday awareness of gender dynamics, as well as informally assess their knowledge of...
November 23, 2009
This is Part II of a series.  Read Part I.
Methods
My examination of museums and science centers took me to science museums and centers of varying sizes in both Northern and Southern California.
In order to obtain a representative sampling of California’s diverse museums, I visited seven science centers of varying scales, geography, and foci, ranging from tiny suburban science centers to the...
November 21, 2009
By Stephanie Weaver
On Sunday, October 25 WMA held a pre-conference workshop at San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts called "Getting Comfortable with Visitor Comfort." The goal of the workshop was to help participants and the museum assess how the museum's experience met visitors' comfort needs, and therefore was an experience they might want to repeat. The facilitators (in alpha order) were...
November 19, 2009
By Leslie Madsen-Brooks
This series of three posts draws on research I originally undertook in 2001 and 2002.  It is a distillation of a much longer paper; if you’re interested in a literature review, a description of my research methods, more details from interviews, and deeper background on the topic, visit Museum Blogging.  For the purposes of the paper I was writing, I interviewed many...
November 18, 2009
By Michelle Maxwell
The gardens at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, OK

Recognized as one of the nation’s premier museums, Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum features some of the finest and most-renowned collection of art, artifacts, and historical archives that document and depict the American experience. The Museum is a national treasure that generations of supporters have been proud to call their own.
I...

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