Community Development

By Mardi Maxwell
(Continued from: Engaging Senior Audiences- Part I: Community Profile)
At a time when the arts face new challenges, organizations are trying out new ways to increase and diversify their audiences. The Palo Alto Art Center (PAAC) recognized that building a senior audience took looking inside their programming and operations and ‘outside their four walls’ to create meaningful...
By Mardi Maxwell
What does it take for museums to engage senior audiences? And how should they go about developing and sustaining this relationship? With community research through John F. Kennedy University’s Museum Studies program, we are now one step closer to having answers to these questions.
In spring of 2015, graduate students, Betsy Ringrose, Christina Samore and Mardi Maxwell embarked on...
By Marianna Pegno, Marge Pellegrino, and Morgan Wells 
The Tucson Museum of Art (TMA) has partnered with the Hopi Foundation’s Owl & Panther Project for a program entitled Museum as Sanctuary (MAS). This program helps foster expressive arts healing through in-gallery and hands on art-making activities on Tuesday evenings throughout the academic school year. This is the fifth year that TMA has...
By John Bello
Community museums are part of a shift in the museum field where there is an emphasis on developing community connections and engaging with visitors in new and different ways. Organizations of all kinds are reaching out to community museums and seeking partnerships to help them connect with the people they serve. I am involved in one such partnership in Tempe, Arizona. The Tempe...
By Margaret Kadoyama
What does it mean to truly listen? And how does the answer to that question relate to our lives as museum professionals?
The theme of Western Museums Association 2015 Annual Meeting is Listen • Learn • Lead. It’s no coincidence that the first word in the theme is listen. Truly listening is at the core of our work with our internal and external communities. But what does this...
By Molly Billows
The Native Youth Program (NYP), currently in its 36th year, is the longest running Aboriginal public program at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology (MOA). Each summer the program brings together six urban Aboriginal youths from the Greater Vancouver area to develop and lead public tours in the museum.
This year the youths are giving tours of c̓əsnaʔəm: the...
By Katelyn Foley
Artist-In-Residence programs, in the traditional sense, exist to give time and space for artists to focus on creative enterprises. While many programs of this type continue to provide this opportunity for artists, museums and other cultural organizations are looking at the model as an audience engagement or educational outreach opportunity. I have had the opportunity to work on a...
By Reed Redman
The Seattle Art Museum’s (SAM) Remix is a popular event which takes place at our downtown location twice a year, and the Olympic Sculpture Park every summer. With humble beginnings, the event started with a grant from the Wallace Foundation to explore and engage audiences ages 18–34. The aim was to produce a program that shifted the audience’s experience of an art institution and...
By Dr. Jennifer Kramer
On April 7, 2015 I participated in an author panel discussion called “Writing about First Nations” as part of the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia’s Read Local BC campaign. I am an associate professor in the department of anthropology and one of the curators responsible for the Pacific Northwest collections at the Museum of Anthropology at the University...
By Michaeleen Gallagher
When Sunnylands Center & Gardens opened to the public in 2012, the programs department was in uncharted waters. We had to build from the ground up. This created challenges both in being a new institution and wanting to be accessible and relevant to many audiences.
One area of particular concern was how to serve the young professionals in the desert. They occasionally...

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