The Future of Museums

Introduction

Visitors line up to enter the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington on its opening day in 2016. During its first year, the museum drew almost 3 million people, many attending a museum for the first time. (Getty Images/The Washington Post/Marvin Joseph)

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Overview

Lonnie Bunch III took the top job at the Smithsonian Institution in June, overseeing a complex of 19 museums that includes one he created over the course of a decade. First as a virtual museum with traveling exhibits, then as a permanent facility that opened in September 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture welcomed nearly 3 million visitors, from sports stars to school groups, in its first full year. Many waited in lines to enter, and many were visiting a museum for the first time.1

The museum struck a chord because it celebrated black poets, politicians and musicians at a time when many Americans wanted to understand the history of slavery and racism. And it led to a surge in attendance at other black history museums. It “raised the bar of awareness around African American history and museums,” said Michael Boulware Moore, president of the International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C. “It just stimulated wanting to know more.”2

Bunch, who has worked as a historian, curator and college professor, is notable partly because he is the first person of color to lead the Smithsonian in its 173-year history.3

As he was making his way to the top of the institution, less tranquil transitions were taking place at another major museum.

Activists gather outside the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in May to demand the resignation of board Vice Chairman Warren Kanders, whose company manufactures tear gas for police departments and the military. Kanders resigned from the board after months of protests. (Getty Images/Corbis/Andrew Lichtenstein)

Protesters, including more than 100 employees, at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art demanded that the vice chairman of its board of trustees, Warren Kanders, resign. The protests centered on Kanders’ role as CEO of Safariland, a Florida company that manufactured tear gas used against immigrants and asylum seekers at the U.S. southern border. Eight artists withdrew their work from the Whitney's biennial exhibition. Kanders quit the board in late July.4

Over the past decade, protesters have targeted museums’ low wages, their support from oil companies and makers of opioid drugs and their display of artifacts that may have been looted or stolen from lands of origin. Some protesters have used museums as a sort of public square to stage their marches on climate change and other causes.5 The once-safe, quiet harbor of managing a museum has become a choppy sea of challenges and change.

Beset by changing consumer tastes and growing competition for time and donations, museums are starting to reinvent themselves to become more engaging and relevant. Their purposes have shifted and their funding sources have as well — but as they have done so, blockbuster exhibits and corporate and individual gifts are receiving increased scrutiny and in some cases antipathy. Museums feel a need to attract younger visitors and more diverse audiences, including some people who want entertainment more than education and culture.

“There's a lot of untapped audiences they could get,” says Anna Toledano, a Stanford University doctoral student who studies the past and future of natural history museums.

Many museum officials say they also feel a need to shift their focus on white, upper-middle-class and European-centric exhibits and perspectives to creative and engaging places where all feel welcome. So the Indianapolis Museum of Art installed a nearly 8-foot-tall plastic snail, artist-created mini-golf for children and a beer garden for adults.

The broader appeal is clear, but some critics say museums lose when they fail to show exhibits that challenge patrons, that “punch you in the stomach,” in the words of one such critic. “A museum's place is for people to experience provocation alongside pleasure,” Kriston Capps wrote in the Washington City Paper. 6

The Louvre in Paris, seen here in March, attracted more than 10 million people in 2018, making it the world's most visited museum. The Louvre uses digital tools and virtual reality to make its art collections more accessible. (Getty Images/Chesnot)

Daniel Weiss, president of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, spoke up for the traditional view when he wrote that protecting and preserving a museum's collection is central to its worth and mission — and that simply getting people through the door is an imperfect metric of success. “If all we're doing is pandering to the public, then we're not really respecting our mission,” he said.7

Many of these issues may be familiar to businesses grappling with changing demographics and demands for transparency and social responsibility. But museums are often grounded in history and permanence. This reality may make reinvention more difficult for institutions that pride themselves on caring for objects of antiquity and are led by people with a reverence for tradition.

Yet some museums are moving outside their comfort zones and creating date night or after-school drop-in opportunities — activities that go beyond their traditional role of gathering and preserving historically significant or worthwhile pieces. And some feel a responsibility to challenge their visitors.

“The museum doesn't have to just be a temple — it can be a forum where debate happens, where courageous conversations happen,” said Anne Pasternak, the first female director of the Brooklyn Museum. “We have a responsibility to correct histories and tell stories that are true to our very diverse audiences, stories that are celebratory, or that may even be difficult.”8

As recently as a decade ago, many museums forbade guests to take photos within their walls. That started changing as museums realized the value of Instagrammable images, says Toledano, the Stanford doctoral student. Still, she says, “museums are very slow-moving institutions…. Museums can definitely take more risks than they're taking.”

The world's best-known museums include the Louvre in Paris, home of Leonardo da Vinci's “Mona Lisa”; the British Museum in London, which houses 8 million objects of archaeology and antiquity; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Prado in Madrid, full of Spanish masters; and the Shanghai Museum, which features ancient Chinese art and furniture.9

Museum attendance is rising faster in China and other Asia-Pacific countries than in the United States or Europe, according to a 2017 report by the Themed Entertainment Association, a California-based industry group.10 The top 20 international museums drew 108 million attendees in 2018, virtually unchanged from a year earlier. This is much slower growth than major theme and water parks; five of the 20 largest museums saw guest counts slide by as much as 20 percent from 2017 to 2018.11 And more than 50 museums have closed in the past decade, most because of financial difficulties, reduced attendance or community support or increased competition for time and entertainment spending.

So when attendance at the Louvre jumped 25 percent in 2018 to a record 10.2 million, the world took note. Gains came after Beyoncé and Jay-Z filmed a critically acclaimed music video for their hit song “APESH*T.” The video, viewed more than 150 million times, showcased several of the museum's best-known pieces, including the “Mona Lisa.”12 Within a month, the Louvre added a 90-minute self-guided tour inspired by 17 of the “key works” featured by the superstar couple.13

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Driven by the quality and distinction of their collections, many museums have significantly better reputations than blue-chip companies such as Lego and Rolex, concluded Cees van Riel, a professor of corporate communication at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Holland. The Louvre, Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, lead with the best reputations, according to his research.14

Yet museums face social pressures, as well as scandals ranging from displaying art treasures looted by the Nazis to stolen or lost Russian and Cuban limousines and cars to accepting donations from companies that sell opioids.15 (See Short Feature.) Censorship can become an issue, such as when the Louvre canceled the display of a sexually explicit sculpture by Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout. The artwork seemed to show a man having sex with a four-legged creature, but the artist insisted it depicts man's interference with nature.16

Museums serve as memorials to death and destruction — the Holocaust or the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are notable examples — as well as tourist attractions, gathering places for the cultural set and beloved venues for class field trips and educational lectures. Museums remember the past and reflect current issues, and some attempt to see the future. They range in size and scale from imposing edifices filling blocks of major cities to small homes sharing stories of a village's or a family's past.

They come in many genres: history, science and technology, nature and natural history, children's, art; the largest categories are historical societies and historic houses and general museums, which account for 49 percent and 26 percent of all U.S. museums, respectively.17

There are hundreds of private corporate museums, shrines sharing history and early products of a particular company. Corporate museums usually locate near a factory or company headquarters and mix corporate memories with marketing and communications; they have been around for more than 100 years.18 These museums celebrate an eclectic array of goods, from instant ramen noodles and ice cream to clowns, computer chips and toilets. Car brands such as the Corvette, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz have museums, as does the Union Pacific Railroad.19 Museums serve up history along with servings of beverages from Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper and beer.

Just what a museum is and what its mission and work should be has evolved over centuries and continues to change.

Lonnie Bunch III was the founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. (Getty Images/Shannon Finney)

“Museums, and especially the Smithsonian, have to figure out how to become valued, not just visited,” Bunch, the Smithsonian head, told The Washington Post. “Americans are grappling with a myriad of issues, whether it's climate change, race, gender, the impact of technology. The Smithsonian ought to be a place where people can go to wrestle with that, to find the tools to live their lives.”20

In 2017, the International Council of Museums (ICOM), a consortium of 40,000 professionals at about 20,000 institutions, started to seek a new definition of what a museum is and why it matters. Its previous definition, updated in 2007, focused on museums’ roles to conserve, research and exhibit for people to educate, study and enjoy. Its new proposed definition uses phrases such as “diverse memories,” “participatory,” “transparent” and “global equality.”21

However, the new description drew dissent for failing to include education and other traditional terms. Some critics said it was too political or activist. “We think that museums can be a lot, but they should not be everything, and the definition should be sharper,” said Beate Reifenscheid, president of ICOM Germany.22

Others say museums need to step away from their history of colonialism and exclusion and embrace current issues. “If we are caring about the communities that we serve, then we should be working to undo the histories of violence, histories of exclusion that have already existed,” said LaTanya Autry, a curatorial fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, who co-founded a campaign called #museumsarenotneutral to challenge the idea that museums are unbiased and free of politics or ideology.23

So the ICOM in October postponed a decision on the new definition.

However they are defined, museums are an important part of a community's identity — and economy. U.S. museums contributed some $50 billion to the economy through consumer spending, jobs and purchases, according to a 2018 report by the American Alliance of Museums. U.S. museums directly employ 372,100 people and contribute to 350,000 more jobs through purchases and staff wages, the report said.24 They also rely on some 3 million volunteers a year and generate $12 billion in federal, state and local taxes.25

Various estimates show that 16 to 24 percent of U.S. adults have visited a museum or cultural institution in the last two years, a number that has been largely unchanged. Museums with declining or stagnating attendance are increasingly offering free admission to all, or free or very low-cost admission to people who receive public assistance.26

About a third of the 240 art museums in the United States offer free admission, although some charge for special exhibits. A dozen charge admission of $25 or more. (Admission fees account for 2 to 4 percent of overall museum revenues, and in a few cases as much as 16 percent.)27

As museum directors, donors and patrons think about the future of the institutions, here are some of the issues they are considering:

Are museums staying relevant in a fast-changing world?

When large chunks of California were hit with planned blackouts in October to avoid setting off wildfires, the Oakland Museum of California stayed open and offered anyone an opportunity to recharge their phone or use the museum's Wi-Fi.28 Its Twitter post on Oct. 9 also said anyone was welcome to stop in to refill water bottles or use the restrooms.29

The museum has gone a long way toward embracing diversity and inclusion with exhibits on the Black Panthers, a 1960s radical group, and the Burning Man counterculture festival. “They are the ideal,” with art, science and natural history all in one building, says Toldano, the Stanford scholar.

Others see the relevance of museums springing from engaging teenagers through teen councils or using social media to make historic objects seem timely or relevant.

“Sometimes I think the adaptability is a direct result of income. When a small museum loses city funding … volunteers may have to band together and think, ‘How will I change this?’” says Caitlin Wunderlich, editor of The Museum Scholar, a publication for emerging curators and museum professionals. She previously worked for the Brooklyn Museum and likes its approach to engaging teens and giving touch tours for visually impaired guests.

“It's like a sleeping giant awakened,” said Gregory Stevens, director of Seton Hall University's Institute of Museum Ethics. Museums are moving from their traditional role of preserving history to reflecting today's important ideas and inspiration.30 The Penn Museum in Philadelphia is addressing the immigration crisis at the southern border by marking spots on a map where migrants died with morgue toe tags.31

Children's museums are staging exhibits on social justice issues and globalization. “We help kids understand that there's a world beyond them,” says Suzanne LeBlanc, director of the Long Island Children's Museum in New York, which for a decade has run a successful and often-copied initiative to help immigrant children and their families prepare for kindergarten.

Children's museums once focused mainly on youth; now many offer exhibits that engage the entire family, sometimes with separate information tags for moms and munchkins, LeBlanc says. And while new exhibits draw in adults, “you can never get rid of your bubbles exhibit,” she says, because children love to go back to some exhibits, visit after visit.

Play and discovery show up in museums aimed at adults through digital games, video walls and virtual reality. The best virtual museums create immersive worlds where guests become characters and solve problems. “They provide immediate satisfaction and deeper rewards” and understanding of issues, says Bridget McKenzie, who leads the museum consultancy Flow Associates and helped create the Climate Museum UK, a mobile facility. Some experts see the popularity of immersion tools and games creating the prospect of a booming industry in museum retrofits.32

Others say museums must become places to connect in person around ideas or issues, to learn, to share and to engage in solving problems or improving situations or cities. “Museums are a space where you can still interact face to face with new people,” which in the mobile online world is difficult to find elsewhere, says Wunderlich.

Climate change has become a hot topic at the Penn Museum and other museums that seek to reflect topics that are timely or generate traffic and conversation.

“Some tap into climate change as the next trend…. [But] we have an incredibly serious and tough role to play in this world. Being relevant isn't about being trendy,” says McKenzie, whose Climate Museum UK is embracing the education and activism approach.

Some history museums, housed in locally significant homes, are becoming more interactive and engaging. They are moving away from displays of dusty objects and the “don't touch anything” mindset to share the problems and dreams of the people who lived in the home. At the Swan House in the Atlanta History Center, guests interact with actors playing the original homeowners, their maid, chauffeur and architect.33

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“Museums should invite visitors to touch, hold, sit upon, and even smell certain objects,” with responsible, flexible use of collections, wrote Ron M. Potvin, assistant director and curator of the John Nicholas Brown Center at Brown University, which seeks to make the humanities and culture more accessible.34

Yet for every sleeping giant that awoke to a world of TikTok, Instagram and immersive experiences, there are those that “retain more authoritative voices,” says Linda Norris, global networks program director for the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a group of museums and history centers that seek to use the past to promote human rights. “If that continues to be your only approach, you will become slowly less and less relevant,” Norris says.

Many museums exist and work mainly “for white, college-educated audiences,” Norris says. Because that mode is ingrained, changing strategies may prove difficult.

Some institutions believe that museums must stay true to their mission of conservation and education. “When your grandchildren walk through this museum, they'll see many of the same works of art that I saw as a child, and they'll see them displayed, exhibited, and interpreted at the highest level,” Weiss of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) told Town & Country magazine. “At the same time, the place won't be a mausoleum. The exhibitions will be different, the scholarship will change, the technology will be different, but the mission will be the same.35

Many museums still have atmospheres or exhibits that feel intimidating, overly serious and exclude or make potential guests feel uncomfortable. Institutions still need to show “that this place is your place” to diverse people, people with disabilities and others, says Wunderlich.

Are museums too tied to major funders and their business interests?

When he was developing the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian, Bunch said the new institution would not accept funding from liquor companies. In an interview with The Washington Post, he suggested that museums need to carefully evaluate potential donors and develop clear standards for which ones are acceptable and which are not. “I would love to say all money comes from saints. I'd love that. But that's not the world we live in,” he said.36

Saints and sinners alike fund museums’ exhibits, expansions and programs as wealthy individuals and corporations fill in funding gaps left by shrinking government dollars. Many museums have ethical codes, but the guidelines may not help them navigate the outcry, fomented through social media and in-person protests, against money coming from the oil industry, opioid makers and producers of other drugs.37

“We do not subject anyone to a certain litmus test,” Weiss, the Met CEO, told the Financial Times. “Even if someone might have a business that might seem objectionable to some of us, if it's not illegal, and we don't believe it's unethical, we wouldn't object.”38

In 2018 and 2019, Nan Goldin, a photographer who overcame an OxyContin addiction, led protests — featuring “die-ins” and medicine containers labeled “extremely addictive. WILL KILL” — at several museums. The protesters demanded that the institutions stop accepting money from the Sackler family and its Purdue Pharma, which makes opioids.39 The family has been a major funder of the arts for many years. Three museums — the Guggenheim in New York and the Tate Modern and National Portrait Gallery in London — announced in the first quarter of 2019 they would not accept financial support from the Sackler family. After a host of lawsuits by states and individuals over the addiction or deaths of thousands of Americans, the drug company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in September.40

Activists outside the Louvre in July protest the museum's ties to the Sackler family. Much of the family's money has come from the sale of highly addictive opioids. (AFP/Getty Images/Stephane De Sakutin)

In March, saying it wanted to avoid being a “distraction,” the Sackler Trust said it would halt all donations. “This is causing museums to really think about where their values are and how those values are expressed,” Sally Yerkovich, author of A Practical Guide to Museum Ethics, told The Washington Post. “Are the kinds of money they accept an expression of their values?”41

At least one director, Tristram Hunt, who leads London's Victoria & Albert Museum, has said he is proud of the support the Sackler family has provided to his institution over the years. Theresa Sackler, known as one of the most generous patrons of the arts in the United Kingdom, serves as a trustee at the museum. “We are not going to be taking names down or denying the past,” Hunt said.42

Museums compete with a growing number of nonprofits for crucial funding as giving increasingly focuses on solving specific societal problems, with quick, measurable outcomes, Laura Lott, president of the American Alliance of Museums, said in a May talk about financial sustainability. “As the pace of change quickens, our field needs to improve our financial discipline, business planning and data literacy,” she said. “Museums must innovate, experiment and implement new business models in order to secure their financial futures.”43

About 60 percent of museum revenue comes from fundraising, either from wealthy individuals or foundations or big businesses. And for some museums, most of this money comes from just a handful of wealthy donors.44

Yet elderly funders are dying, and younger ones are more interested in other causes, says Wunderlich, The Museum Scholar editor. For museums without a major endowment worth millions, “it's very unstable year to year.”

Funding is easier to land for major museums such as New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), but midsize institutions and history museums face more challenges, says Norris, of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. “Many museums have gotten better at diversifying income streams — gift shop, café. You rent your space for weddings,” she says.

The African American museum's largest donors include entertainment tycoon Oprah Winfrey's foundation; a foundation created by the family of drug maker Eli Lilly and Company; philanthropist and financier Robert Frederick Smith; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and David M. Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, a major private equity company. It also accepted millions from Boeing, General Electric and Walmart.45

While a number of European and U.S. museums have sworn off Sackler money, very few are taking the family's name off wings and buildings. One that did was the Louvre, partly because a 20-year time commitment to have the Sackler name on a wing or room had ended.

Institutions stick with tainted donors for many reasons, including contracts that promise a major donor recognition in perpetuity. Some museum executives worry that erasing one donor's name could scare away future contributors. “Museums very much consider the level of public outrage before taking the drastic step of taking someone's name off a building,” said Tom Eccles, the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.46

Even as they give up opioid funds, museums still accept money from the tobacco company Altria. In 2018, Altria, maker of Marlboro cigarettes and Skoal smokeless tobacco, donated $3.6 million to cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian and the Newseum, a news media museum. (See Short Feature.) “When organizations accept money from Big Tobacco, they're essentially allowing themselves to be used by pawns in the marketing strategy of big tobacco companies,” said Dr. Michael Siegel, a Boston University professor of health sciences. He called that “extremely egregious” given that tobacco-related illnesses kill some 480,000 Americans a year.47

Museums must consider the source but also must seek new sources of revenue, says Norris. “The money has to come from somewhere,” she says. (Because its members operate in so many countries, Norris’ coalition does not give ethical guidelines around institutional funding sources.)

Are museum heads visionary, agile and diverse enough to lead?

When Max Hollein was chosen last year as director of the Met, he was the third in a row to hold the position who was white, male and European in origin. Still, his showmanship and business acumen — and appreciation for electronic music — set him apart.48

Months later, Ellen Stofan, the former NASA chief scientist, became the first female leader of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, one of the world's most visited museums. Stofan, the daughter of a rocket scientist and a science teacher, is vocal about the importance of more diversity in museum leadership and exhibits.

“I hope this museum inspires the first woman to step foot on Mars, and I hope she's the first person to step foot on Mars,” Stofan told The Guardian. “Research shows that diverse teams perform better than nondiverse teams, multigender teams perform better, and so why wouldn't you do this?”49

Diversity and inclusion are major issues for museum leadership, from trustees or board members to curators. Museum staffs are slowly growing more diverse.

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The issue matters as audiences and the U.S. population both grow more diverse and museum visitors expect to see themselves and their histories reflected in exhibits, according to Wunderlich and others. “When nobody looks like you, nobody speaks your language, that can immediately make you feel unwelcome,” Wunderlich says. “Museums are behind the times in embracing diversity.”

Women hold 62 percent of the senior leadership roles in art museums, and people of color hold 12 percent of them. The share of curatorial and education jobs offered to African American, Latino and other nonwhite professionals has grown in recent years, and one-fifth of those jobs are held by people of color.50

Museum trustees tend to be older; only 26 percent of all U.S. museum board members are under the age of 50, according to a survey by the American Alliance of Museums. This has consequences, because boards with a greater number of younger members tend to be more engaged in governance and more involved in their institutions, the Alliance said. One possible reason for the prevalence of older trustees is the growing use of boards as a funding source, with large donations required of members.51

Museum leaders also need to cultivate a more agile and adaptable mindset so they can change and adapt to new trends and changing sources of funding, says Wunderlich.

LeBlanc, who leads the Long Island Children's Museum, also is president of the Museum Association of New York, which gives her a close-up view of museum leadership. She says some directors are able to move quickly and “very much respond to what's happening in society. A police shooting — they put up a quick exhibit and get conversation going.” Others expect to spend two years researching and planning for a midsized exhibit exploring a broader theme such as globalization, she says.

“If you want to do something that's more controversial, more personal, you want to have trust with your public,” LeBlanc says.

Museum leaders have for many years appeared politically and socially neutral and risk averse. Now, there are indications a few are joining movements or teaching others how to speak up. A handful of museums have joined 750 or more arts and cultural organizations in declaring a climate and ecological emergency, says McKenzie, who leads the Climate Museum UK.

The Oxford University Museum of Natural History in England recently added a course aimed at teens around the theme of “how to speak truth to power,” she says.

With so much change and so many issues swirling around museums, a director's essential skill is “agility, closely followed by bravery,” wrote Kaywin Feldman, former director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art who now leads the National Gallery of Art in Washington.52

Directors must also learn to engage their community, bringing community members in early on discussions. When Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center prepared to install “Scaffold,” a gallows-like sculpture two stories high, in 2017, it did not talk to members of the Dakota tribe, even though the piece was partly inspired by the hanging of 38 members of the tribe in 1862. The Dakota community and others staged protests, and the museum leaders apologized and agreed to remove the sculpture.53 At the end of 2017, museum Executive Director Olga Viso stepped down.54

None of the funders or museum curators apparently asked questions about the sculpture or suggested connecting with Native American leaders in the months of preparation and purchase, says Trista Harris, a Minneapolis futurist who focuses on cultural and philanthropic forecasting. It was a case of “a lot of people making mistakes,” she says.

Months later, Viso reflected on the need for “vision and nuanced leadership” and the longer time frame. “Now is the time to be open to radical change,” she wrote. “If museums want to continue to have a place … they must position themselves as learning communities, not impenetrable centers of self-validating authority.”55

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Background

Ancient Origins

Ennigaldi-Nanna, a Mesopotamian princess and high priestess in the city of Ur, may have been one of the first curators of a “museum.” Her father, King Nabonidus, loved history and collected artifacts more than 2,500 years ago in Babylon, or what is now Iraq. Statues and items from 2100 B.C. to 600 B.C. were gathered, grouped and labeled under Ennigaldi-Nanna's direction.56

Her museum labels were clay cylinders, carefully written in three languages, ancient and more contemporary. They were created by scribes for Ennigaldi-Nanna, who served as the administrator of a school for high priestesses that had operated for some 800 years.57 She lived in a great house built of inscribed bricks; an archaeologist discovered the artifacts, including clay dog sculptures, bronze and silver rings and a winged dragon quartz seal.58

Many early museums began as the private collections of wealthy individuals, families or royalty, who collected rare or curious objects and artifacts. They displayed their collections in “wonder rooms” or “cabinets of curiosities.” Some of the oldest public museums opened in Italy during the Renaissance in the 15th century.59

The word museum comes from the Greek word Mouseion, meaning home for muses, or the Latin museum, which means learned occupation. The term was first applied around 1660 to an institution that collected and educated.

Two of the world's oldest still-operating museums trace their histories back to those years: the Royal Armories in London and the Amerbach Cabinet in Basel, Switzerland. Perhaps the oldest still-functioning institution may be the Capitoline Museums in Rome, which dates to 1471 when Pope Sixtus IV donated his collection of bronze statues. It opened to the public in 1734.60

The Amerbach Cabinet grew to include art and maps. It was acquired by the city of Basel in 1661 and became part of the municipal Kunstsammlung Basel.61

The Royal Armouries started as a collection of armor, artillery and historic cannons; its first two displays were arranged in 1660, possibly to mark King Charles II's visit to the Tower of London, where it was housed. Over time, its collection grew and was split among three locations: the Royal Armouries in Leeds, Fort Nelson in Fareham and its traditional home in the Tower. It is the only British museum to have a permanent location in the United States, in Louisville, Ky.

In the United States, early museums followed the cabinet-of-curiosities approach, as wealthy settlers gathered specimens from the New World or from their native lands.

Around the 18th century, museums went from private collections for the wealthy to places open for scholars and sometimes the public. Museums came to be seen as places serving the public and enlightening people about history, art and science.

In 1753, the British Museum was established in London when Sir Hans Sloane, a physician and naturalist, bequeathed his 71,000 objects — books, natural specimens and antiquities — to King George II. It considers itself the first national public museum in the world.62

Classifying and labeling components of the natural world grew more precise. In 1735, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus developed a nomenclature to classify living things, defined by methodically labeling species and placing them into families, based in part on the arrangement of their reproductive organs. He worked as a professor and eventually became personal physician to the Swedish royal family. In 1758, he bought a manor estate, where he built a small museum for his personal collections.63

Amid fast-changing social and business expectations, museums began to develop a notion of permanence as a way to affix societal values and worthwhile objects. They became increasingly tied to philanthropy through the second half of 19th century.64

The Smithsonian was established in 1846, based on a gift from British scientist James Smithson, who left his $500,000 estate to a country he never visited. His grave is in the first floor of the Smithsonian Castle in Washington.65

The Smithsonian's first building was completed in 1855, and it was designated as the national museum three years later. Since then the institution has grown to include a zoo, an astrophysical observatory and 19 museums.66

The Franklin Institute was founded in Philadelphia in 1824, and within years offered a high school, library, exhibits and lectures and a research journal, all focused on mechanical arts. It honors Benjamin Franklin, the Philadelphia printer known as the inventor of bifocals, the Franklin stove and the lightning rod as well as for his role in helping found the United States.67

The institute played a central role in the development of American science and technology, offering classes in drafting and engineering. In 1930, in the teeth of the Depression, its leadership started fundraising to open a museum. By 1934, what it called a “Wonderland of Science” had opened with a hands-on approach to learning about science and the physical world.68

Children's Museums and Blockbuster Exhibits

Anna Billings Gallup, a biology teacher, joined the Brooklyn Children's Museum staff in 1903, four years after it was established. She had earned her degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology two years earlier. Gallup described the museum's offerings as “pure fun” aimed at children, including poorer ones. The institution followed the emerging tenets of progressive education, which involved an engaging approach to learning. Her work and writings laid the foundation for the children's museums movement around the world.69

Gallup wanted the Brooklyn Children's Museum to assist in education and suggest ideas for leisure interests. The museum's exhibits covered “zoology, botany, United States history, mineralogy, geography and art,” she wrote in a 1908 article in Popular Science magazine. “They are attractive in appearance, simple in arrangement and labeled with descriptions adapted to the needs of children, printed in clear readable type.”70

Recognized by her peers as a role model, Gallup also was a pioneer as a female curator at a time when few women held leadership roles in museums.71

As world's fairs and expositions came into being, they created buildings that were often repurposed as museums after the fairs ended. Among them was the Field Museum, built in 1893 as part of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It was given its name in 1905 to honor benefactor Marshall Field, the department store magnate.72 World's fairs also are credited with giving birth to museums in London, Philadelphia and elsewhere — and even, in 1894, to the Commercial Museum in Philadelphia, which served as an unofficial museum for world's fairs.73

In the late 1800s and into the 1920s, philanthropists and business owners started building libraries and museums in cities across the country, from New York to Cleveland to Portland, Ore., where in 1892 seven business and cultural leaders established the Portland Art Association.74 By the 1930s, a few science and industry museums were being established in the United States, often to preserve items created in early factories. The museum field continued to grow, as the tourism business flourished along with the growth of the automobile.

In the 1970s, many rural history museums began to spring up in the United States and Europe. France alone has almost a thousand such institutions, celebrating villages or agriculture.75

During that era, two men came up with the idea of creating traveling exhibits that would boost museum attendance because of their broad appeal. They were young, ambitious curators and deeply competitive rivals: Thomas Hoving at New York's Met and J. Carter Brown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Hoving started first, in 1967, with an exhibit called “In the Presence of Kings,” which was a smash hit. Brown brought forth the 1976 blockbuster “King Tut,” which traveled to a half dozen other museums and drew 8 million visitors.76

Other blockbusters followed, including the Egyptian Temple of Dendur, which was installed in the Met's Sackler wing in 1978. (The temple was given to the U.S. government by Egypt in 1965 and awarded to the museum two years later.)77

The Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City provides a backdrop for a press conference announcing a new exhibit in 2015. Starting in the 1960s, museums focused on attracting visitors to see traveling exhibits and blockbuster artifacts such as the Egyptian temple. (Getty Images/FilmMagic/Taylor Hill)

In the 1980s, museums began to change the way they conveyed information in their exhibits, coming to regard the context of the cultural artifact as more important than the object itself.78

Around that time, museum leaders began to question the way the public experienced museums and to seek ways to revitalize the displays and approaches. They published a series of essays that criticized the old ways of operating.79

By the 1990s, there were around 17,500 museums in the United States, and by 2014 that number had doubled to 35,144 — including aquariums, zoos, botanical gardens and historical societies.80 Private museums were established to honor rock stars, performers and civic leaders.

The recession of 2007-09 caused the U.S. unemployment rate to double to 10 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average to lose half its value; the stock market declines cost investors $14 trillion.81 This reduced the size of museum endowments and foundation grants for years to come.

Many art museums cut staffs and reduced hours, canceled shows and postponed renovations or other big projects. Some cut staff pay or benefits or required unpaid leaves. A handful of art museums closed, including the Las Vegas Art Museum and the Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo, Fla.82

The recession also cut public funding for science centers and other museums as government budgets shrank. On average, U.S. science centers receive 23 percent of their funding from public sources.83

Museums cut staffing and programs for several years. By 2012, 60 percent of U.S. museums reported some level of economic stress, a survey by a U.S. museum organization showed.84

Museums began to bounce back as the economy strengthened, travel and tourism accelerated and the number of international visitors grew. By 2015 and 2016, museums were expanding again with new wings or buildings, such as the Tate Modern in London and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Elegant facilities opened in Brussels, Shanghai, Singapore, and one in Bordeaux, France, celebrating wines of that region. One in the Rhône-Alpes region of France replicated the caves where ancient engravings and paintings were found two decades earlier.85

Museums began to develop engaging digital and virtual reality applications, with the Louvre and the Smithsonian leading the way. These developments raised questions about what constituted authentic artifacts or art.86

Art museums began to raise money from galleries to fund shows of artists represented by the galleries. This led to complaints of a pay-to-play model that could give galleries more control over future museum exhibits. “It's the brazenness of it — the expectation of ‘How are you going to contribute?’” gallery owner Lawrence Luhring told The New York Times. 87

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Current Situation

Tapping Experiences

Museums face a growing variety of competitors, from facilities devoted to video games and over-the-top art and music venues to the growing array of Instagrammable spaces. They all want to tap the “experience economy,” a way of selling goods or services by highlighting the effect on people's lives or memories, and the interest in sharing life's best and worst moments through selfies or photos on social media.

Museums are hurrying to keep up, and to create new, engaging experiences within their old walls.

When the Museum of Modern Art in New York City reopened in October after a four-month-long closure for renovation and expansion, it added a “creativity lab” to explore ideas, as well as several galleries on the first level that are free and open to anyone to come in from the streets of midtown Manhattan. It also promised to draw from a more diverse group of artists, following years of criticism that the museum has not been inclusive enough. Among the first shows in the reopened building will be “The Legend of Black Girl's Windows,” a solo show by African American artist and printmaker Betye Saar, in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem.88

Through its $450 million expansion, MoMA will seek to appeal to visitors unfamiliar with terms such as abstract expressionism by banning such labels and focusing instead on ideas and epochs. Curators mix paintings with photographs, films and other media, rather than displaying paintings in one gallery and photographs in another. Although the layout is still mostly chronological, curators inject detours and surprises. “‘More work for more people’ is our motto,” Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture, told The New York Times, with a grin.89

Experts also say museums need to connect with the nation's growing interest in self-care and wellness. Researchers have discovered that a trip to a museum increases levels of seratonin and cortisol, which boost feelings of well-being. Doctors in Montreal now give prescriptions to patients to visit the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.90

Reducing stress is one of the top reasons people cite in surveys on why they visit museums and other cultural spaces, along with an interest in the content, experiencing new things and having fun.91

Spreading Controversies

Yet it is far from fun to be in the spotlight for harassment, fake objects or censorship.

At the Mattress Factory, a contemporary art museum in Pittsburgh, four female employees complained that they were sexually harassed, assaulted and in one case raped by a male co-worker. They say the museum's management retaliated with verbal abuse and rescinded work assignments; the director was placed on paid leave amid turmoil and tensions.92 The museum eventually acknowledged that “certain of its procedures and responses were inadequate.”93

When a group of honor students visited Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in May, they said they were harassed, profiled and disrespected by a museum staffer — who allegedly told them “no food, no drink, no watermelon” — and by other guests. The students said security guards followed them around and treated them differently than white students. The museum apologized and said it will provide sensitivity training to its staff.94

While accepting funding from donors such as the Sacklers is a frequent source of contention in the museum world, controversies can also erupt around exhibits of surprising or unconventional art — or objects that turn out to be fakes.

The Museum of the Bible, a Washington museum focused on the history and impact of the Christian holy book, pulled a tiny microfilm Bible that supposedly went to the moon with a NASA astronaut after an expert questioned its authenticity. The October switch to one the Washington museum said was verified came a year after at least five of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments the museum purchased were labeled fakes. Eleven others are being tested for authenticity.95

The Museum of the Bible in Washington has faced questions about the authenticity of some items in its collection, including a microfilm Bible that supposedly went to the moon and fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls. (Getty Images/The Washington Post/Evelyn Hockstein)

Other museums have discovered artifacts were fakes, from masterpieces to minor works. And several institutions, such as the Guggenheim Museum, have removed items that critics had said were too violent or sexual. The Guggenheim in New York City decided not to install two videos from a Chinese artist showing tattooed pigs having sex and snarling pitbulls about to attack. The National Coalition Against Censorship lists several examples of murals, paintings, sculpture and other artworks being removed or covered up after individuals or groups protested them. Often they are works by students or at university museums or schools.96

And young climate change activists are targeting the Science Museum in London and two other museums because they accepted funding from oil companies BP, Shell and Equinor. By sponsoring museums and their exhibits, the oil companies “greenwash” their reputations and tarnish the museums’ reputations, the activists charge. Ian Blatchford, the director of the Science Museum Group, responded by saying he believed the right approach is to “engage, debate and challenge companies” to do more to reduce carbon footprints and allow museum guests to decide if the approach makes sense.97

Openings and Closings

After paying a $20 to $35 entrance fee, guests at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, N.M., wander into a former bowling alley. They experience trapeze shows, bizarre gargoyles and immersive art and video experiences. One critic dubbed its approach “Big Fun Art.” Meow Wolf has raised $158 million to expand to Las Vegas, Washington, Denver and Phoenix.98

In New York, pop-ups called Candytopia, Color Factory and Winky Lux offer themed rooms, a ball pit and plenty of places for visitors to photograph themselves and their friends having fun. “What the creators of these experiences have realized is that a lot of people want to take pictures of themselves in a museum, without going to a traditional museum,” The New Yorker wrote.99

Several of these places call themselves museums — the Museum of Illusions, the Museum of Ice Cream and the Museum of Pizza. Yet all are business ventures. Peter Kim, executive director of the Museum of Food and Drink, warned that such spaces will “warp and change the meaning of the word” museum, while ignoring museums’ mission to educate.100

Some of these places are not making it. The U.S. Pizza Museum in Chicago, with its pizza-themed record collection and memorabilia, closed in October, although the owner says he plans pepperoni-themed pop-ups. Financial issues and the inability to sell the food it celebrated contributed to its demise.101

It joins a museums graveyard that includes the Roynon Museum of Earth Sciences and Paleontology in Escondido, Calif., the International Museum of World War II in Natick, Mass., and the Newseum in Washington.102

Others, such as the National Air and Space Museum, have closed huge sections to renovate and revitalize, which reduces foot traffic.

The American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Mo., is trying to turn itself around, with a $700,000 city bailout and more funding. It also will refresh exhibits and add new technology to its recording studio exhibit.103

Along with the internet-selfie museums, more traditional institutions have been proliferating, with openings in cities and small towns.

China also has a building boom, fueled by cities that want to add to their reputations. But the Chinese may have overbuilt. Many of its museums, often in architecturally stunning buildings, sit empty or are rented out for auto shows.104

Innovative Museums

With attendance growth slowing, many of the world's major museums are starting to “reimagine their spaces” and create events or use the space to bring in new audiences, says Wunderlich, The Museum Scholar editor. She cites yoga classes, mornings when families are welcome to bring in babies, toddlers and strollers, and evenings with locally brewed beers.

A few use technology and digital media collections to customize and personalize the experience. Visitors to the new National Comedy Center in Jamestown, N.Y., start by indicating their favorite TV comedy and comedian, and that information is used to personalize their experience. Others are using special events, evening shows and exhibits tied to celebrities or well-known designers to draw crowds.105

The American Alliance of Museums’ Muse awards honor virtual and mixed reality, and its winners were lauded by the judges for their playfulness, rich content and being “adventurous in [their] use of new technology in the gallery.”106

Museums are using technology to encourage people to consider issues and opportunities for change. Future City Lab, part of the Museum of the City of New York, offers games, animated maps, data visualizations and artistic interpretations on patterns of city living, so visitors imagine better futures. The Museum of Tomorrow in São Paulo created an artificial intelligence chatbot to converse with guests about what they can do to address their most pressing concern about the future.107

Leaders are attempting to use virtual reality and other advances as a way to engage Millennials and others who might otherwise stay home with Hulu and Netflix. However, technological advances are costly to choose and install, and can become obsolete or less useful.108

Some museums are learning to turn disaster into dollars. When a giant sinkhole opened inside the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Ky., in February 2014, it swallowed at least eight of the sleek cars. Yet attendance soared in the months that followed, and the museum added an exhibit around the sinkhole and restored almost all the Corvettes.109

A sinkhole at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Ky., swallowed a number of vintage cars in 2014. Yet attendance soared after the disaster, and the museum added an exhibit built around the sinkhole. (AP Photo/Michael Noble Jr.)

Institutions also are looking at ways to take their collection and ideas outside the museum complex. The Kohl Children's Museum in Glenview, Ill., is among the museums with a pop-up traveling museum that in October set up inside another institution. It features art, a puppet theater, a robotic maze that children build and other hands-on educational activities, with instructions in English and Spanish.110

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Outlook

Search for Relevance

The future of museums includes touching and healing, exercise classes and more.

A handful are creating tactile representations of their artwork for visually impaired guests. Artist Andrew Myers creates such tactile paintings and portraits using screws. Some pieces of art are being shared using sounds or 3D printed versions of the piece. The changes are in their infancy, yet scholar Patricia Bérubé asked: “As more mediation tools are being developed and used to address different audiences, could the future of the museum be ensured by the evolution of its functions?”111

The American Alliance of Museums predicts that by 2040, museums will show up in schools, hospitals and community centers. Many preschools will operate from museum buildings so the museums can become more integrated into educating and engaging young people and families, and museums will have developed data showing how they promote well-being and wellness and reduce stress and isolation. More than 1,000 museums will offer well-being or cognitive health centers adjoining their exhibit space. This perspective, laid out in a special 2017 report by the Alliance, depicts museums measuring their impact on communities’ equity, education and economies and becoming “champions of climate resilience” that help businesses and other organizations adapt.112

Museum exhibits will become distributed more often through technology and based on the interests and needs of the population, the report predicts. Many institutions will be open around the clock as they move from iconic buildings focused on one subject to community centers that educate youth or support seniors. “Museums are now libraries, libraries are now schools, and teachers are now museum administrators,” the report said.113

The mostly hopeful report shows museums adapting, changing and filling new needs in their communities. Others see more disruption ahead.

“As virtual reality gets better and better, it's hard to make the case for people to come out to the museum,” especially when they can take a virtual walk through the Louvre or learn about U.S. history with a major history museum, says Harris, author of FutureGood, a book about the future of nonprofits.

With growing volatility of fires and floods brought on by climate change, museums will need to invest in more protections for their exhibit spaces and their stored collections, she says.

Amid changing demographics and expectations, museums will move from curator-led exhibits to a higher portion of visitor-curated or self-directed experiences. And they may offer more community programs and educational opportunities for adults and develop new strategies to connect with “younger constituents where they are,” the Gensler architectural firm said in a report based on conversations with museum leaders in six cities.114

Dramatic changes will take place as museums close or merge after they lose money, audiences and relevance. Or they may turn into civic spaces or clinics.115

“Some are going to shut down,” Harris says. “Some organizations are not built for that volatility … as outside conditions change in a gazillion different ways.”

Norris, of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, agrees that not all museums will continue. “Museums that survived the last downturn and the next one, and made themselves vital in your community,” will stick around, she says. Yet she believes the number of museums will continue to increase as individual collectors and small groups of people organize new ones. “There never seems to be fewer museums,” she says, based on decades of work as a museum professional and consultant.

Those that do survive will need to build strong, personal relationships with their major individual donors, as they become increasingly important to nonprofits.116 Museums also should be prepared for continued and heightened scrutiny of donors through the advent of searchable nonprofit annual reports, Harris says.

Other developments may include more exhibits on a tablet or smartphone as museums use new tools to create more interactive and immersive virtual visits. The British government will spend 19 million pounds (around $24.5 million) on “museums of the future,” including augmented reality and virtual reality devices. Some will go to museums with long histories, others to the new Science Museum, opening in London in 2020.117

“Smaller museums are going to have to figure out what is that immersive component,” Harris says, “or become community centers, co-working spaces, places for conversation about climate change. These beautiful buildings — make sure they are used.”

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Pro/Con

Are museums too aligned or enmeshed with major funders and their business interests?

Pro Chris Garrard Co-Director, Culture Unstained. Written for CQ Researcher, December 2019 From exhibitions sponsored by oil companies to boards of trustees dominated by big business, there is a growing sense that some museums have become too enmeshed with the interests of unethical funders and sponsors. In recent years, many artists and activists have launched high-profile creative campaigns to redress the balance and hold museums to account. By scrutinizing what sponsorship money buys, these campaigns promote transparency and seek to renew the public's trust in major cultural institutions. Of course, funding partnerships can play a positive role, but only when the ethical values of the external organization complement or coincide with those of the museum. If museum directors offer up their exhibitions to an arms or oil company for use as brand management tools, they do a disservice both to their own curators and to the cultures they seek to represent. Many directors are fully aware that exhibition launches can provide the perfect platform for corporate sponsors to shore up important relationships with policymakers — relationships that ultimately lead to drilling for new oil or selling more weapons. For a major oil company such as BP, cultural sponsorship is a cheap and effective way to maintain its “social license” to operate, the perception that it is a responsible company that invests in wider society. This is not a form of philanthropy, but a carefully calculated transaction, where BP buys into the reputation of the British Museum or National Portrait Gallery to deflect attention from its oil spills and damaging climate impacts, and instead associates its brand with progressive ideals. In a sponsorship contract between London's Science Museum and the Norwegian oil firm Equinor, a clause prevents the museum from making any comment that would “damage the goodwill or reputation” of the sponsor. Such clauses create a chilling effect within the museum, and here, it makes tangible the management's willingness to align the museum firmly with Equinor's business interests by defending it from reasonable scrutiny. Increasingly, the public is recognizing that museums are not, and never have been, neutral. Therefore, putting in place policies that clearly set out a museum's ethical stance are crucial. In a period of funding cuts, having red lines about who you are prepared to partner with and what you are willing to offer them allows you to resist the pressure to simply “take the money and run.” Otherwise, museums run the risk of aligning themselves with those that have a very different set of values to their own.

Con Carl G. Hamm Managing Partner for Museums & Performing Arts, Alexander Haas, Inc.. Written for CQ Researcher, December 2019 The ethical practice of fundraising requires that organizations respect the free choice of all individuals to give donations and to refuse donations when the acceptance of those gifts would not be in the best interests of the organization or create a conflict of interest that would be detrimental to the organization's reputation, mission, and relationship with existing supporters and beneficiaries. On rare occasion, a donor's conflict of interest — such as their own personal gain, their desire to direct their gift for a use outside the organization's best interest, or the burden of administering a particularly complicated gift — requires invoking a review of an institution's gift acceptance policies or the consideration of a formal gift acceptance committee. Yet, these days, museums are increasingly facing external pressure to reject otherwise legitimate donations based on perceived immorality on the proposed donor's part. For example, numerous museums in the United States and England have recently been forced to respond to public pressure by rejecting gifts from the Sackler family, with protesters asserting the family's personal complicity and contribution to the opioid addiction crisis. It is usually a straightforward decision to refuse a gift when a proposed donor has been convicted of criminal activity. But in recent cases, factors such as a donor's political views, where they are from, their position on a provocative or hotly debated topic such as climate change, or their legal ownership of a company with controversial business interests have encouraged some to question the validity of certain donors’ giving and to criticize whether a museum should accept their gifts. The essence of charitable giving in America relies on an individual's freedom to make a voluntary contribution to any organization or worthy cause they wish to support. These transactions of the soul can bring indescribable joy and fulfillment to the donor, while providing the resources necessary for an organization to maximize the delivery of its mission. Our job as fundraisers is not to question a donor's character or motive for choosing to be philanthropic; it is to facilitate their ability to give, unless some real conflict exists that would substantially impede or damage the organizations we represent. A museum's board of directors, with public input as it sees fit, should be the arbiter of whether a gift from a specific donor would be detrimental to its organization's reputation or mission, or would harm its relationship with its constituents to the extent that the gift should be refused. But as boards diversify and represent more divergent points of view, debate about the receipt of controversial gifts is only likely to increase. I believe that the spirit of philanthropy and goodwill that has fueled America's nonprofit sector and provided immeasurable benefit to society will continue to thrive, reconciling the generosity of well-intentioned individuals and families with the organizations that are meaningful to them.

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Short Features

Funding Woes Cause Museums to Downsize — or Die

The Newseum was created to offer exhibits that celebrate journalism and provide a warning about threats to freedom of the press. As it prepares to close its doors after 22 years, it provides a warning against something else: excessive spending.

The museum has been housed since 2008 in a huge, well-appointed building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, commanding dramatic vistas of the U.S. Capitol and the National Mall. Its final cost was $450 million, almost twice the initial estimate. Its admission fee, around $25, is a stark contrast to the free Smithsonian museums nearby.1 The Newseum drew 10 million visitors to the building, but operated at a deficit because it borrowed so much to pay for the facility.2

The Newseum building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington cost $450 million to build, nearly twice the initial estimate. The Newseum has struggled with budget deficits and is scheduled to close on Dec. 31. (Getty Images/The Washington Post/Katherine Frey)

Many of the museums and cultural centers built between 1994 and 2008 have faced similar problems, according to a study by the University of Chicago. Some 80 percent of the 700 cultural buildings studied by researchers ran over estimated costs, some by 200 percent.3

Amid a long building boom, some museums have closed. A handful of automobile museums shut down, including one at Chrysler's headquarters in suburban Detroit. The reason: reduced interest in car culture, even in the Motor City area.4 The Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in Branson, Mo., the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas and the Women's Museum in Dallas, a Smithsonian outpost, also closed, mostly because of declining fortunes or attendance.5 Others have avoided outright closure by shrinking their collections or space.

Museums die or downsize for many reasons, from mismanagement and big debt loads to an infestation of insects. (Natural history museums, with large collections of dried plants, stuffed animals, fur and skeletons, are especially prone to bug invasions. Museums regularly report beetles and silverfish to a British website called “What's Eating Your Collection?”6) War, fires and floods also cause museums to lose much of their collection.

To raise money for projects or acquisitions, institutions sell off art or antiquities, although this maneuver may bring stigma or sanctions by museum associations. Experts worry that masterpieces will disappear into billionaires’ private collections, never to be seen again by the public.

In Rio de Janeiro in September 2018, a fast-moving fire engulfed Brazil's National Museum — home to the oldest skeleton in the Americas and Greco-Roman art — and destroyed millions of priceless objects. Presidential candidate Marina Silva called the fire “a lobotomy of the Brazilian memory.” A lack of government funding and inadequate fire suppression systems likely contributed to the destruction, critics said.7

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles closed for a week in October as a wildfire threatened; firefighters used the site as a staging ground.8 Getty said its museum, built in 1997, has numerous fire-prevention measures installed inside and outside, including a 1-million-gallon water tank for irrigation and fire sprinklers, which in galleries are used as a last resort to avoid damaging artworks.9

Museums face additional budget pressures to protect against other natural disasters, from hurricanes to floods. The Louvre in October opened a conservation center 110 miles northwest of its Paris home to protect art that had been stored in its flood-prone riverfront basement. By 2024, the off-site center is expected to house 225,000 artworks and artifacts.10

With tighter budgets and dwindling government support, museums increasingly are seeking to sell parts of their collections to pay for needed improvements.

In England, government funding is tight and dozens of museums have closed or cut back branches or hours.11 In continental Europe, some museums, facing reduced government subsidies or higher costs, have sold items ranging from a 4,500-year-old Egyptian statue to Miró paintings and Elvis Presley silk screens created by Andy Warhol.

“If you want to safeguard cultural identity, you cannot sell the best pieces of your collection,” said Marilena Vecco, an assistant professor of cultural economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Holland. “This is the challenge for all museums.”12

The process is called “deaccessioning,” and museum associations have ethical guidelines on how and whether it can occur. The Art Institute of Chicago, for example, sold more than 300 Chinese Ming and Qing porcelain vases in September. Its curators “are always evaluating and refining the museum's collection,” the museum said in a statement, adding that it will use the sale proceeds only to buy new art. That aligns with industry guidelines.13

Yet when the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass., sold 40 pieces of art, including two original Norman Rockwell paintings, to reduce its deficit and remodel, two museum associations criticized the sale, saying collections were “held in the public trust and must not be treated as a disposable financial asset.” Supporters of the move retorted that selling art may be painful, but closing a museum or curtailing most programming is worse.14

A handful of institutions are selling art created by white men in order to buy works of female or African American artists. This method of diversifying a collection allows museums to take advantage of rising art valuations. The Baltimore Museum of Art sold works by Warhol, Franz Kline and Robert Rauschenberg to buy more diverse art.

“You're not raiding your collection or depriving the public if you own better examples by the same artists,” said Nina del Rio, head of museum and corporate art services at Sotheby's New York auction house, which handled the sale for the Baltimore institution.15

As for the Newseum, Johns Hopkins University bought its glass and steel building for $372.5 million and plans to use it to house its graduate programs in Washington. The museum is scheduled to close on Dec. 31, and its exhibits will be placed in storage as the Newseum considers a new, more affordable home in or near Washington. Meanwhile, it will use traveling exhibits and digital presentations to keep journalism history in the public eye.16

— Vickie Elmer

[1] Kriston Capps, “What the Fall of the Newseum Says About News, and Museums,” CityLab, March 7, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/s7zh6ax.

[2] Jason Daley, “D.C.'s Newseum Is Closing Its Doors at the End of the Year,” Smithsonian.com , Oct. 3, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y3lnq2qx.

[3] Capps, op. cit.

[4] Steve Friess, “In the Car Museum Race, Some Drop Out,” The New York Times, May 10, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/ydydz2f5.

[5] Allison Meier, “Resting in Pieces: The Scattered Fate of Closed Museums,” Hyperallergic, Sept. 20, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/tk5dezj.

[6] Pascal Querner, “Insect Pests and Integrated Pest Management in Museums, Libraries and Historic Buildings,” Insects, June 2015, https://tinyurl.com/wxz8c4c; “What's Eating Your Collection?” Collections Trust/Birmingham Museums, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/rsttmkr.

[7] Dom Phillips, “Brazil museum fire: ‘incalculable’ loss as 200-year-old Rio institution gutted,” The Guardian, Sept. 3, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/yc9cpon2.

[8] Jessica Gelt, “Getty Center and Getty Villa to remain closed through Friday because of fire,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 29, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y53g86uh.

[9] Caitlin Shamberg and Annelisa Stephan, “Why the Getty Center is the Safest Place for Art During a Fire,” Getty Center blog, Oct. 29, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/rwaktq6.

[10] Danielle Haynes, “Louvre opens new facility to protect stored art from Paris flooding,” United Press International, Oct. 8, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/t7s42b5.

[11] Mark Brown, “One in five regional museums at least part closed in 2015, says report,” The Guardian, Jan. 12, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/ryuvs6r.

[12] Doreen Carvajal, “Seeing a cash cow in museums’ precious art,” The New York Times, April 4, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/v7rsuyq.

[13] Steve Johnson, “Art Institute will sell 300 ancient Chinese artworks via auction,” Chicago Tribune, May 24, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y2lp32b9.

[14] Dayana Morales Gomez, “Should museums be able to sell their art? This museum says its future depends on it,” PBS, Aug. 9, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/rtuvygg.

[15] Mary Carole McCauley, “Baltimore Museum of Art to sell works by masters such as Andy Warhol, will aim to improve artist diversity,” The Baltimore Sun, April 13, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/vsqa7wg.

[16] Colin Dwyer, “Newseum's Imposing D.C. Home Bought By Johns Hopkins For $372.5 Million,” National Public Radio, Jan. 25, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/ublpjby.

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Museums Face Rising Demands for Return of Looted Artifacts

Activists led their first “Stolen Goods Tour” of the British Museum in December 2018, highlighting what they said were artifacts and art objects taken from Iraqis, Hawaiians, Maori, Greek Cypriots and others. Their first stop was a shield allegedly seized in 1770 by British Capt. James Cook when he met indigenous Australians of the Gwaegal tribe at Botany Bay.17

The unofficial tour was free, in contrast to the $21 to $66 charged by other private tours at the immense museum, which the travel website TripAdvisor says is the fourth-most popular place to visit in London.18 A second tour in May drew 300 guests and, like the first, called for repatriation of objects. The British Museum said it would consider loaning significant objects through collaborative efforts in or near lands where they originated. But it said British law prohibits museums from removing objects in collections, except in rare circumstances.19

For hundreds of years, museums have acquired and displayed artifacts from profiteers and thieves who carted off historically significant pieces from Greece, German Jews, Nigerian tribes and many other peoples and places. Photos of African American slaves, European masterpieces, solid gold bracelets and Mayan statues are being researched to see whether they were acquired, even decades earlier, by looting or other criminal activity.

Museums only started considering returning stolen objects in the 1980s, and even now some institutions lock away the details of where and how they acquired objects as well as details of their history, says Anna Toledano, a Stanford University doctoral student. The donor may require that the provenance be kept secret, she adds.

“How far back will you go? Until Roman times?” asked Hartmut Dorgerloh, director of the Humboldt Forum, a Berlin museum in development. “Because many items in Rome were robbed somewhere in Greece or in ancient Egypt.”20

For many years, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington has operated two offices that research requests for repatriation of human remains of ancestors and sacred and funeral objects from indigenous cultures in the United States and worldwide. More than 6,220 remains of indigenous people have been returned or made available to return to their homes, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History holds some 30,000 human remains awaiting requests to reclaim them.21

The French government took the lead on a broad return of cultural artifacts in 2017 when President Emmanuel Macron told university students that “a large share of several African countries’ cultural heritage” must be returned within five years. He broke with the widely held tenet that public collections are inalienable, and asked two academics to give advice on how to share the items more widely.22

One of them, Bénédicte Savoy, a French art historian specializing in the restitution of art looted by Napoleon, resigned from a museum planning group in Germany because he said it refused to dig deep into the sourcing of historic pieces. “I want to know how much blood is dripping from each artwork,” Savoy wrote.23

France returned 26 royal treasures, including statues, thrones and carved palace doors, to Benin, Nigeria, last year.24 The French move has led to formation of the Benin Dialogue Group, which includes representatives from Nigeria and major museums that display treasurers taken from the kingdom of Benin. This kingdom flourished from the 13th to the 19th centuries in what is now southern Nigeria.25

A foundation in the Democratic Republic of Congo and a nonprofit in Cameroon also are seeking the return of African art and artifacts. One African working to bring back looted art, businessman Sindika Dokolo, has urged them to move quickly before there is a change in government or attitude in France.26

Institutions in “all countries are learning to actually develop meaningful relationships with indigenous communities,” said Te Herekiekie Herewini, head of repatriation at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the country's national museum.27

War causes or contributes to the looting, some of it done in the taking of “spoils of war” and some by professionals who see profit in the chaos war sows. In Iraq during the Gulf War of the 1990s, machine gun-toting looters stole artifacts that date back 10,000 years.28

Others took items they claimed were in danger of destruction. One was Thomas Bruce, also known as Lord Elgin, who served as British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He arrived in 1800, when Greece was still an Ottoman domain.

Museumgoers examine a section of the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum in London in 2018. The British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire brought the marbles and other Parthenon artifacts to England in the early 19th century; Greece has been seeking their return since 1832. (Getty Images/Dan Kitwood)

War, plundering and decay had left the Parthenon in Athens much diminished. Lord Elgin hauled away 200 boxes of marbles from friezes, plus sculpture, from the ancient temple, using an ambiguously worded decree from the Ottoman sultan as justification. The British government later bought the artifacts and placed them in the British Museum. Greece regained its independence in 1830 — and since 1832, its leaders have unsuccessfully sought the return of the marbles.29

The issue of provenance — the documented trail of ownership of a piece of art going back hundreds of years — has arisen again and again in the museum world. Trading in looted antiquities is an international criminal activity that is tracked by at least seven commercial and nonprofit databases, including one by Interpol, the international intergovernmental policing agency.30 Stolen art and artifacts show up in major auction house catalogs and elsewhere.

The precise amount of artifacts and art taken is unclear, but many experts say it is huge. Millions of ancient coins are stolen annually from archaeological digs and resold to collectors, a Baylor University professor estimated.31 An international research organization called Trafficking Culture publishes information and books on the issue, and a number of researchers track stolen art and artifacts.

Solutions may be costly and difficult. Returning precious objects to nations that have few if any resources to support museums raises concerns that they will be stolen again. Some museums are sharing more on the origins of artifacts or tightening their policies and practices on new acquisitions. Lacking binding international laws, indigenous people rely on treaties or human rights laws to demand that illegally trafficked objects be returned. One expert at Fordham University in New York City suggests a governing agency similar to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission should scrutinize museums’ new pieces.32

“Only the really well-endowed museums have the capacity to hire staff” for repatriation research, says Caitlin Wunderlich, editor of The Museum Scholar, a publication for emerging curators and museum professionals. “Others don't even know what's in their museum storerooms.”

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art returned a highly decorated first-century B.C. golden-sheathed coffin because the Manhattan District Attorney's Office presented evidence that it had been stolen from Egypt in 2011 and the paperwork falsified. The Met has previously returned stolen vases and stone sculptures that were sold to the museum.33

One expert's research has led major museums and auction houses to return dozens of objects to rightful owners in Italy, Greece and other countries.

“My work now resembles a gigantic jigsaw puzzle made of thousands of smaller puzzles,” said forensic archaeologist Christos Tsirogiannis. Museums do not always cooperate, he said. “They hold onto illicit objects as long as they can, until someone finds out. It's all about money, fame and ownership,” Tsirogiannis told National Geographic. 34

— Vickie Elmer

[17] Naomi Polonsky, “Hundreds Attend Guerilla, Activist-Led Tour of Looted Artifacts at the British Museum,” Hyperallergic, Dec. 10, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/yx6wzbb7.

[18] “The British Museum,” TripAdvisor, accessed Nov. 20, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/tcdllk2.

[19] Naomi Polonsky, “Activists Return to the British Museum to Lead Another ‘Stolen Goods Tour,’” Hyperallergic, May 8, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y53ybzwb.

[20] Farah Nayeri, “Return of African Artifacts Sets a Tricky Precedent for Europe's Museums,” The New York Times, Nov. 27 2018, https://tinyurl.com/yx7q2mo4.

[21] Kayla Randall, “How the Smithsonian Is Reuniting Thousands of Human Remains with Indigenous Communities,” Washington City Paper, Oct. 18, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/tp3cakj.

[22] “The clamour to return artefacts taken by colonialists,” The Economist, March 28, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yx4ezdpb.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Nayeri, op. cit.

[25] Mark Cartwright, “Kingdom of Benin,” Ancient History Encyclopedia, April 2, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/tso45bh.

[26] Nayeri, op. cit.

[27] Randall, op. cit.

[28] “Destruction In Mesopotamia: Ancient Mysteries Fall Prey To Looters In Iraq, Science Feature Reveals” Science Daily, July 6, 2001, https://tinyurl.com/ruynyoc.

[29] Juan Pablo Sánchez, “How the Parthenon Lost Its Marbles,” National Geographic History, March-April 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y4c2kryj.

[30] “Commercial databases of stolen cultural property,” Collections Trust, accessed Nov. 20, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/vzhbyw8.

[31] “‘Smoking Gun’ Ancient Coins Are Being Looted from Excavations — and Too Few Coin Scholars Are Firing Back, Baylor Expert Says,” Newswise, Feb. 16 2014, https://tinyurl.com/tud94wy.

[32] Leila Alexandra Amijneddoleh, “Protecting Cultural Heritage by Strictly Scrutinizing Museum Acquisitions,” Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal, 2014, https://tinyurl.com/udhzdz9; Saskia Vermeylen, “Easter Island Statues: international law is shifting against British Museum,” The Conversation, Nov. 29, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/sh6v7m7.

[33] Colin Moynihan, “Met Museum to Return Prized Artifact Because It Was Stolen,” The New York Times, Feb. 15, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yyzccpr2.

[34] Nick Romeo, “Museum-Goers Beware: That Ancient Artifact May be Stolen,” National Geographic, May 1, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/u93x48x.

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Bibliography

Books

Asma, Stephen T. , Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums , Oxford University Press, 2001. A philosophy professor at Columbia College Chicago looks at the world of collecting curiosities and bizarre natural specimens.

Fortey, Richard , Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum , Vintage, 2009. A senior paleontologist offers an intimate biography of London's Natural History Museum, including its eccentric personalities and scientific endeavors.

Fraser, Andrea , 2016: Museums, Money and Politics , MIT Press, 2018. An artist and UCLA professor explores the politics of the museum world by documenting the 2016 political donations of more than 5,000 trustees at U.S. art museums.

Karp, Ivan , et al., eds., Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations , University of Chicago Press, 2018. A collection of essays analyzes museums’ changing roles in science and society.

Schubert, Karsten , The Curator's Egg: The Evolution of the Museum Concept from the French Revolution to the Present Day , Ridinghouse, 2009. A German art dealer traces the growth of the museum concept from the Louvre in Paris to the current popularity of buildings by “starchitects.”

Articles

Cahalan, Rose , “Plight at the Museum,” Texas Observer, Jan. 7, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/wc5jtvm. This analysis looks into the life, history and slow decline of Texas' largest history museum, the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum.

Clark, Taylor , “Meow Wolf's Magic Kingdom: How a ragtag group of artists launched an art-entertainment empire,” California Sunday Magazine, Sept. 13, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/rm5j5sc. A journalist looks at the mystery, discord and creativity of Meow Wolf, a collective turned company that creates immersive arts experiences.

Farago, Jason , “The New MoMA Is Here. Get Ready for Change,” The New York Times, Oct. 3, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/uhjfyv5. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City reopens with a more eclectic collection and a commitment to openness and diversity.

Harris, Elizabeth A. , “The Louvre Took Down the Sackler Name. Here's Why Other Museums Probably Won't,” The New York Times, July 18, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/s4ll5at. Before giving huge gifts to museums, donors negotiate contracts to guarantee their recognition for decades or longer. That and other reasons keeps tarnished names on museum wings and buildings.

Loew, Karen , “Why Do Instagram Playgrounds Keep Calling Themselves Museums?” CityLab, Oct. 16, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/tk6qxbq. More for-profit immersive Instagram experiences are calling themselves museums, although their purpose is to “sell a good time for a profit.”

Maloney, Devon , “Just How Does a Wax Museum Survive in the Digital Age?” Vanity Fair, Feb. 20, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/tfntvnw. A journalist says wax museums are drawing guests by removing the velvet ropes and encouraging close-up selfies with likenesses of Jennifer Aniston and other celebrities.

Randall, Kayla , “How the Smithsonian Is Reuniting Thousands of Human Remains with Indigenous Communities,” Washington City Paper, Oct. 18, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/tp3cakj. Two offices within the Smithsonian research requests to return funeral garb, ancestors’ bones and other human remains to indigenous communities around the world.

Sugiura, Eri , “Kengo Kuma, Sebastiao Salgado say museums must change with society,” Nikkei Asian Review, Aug. 21, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yxua55vk. Architects, a Brazilian photographer and a Chinese artist-designer discuss museums’ changing roles.

Reports and Studies

“Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey, 2018,” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/taul28z. To encourage greater diversity in museum staffs, researchers are compiling the demographics of curators and other personnel.

“Museum 2040,” Museum, November-December 2017, https://tinyurl.com/syapphc. A special report of the American Alliance of Museums, which accredits U.S. museums, imagines the museum world in 2040.

“TrendsWatch2019,” American Alliance of Museums, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/qvtel3q. This annual report explores the importance of trust, explaining museums’ standards on research in an era of fake news and information and efforts to “decolonize” museums and their collections to remove European or American perspectives and cultures.

Harms, William , “Careful planning and focus on audience crucial to success of new cultural facilities,” Cultural Policy Center, University of Chicago, 2012, https://tinyurl.com/t29g3z9. A study examines a major building boom involving museums, theaters and performing arts centers and predicts the new or renovated structures will draw more people.

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The Next Step

Closures

“Michigan prison museum to close at end of year,” The Associated Press, Nov. 13, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/r7omnhu. A Michigan museum housed in what was once the largest walled prison in the world will close after five years due to shortages in financial support and staffing.

Cole, William , “Naval Air Museum Is Being Evicted over Contract Issues,” Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Nov. 9, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/tkvn843. A naval air museum will be evicted from state airport land because of disputes with a Hawaii transportation agency over contract issues.

Miranda, Carolina A. , “What's next for nonprofit museums after the closing of Marciano Art Foundation?” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 8, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/ud8f5rk. Private art collectors are shuttering a nonprofit Los Angeles museum after employees attempted to unionize.

Diversity

Davis, Josh , “There are more male than female specimens in natural history collections,” Natural History Museum, Oct. 23, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y2lvculx. A study of sex bias in natural history found that male specimens were more prevalent at several museums around the world.

Hannon, Kerry , “In the #MeToo Era, Museums Celebrate Women,” The New York Times, Oct. 23, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/vnz3nqq. In honor of the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in the United States, many museums are featuring exhibits centered on women.

Lefrak, Mikaela, and Christian Zapata , “Smithsonian Secretary Plans to Attract New Visitors to Anacostia Museum,” WAMU, Nov. 5, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/r8kt94l. The new head of the Smithsonian Institution wants to increase the diversity of visitors to all 19 museums under his leadership.

Innovative Exhibits

“EnChroma Glasses Enable Color Blind Visitors to Experience Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Vibrant Color,” Invision, Nov. 13, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/vetwtno. A Missouri art museum is collaborating with an eyewear company to provide color-blind visitors with an opportunity to view exhibits in full color.

Butzer, Stephanie , “Denver Museum of Nature & Science opens new, highly interactive ‘Extreme Sports’ exhibit Friday,” ABC 7, Sept. 12, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/u9r4475. A Denver museum makes use of virtual reality and an obstacle course in an exhibit about extreme sports.

Pellechia, Thomas , “A Brewing History Comes to the National Museum of American History,” Forbes, Oct. 23, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yxxe9hdx. An updated food exhibit in Washington's National Museum of American History will include a permanent feature about the history of beer.

Museum Donors

Kosman, Josh , “Group wants MoMA donors tied to Jeffrey Epstein off board,” New York Post, Nov. 14, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/rjbnzh3. A feminist group sponsored ads calling for the removal from the Museum of Modern Art's board of donors who have financial ties to the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Lefebvre, Sam , “Special Report: ‘Toxic donors’ are coming under fire at art museums — but not in liberal San Francisco. What will SFMOMA do?” Mission Local, May 15, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y5grjty8. As the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art addresses concerns about diversity and inclusion in its exhibits, liberal critics complain that donors with ties to the so-called military-industrial complex and to the U.S. Border Patrol remain as trustees.

Pogrebin, Robin, Elizabeth A. Harris and Graham Bowley , “New Scrutiny of Museum Boards Takes Aim at World of Wealth and Status,” The New York Times, Oct. 2, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y5ls5mos. The vice chairman of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art resigned after protesters criticized his company for supplying tear gas used against migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Museum supporters warn that such protests could make it harder for cultural institutions to attract wealthy donors.

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Contacts

American Alliance of Museums
2451 Crystal Drive, Suite 1005, Arlington, VA 22202
202-289-1818
aam-us.org/
Organization that accredits U.S. museums and shares standards and best practices; also holds workshops and conducts advocacy and research.

American Association for State and Local History
2021 21st Ave. South, Suite 320, Nashville, TN 37212
615-320-3203
aaslh.org
Association that provides leadership and support for members who preserve and interpret state and local histories; also represents local, university, state and other history centers.

Association of Art Museum Curators
174 E. 80th St., New York, NY 10075
646-405-8057
aamc@artcurators.org
Professional organization for museum curators; also conducts research and promotes ethical standards.

Association of Science and Technology Centers
818 Connecticut Ave., N.W., 7th Floor, Washington, DC 20006-2734
202-783-7200
astc.org
Membership organization of 700 science and technology museums that works on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and offers job postings, directory and professional development.

Institute of Museum Ethics
Seton Hall University, 400 S. Orange Ave., Arts Center AC 204, South Orange, NJ 07079
museumethics.org/
Created as an adjunct of Seton Hall University's master's program in museum professions, this organization has a bibliography on museum ethics and holds occasional conventions.

Institute of Museum and Library Services
955 L'Enfant Plaza North, S.W., Suite 4000, Washington DC 20024-2135
202-653-4657
imls.gov
Government agency that provides grants and research to U.S. libraries and museums.

International Association of Women's Museums
Via Mainardo, 2-1-39012, Merano, Italy
02950590212
iawm.international/
Group that monitors, connects and provides resources about women's museums and the issues those museums face. Also holds conferences and symposiums and tracks locations of women's museums in an online database.

International Council for Museums
Maison de l'UNESCO 1 rue Miollis, 75732 Paris Cedex 15 France
+33 (0) 1 47 34 05 00
icom.museum
Membership organization with 44,000 professionals in 140 countries that establishes professional and ethical standards for museum activities.

Museums Association
42 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1R 0AZ
020 7566 7800
museumsassociation.org/home
Established in 1889, the association represents 10,000 individual members and 1,500 museums; also campaigns for “museums to change lives.”

MuseWeb
703 Dale Drive, Silver Spring, MD 20910
240-839-1114
museweb.net/
Group that holds an annual convention, publishes a catalog of conference papers and offers consulting services for museums.

Trafficking Culture
Ivy Lodge, 63 Gibson St., Glasgow, G12 8LR Scotland
traffickingculture.org/
Group of researchers and forensic criminologists focused on antiquities and artifacts taken or trafficked. Publishes case studies and papers by its researchers, based at Oxford and Glasgow Universities and the University of Victoria at Wellington, New Zealand.

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Footnotes

[1] “Our Opening Year, An Overview,” National Museum of African American History and Culture, accessed Nov. 25, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/uler3f8.

[2] Martha T. Moore, “Surging Interest in Black History Gives a Lift to Museums, Tourism,” Pew Charitable Trusts, Nov. 21, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/tepbpqk.

[3] “Lonnie G. Bunch III,” Smithsonian Institution, accessed Nov. 25, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/qopvh3o.

[4] Megan Cerullo,“Whitney Museum board trustee resigns after protests over border tear-gas ties” CBS News, July 25, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y3znxqjw.

[5] Geraldine Kendall Adams, “Museums increasingly targeted as sites of protest,” Museums Association (UK), May 15, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/wpd7xlk.

[6] Alina Tugend, “To Reach New Audiences, Museums are Redefining What they Offer,” The New York Times, March 12, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/ycljzte6.

[7] Dan Weiss, “What Makes a Museum Successful?” Yale Insights, Aug. 3, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/ss7qneo.

[8] Tatijana Shoan, “Brooklyn Museum's Anne Pasternak on Shaking Up the Art World,” As If, accessed Nov. 25, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/v9uwc4x.

[9] Soo Kim, “42 incredible museums to visit in your lifetime,” The Telegraph, Sept. 15, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/uksdz8y.

[10] “2017 TEA/AECOM Theme Index and Museum Index reports on world's top-attended theme parks, water parks and museums,” Themed Entertainment Association, May 23, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/v27lwru.

[11] “Theme Index Museum Index 2018 Global Attractions Attendance Report,” Themed Entertainment Assocation, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/wxqmfj4.

[12] Angelique Chrisafis. “Beyoncé and Jay-Z help Louvre museum break visitor record in 2018,” The Guardian, Jan. 3, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y8gooxxp.

[13] Lindsey V. Thompson, “The Louvre Is Adding A Tour Inspired by Beyoncé and Jay-Z's APESH*T Music Video,” Architectural Digest, July 9, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/reqd9zb.

[14] Cees van Riel, “What businesses can learn from the high reputations of museums,” Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Aug. 29, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/rd5fdtg.

[15] Tom Parfitt, “Classic Russian cars worth millions go missing in museum scandal,” The Telegraph, Nov. 20, 2012, https://tinyurl.com/w3y28jl.

[16] Kelly Grovier, “The artworks that caused a scandal,” BBC, Oct. 19, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/ych2waoe.

[17] “Museum Data Files,” Institute of Museum and Library Services, November 2018, p. 1, https://tinyurl.com/rk6g5cx.

[18] Mariacristina Bonti, “The Corporate Museums and Their Social Function: Some Evidence From Italy,” European Scientific Journal, November 2014, https://tinyurl.com/rmw2ksj.

[19] Joelle Seligson, “Corporate Culture? One part education; one part sales. This is the corporate museum,” Museum, November-December 2010, https://tinyurl.com/wtmk86y.

[20] Peggy McGlone, “Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian's first black leader, on the challenge of making it ‘a place that matters,’” The Washington Post, Aug. 30, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/rpm5awt.

[21] “Creating a new museum definition — the backbone of ICOM,” International Conference of Museums, accessed Nov. 25, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yx7gr7j9.

[22] Suyin Haynes, “Why a Plan to Redefine the Meaning of “Museum’ Is Stirring Up Controversy,” Time, Sept. 9 2019, https://tinyurl.com/rrzyqjx.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Robert Stein, “Museums as economic engines,” American Alliance of Museums, Jan. 18, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/s42r7oq.

[25] “Museums as Economic Engines, Part 2: Cultural Institutions Employ Two Times as Many Americans as the Sports Industry,” The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Shared Experiences Blog, March 2018, https://tinyurl.com/vlpf5sp.

[26] Colleen Dilenschneider, “Active Visitors: Who Currently Attends Cultural Organizations? DATA,” KYOB, Jan. 23, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/vmnnnee; “Art Museum Attendance,” Humanities Indicators, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, August 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yadunst2.

[27] “From $29 to Absolutely Free: More Than 200 U.S. Art Museums by Admission Price,” ARTnews, Jan. 10, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/skwolru; Daniel Grant, “How much is too much?” The New Criterion, July 23, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/rr6zg4k.

[28] Lauren Hernández et al., “Live updates: Second phase of outages have begun hitting the Bay Area,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 9, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y57cba4k.

[29] Oakland Museum of California, Twitter post, Oct. 9, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/tk6hr8b.

[30] Carol Strickland, “Can art help unite a diverse society? Museums aim to find out,” The Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 10, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/tjjlaf5.

[31] Stephan Salisbury, “Philadelphia museum shows: Climate change, notorious RBG, shark-bite survival and ‘Spit Spreads Death’ at the Mütter,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 14, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/wmdzcba.

[32] Kelly Song, “Virtual Reality and Van Gough Collide: technology is turning museums into a booming industry,” CNBC, Sept. 24, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/yc2ash82.

[33] Najja Parker, “Don't forget to visit these 8 museums in metro Atlanta,” The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Feb. 13, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/uho2bmc.

[34] Ron M. Potvin, “House or Home? Rethinking the House Museum Paradigm,” AASLH Blog, Aug. 15, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/rnczjpq.

[35] David Freedlander, “Metropolitan Museum of Art President Daniel Weiss Opens Up About His Plans to Save the Museum,” Town & Country, Sept. 8, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/w7ap228.

[36] McGlone, op. cit.

[37] Antonia Cundy and Anjli Raval, “Scrutiny mounts over corporate funding of the arts,” Financial Times, Oct. 1, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yx3s4dgl.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Masha Gessen, “Nan Goldin Leads a Protestat the Guggenheim Against the Sackler Family,” The New Yorker, Feb. 10 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yymbocp2.

[40] Peggy McGlone, “As more museums say no to Sackler donations, family trust halts its giving,” The Washington Post, March 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/rmzazym; The Associated Press and Laura Strickler, “Purdue Pharma, maker of painkiller OxyContin, files for bankruptcy as part of settlement,” NBC News, Sept. 15, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y563ck9e.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Mark Brown and Amy Walker, “V&A boss proud of funding from US family linked to opioid crisis,” The Guardian, July 10, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/rychdxg.

[43] Laura Lott, “Financial sustainability is everyone's responsibility,” American Alliance of Museums, May 29, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/tarmhb2.

[44] “The Business Model of the Nonprofit Museum,” Sothebys Institute of Art, Jan. 10, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/wkkftv3.

[45] Peggy McGlone, “A Diverse Foundation,” The Washington Post, Aug. 5, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/wjrroe7.

[46] Elizabeth A. Harris, “The Louvre Took Down the Sackler Name. Here's Why Other Museums Probably Won't,” The New York Times, July 18, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/s4ll5at.

[47] Jessica Glenza, “Big tobacco: top US arts institutions under fire for accepting donations,” The Guardian, March 29, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y5n5l9qo.

[48] Robin Pogrebin and Jason Farago, “With Choice of New Director, the Met Gets a Scholar and a Showman,” The New York Times, April 18, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y7apdoh3.

[49] David Smith, “First woman: Smithsonian Air and Space director looks from the Moon to Mars,” The Guardian, Oct. 13, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y7qslfyp.

[50] “Latest Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey Shows Increases in African American Curators and Women in Leadership Roles,” American Alliance of Museums, Jan. 28, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/wywhg3h.

[51] Marianna Fernandez, “For Museum Boards, Age Diversity Is One of Many Issues —Could Nixing Trustee Dues Fix Them All?” The Observer, Aug. 14, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/wfwvm6c.

[52] Kaywin Feldman, “Museum leadership in a time of crisis,“ Apollo, May 28, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/wry82ks.

[53] Liz Sawyer, “After outcry and protests, Walker Art Center will remove ‘Scaffold’ sculpture,” Star Tribune, May 28, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/vordvny.

[54] Andrew R. Chow, “Olga Viso, Embattled Leader of Walker Art Center, Steps Down,” The New York Times, Nov. 14, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y8errbwg.

[55] Olga Viso, “Decolonizing the Art Museum: The Next Wave,” The New York Times, May 1, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/ydcobedc.

[56] Louise Pryke, “Hidden women of history: Ennigaldi-Nanna, curator of the world's first museum,” The Conversation, May 21, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y3mhczr6.

[57] Alasdair Wilkins, “The story behind the world's oldest museum, built by a Babylonian princess 2,500 years ago,” Gizmodo, May 25, 2011, https://tinyurl.com/shz2ekj.

[58] “Palace of Bel-Shalti-Nannar / AD,” Ur Online, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/w2ogpf4.

[59] “The world's oldest museums,” The European Museums Network, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/upz6zc9.

[60] “The World's Oldest Museums,” World.Atlas.com, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/rc38p83.

[61] “Our three venues,” Kunstsammlung Basel, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/vaozhms.

[62] “The British Museum story,” The British Museum, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/n33vtw9.

[63] “Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778),” University of California Berkeley, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/veej43y.

[64] Steven Lubar et al., “Lost Museums,” Museum History Journal, Dec. 6, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/sblxx9h.

[65] “Our History,” Smithsonian, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y95fpwsl.

[66] “Smithsonian Institution Chronology,” Smithsonian, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/u8ues53.

[67] “Benjamin Franklin's Inventions,” The Franklin Institute, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/uwcwupl.

[68] “Mission & History,” The Franklin Institute, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/wozzoke.

[69] Joan H. Baldwin and Anne W. Ackerson, Women in the Museum: Lessons from the Workplace (2017), https://tinyurl.com/sknodgq.

[70] Anna Billings Gallup, “The Children's Museum as an Educator,” Popular Science Monthly, April 1908, https://tinyurl.com/sfnrmel.

[71] Jessie Swigger, “The first four: Origin Stories of the first four children's museums in the United States,” Association of Children's Museum blog, March 8, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/v4emxjs.

[72] “Timeline,” Field Museum, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/qtq9czu.

[73] Xiuqin Zhou, “After the Fairs: World's Fairs and the Development of Museums,” Expedition, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/wsx64lr.

[74] “A Brief History of the Museum,” Portland Art Museum, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/to5mabh.

[75] Dallen J. Timothy, Cultural Heritage and Tourism: An Introduction (2011), p. 311, https://tinyurl.com/v8x8njt.

[76] Henry Adams, “What happened to the blockbuster art exhibition?” The Conversation, Jan. 2, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/qnkn3h6.

[77] “The Temple of Dendur,” The Met, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/s9rwc28.

[78] Arzu Cilasun Kunduraci, “Virtual Museum and the Review of Virtual Museums in Turkey,” ResearchGate, May 2012, https://tinyurl.com/rfbqzg5.

[79] Randolph Starn, “A Historian's Brief Guide to New Museum Studies,” American Historical Review, February 2005, https://tinyurl.com/sd48z78.

[80] “Government Doubles Official Estimate: There are 35,000 Active Museums in the U.S.,” Institute of Museum and Library Services, May 19, 2014, https://tinyurl.com/rychdxg.

[81] Anne Sraders, “What Was the Great Recession? History, Causes and Consequences,” The Street, July 16, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/vgt4wgm.

[82] Marque-Luisa Miringoff and Sandra Opdycke, “The Arts in a Time of Recession,” The International Journal of the Arts in Society, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/s76x4ho.

[83] Katherine I. Goodall, “The State of the Science Center,” Association of Science and Technology Centers, Aug. 24, 2011, https://tinyurl.com/rfexgmo.

[84] Jack Rouse, “The Business of Culture Conclusion: Museums, Robots and the Economy,” Jack Rouse Associates, May 15, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/txlj5mm.

[85] Paul Rubio, “10 Biggest Museum Openings of the Year,” Conde Nast Traveler, May 11, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/szv82wv.

[86] Jenny Kidd, “Museums are using virtual reality to preserve the past — before it's too late,” The Conversation, July 14, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/v8hc4a4.

[87] Robin Pogrebin, “Art Galleries Face Pressure to Fund Museum Shows,” The New York Times, March 7, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/ybwfgtnl.

[88] Anna Purna Kambhampaty, “The MoMA Will Soon Open Following Extensive Renovations. Here's What to Expect from the Revamped Museum,” Time, Oct. 8, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yx2edhat.

[89] Jason Farago, “The New MoMA Is Here. Get Ready for Change,” The New York Times, Oct. 3, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/uhjfyv5.

[90] Katie Sehl, “Doctors Can Now Give Out Prescriptions for a Visit to the Museum,” Fortune, July 6, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/tve5y9t.

[91] LaPlaca Cohen, “Culture Track,” 2017, https://tinyurl.com/vcfpu23.

[92] Bill O'Driscoll, “Acclaimed Art Museum Deals With Fallout Over Sexual Assault Scandal,” National Public Radio, Dec. 26, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/tpk9cda.

[93] “Settlement reached in North Side Mattress Factory sexual misconduct complaint,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Dec. 26, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/vbn4oz7.

[94] Laura Ly, “Honor students complain of racial incidents at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts,” CNN, May 24, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yxknrcup.

[95] Ken Miller, “Museum of the Bible Quietly Replaces Questioned Artifact,” NBC 4 Washington, Oct. 5, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/r4yhqqh.

[96] “Art and Culture Censorship Timeline,” National Coalition Against Censorship, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/suj6ngs.

[97] Steve Bird, “Student climate change activist plan to target Science Museum over oil sponsorship,” The Telegraph, Oct. 5, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y5jpk22s.

[98] Dylan Owens, “Meow Wolf: The Insane Art Collective Taking Over the World,” Rolling Stone, Jan. 16, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/svmxe4j.

[99] Sophie Haigney, “The Museums of Instagram,” The New Yorker, Sept. 16, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/ur2zqey.

[100] Karen Loew, “Why do Instagram Playgrounds Keep Calling themselves Museums?” CityLab, Oct. 16, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/tk6qxbq.

[101] Steve Johnson, “Chicago beat New York to open a pizza museum. Now it's closing,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 23, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/qltsgdh.

[102] Matt Hoffman, “Escondido Museum Specializing In All Things Prehistoric Plans to Close Next Week,” KPBS, June 28, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/vewznma; Abbey Niezgoda, “Natick Residents React to Closure of International Museum of World War II,” NBC Boston, Sept. 4, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/w3c4tmg.

[103] Cat Reid, “American Jazz Museum works to change its tune, perception,” KSHB, Sept. 3, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/tm27u6m.

[104] Wade Shepard, “Why China Has Hundreds Of Empty ‘Ghost’ Museums,” Forbes, June 20, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/uka6lvx.

[105] “Theme Index Museum Index 2018 Global Attractions Attendance Report,” op. cit.

[106] “2019 MUSE Award Winners,” American Alliance of Museums, accessed Nov. 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/rrtbock.

[107] Elizabeth Merritt, “Decolonizing the Future: museums as agents of generational equity,” American Alliance of Museums, Sept. 17, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/sgj3fgl.

[108] Christina Nolan, “The Role of Technology in Museums,” Arts Management & Technology Laboratory, July 14, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/shpxa6w.

[109] Vickie Elmer, “A bunch of cars at the Corvette Museum got swallowed by a sinkhole — and attendance soared,” Quartz, June 7, 2014, https://tinyurl.com/vt26rvo.

[110] Yadira Sanchez Olson, “Kohl Children's Museum travels to North Chicago for pop-up exhibit featuring STEM activities,” Chicago Tribune/ Lake County News, Oct. 10, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/w3rkh2h.

[111] Patricia Bérubé, “Museums present visual art as beautiful things you can touch,” The Conversation, Oct. 9, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yy543p8n.

[112] “Museum 2040,” American Alliance of Museums, November-December 2017, https://tinyurl.com/syapphc.

[113] Ibid.

[114] “What is the future of the museum?” Gensler Research & Insight, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/uq49kzb.

[115] “Museum 2040,” op. cit.

[116] Ellie Buteau, Hannah Martin and Charles Loh, “Crucial Donors: How Major Individual Givers Can Best Support Nonprofits,” Center for Effective Philanthropy, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/qna2yss.

[117] Bea Mitchell, “Government investing £19m in ‘museums of the future,’” Blooloop, Oct. 29, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/thnb5hg.

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About the Author

Vickie Elmer is a freelance writer and editor who focuses on business, careers and creativity. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Fortune, Kiplinger's Personal Finance and SAGE Business Researcher where she covered the art world, failure and the fashion industry. She leads Mint Artists Guild, a small nonprofit that helps talented teens launch creative careers, and often visits museums in Detroit and many other cities.

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