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A community museum is a museum serving as an exhibition and gathering space for specific identity groups or geographic areas.
In contrast to traditional museums, community museums are commonly multidisciplinary, and may simultaneously exhibit the history, social history, art, or folklore of their communities.
In the United States, the emergence of community museums in the 1960s and 1970s has a direct correlation with the greater social movements of the time. Noting that their histories and cultures were largely absent from mainstream museums, activists and civic leaders from minority communities began to open their own museums in an attempt to have their identities and stories told. [1] In the context of the African American community, this lack of representation prompted individuals to open small, locally focused museums, many of which provided early models for contemporary community museums. As they grew in stature and wealth, some museums started to stray from their mission and commitment to local communities and began tackling broader global issues. In the past few years, an emphasis on returning museum focus to local community history and culture has helped differentiate the community museum from every other type of museum. [2]
During the 1960s and 1970s, community museums tended to be created and run by activists rather than museum professionals. One notable example of such an activist is John Kinard, the founding director of the Anacostia Community Museum. Although Kinard lacked experience in the museum setting, he used his connections within the community to learn on the job. [3] However, as community museums grew in size, they often hired historians or museum professionals to guide their curation, collections management, and fundraising. Starting in the late 1970s, The Anacostia Community Museum began to create specialized internal departments and emphasize expert credentials in its hiring process. [4] Similarly, after taking over as director of the Wing Luke Museum in 1983, Kit Freudenberg directed staff to rigorously clean, catalogue and research the museum's artifacts, "many of which had been placed in boxes or marked with masking tape." [5]
Community museums are marked by their blend of traditional museum methods with methods commonly associated with community organizations and community arts projects. They often practice participatory methods, involving their audiences in various processes, particularly exhibition development and public programming. These practices are varied. The Wing Luke Museum conducts outreach at the beginning of exhibition projects, convenes advisory committees composed of audience members at various stages in the curatorial process, and has even hired full-time community organizers to join their staff. [6] [7] The Brooklyn Historical Society has accepted exhibit proposals from audience members and trained them in curatorial skills to co-create exhibits. [8] These methods distinguish geographically specific museums like the Anacostia Community Museum from local history museums, which may exclude non-museum professionals from their curatorial processes.
While such methods require more labor from museum staff than traditional curatorial methods, [9] writer and museum director Nina Simon has argued that they make museums more inviting and relevant to audience members. [10]
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas often consist of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.
A curator is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the particular institution and its mission. The term "curator" may designate the head of any given division, not limited to museums. Curator roles include "community curators", "literary curators", "digital curators", and "biocurators".
The Anacostia Community Museum is a community museum in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in the United States. It is one of twenty museums under the umbrella of the Smithsonian Institution and was the first federally funded community museum in the United States. The museum, founded in 1967, was created with the intention to bring aspects of the Smithsonian museums, located on the National Mall, to the Anacostia neighborhood, with the hope that community members from the neighborhood would visit the main Smithsonian museums. It became federally funded in 1970 and focuses on the community in and around Anacostia in its exhibitions. This museum also houses a library.
Museology is the study of museums. It explores the history of museums and their role in society, as well as the activities they engage in, including curating, preservation, public programming, and education.
The Wing Luke Museum is a museum in Seattle, Washington, United States, which focuses on the culture, art and history of Asian Pacific Americans. It is located in the city's Chinatown-International District. Established in 1967, the museum is a Smithsonian Institution affiliate and the only pan-Asian Pacific American community-based museum in the country. It has relocated twice since its founding, most recently to the East Kong Yick Building in 2008. In February 2013 it was recognized as one of two dozen affiliated areas of the U.S. National Park Service.
The Museum of Fine Arts is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas. With more than 1.2 million visitors a year, it is the 79th–most visited art museum in the world as of 2022.
Public humanities is the work of engaging diverse publics in reflecting on heritage, traditions, and history, and the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of civic and cultural life. Public humanities is often practiced within federal, state, nonprofit and community-based cultural organizations that engage people in conversations, facilitate and present lectures, exhibitions, performances and other programs for the general public on topics such as history, philosophy, popular culture and the arts. Public Humanities also exists within universities, as a collaborative enterprise between communities and faculty, staff, and students.
Exhibit design is the process of developing an exhibit—from a concept through to a physical, three-dimensional exhibition. It is a continually evolving field, drawing on innovative, creative, and practical solutions to the challenge of developing communicative environments that 'tell a story' in a three-dimensional space.
Betty Blayton was an American activist, advocate, artist, arts administrator and educator, and lecturer. As an artist, Blayton was an illustrator, painter, printmaker, and sculptor. She is best known for her works often described as "spiritual abstractions". Blayton was a founding member of the Studio Museum in Harlem and board secretary, co-founder and executive director of Harlem Children's Art Carnival (CAC), and a co-founder of Harlem Textile Works. She was also an advisor, consultant and board member to a variety of other arts and community-based service organizations and programs. Her abstract methods created a space for the viewer to insert themselves into the piece, allowing for self reflection, a central aspect of Blayton's work.
The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is a nonprofit grantmaking organization and knowledge-sharing hub for arts and culture in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US established in 2005. In 2008, Paula Marincola was named the first executive director. The Center receives funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts and makes project grants in two areas, Performance and Exhibitions & Public Interpretation, as well as awarding grants to individual artists through Pew Fellowships. In 2021, the Center announced the introduction of Re:imagining Recovery grants to assist in COVID-19 recovery.
Shared historical authority is a current trend in museums and historical institutions which aims to open the interpretation of history to the public.
John Robert Edward Kinard was an American social activist, pastor, and museum director. He is best known as the director of the Anacostia Museum, a small community museum founded by the Smithsonian Institution in 1967. Kinard was the museum's first director, and remained in the post until his death. The Washington Post said Kinard was "a passionate believer in the idea that the well-being of black people depends on having a record of their past". Noted British archeologist and museologist Sir Kenneth Hudson said Kinard "developed the Anacostia Museum into one of the small number of museums of influence in the world."
Portia James was an American curator and historian. A specialist in African-American material culture, she worked as the cultural resources manager of the Anacostia Community Museum.
Michael Atwood Mason is an American folklorist and museum professional. He was CEO and Executive Director of President Lincoln's Cottage. Up to February 2021 he was the Director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
The Jerusalem Center for the Visual Arts (JCVA) is an international artists-in-residence program that hosts artists and curators in Israel.
Cecil Fergerson was an African-American art curator and community activist. He is widely credited with fostering African-American and Latin-American art communities in Los Angeles for more than 50 years, and was named a "Living Cultural Treasure" by the city in 1999. While working at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Fergerson co-founded the Black Arts Council (BAC) to advocate for African-American artists and support their community. His advocacy at LACMA and BAC led to seminal exhibitions of African-American art in the early 1970s.
Edith T. Martin is an American artist and museum professional.
Lilian Thomas Burwell is a Washington, DC sculptor and painter whose shaped paintings often blur the line between the two disciplines. Her artwork uses abstraction to create a personal response to the natural world.
Zora Martin-Felton was an American museum director and curator. She established the education department at the Anacostia Community Museum, which is a museum in the Smithsonian Institution and worked as Director of Education from 1967 to 1995.
The Cinque Gallery (1969–2004) was co-founded by artists Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, and Norman Lewis as an outgrowth of the Black power movement to "provide a place where the works of unknown, and neglected artists of talent …" — primarily Black artists — "would not only be shown but nurtured and developed". "Relying on a series of volunteers, Cinque hosted solo, group, and touring exhibitions," and sponsored an artist-in-residence program, which was inaugurated with collagist Nanette Carter.