Museum Archipelago

The displays at the Tiagarra Cultural Centre and Museum in Devonport, Tasmania, Australia were built in 1976 by non-indigenous citizens and scientists without consulting Aboriginal Tasmanians. David Gough , chairperson of the Six Rivers Aboriginal Corporation, remembers visiting the museum when he was younger and seeing his own culture presented as extinct . Today, Gough is the manager of Tiagarra...

Penal transportation from England to Australia from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s was used to expand Britain's spheres of influence and to reduce overcrowding in British prisons. The male convict experience is well-known, but the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart is at the center of a shift in how Australians think of the role that female convicts played in the colonization of Tasmania. Dr. Jody...

The fight for racial diversity in museums and other cultural institutions is not new: people of color have been fighting for inclusion in white mainstream museums for over 50 years . Dispose these efforts, change has been limited. A 2018 survey by the Mellon Foundation found that 88% of people in museum leadership positions are white. Stephanie Cunningham has a clear answer for why these white ins...

There’s a new tool in young-Earth creationists' quest for scientific legitimacy: the museum. Over the past 25 years, dozens of so-called creation museums have been built, including the Answers in Genesis (AiG) Creation Museum in Kentucky. Borrowing the style of natural history museums and science centers, these public display spaces use the form and rhetoric of mainstream science to support a beli...

Joe Galliano came up with the idea for Queer Britain , the UK’s national LGBTQ+ museum, during the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalization of homosexual acts in England and Wales . Discouraged by the focus on male homosexuality and on legislation, he launched a bid to preserve histories that have been ignored or destroyed. If all goes well, the museum will open in London in a few years....

In American history most often told, the vitality of Black activism has been obscured in favor of celebrating white-lead movements. In the 19th century, an enormous network of African American activists created a series of state and national political meetings known as the Colored Conventions Movement . The Colored Conventions Project (CCP) is a Black digital humanities initiative dedicated to ide...

Lana Pajdas is the founder of Fun Museums , a heritage and culture travel blog with a radical idea: museums are fun. It is the guiding principle of her museum marketing, consulting work , and even her photographs . In this episode, Pajdas describes Heritage Sites in her native Croatia, from the interpretation of the 1991 Battle of Vukovar at the Vukovar Municipal Museum to the Game of Thrones-insp...

Barbara Hicks-Collins grew up in a Civil Rights house in Bogalusa, Louisiana. In her family breakfast room in 1965, her father, the late Robert “Bob” Hicks , founded the Bogalusa chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice . The armed self-defense force was formed in response to local anti-integration violence that the local police force complicitly supported. The house became a communication h...

High in the Balkan mountains, Buzludzha monument is deteriorating. Designed to emphasize the power and modernity of the Bulgarian Communist Party , Buzludzha is now at the center of a debate over how Bulgaria remembers its past . Architect Brian Muthaliff wants the building to evolve along with Bulgaria. His master’s thesis on Buzludzha describes a re-adaption of the site to subvert the original i...

The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum , on the Big Cypress Reservation in the Florida Everglades, serves as the public face of the Seminole Tribe of Florida . But the museum collaborates with the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO) next door to preserve the tribe's culture, working for and with the community through various shared projects. One of the projects...

By day, Paula Santos is Community Engagement Manager at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art . By night, she hosts the excellent Cultura Conscious podcast. On Cultura Conscious, which just celebrated its one-year anniversary, Santos interviews cultural workers on their work with justice and equity. The discussions dive deep into what Santos calls the "nuts and bolts" of museum work. On this episod...

The Jewish Museum of History in Sofia, Bulgaria is housed on the second floor of the Sofia Synagogue in the center of Bulgaria's capital, just steps away from an Orthodox Church, and Sofia's Mosque. This clustering of places of worship — it's hard to find another example of this in Europe — is part of the unique story of Jewish people in Bulgaria. While the museum tells the full story of the Jewis...

When the American Writers Museum opened in Chicago in 2017, it became the first museum in the US to celebrate all genres of writing. Early in the planning phase, founder Malcolm O’Hagan made a couple of key decisions: no artifacts and no single curator. In this episode, the museum’s programs director Allison Sansone explains how these decisions continue to shape the museum, from a timeline of 100...

The campus of the Bulgarian National Museum of Military History in Sofia is defended on all sides by a garden of missiles and tanks . But as Director of Public Relations Deyana Kostova points out, many of the exhibits inside focus on the consequences of war rather than the tools of warfare. One of these exhibits, called 'The Little Man in the Great War' , explores the Bulgarian World War I experie...

Ariana Lee and Palace Shaw create The Whitest Cube , an excellent new museum podcast about people of color and their experiences with art institutions as artists, visitors, workers, activists, or casual admirers. The podcast interrogates the city of Boston and its museums through the lens of race. In this episode, Lee and Shaw talk about the reasons for starting the podcast, what diversity in muse...

High in the Bulgarian mountains, Buzludzha monument is deteriorating. Commemorating  early Bulgarian Marxists , it was designed to emphasize  the power and modernity of the Bulgarian Communist Party . Buzludzha is now at the center of a debate over how  Bulgaria remembers its past . Some people want to destroy it, some people want to restore it to its former glory, but Bulgarian arc...

There were no children’s museums in the Balkans before Muzeiko opened in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2015. Days before Muzeiko’s historic opening, I interviewed Vessela Gercheva, the museum’s Programs and Exhibits Director. Gercheva talked about the challenges of opening the museum, not the least of which was how few people actually knew what a children’s museum was. Today, almost three years later, Gerche...

Margaret Middleton is an independent exhibit designer and museum consultant based in Providence, RI, USA. Middleton recently completed the design of the children's exhibits at the Discovery Museum in Acton, MA, USA. Driven by a background in industrial design and queer activism, Middleton is passionate about creating visitor-centered museum experiences , and writes and speaks about inclusion in mu...

The Bulgarian National Polytechnical Museum is a science museum that also tells the story of Bulgarian and world history. The building itself once housed a museum of a Bulgarian communist leader, and the technical artifacts on display , from simple machines to Bulgarian-made computers from the 1980s present both scientific concepts and the political contexts in which they were developed . In this...

In episode 36 of this podcast , Bill Bradberry, Chair of the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Area Commission , described encountering the glaring lack of cultural diversity within and around the museum industry, particularly in leadership. He cited the new Museum Studies program at Lincoln University as an example of a program that addresses the problem directly. Blake Bradford is the...

Until a few weeks ago, one of the only places in downtown New Orleans acknowledging the city’s slave-trading past was a marker in Congo Square , erected in 1997. The New Orleans Committee to Erect Historic Markers on the Slave Trade has since put up two new markers, one on the transatlantic slave trade along the Moonwalk and another on the domestic slave trade at the intersection of Esplanade Aven...

View Shownotes As the oldest site of human habitation in North America, the Meadowcroft Rockshelter has a challenge: how to convey its mind-boggling timescale, spanning from prehistory to the 19th century? David Scofield, director of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Historic Village, describes how the museum is designed to connect the big changes in how people lived through 16,000 years of history....

View Shownotes Jenny Mathiasson and Kloe Rumsey started The C Word: The Conservators’ Podcast to broadcast their friendly and professional discussions about conservation. Each episode features a different hot topic in the conservation world, and the podcast stands out for its hosts willingness to tackle complex topics. In this episode, the hosts discuss whether photos are data or objects, the Digi...

Over the course of his long life, Hans Sloane collected tens of thousands of items which became the basis for what is today the British Museum. Funded in large part by his marriage into the enslaving plantocracy of Jamaica and the Atlantic slave trade, and aided by Britain’s rising colonial power and global reach, he assembled an encyclopedic collection of specimens and objects from all around the...

Image: Sanchita Balachandran. Photo Credit: James Rensselaer. Sanchita Balachandran , Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum , hopes to see the field of conservation develop into more of a social process, rather than simply a technical one. From her 2016 talk at the American Institute for Conservation’s Annual Meeting , to teaching her students how to interrogate an object i...