Museum Buzz

Ian Ellard, Head of the V&A Academy at the V&A in London, shares his experience of rapidly switching to distance learning as a result of COVID-19. Ellard was about to launch a new, cohesive adult learning program: the brochure was ready to print, the new logo was approved, all they had to do was hit 'send'. "But public health had other plans."  Listen to our conversation as we explore their journe...

Kat Harding, PR and Social Media Manager at the North Carolina Museum of Art, shares a deep dive into their approach to #MuseumFromHome. This popular initiative by museums from around the world has allowed visitors to stay in touch with the institutions they love - and access new collections - during the pandemic. 

In the wake of the shutdown, Scott Stulen, CEO and President of the Philbrook Museum of Art, had to act quickly. Projects that would take months, took hours. A new idea presented in the morning was up and running by the afternoon. In this conversation, Scott reflects on the role of museum leadership during these tumultuous times. From collaboration to garden cats to victory gardens, the Philbrook...

Erika Sanger, Executive Director of the Museum Association of New York (MANY), is balancing the desire and need to re-open with the reality of a national health crisis.  In this conversation, we talk about how she's led museums to navigate this difficult time by offering information, resources, and virtual meet ups. We also cover the economic realities that museums face: in New York state, museum'...

How have museums responded to the "COVID Moment"? In this episode, Josh Goldblum, CEO of BlueCadet , talks about how museums are having to rethink the visitor experience. With museums closed and faced with re-opening, Goldblum believes museums can evolve their thinking by looking to other industries such as journalism, or companies such as Disney and Whole Foods.  Plus, what all museums may be won...

Museum Buzz is back with Season Two! In this season Emily interviews guests from around the world to unpack one buzzword from different perspectives. That buzzword is "Distance." We'll look at it through the lens of interpretation, re-opening, exhibition design. But also a little more abstractly: Can museums afford to distance themselves from the present? How do you shrink the distance between a v...

"What we really represent is an awareness raising campaign against lazy language." Balancing serious commentary and tongue-and-cheek humor, the season finale of Museum Buzz ends with a conversation about...buzzwords! Together with Jim Fishwick from the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and Tilly Boleyn from the Science Gallery Melbourne , we reflect on the notion of buzzwords: what they reall...

"It's easy to make assumptions, and that's how we end up with museums that aren't relevant to their public." The future of museums is relevancy and Jim Richardson, founder of the MuseumNext conference and museum news website, identifies the top priority museums should invest in to stay relevant. Tune in as we discuss audience research, digital trends and the role of leadership in impacting change....

"People don't want to feel dumb. They don't want to feel like they've done something wrong." Myra Weise brings a human-centered approach to creating more hospitable museum spaces.  This interview is from our first live podcast event at the North Carolina Museum of Art as part of a month-long training for frontline staff about hospitality. Weise, Manager of Museum Services at the Nasher Museum of A...

"If your building is totally accessible, or your website is totally accessible, but then, when people come to the space [and] the interactions they're having with the staff don't feel welcome, and they're feeling microaggression's and they're feeling bias... then that negates all that work." While museums have been investing in access programs for decades, the buzzword is getting new life as it be...

"Diversity does not speak to racism. It does not speak to structural inequality. It does not speak to all of these societal ills that still play out in these codified ways." Think you know what diversity means? Think again. Dr. Porchia Moore - Johns Hopkins University professor , co-creator of the Visitors of Color Project and the Incluseum , and consultant - challenges the very notions of these w...

"[Collaboration needs] really strong vision from the top about what we're trying to accomplish together. So it's not marketing's goal and curatorial's goal and development's goal. It's our goal that curatorial, marketing, and development are working on, together. And it's hard to lose that deeply ingrained turfiness in the way that we're set up."   How do museums move away from "deeply ingrained t...

"In a perfect world we would have equity. We could celebrate and recognize that we all have differences, and are diverse, in how we come to the world and move through our spaces…And if I'm coming to come down from the clouds and be less Polly Anna-ish, I would say that the reason it's on museums is, you know what, we're really late. We're late to this work. There was never a Brown v Board for muse...

"Content is king. It is what we have in our pockets as museums. [And it's important] to keep that in mind, that power. But, also think about the audiences and why we still exist and why that content remains powerful." Content is still king. It's what museums put out on social media, it's the labels on the walls, and it's the object behind glass. But how can we harness the uniqueness of content in...

"Immersive is a word that feels like something. You get what immersive means, palpably, when you hear that word…we crave magic. We crave experience. We crave things that feel different." Seema Rao of Brilliant Idea Studio immerses us in the buzzword 'immersive.' You might be surprised at the breadth of her definition, but not at the depth of her thinking around this word. In this conversation we a...

"This idea that museum attendance is falling and we just can't bring people in...I think that's a myth and something we say to stop ourselves from doing that hard work about how can we make our spaces more inclusive." Tune in to hear this and more as we try to define inclusion, identify three starting points for museums wanting to create inclusive environments, and what's the disconnect between cr...

Welcome to a brand new podcast about buzzwords in museums! The podcast will unpack trendy words in the field and their meaning. We'll also play a game at the end of each episode. Stay tuned for the first episode.