We at the Hudson River Museum read your post with interest: we are a mid-sized

museum located 20 mi. north of NYC; our facilities include a landmark Victorian

mansion, a 1969 addition with modern galleries, the Andrus planetarium, a

museum store designed by Red Grooms, a cafe, and education center.  Our

interests span regional history, American art and science.  We are located in

Yonkers, NY state's 4th largest city that made national news in the 1980s with

its near bankrupcy and battles to desegregate its schools and housing.

To help solve our identity issues, we undertook a self-study 3 years ago, in

preparation for AAM reaccreditation.  It was a long, arduous and sometimes

contentious undertaking, but most of us would agree it was well worth it.  We

identified key stakeholders, who we serve well now, who we would like to serve

better, our strengths, weaknesses, facility concerns, you name it, we discussed

it.  Out of this came a new long range plan, complete with an "action plan" to

implement our goals.

To tie the Museum's disparate elements together, we focus many of our exhibits

and programs to our region: the lower Hudson Valley--exploring its rich

history, artistic legacy (past and present) and cultural diversity.  Many of

our most successful shows are multi-disciplinary, for example: "The River that

Flows Both Ways: Hudson Stories" examined the river as a source of artistic

inspiration, commerce and industry, biological diversity and environmental

fragility.  Our current show, "Making Faces: American Portraits" integrates

popular culture objects (green cards, T-shirts, stamps, baseball cards) with

the fine arts to explore 200 years of American portraiture.  Because our

largest audiences are schoolchildren and families, we make sure to include many

interactive elements in each of our exhibitions.

Educational programming is of upmost importance when conveying a museum's

identity.  Again, to maintain our family audience, we offer family programs

every Sunday afternoon.  These may include art making activities, dance, puppet

or music performances, gallery walks with noted artists, science experiments,

storytelling, and more.  We also feel that seniors are neglected by many

American museums, and offer free bi-monthly programs tailored to this audience.

About 35% of our visitors are African American or Latin American; in addition

to the usual African American history month celebrations, we strive to

cultivate and express diverse points of view in our programming and exhibits,

and feature artists of color throughout the year.  But probably the most

important thing we've done to enlarge our audience is to collaborate with area

civic, cultural, social, educational and environmental organizations.  For

example for the river show, we worked with Clearwater, Scenic Hudson,

Riverkeeper, Ferry Sloops, Sarah Lawrence College, and many others.

Sorry to go on so long, these issues are obviously something that we struggle

with daily.  However, our attendance has doubled in size in recent years, so we

feel we are on the right track.

Kathryn Slocum (Grants Officer)