Hello!
I am working on ideas for two session proposals for the upcoming AAM Annual Meeting and am looking for a couple more panelists. With the theme of the upcoming conference focusing on community, I am seeking speakers who can talk about ways their museums are actively engaging their community by bringing the museum to them and taking the museum outside of the traditional walls. My two session proposals are as follows:
1. Lets Get Together: What Happens When Museums Meet Their Community
This session will focus on how museums are actively engaging their community and working in collaboration to tell stories and make museums more accessible to everyone. I am looking for panelists who have worked with community members and brought them into the interpretive process, allowing voices outside the museum to be heard. At my institution we have community-curated exhibitions where the community brings the objects and much of the research and the museum guides the community in developing their materials into exhibitions and/or public programming. We also work with artists to create artworks that tell the story of overlooked communities while actively engaging those communities in the artmaking and content collection processes.
2. Developing School/Community/Museum Partnerships
This session will look at how museums can take an active role in working with schools while engaging the community. I am seeking panelists who are looking outside the box to bring all three of these groups together in new ways to create lifelong learners who take an active part in assisting museums in their work and bring the community together. One example is a project I co-created with my local Social Studies Curriculum Coordinator where I worked with the African American History class at a local high school to document the history of two local and largely undocumented landmarks. During the semester, the students learned how museum's research and collect objects for exhibitions as well as how to conduct oral history interviews. They then went out into their communities and conducted interviews as well as found objects and images before turning them over to the museum. Museum staff then worked with the students to write an exhibition script and the school district's print and media services department turned everything into exhibition panels that are now on display in the museum.
If you are interested in participating in either one of these sessions or would like to learn more, please feel free to contact me by return email (
[log in to unmask]) or by telephone at 410.216.6186.
Thanks!
Genevieve Kaplan
Education & Public Programs Manager
Banneker-Douglass Museum
84 Franklin St.
Annapolis, MD 21401
p: 410.216.6186