Browsing by Subject "museum education"
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Item Being Neighborly: How One Museum Looks Beyond its Walls to Build Community(2020-06) Butler, Brenda FIt is common for museums to be geographically located in urban neighborhoods with neighbors who do not visit. Museums make efforts to engage with their communities through programming to establish relationships with neighbors; this study highlights one museum, The American Swedish Institute (ASI), located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This case study seeks to discover whether ASI is building cross-cultural relationships in their neighborhood; and finding what impacts are made on the neighborhood. This study may be useful to arts or cultural organizations seeking to build on their relevance to their neighbor communities and wanting to better engage with neighbors.Item Chicago's Botanic Garden: Translating Horticulture into Community Action(2020-01) Luiken, RebaIn 1972 when the Chicago Botanic Garden opened to the public, it introduced the nation’s “second city” to its new botanic garden. Just one of a proliferation of new museums in the second half of the twentieth century, the botanic garden would become a national leader of in community work as museums and public gardens focused on local community engagement. From its inception, CBG aspired to join the most well-established botanic gardens in the United States. This dissertation documents the financial, social, and personal influences that shaped programs that were innovative and effective. As the Chicago Botanic Garden developed, its leaders strove to meet the tripartite goals of the field—scientific inquiry, education, and landscape cultivation. They proved to be particularly successful in the area of education and, specifically, community horticulture. Encompassing programs like horticultural therapy, community gardening, and environmental and science education in local schools, community horticulture programs became centers of expertise at the garden. Given CBG’s origin in the Chicago Horticultural Society, staff and board members at the botanic garden already had a vested interest in ongoing programs in the field, and this led them to concentrate resources there, often at the expense of research development. Dedicated leadership at the executive level succeeded in creating a striking physical landscape, even as they balanced the goal of reaching central areas of the city of Chicago. The public, private foundations, and governmental funders demanded increased relevance and accountability. As a suburban garden funded in large part by urban tax revenue and a young museum without an established scientific reputation or broad philanthropic base, garden leaders and staff worked hard to meet sponsors’ expectations. Ultimately, CBG did provide an impressive number of widely recognized programs by the end of the century. In significant ways its community horticulture accomplishments relied on the expertise of long-tenured employees who built an environmentally just community infrastructure through personal relationships and strategic funding strategies.Item Heterogeneity & Hierarchy: Collaborative, Cross-Departmental Work and The Dissemination of Power in American Art Museums(2023) Gonda, TaylorThis study examines the hierarchical impact of cross-departmental, collaborative public-facing work in art museums, and whether or not collaborative work that takes place across power levels in the art museum organization leads to more successful projects. This paper finds that cross-departmental and collaborative work in art museums challenges the hierarchical norms in the art museum space. Museum employees surveyed generally felt that greater integration of departments led to more successful programmatic outcomes, but the hierarchical nature of the art museum workplace and the supremacy of the scholarly curatorial voice in the leadership of that space hampers the execution of that integration, and hinders the field’s ability to create truly inclusive, relevant museum programming. An argument is made for deep, systemic change in the art museum organizational structure and culture, and for art museums to use the many resources and tools already available to expand the definition of expertise in the art museum, and to open decision-making rooms to voices outside of executive leadership derived from the curatorial field.