491 Proposal

 Hello everyone,  my topic is to cover how museums plan to target and appeal to people with lesser incomes. This includes how often people of color view and enter museums compared to their white lower income counter parts, as this reflects what demographics museums are typically built around, as many poorer folks cannot afford to drive further to another town for a museum. While not current and I am looking for a more updated source of this study, according to the 2010 study performed by the NEA in 2008, only 15% of Hispanic people  and  12% of African Americans visited museums. (Farrell & Medvedeva, 2010) The world has changed since then and I would be interested to see if the same study was performed again, though I can currently only find the one study from 2008. However, I did discover an attempt to encourage lower income families to visit museums recently as 2017 called Museums for All. The organization has succeeded in 190 museums to participate in its program. (Museum Visits Top Half a Million through Museums for All, an Access Program for Low-Income Families 2019)

Farrell, B., & Medvedeva, M. (2010). THE CENTER FOR THE FUTURE OF MUSEUMS an initiative of the American Association of Museums 8DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSFORMATION AND THE FUTURE OF MUSEUMS. Retrieved September 27, 2020, from https://www.aam-us.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Demographic-Change-and-the-Future-of-Museums.pdf

Museum Visits Top Half a Million through Museums for All, an Access Program for Low-Income Families. (2019, May 17). Retrieved September 27, 2020, from https://www.imls.gov/news/museum-visits-top-half-million-through-museums-all-access-program-low-income-families

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Labor

  Racism and sexism are things we've been told are bad since we were children. Yet, did this solve the problem of racism and sexism? No, of course not. Everyone whether they realize it or not, grows up with a bias know as, well, implicit bias. This is why it is important to listen to minority staff members when they express concern over their treatment in the museum and recognize how they treat people who they may have biases towards. Yet how does one recognize this bias? In the article by Jennifer Edgoose, Michelle Quiogue, and Kartik Sidhar, they describe removing implicit bias as "[...] discovering your blind spots and then actively working to dismiss stereotypes and attitudes that affect your interactions" (Sidhar, 2019). Educating or exposing yourself voluntarily yourself on one particular group can remove bias. One thing that they do not bring up that would be a crucial step to finding bias is to think of the area you grew up in and how they treated out...
Read more

Week 3: Audience Research

Image
 This week, the reading allowed us to go more in depth with how museums are tackling diversity. The two pieces I chose to read were "Your Label Makes Me Feel Stupid" by Gail Gregg and "Developing an Inclusive Tour" from the Minneapolis Institute of Art. "Your Label Makes Me Feel Stupid" discusses changing the way we describe art so that others may make their own judgements about the piece and when it was made as opposed to providing technical jargon that the average museum goer may not understand. In the article, the piece 15 April 1962 by Frank Lobdell is discussed as its description changes from “A tightly coiled form struggles against the confines of the canvas. Thick paint, hot colors, hard lines, and a gouged surface reinforce the sense of uneasiness. They express the artist’s view of the human condition as a struggle for meaning and dignity.”(Gregg, "Your Labels Make Me Feel Stupid" 2010) to “The horrors of Frank Lobdell’s firsthand exp...
Read more

Week 7

Image
 This week we covered controversial exhibits, and there is none more controversial in the field of animation than Ralph Baskshi. Ralph Baskshi has created extremely controversial animations that cover themes of race and oppression. He also made Cool World ,one of the first big budget adult animated movies of the western 21st century.   A background painting from “Cool World. (© Bakshi Productions, Inc.) His work is technically phenomenal,  though the more offensive pieces are difficult to explain to modern sensibilities as his views on race in "Coonskins" and "Fritz the Cat" are controversial. The portrayal of the black characters in his films are stereotypes, though their purpose in the story is to speak to how people misunderstand black people. Though Ralph Baskshi is white, he grew up in Brooklyn which also explains why he has certain views on black people that other white people might find offensive ( "Brownsville") . His animated pieces are typically ...
Read more