Can Museums Serve Distinct Groups While Also Building a Cohesive Community?

Social Bridging Is Challenging for Arts Organizations and Patrons, But It's Good for Both

Like many organizations, my museum, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, struggles with two conflicting goals.

The museum should be for everyone in our community.

But it’s impossible to do a great job being for everyone. We’re more successful when we target particular communities or audiences and design experiences for them.

How do you reconcile the desire to be inclusive with the practical imperative to target? In the past, I’ve subscribed to the theory that an organization should target many different groups and types of people to serve a constellation …

By Nina Simon | June 22, 2017

How a Black Panthers Exhibition Connected Activism of the Past to an Evolving Present

An Oakland Museum Redefined Engagement Through a Timely Subject

By Lori Fogarty | June 22, 2017

When can you really feel arts engagement in your bones? How do you know that you have achieved genuine engagement?

For those of us who work at the Oakland Museum …

Audience Engagement Is Not Community Engagement. We Need More of the Latter.

Arts Organizations Should Build Relationships That Aim for Mutual Benefit

By Doug Borwick | June 22, 2017

Engagement is an important word in the nonprofit arts industry, often paired (at a minimum) with arts, audience, and community. Over the last decade, “engagement” has very nearly become worn …

American Culture’s Unlikely Debt to a British Scientist

A Fortuitous Influx of Cash Launched the Smithsonian’s Earliest Art Collection

By Helena E. Wright | November 16, 2016

In 1835, through an unlikely turn of events, the young United States became the beneficiary of the estate of one James Smithson, a British scientist of considerable means who had …

The Journey to Artist Maurizio Cattelan’s Golden Toilet “America” Is Gross, and It’s Great

The Gleaming Potty Art Isn’t Genius, But That Won’t Halt the Curious … Or the Instagram Crowd

By Yxta Maya Murray | October 5, 2016

The Guggenheim guard, a young woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a pretty, round face, said that the wait to see Maurizio Cattelan’s America would be one hour. My husband …

Coyote as Clown, Cowboy, and Creator

Artist Harry Fonseca Transformed the Native American Folk Figure Into a Commentary on 20th Century Culture

By Amy Scott | August 19, 2016

In 2006, during the last few months of his life, the artist Harry Fonseca often spent Sundays in his Santa Fe studio with the curator Patsy Phillips. His ability to …

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