What is the relationship today between museums, galleries and learning? The Responsive Museum interrogates the thinking, policies and practices that underpin the educational role of the museum. It unravels the complex relationship of museums with their publics, and discusses today's challenges and the debates that have resulted. The highly experienced team of writers, including museum educators and directors, share their different experiences and views, and review recent research and examp...

This very practical book guides museums on how to create the highest quality experience possible for their visitors. Creating an environment that supports visitor engagement with collections means examining every stage of the visit, from the initial impetus to go to a particular institution, to front-of-house management, interpretive approach and qualitative analysis afterwards.This holistic approach will be immensely helpful to museums in meeting the needs and expectations of visi...

Illustrated with over fifty photos, Civilizing Rituals merges contemporary debates with lively discussion and explores central issues involved in the making and displaying of art as industry and how it is presented to the community.Carol Duncan looks at how nations, institutions and private individuals present art , and how art museums are shaped by cultural, social and political determinants.Civilizing Rituals is ideal reading for students of art history ...

Heritage Toronto Book Award — Shortlisted, Non-Fiction BookIlluminates Toronto’s early history through its small heritage museums.A portrait of William Lyon Mackenzie stares from a mural at Queen subway station, his face as round and orange as a wheel of cheese. He served as Toronto’s first mayor, led the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, and was grandfather to William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s tenth prime minister, whose own orange-pink visage graces the Canadia...

The discovery of a previously unknown painting by an Italian Renaissance master, and how it went from media sensation to career-ending scandal.On the eve of its centennial celebrations in December 1969, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts announced the acquisition of an unknown and uncatalogued painting attributed to Raphael. Boston's coup made headlines around the world. Soon afterward, an Italian art sleuth began investigating the details of the painting's export from ...

At the beginning of the 21st century museums are challenged on a number of fronts. The prioritisation of learning in museums in the context of demands for social justice and cultural democracy combined with cultural policy based on economic rationalism forces museums to review their educational purposes, redesign their pedagogies and account for their performance.The need to theorise learning and culture for a cultural theory of learning is very pressing. If culture acts as a proce...

Museums may not seem at first glance to be engaged in social work. Yet, Lois H. Silverman brings together here relevant visitor studies, trends in international practice, and compelling examples that demonstrate how museums everywhere are using their unique resources to benefit human relationships and, ultimately, to repair the world. In this groundbreaking book, Silverman forges a framework of key social work perspectives to show how museums are evolving a needs-based approach to provide ...

Winner of the 29th annual Lambda Literary Award for LGBT StudiesAll museums are sex museums. In Sex Museums, Jennifer Tyburczy takes a hard look at the formation of Western sexuality—particularly how categories of sexual normalcy and perversity are formed—and asks what role museums have played in using display as a technique for disciplining sexuality. Most museum exhibits, she argues, assume that white, patriarchal heterosexuality and traditional structures of in...

Current discourse on Indigenous engagement in museum studies is often dominated by curatorial and academic perspectives, in which community voice, viewpoints, and reflections on their collaborations can be under-represented. This book provides a unique look at Indigenous perspectives on museum community engagement and the process of self-representation, specifically how the First Nations Elders of the Blackfoot Confederacy have worked with museums and heritage sites in Alberta, Canada, to ...

An anthology of writings on exhibition practice from artists, critics, curators and art historians plus artist-curators. It addresses the contradictions posed by museum and gallery sited exhibitions, as well as investigating the challenge of staging art presentations, displays or performances, in settings outside of traditional museum or gallery locales.

How does a city and a nation deal with a legacy of perpetrating atrocity? How are contemporary identities negotiated and shaped in the face of concrete reminders of a past that most wish they did not have?Difficult Heritage focuses on the case of Nuremberg – a city whose name is indelibly linked with Nazism – to explore these questions and their implications. Using an original in-depth research, using archival, interview and ethnographic sources, it provides not only fasci...

Gender, Sexuality and Museums provides the only repository of key articles, new essays and case studies for the important area of gender and sexuality in museums. It is the first reader to focus on LGBT issues and museums, and the first reader in nearly 15 years to collect articles which focus on women and museums. At last, students of museum studies, women’s studies, LGBT studies and museum professionals have a single resource.The book is organised into three thematic par...