Change is Required: Preparing for the Post-Pandemic Museum is a book about the future of American museums. Like other institutions, museums and zoos, historic sites, gardens, and arboreta, were powerfully affected by the nested crises of the pandemic. These unprecedented crises challenged American museums. Adapting to novel circumstances and uncertainty became the order of the day; improvisation in policy and practice the new norm.
Amidst upheavals and disruptions, a number of American museums have charted new directions for themselves and their communities. Many museums have taken a decisive turn to digital programming. Others have taken a turn toward community, developing new kinds of collaborations with their neighbors and local audiences. Still others have moved issues of equity and justice--internally and in the world--to the center of their institutional concerns.
In every part of the country--and in every type of museum--museum workers are challenging old assumptions, conventional narratives, and customary practices as they look to the future. In Change Is Required, a unique array of 50 museum professionals--representing different disciplines, positions, and experiences--share their thinking about assessing needs and possibilities, managing people and resources, and building productive new relationships with neighbors, communities, and partner organizations.
These authors argue that change is necessary--inside and beyond the museum. It is futile and unproductive to default to the old "normal." To achieve greater relevance, impact, equity, and inclusiveness, museums need to reconsider their leadership models, organizational culture, internal structures, and community collaborations Bristling with personal passion, informed by experience, and focused on the future, the essays in this volume convey the urgency to rethink traditional museum practice, offering visionary--yet practical--routes to future museum success in a volatile, complex, and ambiguous world.
In its depth and range, this book constitutes an invitation to join in the growing, lively discourse about possible futures for museums in America. The invitation extends not only to museum professionals, but to all those interested in cultural affairs and institutions.
Author Biography:
Avi Decter, Managing Partner of History Now, has worked in and with museums across the country on exhibitions, programs, and strategic plans for more than forty years. He is a founder and past chair of the Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM) and an officer of the AAM's Independent Museum Professionals Network.
Mr. Decter has held senior positions at the Museum of American Jewish History, Winterthur Museum and Gardens, and the Natiional Museum of American History (Smithsonian Institution). He has helped to plan several new museums including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Louisville Slugger Museum and Visitor Center, the Boott Cotton Mill Museum at Lowell National Historic Park, and the National Civil War Museum.
He is the author of Interpreting American Jewish History at Museums and Historic Sites (Rowman & Littlefied, 2016) and is completing a new book titled Exploring American Jewish History through 50 American Treasures, to be published by Rowman & Littlefield. Mr. Decter has co-authored and edited two other books and half a dozen book-length catalogues (with essays by leading scholars and museum professionals). He and Mr. Yellis have co-authored a dozen blogs on the current crises in museums published on the AASLH website and AAM's Museum Junction.
Ken Yellis, Principal of Project Development Services, is a historian with more than forty years in the museum field as educator, exhibit developer, program planner, and grant writer. He was grant writer and content developer for The Brooklyn Navy Yard: Past, Present and Future and wrote four successful grants for two major Brooklyn Historical Society projects, In Pursuit of Freedom and Waterfront. Ken has worked at the National Portrait Gallery, Plimoth Plantation, the Yale Peabody Museum, the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and Touro Synagogue. He was Guest Curator for Passages Through the Fire: Jews in the Civil War, Project Coordinator for the Newport Historical Society’s “The Spectacle of Toleration,” and Chair of the Technical Committee of the Newport World Heritage Commission.
Ken was long Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Museum Education. He has written for Curator, Museum, The Public Historian, America in WWII, Seaport Magazine, Discovery (The Peabody Magazine), Jewish Daily Forward (on-line), ARTES (on-line), Providence Journal, Exhibitionist, Museologist, and others. His chapter “Museum Education,” M.S. Shapiro, ed., The Museum: A Reference Guide (1990), remains widely read, cited, and incorporated into curricula. He has contributed chapters to Museum Education Anthology, Patterns in Practice, Transforming Practice, and Interpreting Religion at Museums and Historic Sites. His exhibition, (www.seekingshelterblockisland.org), Seeking Shelter, should go on view at Yale Divinity School in spring of 2021.
