New England Museum Association, Burlington, VT
The first week of November, I traveled up to Burlington, VT with some of my coworkers from the Mark Twain House & Museum for the 2019 New England Museum Association conference. Though I’ve been to many history conferences, and will go to two more this winter, this was my first museum conference.1 In case you are wondering what people might talk about at a museum conference, you can take a look at the program and see for yourself!
I was there as an educator in a historic house museum, but there are obviously all kinds of museums and all kinds of jobs in those museums, so there were panels on topics ranging from climate change to climate control systems, development to decolonization, audience assessment to audio content delivery. Still, there were some constant issues that seemed to infuse many of the panels.
- Education, interpretation, and programming—in many ways, the most diverse category, including everything from the practicalities of working with community partners or starting a podcast to the possibilities and challenges of engaging visitors in explorations of climate change, queer history, and women’s suffrage
- Assessment and evaluation—of ourselves, our current visitors, and the audiences we’d like to reach, with an emphasis on collecting good data at the start
- Money—there were sessions about grants, visitation numbers, staff salaries, and what to do with tainted donations, all rooted in the fact that most museums really never have enough money, especially at the moment
I chose to go to a lot of panels featuring speakers from art museums, simply because the topics were relevant to the work I do as an educator at Twain. On the first day, for instance, I went to a panel called “The Art of Race and Relationship Building,” which discussed an ongoing collaboration between RISD and the Center for Reconciliation.2
Many of the sessions had a hands-on component–or eyes-on, in this case!
The next day, I went to another panel which discussed how to support visitors and museum staff members as they engage with exhibitions on “hard subjects” like war and incarceration. Though the panel again focused primarily on art, I left having realized a way I needed to attend to this in my own institution—and some strategies for how I could go about it.
At “Civic Engagement and the Museum: Inspiring Our Audiences to Action,” we heard from speakers at the New England Aquarium, Old Sturbridge Village, and the New Bedford Whaling Museum, places that are thinking about ways to encourage visitors to take action on issues related to their institutional missions, like science-based fisheries management. Sessions like this one are valuable both because they show you what’s possible—in this case, that this sort of engagement with visitors can actually boost their approval of an institution, something many wary boards need to hear.
This is what a lot of the conference looked like. Not great for postcard photographs!
But they also make it clear that, despite my earlier revelations, there are usually no easily-portable solutions. Institutional differences matter. What works to get visitors educated about and engaged in ending whaling probably isn’t going to work to get visitors educated about and engaged in racial justice activism. And unlike a history conference, where I could come home and immediately start hunting down new (to me) sources and incorporating what I’d learned into my own work, very little of what I learned at NEMA could be implemented quickly, let alone immediately, nor could it be done without consulting and planning with colleagues and outside partners.3
Another big difference for me was the exhibit hall. At the conferences I’d been at in the past, the exhibit hall was the book hall, full of publishers displaying their wares and talking to potential authors. At NEMA, the exhibit hall was full of people who sold collections storage solutions, security systems, lighting, audio/video services, archival supplies, and easily-collapsible display furniture for traveling exhibits. It was another 
good reminder of the incredible diversity of museums and museum jobs. I was missing the thrill of spotting my friends’ books until I stumbled across Contingent contributor Joanna Scutts’ book in a local bookstore one night!
Though my previous conference attendance helped me prepare well (good shoes, plenty of portable drinking vessels, primo travel snacks), going to a museum conference was a new experience for me. For one thing, it had been years since I’d traveled to a conference that I wasn’t also presenting at, not for lack of interest, but for lack of funding. In academia, presenting at conferences is part of your job, in a way, so it is sometimes possible to get reimbursed for some of the costs of a conference you’re presenting at—though this is highly dependent on your employment status. This time, my employer was paying the cost of my registration (the cost of attending NEMA was between $200 and $500) and lodging, giving me valuable time to listen, learn, and network.
Though many of the Vermont museums we wanted to see on our trip were closed for the season, we did manage to find one place to learn about Vermont history on our snowy trip home!
- Though I’m going to talk a lot about the differences, since I was experiencing them for the first time, I don’t mean that to suggest that the differences were unexpected.
- In this session, each table looked at a reproduction of a piece of art, so we could understand the feel of the program. My table looked at the piece of art described in the linked article.
- Again, not surprising, but worth noting.
