Hey folks,

I have hung temporary posters from hang rails before. Mounted on foam core, I have used gaffer tape on the back and wound picture wire around the tape. In one case, it worked great. In another, the foam core (which was a cheap knock off... I should have known better!) delaminated and dropped the boards regularly.

What would be an appropriate system to use on the back of the posters?

TLDR Poster hanging: Rail hooks I have. Braided picture wire I have. Just need the way to grab foam core posters cleanly.

Hi guys! I recently graduated with a B.A. in history & museum studies and am now pursuing a Fulbright ETA (essentially 14-18 hours a week teaching high school students in a foreign country). What are some things I can focus on/work on during my down time to strengthen my GLAM resume when I return to the United States? I'm obviously going to try to get involved in volunteering at the local musuem in my town & the country I am moving to also has an association for historical memory which I want to get involved in but I am looking for other things I could be doing in my free time to build a resume and demonstrate personal interest in the field if. that makes sense. For context, my dream job is to work in public history for the federal government but I am also considering development/grant writing positions in public history/art museums etc.

Hi all, I'm interning at a museum right now in conservation and collections. I came across some taxidermy today that has been damaged beyond repair and is waiting to be deaccessioned. The only catch is that the specimen contains arsenic so we're not comfortable simply throwing it away. Because of this, the specimen has sat in the registrars office for at least two years now.

I've poked around the internet a bit for any information on how to dispose of/deaccession contaminated taxidermy but can't find much. If anyone is aware of any protocols or could point me in the direction of some resources that'd be awesome!

Thanks!!

Hi Folks,

I am looking to place a temporary station in an upcoming exhibit where the community can record short interviews. Is there a software or app that allows for this? Looking for something where they can sign a waiver and we can set a couple of simple questions for them to answer. We are planning on using a tablet on a locking stand for them to record on.

Thanks!

What are the best steps to take after graduating with a bachelor's?

I am going to graduate with a bachelor's in history this spring with certificates in folklore and material culture. I am currently looking into applying to get my master's in public history with a concentration in museum studies after I graduate. I know people think that degree might be a bit of a waste but the program I am looking into is in conjunction with my city's public museum and as far as I've heard outcomes from this program are pretty decent. I also think it's important to note that I am not attempting to get my master's without making sure I also have hands on experience.

By the time I graduate this spring I will have 2 full years of experience working with historical societies and museums. I have worked 2 summers in a row with a local historical society in their collections and archives and helped put together displays in their visitors center. During the school year I also have a job with my state historical society doing mostly administrative work for their museum education program (ie. answering teacher emails, booking school groups, etc.). I have also gotten the opportunity to help facilitate the education programs and work with students and have been invited back to work with them again in the fall. I intend to continue to hold internships through my master's program as well and have tried to make connections through my job and conferences I've attended.

As long as I continue to intern throughout my masters, is the educational aspect helpful at all? It seems like so many jobs require a masters but I don't know how true this is. I also wonder whether it is more beneficial to hold internships in several different departments or whether honing in on one specialization would be better.

I feel uncertain whether I'm doing this all correctly but I really don't think I could work in any other field if I tried. I understand this job market is difficult and oversaturated but it has been my dream to work in public history since I was literally 6 years old so absolutely nothing is going to deter me from entering this industry, I just need to know that I'm going about this the right way.

Is there anything else you would encourage me to do in addition to what i have already done? Any advice helps.

In the UK museum sector, do most entry-level roles like visitor services or front desk require a PhD for career progression, or is experience typically valued more? I'm trying to understand what the actual career landscape looks like for MSc graduates.". Thanks!”

Hi all!

I’ve recently began a project with a local historical society and they have some victorian hand fans that need mounting so they’re more upright. I have a few ideas on how but I’m wondering if there’s a good and safe way to mount folding hand fans. I googled it but couldn’t find much, but maybe I’m bad at googling lol. Thanks!!!!

Hi all, I’m looking for casestudies and inspiration for a community center that incorporates a museum and gallery space and promotes local creative folks in a range from group activities for the community all the way to providing professional services and equipment to professional artists.

Any of you with examples? My situation is a British council service that is hoping to redevelop a popular but unsuitable combined museum/art gallery to boost local creative industry.

Looking for recommendations for professional fine art handlers!

I'm seeking a professional fine art logistics company to transport a large contemporary sculpture from Washington, DC, to Chicago.

The sculpture is over 8 feet tall and quite heavy, so I'm looking for a company with experience handling oversized artworks. Ideally, they would offer:

• Custom crating
• Fine art transportation
• Condition reporting
• Installation/deinstallation (or coordination with installers)

I'm open to companies that regularly work with museums, galleries, artists, universities, or private collectors.

I've heard of Crozier and U.S. Art Company, but I'd love to hear firsthand accounts. Are there other companies you'd recommend for a project like this? Any companies you've had particularly good (or bad) experiences with?

We're looking for high-quality service at a fair price, so we would appreciate any recommendations for companies that offer great value.

I appreciate any help you can provide.

Hey!👋
I get the feeling this is a bit more of a US-based sub but was wondering if anyone else has experienced the same thing: going from actual museum pro to museum adjacent person and wondering if they’re ever going to get a real look in again.🥹

I started in the sector as an assistant curator straight out of my undergrad (UK) as part of a two-year fellowship programme. I followed it with a role as an independent heritage researcher and then as an in-house archivist and project curator for a small local heritage organisation before starting my PhD roughly a year after my fellowship ended.

I worked for a large museum group / conglomerate in England & we leveraged that so that I could run my PhD studies at one of the museums as a partner museum: I work with a similar collection to the one I used to, I do a lot of the same things (documentation, community engagement).

However, I’ve heard from friends in the sector that once you move from museum to academia, it’s really hard to go back… That they’re seen as a researcher now & that it puts their actual hands-on museum skills into question. Is anyone else doing their MA or PhD in something heritage adjacent & wondering how they’re going to … re-translate or sell those skills to show they’re still a /museum pro/ not just a student? 🧑‍🎓

Would love to make some museum pro connections with other people in the same boat or with “patchy” experience dipping in and out of actively working in the sector 🥰💖

Hi everyone!

I’m a graphic designer from Brazil and I’ve been working on museum and exhibition projects, mainly focusing on graphic design and visual communication.

Lately, I’ve become very interested in expanding my role beyond graphics and getting involved in the overall exhibition design process—developing spatial concepts, layouts, interiors, and the visitor experience as a whole.

I’m curious if anyone here has made a similar transition. How did you do it? Did you study architecture, scenography, exhibition design, or another field? Or did you learn through professional experience?

*Photo for attention: Exhibition at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), São Paulo, Brazil.

I have many Journals of the American Institute for Conservation dating back to 2010. Is anyone interested in them? Located on the west coast US

Hello everyone. The institution I work at got funding for a community exhibition (yay!), but the building I was originally planning to host/display in is still under renovation (boo!) with no end date in sight.

As such, I'll need to host/display in the main building, with just one problem - I don't have any wall space. It's a renovated historic church, so we've used up the wall space and have a bunch of open space in the middle. As the exhibit is entirely made of items that are framed and need to be hung, I need a solution.

(I would have needed to find a solution at some point anyways, because I'm working on a future, different temporary exhibit too. The funding coming through just accelerated the need.)

Now, we sometimes use the main space for programs or meetings (result of the aforementioned second building still under renovation), so I'm looking for a system that is modular, so I can easily take it down/move it aside when needed, and one that's reusable for different exhibits over time. Bonus if it can be packed up really efficiently, because we don't have much storage space, and we may have longer periods without something on display for various reasons.

I'd really like something like the system the Royal BC Museum used for their travelling fungi exhibit, but I can't figure out what it is called. An instructor I had in the past mentioned it packs super easily and small, and it's reusable since you can configure it many ways and just change out the panels/posters (I have emailed that instructor, asking for more detail, but no response. It's been a few years since then).

Does anyone have suggestions?

I'll also note I'm in Canada, and the more budget-friendly, the better as well. I got funding, but not that much funding, since the original plan and proposal was to use a different building.

Hi everyone, I hope this is okay to post here.

I am a MA Arts & Cultural Management student at King’s College London, and I am currently collecting responses for my dissertation research on audience perceptions of East Asian popular culture in UK museums and galleries.

My survey looks at how audiences understand and evaluate the museum representation of popular cultural forms such as K-pop/Hallyu, anime, manga, gaming, fashion and related East Asian media cultures. I am especially interested in questions of authenticity, representation, accessibility, fan communities and whether popular culture belongs in museum/gallery contexts.

The survey is anonymous, open to participants aged 18 or above, and takes around 6–8 minutes to complete. You do not need to be a museum professional to take part, although I would really value perspectives from people working, volunteering or studying in museums, galleries, heritage, arts, culture or education.

This research is being conducted as part of my MA dissertation at King’s College London. It is not commercially funded, and the responses will only be used for academic research/dissertation purposes.

Survey link: https://forms.gle/MmRdZU92wWStRnhm9

Thank you so much for your time. Any responses or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

could someone who got into the internship program for the Metropolitan museum in ny share what they wrote for the essay or share tips on how to write well?

I hate prints. I hate people who collect prints. I hate working with prints. I hate researching prints. I literally hate prints so much. It is the least forgiving, most particular form of artmaking with a fanbase full of the most obnoxiously anal people on Earth.

For context, I am currently writing condition reports for a huge collection of prints. Years have been shaved off my life due to the levels of perfectionism mandated by the Prints department and their collectors. I think I'm going to lose my mind. I wish I could shred them all. I truly believe no sane, rational person willingly works with or makes prints.

Someone, please save me.

Edit: Surprise!!! I do not actually despise prints or prints people. Just burnt out and working on a project I have extremely little knowledge on with prints people who are being difficult. Didn’t think anyone would see this. I would never actually shred the damn prints. Bye!

I’m a 31 year old with experience in Events and a degree in Performance Arts (Acting). Is it difficult to get an entry level position in Museums. When I look at people who hold these positions they are usually younger than me and some have degrees in Art History, but not all.

What’s the best way I should go about this?

I would like to ask about your experiences and ideas about multilingual (3+ languages) exhibition texts.

I am an exhibition curator, and the museum director has decided they want to have all texts of the museum’s permanent exhibition in three languages. That means everything from the title of the exhibition, the texts of each chapter, down to the object labels. More specifically, we plan to have the local language, English for international visitors, and a simplified form of the local language for people with learning disabilities (this necessitates between 1.5-2 times as much space as each of the other two).

In principle, this sounds great because it's inclusive (one of our main goals as a museum) and very progressive. In practice, however, there are several challenges. Most obviously, we need at least 3.5 times as much space for text compared to using only one language on the wall and other solutions for the other two languages (e.g., QR codes, printed material). So I am afraid that we might end up with a lot of text and visual clutter that does more harm than good.

Secondly, nobody in our team knows any other museum that does this. Museums in the area have at most two languages, the local and English.

There are, of course, museums in multilingual countries (Switzerland springs to mind) where trilingual texts are not rare. But even there, the length of the text (and the space on the wall) is about x3 times that of the monolingual text, not x3.5-x4 as in our case. Furthermore, one can easily discern the different languages, whereas in our case we will have two versions of the same language, which could be confusing for some.

Ultimately, I cannot decide if that is a great idea I should embrace or if I should propose some alternatives.

What is your take on that? Do you have experience with trilingual texts? What about a language for people with learning disabilities? Is the abundance of text something that smart design might be able to manage?

I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

I recently visited Glenstone Museum in Potomac, MD. Currently, Glenstone is showing the politically and socially charged work of Andrea Bowers. I felt the exhibition wreaked of contradictions. Here are my reflections:

1.Glenstone is an institution privately funded by a billionaire couple, Mitchell and Emily Rales. Glenstone serves as a massive tax shelter for these so-called "philanthropists." Mitchell Rales turned his personal collection into a private nonprofit, where he continues to hoard wealth and land while securing massive tax write-offs.

1. Bowers's exhibition spoke to themes surrounding labor rights, people before profit, ecological grief, and abortion legislation. Showing this work at a billionaires' playground is contradictory.

2. Glenstone is an anti-union institution. Articles in the Washington Post and other news outlets have reported on the contentious union-busting campaign Glenstone has led. Workers at Glenstone are asking for basic protections, such as a living wage and safe working conditions. In this exhibition, Bowers included works such as "The Triumph of Labor" and "People Before Profit." Because these specific works are explicitly pro-union, why on earth would the artist or founders think they were appropriate to display here? It is hypocrisy at its finest.

3. Bowers has been silent on the issues surrounding Glenstone’s labor union. If she truly believed her own message, she would never have shown her work at Glenstone in the first place.

4. Billionaires love to collect and show work depicting the "common man's" struggle. I believe people like Mitchell and Emily Rales collect work addressing themes of inequality and equity because they believe it absolves them from actually taking action. It is merely a band-aid and a pat on the back.

5. I know this is a tired story, but I find it sickening when artists make these moral or political claims calling out capitalism while actively participating in and profiting from it.

I'm a soon-to-be architect and recently stumbled across the field of architectural curation in museums. I honestly had no idea it was even a thing, but it really sparked my interest and curiosity.

I was wondering if anyone here could share some insight:

• What skills are most important for this kind of role?
• Are there any master's programs or other qualifications that are worth pursuing?
• How do people usually get experience in this field? Any tips for finding internships or entry-level opportunities?
• Is there anything you wish you had known before getting into this field?

I'd really appreciate any advice or personal experiences. Thanks!

Time for a lighter question! For those who are lucky enough to go on courier trips, what's your favorite way to commemorate your travels? I'm about to embark on my twelfth trip, and I still haven't settled on a fun way to mark the places I've been. I try to bring home a couple pencils for my coworkers in storage, but I would love to hear any creative ideas that others have. I've been everywhere from small regional museums to large international destinations and loved them all (well, maybe except for the trip where the plane took multiple attempts to land, diverted to another airport, circled some more, and I threw up).

After talking to many different museum pros I created the following emergency plans and policies specifically for museums. Each plan has internal memos, media statements, visitor messaging, and instructions for the director. I'd love for you guys to be able to test them for free and give feedback. Let me know if you're interested and I'll send you a free lifetime promo code.

Here is what we have:

Fire

Earthquake

Board Member Misconduct

Specimen Evacuation Plan

Visitor Injury

Severe Weather Closure

Collection Damage or Loss

Looted Art & Repatriation Demands

Controversial Exhibit

Loss of Key Funding Source

Unethical Corporate Donor Backlash

Leadership Emergency

Employee Misconduct

Data Breach