What Does it Mean to Be Diverse?

Museums and heritage organizations all across the state are working every day with incredibly diverse populations: Alzheimer’s patients, new immigrants, youth at risk (and their parents), and pre-schoolers and teens to name but a few. Our institutions cultivate new generations of volunteers, board members and staff to bring fresh perspectives that revitalize our work. Diversifying audiences, programs, collections, and community relationships begins with an organizational commitment that must be a shared responsibility. How will you participate and help your peers through this important conversation taking place at the 2013 Conference? Museums in Conversation encourages you to hold your ideas in the palm of your hand to allow them to be picked up and used by others!

Kicking off our exploration of this year’s theme is opening keynoter, Candice Anderson! Ms. Anderson is the Executive Director of Cool Culture, a non-profit that partners with 90 of New York City’s best known cultural institutions and more than 400 early education providers to offer 50,000 under-served families free access to museums, botanical gardens and zoos. Ms. Anderson will launch our discussion with her presentation entitled Diversity as Practice: Creating Community through Collaboration.

Steven Kern, Executive Director at Syracuse’s Everson Museum of Art will draw our conversations to a close in his Closing Keynote presentation entitled “Museums for all & for all time”.

The 2013 conference theme is based heavily on conversations with keynoter Ron Chew that took place in Albany during the 2012 conference, to read more about Ron and his conference participation check out, An Interview with Ron Chew by Joan Baldwin

Museums in Conversation is sponsored by Museumwise: The Museum Association of New York.  In partnership with the New York Council for the Humanities and New York State Council on the Arts.