Dear My First Museum - Thanks for Everything! - Love, Advocate

If one of Dolley Madison's* necklaces had come unstrung, madly scattering pearls to each corner of our Belle Vue Room venue, those pearls would hardly have been able to compete with the many directions into which our last Director's Roundtable discussion sent conversation threads streaming! Our participants tore into the reading as enthusiastically as Dolley's dinner guests, steamed by partisanship and Washington's swampy summers, would have spooned into their oyster ice cream. The topic was "Demographic Trends in Museums," and the reading was a recent report by the Center for the Future of Museums, Museums and Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures (AAM, 2008).


If the Museums and Society 2034 report presented a massive bucket of oysters that we tried to shuck as quickly as possible in our limited roundtable timeframe, one of the biggest pearls we found first was in the concept of "Museum Advocates," a group the report's authors identified based on surveys administered to 30,000 core museum visitors. As Page 6 of the report defines the group, "Museums are not just places that they visit on occasion, but are especially important places in their lives where they truly enjoy spending their leisure time. And what distinguishes Museum Advocates from other people? Nearly all have a distinct memory of a specific, seminal museum experience, usually between the ages of 5 and 9."


Moreover, given that the U.S. population is currently one-third minority (as defined within the article, non-white), and rapidly moving toward majority-minority, while core museum visitors are currently only 9% minority and museum employees only 20% minority, the report continues on to ask:  "If 5 to 9 is the critical age for converting children into lifelong museumgoers and advocates, how can museums attract minority children in this age range whose support they want in 2034?"


Which brings us to our first discussion question, presented on a silver platter as graciously as if Dolley had served it up herself:  Do YOU identify with this group of Museum Advocates? If so, describe your "seminal museum experience!" How and why did it make you an advocate? For instance, one of our extremely accomplished collections interns mentioned that once she had viewed the First Ladies (gowns) Collection exhibit at the Smithsonian, she was hooked for life! This seems like such a textbook example of the seminal museum experience - a trajectory that launches with a trip to a museum and ends up with a graduate-educated author, teacher, and museum professional in the history of fashion - that many of us were dying to learn more about it. Time did not permit discussion of this and other fascinating (and, I imagine, well-clad) journeys to museum advocacy, hence the inspiration for this online chat.


If you are not too busy advocating for museums at this very moment, I hope you all will share, whether or not you were able to attend the roundtable!




*P.S. I confess to having Dolley Madison on the brain, as Dolley is one of Dumbarton House's Very Important Visitors and the PBS "American Experience" documentary on Dolley premiered at the beginning of this week. (If you missed the episode, a fun and, I think, fair review of it appeared in The Washington Post - and there is always Netflix.)