AAH 471 - Museum Studies

 
Delivery: Lecture
Within the broad field of museum studies, this course focuses on the intersection of mission, collecting, and display for art museums and house museums in the United States. Museum mission statements often describe institutional goals in terms of conservation, community outreach, education, or the delivery of cultural resources, while museum staff work to create exhibitions, architecture, and didactic materials that enact that mission and make it visible to museum users. To examine how mission shapes collecting practice and display, students read scholarly studies of museum trends, case studies of innovative practices, guidelines crafted by museum professionals, and news coverage of current museum challenges and then apply that scholarly study to a research project analyzing an important event in an American museum: an acquisition, exhibition, protest, architectural expansion, or repatriation of an object or collection.

3 credits
Spring