There are museums and there are art galleries. Then there are art museums—think of the illustrious Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Louvre, Rijksmuseum or closer home, the National Gallery of Modern Art. 

But beyond what we have come to understand as museums and art galleries, there is a new update on how we view art museums, those that go beyond selling artworks and holding a rotating cast of exhibitions, and that harness technology, community support and new forms of storytelling.

Last week, the New York–based Association of Art Museum Curators Foundation (AAMC) announced that it would launch the Professional Alliance for Curators of Color, a new program meant to empower curators of color from around the world. The consortium will connect the first cohort of curators not only with each other but with the AAMC’s vast network of professional contacts within the curatorial field and beyond. In its press release announcing it, the AAMC said the new program “seeks to address issues of isolationism, racism, inequity, and lack of access that are far too often the experience for BIPOC curators.”

Lord Cultural Resources has been engaged to provide advisory services to the AAMC curatorial cohort. Advisors include Gail Lord, President, Joy Bailey-Bryant, President US, Kathleen Brown, Senior Practice Leader, Javier Jimenez, Director, and Associate Consultants Veronica Gonzales and Monica Sylvain.

Like museums around the world, the Smithsonian is preparing to reopen in a landscape fraught with uncertainty.

Newly released footage shows the full extent of the vast 65,000 sq. m space and the designs striking use of straight lines and concrete.

The first of its kind Bihar Museum Biennale is here. Hosted at the Bihar Museum, thirteen Indian and six international museums are participating in this week-long event, starting today, 22 March. With virtual exhibition tours, a food trail, an international conference and masterclasses planned over an intensive week of the Biennale, here’s a list of things you shouldn’t miss out on.

Gail Lord was part of the Panel Container vs Platform: Museum as an open space for conversation that took place on March 23.

To support efforts on the island aimed at raising awareness of the importance of hazard mitigation, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) awarded a $4.1 million grant to the EcoExploratorio Resiliency Institute (ERI). This unique center in Puerto Rico will provide guidance on resilience and other mitigation topics to the public. The funds are provided by FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program.

In 2012, Kathleen Brown, Senior Practice Leader, was engaged to develop the original concept planning and development for EcoExploratorio.

Archinect's last report of the highly anticipated Academy Museum of Motion Pictures reported the Museum's planned opening and potential delay due to Covid-19 concerns. Today, The Academy Museum announces its inaugural programming and the official public opening, which will occur on September 30, 2021. To kick start its public debut, the Museum kicks off with its virtual programs in April.

Madison's Center for Black Excellence and Culture is teaming up with a world-renowned planning firm. The center, which will open on Madison's south side in 2023, is partnering with Lord Cultural Resources for Business Planning.

Institution issues newly written history that discloses its founders’ pro-Confederacy stance and business ties to racist labour practices in the South.

The museum is launching a research project to uncover forgotten women's histories at the museum.

For the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the reckoning followed a field trip gone awry. In the spring of 2019, a group of middle schoolers, all students of color from the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy in Dorchester, Massachusetts, were treated to a visit to the museum as a reward for good grades and good behavior. There, they were allegedly greeted with racist invective and profiled by museum staff and fellow visitors alike. According to Academy teacher and chaperone Marvelyne Lamy, a museum employee told the children that “no food, no drink, and no watermelon” were allowed in the galleries. In an impassioned Facebook post uploaded after the visit, Lamy also described in detail how the students were harassed by fellow museumgoers and tailed closely through the galleries by museum security, who reprimanded them disproportionately compared to white students visiting from another school. She swore she would never go back to the MFA.

The University of Aberdeen is to return a Benin bronze - a sculpture looted by British soldiers in Nigeria in one of the most notorious examples of the pillaging of cultural treasures associated with 19th century European colonial expansion.

Younger paleontologists are working to overcome some historical legacies of their discipline and change how people learn about natural history.

Amid debate, AAMD votes 91-88 against exploring a controversial revision of rules to allow proceeds to finance collections care.

Although “thumbstoppable” social media content is essential, the online world has dark consequences too, says Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Critics warn that donors might be discouraged from giving artworks if they fear they will be sold off when rainy days come.

With lockdown lifted for nail salons and zoos, anger rises over arts institutions’ continued closure, estimated to cost the sector $22m a day.

The island of Elba could exhibit some of the Uffizi's Napoleon-themed works in time for the 200th anniversary of the military leader's death.

Museums are traditionally very good at telling, but not very good at listening. This is obvious not only in the ways museums are often removed from the public they’re meant to serve, but in the ways they’re distant from each other. Yet unexpectedly, the pandemic has afforded museums and arts organizations all kinds of opportunities to close some of that distance, and the results have us rethinking what’s possible.

There are any number of developments set to reshape the museum world and the roles of those who work in it over the next decade. Some are universal: the fallout from the pandemic, digital advances and globalisation.

Agencies seem to be betting that time and increased exposure to the kingdom will wear down Western qualms over its human rights record.

As we come to terms with the one-year anniversary of COVID lockdowns, Canada’s arts community is focused on creating a brighter and more sustainable future. A future that takes advantage of the upheaval wrought by the pandemic, to repair the broken model outlined by Marsha Lederman on March 13 (Eight ways to fix the arts industry, postpandemic). To be effective, this repair will include provision of a Basic Income Guarantee.

So I went to the Beeple museum. What, you say, is the Beeple museum? I refer to the B.20 Museum, built by the Metapurse fund, designed by Voxel Architects, and wholly existing within the online universe of CryptoVoxels.

The acceptance of virtual couriers is rapidly transforming the way artworks travel around the world.

From dealing with cyberattacks on newly implemented digital offerings, to figuring out how to renegotiate a postponed loan, the coronavirus has raised a whole new crop of issues for museums.