Reposted from The Daily Beast

On March 18, 1990, two men posing as Boston Police Department officers gained entry into the city’s famed Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and, after 81 minutes, walked out with 13 works of art—including Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee and Vermeer’s The Concert—valued by the FBI at approximately $500 million. In the 31 years since that St. Patrick’s Day heist, none of the pieces has been recovered, and none of the individuals responsible for the theft has been definitively identified, or brought to justice. It was one of the crimes of the century, and it continues to confound authorities and journalists to this day.

Yet as suggested by This is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist, perhaps the greatest mystery of all isn’t that the crooks initially got away with their loot, but that no one has since squealed—this despite the fact that the museum continues to offer a $10 million reward for information leading to the art’s recovery.

Director Colin Barnicle’s four-part Netflix docuseries (premiering April 7) takes a jaunty look at this infamous heist, which began in the wee hours of March 18, when museum security guard Rick Abath allowed two uniformed strangers into the facility. There, the faux-cops bound Abath and his colleague with duct tape in the basement, and then took their sweet time snatching a strange collection of works from various rooms, as well as grabbing the building’s VHS security camera tapes. There was no apparent rhyme or reason behind the items they targeted, but the patient thoroughness of their activity, as well as their familiarity with the museum—including the location of a secret room’s door—indicated that they may have benefited from inside knowledge or assistance.

Suspicion first fell on Abath, who had previously opened the museum door leading to the street just minutes before the disguised thieves arrived. This is a Robbery spends considerable energy looking into Abath, a stoner-rock slacker by day who didn’t really like his job or his bosses, and who had let someone into the museum—a clear violation of security protocols—the night before the heist. Abath doesn’t participate in the series, but Barnicle does include snippets of a CNN interview with him, as well as an audio recording of his chat with former Boston Globe investigative journalist (and Spotlight team member) Stephen Kurkjian, during which he denies any involvement in the crime.

This is a Robbery has a propulsive momentum that doesn’t interfere with its comprehensive examination of its story’s numerous angles. Utilizing an array of graphical timelines and maps, photographs, and archival news and crime scene videos, it lucidly details the multiple threads that comprise its tale. Interviews with investigators and local journalists help convey the atmosphere of this particular Boston era, while a sense of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum comes courtesy of long nocturnal trips through its inviting, ornately decorated hallways. There’s nothing groundbreaking about Barnicle’s chosen form, and his dramatic recreations (shot melodramatically, with actors’ faces always obscured) are a superfluous annoyance. However, thanks to sharp cutting by a team of four editors, the series moves smoothly back and forth in time, and between locales and personalities, to provide a coherent account of the complicated saga.

Though Abath was a promising initial suspect, attention soon turned to Myles Connor, an infamous New England art thief who was as brash as he was talented. The only problem was that Connor had an airtight alibi: he was behind bars for a prior offense when the robbery took place. Nonetheless, thanks to present-day interviews with Connor and others, This is a Robbery surmises that Connor may have had a hand in the burglary via his association with Bobby Donati, an Italian mafioso with whom he’d previously partnered on an art-snatching job. Donati thus had experience with such plots, and moreover, he had a motive—namely, to get his underworld pal Vincent Ferrara out of prison.

It’s there that This is a Robbery dives headfirst into a tangle of Italian mob connections and conspiracies, resulting in a persuasive theory that Donati and his close confidant Bobby Guarente concocted the plan, which was then carried out by a group of gangsters—led by Carmello Merlino, and including Charlie Pappas, David Turner, George Reissfelder, and Leonard Dimuzio—that operated out of Merlino’s TRC Auto Electric shop in Dorchester. Through analysis of these characters’ whereabouts and history, as well as anecdotes from their relatives, Barnicle’s docuseries comes up with a reasonable hypothesis about who pulled off the heist. It additionally deduces that in the aftermath of the crime, the art may have been transferred by Guarente to Hartford, CT gangster Robert Gentile, whose house eventually became the subject of a raid that, alas, turned up no hard evidence.

This is a Robbery is most illuminating when exploring the motivations of thieves who pilfer priceless one-of-a-kind artworks. While sales on the black market are an option, the series reveals that such paintings and sculptures can also be used as collateral for drug deals, thereby functioning as illicit pseudo-currency for big transactions. More stunning still, they’re often sought as leverage against future incarceration. In other words, a thief could theoretically trade a Rembrandt in their possession for a lighter sentence regarding an unrelated case—a “get out of jail free card” situation that Connor himself pioneered. That Guarente, Merlino and company didn’t cough up a painting in order to free their arrested cohorts, then, might mean that they didn’t actually have anything to do with the heist in the first place.

Hovering over these proceedings is the bigger question of why no one has decided to sing and, in doing so, collect the $10 million reward. The answer may simply be that it’s because most of the possible culprits are now dead (due to natural causes, murder or shady circumstances). Or it could be that a bombshell is forthcoming, now that David Turner has been released from prison. This is a Robbery doesn’t offer a definitive answer, instead tantalizing by suggesting that the truth is still out there.

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Reposted from The New York Times

Should museums tell the public about missing art?

Two pieces of gold and silver-encrusted Italian Renaissance armor, which had been stolen from the Louvre in 1983 and found this year in a family’s private collection in France, were discovered the way stolen art often is: An expert crosschecked the items against an online database of lost and stolen art.

But museums have at times withheld information about thefts, fearing that revealing security weaknesses could make other institutions less likely to loan them art or that it could encourage other thefts, according to current and former museum officials. Art security experts say the failure to report thefts, particularly involving items stolen from storage, has prevented museums from recovering items.

Philippe Malgouyres, the curator of heritage art at the Louvre, said that when he started working in museums decades ago, he heard stories of thefts and disappearances that had not been reported.

“Our purpose is to preserve objects for the future and for the public,” Mr. Malgouyres said. “When we fail to do that somehow, when something is stolen, it’s a very painful experience, which led some museums in the past, especially, not even to go to the police sometimes, because they were feeling so embarrassed about it.”

He said that while the armor that was recently recovered was not as well known as many other pieces in the Louvre’s collection, he had thought it would eventually be found because it had been cataloged in a database of art thefts in France.

Now, public museums and galleries act in a more transparent way, said Sandy Nairne, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery in London and the former director of programs at the Tate Gallery.

“In the past, there was a kind of instant reaction of institutions that wanted to protect their sense of integrity that made them very cautious about talking about it,” said Mr. Nairne, who led a team at the Tate that recovered two J.M.W. Turner paintings in 2002, eight years after they had been stolen while on loan to a museum in Germany.

On Sunday, the newspaper El País reported that the National Library of Spain had discovered in 2014 that one of its holdings, a 17th-century book by Galileo, had been replaced by a copy but did not report it to the police until four years later, when researchers had requested the work.

Although it is obvious when artwork that is on display is stolen, museums can sometimes take years to realize that pieces in storage have been taken, said Tim Carpenter, a special agent with the F.B.I.’s art crime team.

“It might be 10 or 15 years before they do an inventory and say, ‘Hey, where is this piece?’” he said. “You can imagine how difficult it is trying to play catch-up on a 15-year-old crime. It makes things infinitely more difficult for us.”

A comprehensive inventory of a museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has hundreds of thousands of objects, is time-consuming and expensive, but poor record-keeping can hamper an investigation of theft.

In one case that Mr. Carpenter worked on, a major museum discovered the disappearance of artifacts 15 to 20 years after the theft. The authorities knew where the artifacts were but could not recover them because the museum was unable to establish that the items had belonged to it; the museum’s most accurate inventory was from the 1920s, he said.

The advantages of reporting thefts are clear: Members of the public can help identify stolen art, and it’s more difficult for thieves to sell. In 2011, after a drawing attributed to Rembrandt was stolen from an exhibition at a hotel in Los Angeles, the authorities released an image of the piece. Days later, it was left at a church.

However, there are also instances when keeping thefts out of the public eye is advantageous for investigative purposes, said Lynda Albertson, the chief executive of the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art, an organization that researches art crime.

In 2013, when thieves stole 27 pieces from the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome, the police kept quiet about the theft and, as a result, recovered most of the pieces, she said.

“Sometimes they’re very quiet, not so talkative or splashy,” Ms. Albertson said of the division of Italian police that focuses on art crime. “That discretion has been quite helpful.”

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Reposted from AAM

We are a profession of some of the most brilliant thinkers, scholars, educators, artists, scientists, and revolutionaries from almost every background and way of life. Most of us working in and with museums approach the work with passion, acquired skill sets, and determination to change our communities through the history and culture of humankind.

Rarely, however, do we think about theories. And on the occasions that we do, we usually consider them the luxuries of academia. Yet, theories can offer solutions for informing our best practices. Theories are developed from a set of principles based on observation and research. They explicate and predict conditions and phenomena and help us 1) augment our knowledge and 2) achieve a base unit of understanding.

I began writing about and using theory in 2010 as a mechanism for interrogating legacies of exclusion in museums. I wanted to challenge the statements that were accepted as truths about why Black people and people of color did or did not visit museums. I wanted to challenge assumptions accepted as truth about leisure-time activities and museum-going in correlation to what I understood about race and racism. Specifically, I have employed critical race theory as a method of inquiry to interrogate the role and function of race in museums.

Why Theories Matter for Museums

When I started investigating race within the museum context, I found that all of the research on visitors recognized that Black people and people of color were overwhelmingly not attending museums at the same rates as their white counterparts. However, no studies accounted for or articulated race, racism, or historical oppression in their research. It was as if there was no existing knowledge of race or racism.

How could we not account for institutional and systemic racism when we know for a fact that there were museums that would not allow Black visitors? How could we not account for the pseudo-science of eugenics in our natural history museums and its impact on collections and taxonomies of knowledge? How could we continue to argue that implicit bias was not a factor when white artists are glaringly over-represented in the permanent collections of our most beloved art museums?

As an activist-scholar, I was acutely aware that existing knowledge was being egregiously bypassed, and the existing museum-going data was missing vital information. How could our internal and external behaviors be labeled best practices, codes of conduct, or standards when the field was overwhelmingly white and did not account for Black and Indigenous ways of knowing? What have our standards been based on? What theories prove that the ways in which we are working in museums are the best ways for the times that we live in?

I began to search for a theory that could offer reasonable and inquiry-based answers to these questions. While many scoff at theory as merely an intellectual exercise or academic jargon, I recognized that theory informs praxis and vice versa. Theory and application are gradients of the same hue. Praxis is literally defined as shape-making and world-changing. That is, praxis is informed, committed engagement toward problem-solving a situation as intentional thinking and acting.

Theory provides meaning to what we see in our daily application and work practices. It is a framework for taking what we know and applying principles for relevance, fine-tuning, new applications, and installing new modes of conduct. We can use theory to make predictions, develop best practices, and guide new territories of exploration from research and observation. The systematic set of interrelated concepts, definitions, and explorations help us uncover how and why things work as they do.

Theories are used across disciplines to advance conversations, illuminate cross-disciplinary dialogue, and provide a conceptual framework for resolving a conundrum through shared language. In the museum field, we tend to focus purely on accepted codes of conduct created through professionalization, established best practices, and hit-or-miss risk-taking.

“The core credo of CRT is that racism is pervasive, and even with legal preventions in place racism will never be fully eradicated because of the ubiquity of Whiteness.”

What are the advantages of applying theory to assist us in solving some of our most complex and challenging issues in museums? How can we apply theory as an informative framework to address issues such as social injustice and systemic and institutional racism? How can theories help us think about the ways in which code words, such as “community,” “diversity,” and “invitation,” signal exclusion to our visitors even as our intended outcome is participation and welcome? These were the key questions that I used to approach the topics of diversity and inclusion in our field.

What Is Critical Race Theory?

Critical race theory (CRT) was developed in the 1970s from the writings of legal scholar Derrick Bell to respond to legal reversals of key legislation passed during the Civil Rights Movement. CRT was a way to trace the roots of racist legislation going back to the harsh Black Codes that restricted Black Americans’ freedom after the Civil War while providing a legal and political framework for challenging racial inequality within the law. Other scholars, such as Alan Freeman and Richard Delgado, augmented CRT by implementing cross-disciplinary theories with fields such as cultural studies, critical legal studies, postmodernism, and feminism.

The core credo of CRT is that racism is pervasive, and even with legal preventions in place, racism will never be fully eradicated because of the ubiquity of Whiteness. Originating in the 17th century, Whiteness was created by white Christian and English settlers to distinguish colonists from African and Indigenous peoples. Whiteness became a recognized legal term that also distinguished class. Within the context of the United States, Whiteness was specifically designed to establish legal and social hierarchy and to utilize skin color as a legalized privilege.

In our contemporary times, critical race scholars have identified additional tenets of the theory to better define Whiteness and how it functions in today’s society. Whiteness includes the proximity to the rights, values, beliefs, and experiences of Whiteness in relation to the impact of racism that elevates and distinguishes white people over people of color. Whiteness, like race, is a social construct.

CRT—now used in disciplines such as education, women and gender studies, American studies, queer studies, critical white studies, and more—critically examines constructs of race, specifically, as it relates to eradicating racism and restoring justice. CRT is a set of inquiry-based principles designed to:

• illuminate inequality,
• name the inequality,
• establish new protocols for creating/restoring justice, and
• eradicate engineered privileges experienced as racism.

Advocates of CRT utilize it to practice activism and scholarship. CRT activist-scholars, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality,” employ CRT as a mechanism for addressing systemic inequality and advocating for justice. In addition to the notion that racism is pervasive and unable to be fully eradicated, CRT encompasses the following three key tenets:

1. Counternarrative or storytelling—using the narratives of people of color to illuminate racialized experience to counter a dominant narrative of white norms. Storytelling is viewed as an accepted and legitimate way of knowing.
2. Interest convergence—that white people will eschew racism only until their interests no longer converge with those of people of color.
3. Critique of liberalism—that social transformation is only possible when “Band-Aid approaches,” such as affirmative action, color blindness, and merit principles such as respectability, are rejected. Liberalism as an ideology destabilizes conscious effort and language that centers on race and race-consciousness.

It is important to note that CRT is not:

• a political agenda;
• a scheme to make white people feel guilt or shame;
• a mechanism for revising history such that one race is pitted against another or demonized; or
• something that can be “taken down,” needs to be “fought,” creates harm, or disturbs the fabric of society.

Combating Racism and Anti-Blackness in Museums

Museums are rooted in colonialism and imperialism. As such, CRT is a necessary tool for evaluating the ways in which white supremacy culture exists in our cultural heritage institutions. In our field, Stephen Weil notably shifted our attention from the object-centered museum to the human-centered museum when he wrote “museums should be about people, not objects.” Yet, which people? Whose culture? Whose cultural heritage objects?

In museums, our attention has been focused on “diversity’’ and “diversity initiatives” as a means to hegemonically continue our “best practices” and status quo allegiance to Whiteness as opposed to practicing inclusion and intentionally destabilizing and de-centering Whiteness. CRT allows us to focus on structures of power and privilege, thereby transforming our communities in new ways. It is a tool for identifying the impacts of our collective implicit bias that is rendered as professionalization.

The Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping—issued on September 22, 2020, to end so-called “divisive concepts” covered in federal workplace trainings—is a key example of the ways in which Whiteness is allowed to determine what is harmful, and whether or not one is able to claim that harm and demand reparations for being harmed. It is a deepening of the white master narrative that there is a single American history.

Our American history is complex, riddled with heroic feats, savage instances of oppression, social and cultural behaviors that demand sameness and not diversity, and more. It is reductive to think that individuals with the most power and the least ability to experience harm are the same entities that can emphatically declare that implicit bias does not exist, racism is imagined, and white privilege is false.

“CRT allows us to focus on structures of power and privilege, thereby transforming our communities in new ways.”

CRT is a liberatory framework for providing the language tools, theoretical frameworks, history, and legal contexts to organize our thinking so that we can address access, diversity, inclusion, and equity in museums. In addition, it augments our commitment to sharing the full depth and breadth of information that material culture affords us. Furthermore, it allows us to use research, rubrics, toolkits, and other tools to eradicate systemic racism in our practices as we continue to adhere to standards of excellence, thereby redefining and transforming our field by committing to anti-racism and combating anti-blackness.

Museums are the most trusted institutions in our nation. If we adhere to standards set upon us by those who do not invest in scientific and academic rigor, reason, and standards, we forfeit that trust.

The practical — making judgments       

People begin with a situation or question which they consider in relation to what they think makes for human flourishing. (the good)

They are guided by a moral disposition to act truly and rightly.  (Phronesis)

This enables them to engage with the situation as committed thinkers
and actors.  (praxis)

The outcome is a process. (interaction)

Source: Mark Smith, Local Education: Community, Conversation, Action, 1994

Do I Need to Incorporate CRT into My Museum Work?

Whether you are in a structural leadership position, a board member, a volunteer, or a casual/part-time worker, racial equity is part of everyone’s work. Below are some actions you can take today.

1. Do you understand the basic language tools for racial equity? (Do you have mechanisms in place to ensure that this language is not being co-opted by the values being employed?)
2. Do you apply trauma-informed and healing-informed care to your daily museum work?
3. Do you know your museum’s racial history?
4. Is your board still predominately white?
5. Are your collections still predominately lacking complex, multilayered narratives/representation?
6. Is your social media still only speaking to your “base/core”?
7. Is your development department still only targeting Black, Indigenous, and other people of color as beneficiaries of donations instead of donors/philanthropists themselves?
8. Do you understand what anti-blackness is and what it looks like in your decision-making approach?
9. Do you believe that race and/or racism has nothing to do with museums or museum-going and doesn’t impact the work that you do?
10. Has your museum created spaces, opportunities, advisory capacities, and more to elevate the presence, power, and voices of historically marginalized communities in your institution in a tangible, visible way that shares authority and ways of knowing?

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Reposted from The Art Newspaper

Museums across Poland and in parts of Germany have been forced to close again as a third wave of the pandemic engulfing much of Europe prompted authorities to tighten lockdown restrictions. 

In Poland, where museums reopened on 1 February, the government ordered them to close again until at least 9 April, as daily numbers of new cases reached levels not seen since November. In Germany, Hamburg’s Kunsthalle and Museum of Applied Arts were forced to close just days after reopening because of an increasing number of new cases in the city.

The German government had allowed museums to reopen from 8 March after four months of forced closure. But the plan approved by the federal government and states also included a so-called emergency brake for the event that new infections begin to rise more steeply. In Hamburg, the rate of infections reached that level last week. The Kunsthalle had reopened on 9 March with an exhibition featuring Giorgio de Chirico that is only scheduled to run until 25 Apr. The Museum of Applied Arts had reopened on 12 March.

German Health Minister Jens Spahn warned on Friday of “challenging weeks ahead” and the possibility of a stricter lockdown instead of the looser measures the government had hoped to announce this week. “There are not enough vaccines in Europe to stop the third wave of the pandemic with vaccinations alone,” he said. “We need to be patient.”

In Germany, museum openings are tied to the rate at which the disease is spreading in individual regions. In regions where the average number of new coronavirus cases per day over the past seven days is below 100 per 100,000 residents, museums can open. However, if a region’s seven-day average for new cases rises over 100 per 100,000 inhabitants for three straight days, then it must revert to a stricter lockdown, including museum closures, two days after that. 

With a number of German regions now above that limit, it is likely more museums across the country will be compelled to close in the coming days. Some have not even reopened after the four-month lockdown in force until 8 March.

A similar system linked to regional rates of contagion is in operation in Italy, where the Uffizi in Florence has been closed since 15 February. Last week, Italy declared 11 regions, including Rome and Milan, as red zones, in which all museums and other non-essential shops must shutter. 

The French authorities also tightened lockdown rules in many regions including Paris, where museums have been closed since last October. The French public health authority said on 20 March that the number of new cases had risen by more than 35,000 in the previous 24 hours and that pressure on hospitals was “critical in some regions.”

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Reposted from Security Management Magazine

The decisions you make today will have significant impact on your operations for quite a while. With that in mind, taking measures today to mitigate the potential spread of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) is necessary to ensure not only the continuation of effective operations today but resiliency for years to come.

Like many natural disasters, infectious diseases such as COVID-19, Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and the reemergence of tuberculosis can have harsh impacts to safety and security operations—and the global economy.

For these reasons, it’s time to integrate communicable and infectious diseases into business continuity strategies as an emerging natural hazard. Aggressive measures to ensure a safe, sanitary, and secure working environment are necessary to create a foundation for health, safety, and protective service professionals.

COVID-19 is the most recent in a round of threats from emerging highly infectious disease, and it highlights the need to continually plan for and exercise strategies to assure readiness to respond and maintain resiliency. Having a plan is essential to ensure the health and safety of employees and stakeholders of any organization.

Build and Exercise Your Plan

If you have not already done so, now is the time to pull out your pandemic preparedness plans and business continuity strategy. Be sure to review the policies and procedures to confirm that they are still current for your organization.

Managing the response to any threat requires understanding the threat characteristics and profile. Mitigating the threat of emerging infectious diseases requires planning and resources to assure that systems are in place for operations, as well as for decision making.

Everyone, from organizations to the local government to public safety professionals to the community, must be part of managing the threat. If there is a state or federal declaration of an emergency or major disaster, security professionals must examine the emergency orders to ensure compliance.

Many federal and municipal governments across the world are implementing social distancing mandates to manage the threat of spreading COVID-19. In response, some companies and organizations are requiring—or encouraging—employees work from home. Some, however, might not have the technology infrastructure in place to support this kind of work style. For example, employees may not have high speed Internet for video conferencing and meetings.

To prepare for this organizational change, conduct a workshop or tabletop exercise with leadership so everyone understands the expectations and responsibilities of their function—even while working remotely. Workshops are an opportunity for everyone to walk through a discussion on the policies and procedures that are no longer valid or may have changed in the organizational dynamic since the plan was last updated.

Updating Your Plan

Many agencies consider communicable illnesses public health incidents instead of slow onset disasters that require activation of crisis management systems. Similar to natural hazards, a pandemic will threaten organizational normalcy by disrupting day-to-day business operations and community activities. For this reason, private sector business continuity and public sector emergency planners need to consider emerging infectious diseases as part of their Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA) and Business Impact Analysis process.

Community mitigation strategies for pandemics may include social distancing and isolation of exposed individuals, along with quarantine of those who are infected or ill. These strategies require activation of jurisdictions’ emergency operations plans to cancel public gatherings and events, and to create points for monitoring residents.

Traditionally, preparedness for pandemics has included the need for discussions on how to be prepared for up to 40 percent of your organization unable to report to work. This may be because of social distancing requirements, infection, or the need to provide care to someone who is infected. Organizations need to think through how they will handle employees who cannot report to work while continuing to effectively operate.

To help make these decisions on staff, organizations should review World Health Organization (WHO) and national health sites—like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—for best practices. They should also be familiar with, and routinely monitor, recommendations and guidelines from state and local health authorities.

In areas with high exposure risk or isolation orders, organizations should limit facility access to only essential personnel necessary for operations. Organizations should also consider creating a safety parameter for monitoring entry. For instance, the White House has begun conducting temperature checks before allowing reporters into the press briefing room.

Additionally, all personnel should be advised not to report to work if they are sick or experiencing flu-like symptoms. All staff who routinely come into contact with the public or surfaces exposed to the public should wear exam gloves on site.

Communicate with Your Stakeholders

All organizations mut have a strategy to keep employees, stakeholders, and regulatory authorities informed—as appropriate—through consistent, concise messaging. Communication systems and processes are the essential tools to tell your story and manage perceptions about how you are handling the coronavirus pandemic.

Organizations should provide information across multiple platforms, exercising and evaluating each to determine what works best for messaging. It is unsettling when information is not available. The lack of information can cause emotions to run high. Providing validated information will go a long way towards preventing gossip and speculation.

Exercise your organization’s communication plan. Stay on message and provide accurate, credible information to media outlets and Intranet services.

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Reposted from AAM

At Thanksgiving Point Institute—a farm, garden, and museum complex in Lehi, Utah—we’ve been wondering how visitor agendas are changing during the current health crisis. Understanding visitor motivations informs our efforts to be inclusive and relevant, and we believe the current social, political, and pandemic conditions are creating new paradigms that call for a reevaluation of visitor needs and how we serve them.

Several large national studies have been conducted to understand museum visitors in the time of COVID, such as those by LaPlaca Cohen and Slover Linett, Morey Consulting, IMPACTS Experience, and Wilkening Consulting on behalf of AAM. These studies are important resources for understanding national trends, but at the same time, each museum, and each community it serves, is unique. COVID case rates, mandates, and attitudes toward safety precautions differ regionally within the US (Desmon, 2020) and will necessarily inform when we open, how we open, and what communication strategies we use around opening. With that in mind, at Thanksgiving Point we have felt it is important to supplement the lessons from the national data with local data on our specific visitors.

Building on our work over the past eight years to track our visitors’ motivations and agendas on an ongoing basis, we have been using three different tools during the pandemic: a pre-opening survey of visitor needs, a weekly exit survey, and observations of visitors in galleries compared to parallel data collected pre-pandemic.

The findings have been surprising. While we expected there to be significant differences in visitors’ behavior and motivation pre- and post-pandemic, we have discovered that they are interested in reengaging with familiar places and in familiar ways, perhaps to find a sense of connection and normalcy in an abnormal time. Some of our findings stand in contrast to assumptions and even findings in national discussions, emphasizing the need for local data to understand local needs.

Pre-Opening Surveys

In preparation for reopening in April 2020, we sent a survey to membership holders and a random sample from our general mailing list. The goal of the survey was to explore pandemic-related needs our visitors might have that Thanksgiving Point could contribute to meeting, and thus position ourselves to support healing and thriving in the community.

The more than seventy-five hundred responses confirmed that our visitors highly value Thanksgiving Point as a place to spend time with others, and that having a place to deepen relationships with family and friends was the most important role they needed us to play—more than providing a place for conversation and dialogue or offering structured wellness programs.

Later in the survey, we provided visitors a space to tell us “anything else” on their mind about reopening. From these, a clear pattern emerged confirming the appeal of having a place to deepen relationships with family and friends. Here are a few examples:

“It would provide peace for my family to walk through the gardens and enjoy the outdoors.”

“We really have gained a new perspective on the important things we do together as a family and we really miss the experiences we have shared and the venues that we get to explore at Thanksgiving Point. I know this has been a crazy time for everyone and we are excited to feel some sort of normalcy again and can’t wait to visit. Especially the gardens.”

“I have missed the gardens during this time. They are a place I go for my own emotional wellbeing as well as taking family and friends. I have missed going and life will definitely feel more normal once we can go back.”

The social nature of museum visits has been well studied, and considering the isolating impact of COVID-19, it is no surprise that relationships are at the center of hopes for a visit. At the same time, these visitor responses suggest another trend: Thanksgiving Point venues provided a place of refuge and escape even before the pandemic, and visitors yearned for that now more than ever. This trend is also appearing in our ongoing exit surveys.

Exit Surveys

Since 2012, Thanksgiving Point has conducted a monthly exit survey of visitors to our five venues. This ongoing practice provides us with a dashboard of what’s going well and what needs attention—perhaps more important now than ever to know.

One question we use explores visitor motivations for coming, with response options inspired by Falk’s (2009) identity-related motivations. Among the various identities, rechargers—visitors with “the yearning to physically, emotionally, and intellectually recharge in a beautiful and refreshing environment” (Falk, 2009, p. 64)—have historically been common at Thanksgiving Point’s gardens, but minimal in our other venues. However, since reopening after COVID-related shutdowns, we have seen a significant upward trend in this motivation across all venues.

The chart below compares responses from our first two months of being reopened to the same two-month period in 2019 across all venues combined. (Understanding that motivations can be multiple, even during a single visit, visitors can select up to two identities in the survey question. As such, the sum of percentages in the chart will exceed 100 percent.)

While visitors still most commonly have the goal of providing a meaningful experience for the children they bring, that rate did drop slightly. We speculate this is because of the interactive nature of many of our exhibit spaces and concerns about surface transmission of the virus.

Most interesting to us, though, is the 400 percent increase in visitors with the goal of recharging physically, emotionally, or spiritually. From May 18 to July 18 of 2019, 6.1 percent of visitors selected this response, but over the same period in 2020 that number jumped to 24.4 percent. As we might expect, visitors appear to be looking for ways to find relief from the stresses of current events and are hoping that museums can provide that.

Gallery Observations

As a final approach to understanding visitors during re-opening, we conducted tracking and timing studies in three different galleries. We wanted to know if visitors’ behaviors were different in COVID-related conditions, and how limitations might be impacting their experience.

We had conducted timing and tracking studies prior to the pandemic as part of regular efforts to understand stay times, visitation patterns, and learning behaviors. With that data in hand, between May-October 2020 we conducted the studies again to explore how these might differ under pandemic conditions. Considering the unobtrusive nature of observations, we did not need to adjust our methods.

We conducted these comparison studies at two Thanksgiving Point museums: in a paleontology exhibit hall at the Museum of Ancient Life and in the Kidopolis Gallery at the Museum of Natural Curiosity. We thought visitors might spend more time at the exhibits, because it had been a while since they had been able to attend a museum, they were looking for “escape,” or because museum admission was limited and there would be fewer people in the galleries. However, we found no significant differences, despite adjustments and safety precautions imposed by the pandemic. Visitors are staying similar amounts of time, making a similar number of stops, and engaging with the exhibits similarly to how they would at any time. In surveys visitors expressed a desire for “normalcy,” and their gallery visits suggest they are behaving accordingly.

Implications

As we adapt to rapidly changing conditions, museums are asking, what role can we play to support healing in our community? Understanding visitor agendas can shed insights on that question. In a December 2020 “Data Story,” Wilkening Consulting concluded that, on a national scope, respite is not a straightforward thing that museums can provide in this moment. Yet findings from these three approaches in visitor studies at Thanksgiving Point suggest that our local visitors are turning to our museums for much-needed relief from the stress and challenges associated with COVID-19. The responses to the open-ended survey questions, and the unchanged behavior during gallery observations, lead us to believe the “normalcy” of a museum visit is part of that relief. With this in mind, we have tried to welcome visitors with an extra measure of warmth and service that shows even through masked faces. We have also used our findings to advocate for staying open—we feel we are providing needed relief for our visitors during this challenging time. While we rely on national data to guide us in best practices for a safe reopening and inspire us with innovative approaches, local data helps us stay relevant and responsive to our visitors’ needs.

In a recent special issue of the Museum & Society journal focused on museums’ first responses to COVID-19, editor Amy Levin noted that almost none of the more than fifty submissions received focused on COVID-19 as a physical disease. Instead, she says, most “explored the epidemic as a social, psychological, economic, and cultural phenomenon in the context of a simultaneous popular uprising against racism” (Levin, 2020). In some ways, the emotional repercussions of the pandemic and concurrent social fractures have been equally as notable as the health crisis itself, even for those who have not contracted the disease.

Connecting and recharging are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the relationships we form with other people are vital to our mental and emotional wellbeing, and really, our survival (Northwestern Medicine, n.d.). Even during times of isolation, we must commit to helping each other. We suggest that museums everywhere can provide this kind of critical respite to visitors navigating their way through current social, political, and pandemic issues.

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Reposted from Town & Country

When Emily Cooper breezily bypassed the Louvre in favor of Atelier des Lumières’ digital reproduction of Starry Night on the Netflix series Emily in Paris, art lovers everywhere cringed from their couches. A room filled with digital renderings of famous artworks—oversize, animated, set to music, and sometimes even scented (quelle horreur)—hardly compares to the real thing. Or does it?

Already a fixture in Europe and Asia, digital art spaces are sprouting up across the U.S., promising immersive experiences that can transport viewers. The expansive, room-wrapping format of these shows riffs on an experience created by teamLab, an art collective based in Tokyo. In 2001, they debuted their landmark digital art technology, creating interactive rooms that grew into an eponymous museum in Tokyo, which opened in 2018. It had 2.3 million visitors its first year, the largest attendance for a single-artist institution in the world.

Aside from one-off exhibitions like Yayoi Kusama's Mirror Rooms or Random International’s Rain Room, the most established of these digital-first spaces in the U.S. is Artechouse in New York’s Chelsea Market (it also has outposts in Washington, D.C., and Miami Beach) which commissions digital artists to create specific digital installations. But it's not the only game in town anymore: Superblue, opening this spring in Miami, is taking things up a level by including installations from teamLAB and James Turrell.

Museum curators are reckoning with the fact that these destinations, once dismissed as Instagram fodder, could also be the way forward in the world of classical art. Dwindling museum foot traffic is a real issue that was exacerbated by Covid-19 restrictions.

“People are introduced to and engage with art differently now,” says Jonathan Berger, marketing director at Newfields Museum in Indianapolis (formerly the Indianapolis Museum of Art). “As a cultural institution we have to reflect that, yet even though society has changed, museums haven't.” The Newfields Museum is the first U.S. institution to go all-in on a dedicated space in hopes to increase visitors. It is dedicating its entire fourth floor to a 33,000-square-foot virtual space, entitled The Lume, which will open in June.

Other classical remixes include both traveling pop-up exhibitions, such as San Francisco’s “Immersive Van Gogh,” which opened March 18 after a residency in Toronto, and standalone venues. Culturespaces, the company behind Paris’s Atelier des Lumières of Emily in Paris fame, is opening an outpost in Lower Manhattan’s former Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank this year (date to be announced).

“Anything that brings people to the fine arts is worthwhile,” says Steven Naifeh, curator and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Van Gogh: The Life. “But at the same time, I think of it like music. As nice as listening to a recording can be, it would be terribly sad to never see a live performance.” 

Undoubtedly, there is a poetry to standing next to a work of art, the same canvas that a great master touched, to study the brushwork; it just might not be enough alone to sustain the institutions these works call home. The staggering numbers drawn in by digital shows is a tempting lure, one that museums hope will get people in the door and then stick around to explore the collections IRL. 

For Newfields and "Immersive Van Gogh, the artists serves as a suitable entry to art, and not only because of his popularity. Van Gogh wanted as many people to see his work as possible and even painted duplicates of Sunflowers and Lullaby to send out to friends. If he were around today it is likely he would be impressed by these extravagant displays—and he might even tag himself.

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Reposted from Artnet News

An eight-year-long, $2.4 million restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece went viral last year as the 12-paneled painting’s central figure, a sweet lamb symbolizing Jesus himself, was made to look like the kid from the ”Trying to hold a fart next to a cute girl in class” meme. 

People online promptly compared the effort to Monkey Christ and any number of other famous restoration fails—even as researchers proved that this is what the lamb originally looked like when Flemish painters Jan Van Eyck and Hubert Van Eyck first created the work at Belgium’s St. Bavo’s Cathedral in 1432.

But you needn’t rely on memes to weigh in on the painting anymore. Today, St. Bavo’s Cathedral welcomed the famed painting home after its run in a once-in-a-lifetime Jan van Eyck exhibition, and in doing so they unveiled a new €30 million ($35 million) state-of-the-art glass structure for its display, as well as other updates.

The 20-foot-tall case boasts bulletproof glass and a 1,000-square-foot climate-controlled interior. The painting was moved from the cathedral’s Vijd Chapel to the Sacrament chapel, where, according to the Guardian, it will hang from pneumatically controlled steel supports above an altar. Meanwhile, extra large security doors have been installed nearby, in case of an emergency. 

For another painting this might seem like overkill, but not for the Ghent Altarpiece, which, over the course of its 588-year history, has been stolen on more than a dozen occasions—Napoleon and Hitler were among those desperate to take it—and nearly destroyed by fire on numerous others.  

“Jan Van Eyck was a genius who has been astonishing the world for more than five centuries with his innovative techniques. Both the magnificent restoration and the circumstances in which the Ghent Altarpiece can now be admired are astonishing,” Jan Jambon, the Flemish Prime Minister, said in a statement. “The splendor of colors, the details, the lighting: everything is perfect. That makes us proud.”

With the installation of a new display for the Van Eycks’ masterpiece came a full architectural upgrade for St. Bavo’s—a process that involved the redesign of the Cathedral Crypt and some of the building’s ancient stone walls. With an elevator and extra sets of stairs, the 746-year-old site is now fully accessible. The cathedral has also introduced a new augmented reality experience that will guide visitors through the space virtually. 

“Religious and Christian heritage is unlocked here in a unique way,” the Bishop of Ghent, Lode Van Hecke, added. “This is not only important for the sake of the past, but even more so for today and tomorrow.” 

“It confronts us with human’s eternal quest for mystery,” he continued. “I am convinced that many people will find personal resonance here.”

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Reposted from Texas Monthly

What happened?

On Tuesday night, a pair of would-be art thieves in Houston attempted to commit a glamorous crime: breaking into the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Bayou Bend Collection and Garden in River Oaks, with the suspected intent to pull off an honest-to-gosh heist. According to the museum, the duo is believed to have consisted of a man and a woman, who are accused of entering the illustrious mansion in which the collection is housed at around 6:45 p.m. How did they enter? If the words “art heist” mean anything, they mean that the thieves did not attempt to enter through the front door: rather, they squeezed through a grate covering a basement window on the museum’s north terrace.

What did they steal?

Alas, nothing. The heist wasn’t meant to be. The museum’s burglar alarm sounded, alerting a security guard to the intruders’ presence. As detailed by the museum’s statement on the attempted crime, they escaped through the main door on the museum’s southern facade, after which the security guard gave chase (!) as they darted through the woods (!!) on their way to a motorized fishing boat (!!!) they had prepared as a getaway vehicle, waiting for them on the nearby Buffalo Bayou.

Did they get clean away?

So far, it appears that way. After evading the security guard, the waterborne burglars navigated the bayou to a storm drain, where they abandoned their craft and, thus far, seem to have vanished. Police found the boat, investigated the museum, and explained that “no one was harmed and no works of art were damaged,” and that “nothing appears to have been removed from the premises.” 

Who were they?

Nobody knows! That’s what happens when you complete a successful getaway.

You sound kind of impressed by these burglars?

I mean, kind of, yeah? Certainly, we don’t wish to encourage our readers to commit crimes of moral turpitude, and stealing valuable things that don’t belong to you is definitely not a good thing. But we are not immune to the allure of certain crimes as being, uh, pretty cool, and decades of heist movies and shows—from The Thomas Crown Affair to The Great Muppet Caperto Ocean’s Eleven to Bonnie & Clyde to Lupin—have worked their magic. We acknowledge the glamour conjured by the words “art thieves.” That’s especially true when the caper A) results in no injuries or material losses, B) was planned elaborately enough that the criminals found a basement window to enter through, and C) was conducted both by land and by sea.

They still set off that alarm, though.

True, yes. These are C+ art thieves at best. Danny Ocean would not accept them into his crew.

Is art theft a thing that happens often in Texas?

Depends on your definition of “often,” really, but it happens more often than you might think! Right here in the Lone Star State, there are instances of high-end art, some of which is of immense value, being either taken, purchased despite being of dubious provenance, and/or disputed by multiple owners with claims to the work.

That’s true of pieces by contemporary artists such as Nicole Charbonnet and Erin Cone, who each had several paintings stolen from a trailer in a Dallas parking lot while in transit from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Louisiana in 2019. (The FBI is still seeking leads in the case, though a possible break came in January, when a mysterious caller reached out to Cone and to Charbonnet’s art dealer, seeking a reward for returning the paintings.) It’s true of a pair of priceless stolen thirteenth-century Byzantine frescoes purchased and restored by Houston collector Dominique de Menil, half of the couple for whom the city’s Menil Collection is named, in the 1990s. After being displayed in Houston for more than a decade, the frescoes were returned to the Church of Cyprus in 2012. Just this month, a similar case in Dallas led to the return of a looted ancient artifact, the Stele of Lakshmi-Narayana, to its native Nepal.

And then there’s the pair of portraits of the actress Farrah Fawcett, painted by the legendary Andy Warhol, which the actress bequeathed to the University of Texas—but one of which remained for years in the possession of her former beau Ryan O’Neal. (O’Neal’s possession of the work was discovered, naturally, while he was filming a reality TV show, because the camera captured it hanging on his dang wall. After a lengthy legal battle, O’Neal was allowed to keep the painting.) Another recent scandal took place in Houston, where a ring of art thieves targeted the city’s wealthy socialite community—including former mayoral candidate Tony Buzbee, who used the example to argue for “more police on the street” during his campaign. Those burglars were arrested in the summer of 2019, after months of casing their targets via social media.

Do any of those stories contain the cinematic gravitas of two mysterious villains breaking into a stately mansion that houses nearly five thousand pieces of decorative art created between 1620 and 1870?

They do not. But neither do they involve anybody splashing around the sewers empty-handed, with their boat in the possession of the police, so we’ll call it a wash. In any case, the bungling bayou burglars did better than the 2014 attempted art thieves who tried to steal an oversized canvas work and escape through Houston’s downtown tunnel system but found themselves stymied by size of the 6-by-6-foot piece, which was too large to fit through the entryway.

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Reposted from KGOU

The head of security at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City took the internet by storm when he was tasked with running the museum’s social media accounts at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now the security director turned internet star has an exhibition of his own at the museum.

The exhibition #HashtagtheCowboy opened March 17 and features the viral social media posts of Tim Tiller, the museum’s director of security. In his endearing posts, Tiller shows off artifacts in the museum’s collection as he learns the ropes of social media. 

Tiller’s security guard uniform and bolo tie are also included in the exhibition as well as letters and gifts he’s received from fans around the world. 

Nathan Jones, associate curator of history at the museum, said the exhibition is a physical representation of what has brought people joy online during the pandemic.  

“There's a tendency to look back on 2020 and just see the bad things,” Jones said. “And while there were plenty of catastrophes going on around us, there were also moments of genuine human connection when we were all feeling very isolated. So this was one of the big highlights for this museum's community and for our online followers.”

Tiller took on the additional role of assisting with social media since he was one of the few employees allowed in the museum while it was temporarily shut down in March 2020 due to the pandemic. Even after the museum reopened, Tiller has remained involved in posting on social media. 

Seth Spillman, the museum’s chief marketing and communications officer, said Tiller’s social media posts have attracted new visitors to the museum. 

The exhibition runs through Aug. 8.

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