Bank Street Leadership in Museum Education

Bank Street Leadership in Museum Education A space for program alumni and our museum education community to connect, share, and learn. Curated by Bank Street alumni.

The Culture Wars Followed Us Inside: It's no longer only about the art. They want the organization, and we spent thirty ...
09/06/2026

The Culture Wars Followed Us Inside: It's no longer only about the art. They want the organization, and we spent thirty years making it easy to take. | The Reprise https://buff.ly/UIS3yxZ

by Emil J. Kang

Museums preserve collections across generations. Performing arts companies sustain repertoires by employing the people who know the work. That continuity requires institutions.

Stability that produces nothing has no claim on public money. Attendance and a balanced budget show that you survived the year. They say nothing about whether you can make the next thing, or refuse to change it when someone asks.

READ MORE

It's no longer only about the art. They want the organization, and we spent thirty years making it easy to take.

09/06/2026

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Beyoncé Gives the Studio Museum in Harlem a $2 M. Gift on Her Birthday | ARTnews https://buff.ly/8NFOEuE

by Brian Boucher

Beyoncé Knowles turned 45 on September 4, and to mark the occasion, the global superstar entertainer made an unusual birthday gift, of $2 million, not to herself but to the Studio Museum in Harlem.

“Art tells all our stories; the past and the present, but is not always accessible to everyone,” said Beyoncé in a press release. “I have always been impressed with the Studio Museum in Harlem because of its intention to make the museum an integral part of the community. I have been introduced to several of my favorite young and upcoming Black artists through exhibits at the Museum. It is a place of inspiration where all audiences can discover new stories through the canvases of diverse storytellers that reflect our humanity.”

READ MORE

Beyoncé turned 45 on September 4. The global superstar entertainer made an unusual birthday gift, of $2 million to the Studio Museum in Harlem.

The Met’s Other Failure | The Atlantic Gift Article https://buff.ly/VLEnx54 The museum’s John Galliano exhibition had pr...
09/06/2026

The Met’s Other Failure | The Atlantic Gift Article https://buff.ly/VLEnx54

The museum’s John Galliano exhibition had problems beyond the designer’s past transgressions.

by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

Putting on a museum exhibition of Galliano’s work, even while interrogating his past behavior, was always going to be ethically dicey because the designer still stands to benefit from the publicity and prestige that the show bestows. This saga suggests that the Costume Institute, and perhaps all fashion museums, should forgo retrospectives of living artists—and revisit why rules discouraging them were necessary to begin with.

READ MORE

The museum’s John Galliano exhibition had problems beyond the designer’s past transgressions.

09/06/2026

Kennedy Center’s Removal of Joel Shapiro Sculpture Raises Concern Among Artists: ‘I’m Crushed’ | ARTnews https://buff.ly/IqEvdxZ

by Alex Greenberger

“I’m crushed,” said sculptor Deborah Butterfield, speaking to ARTnews by phone on Wednesday, the day after Blue’s disassembly began. The Shapiro sculpture was formerly on view in the REACH, an addition to the Kennedy Center that was opened in 2019. A sculpture of a horse by Butterfield, titled Milk River, is currently on view there, too.

Butterfield described Milk River as being “almost a Buddha.” “It’s a reverential, reflective piece, and I don’t think they’re threatened by it,” she said, so she does not expect it to be targeted for removal. But she worried about what the Shapiro sculpture’s removal could be mean for art in D.C. and the country more broadly.

“It’s the insidious malevolence behind this decision,” she said. “To control our thoughts and what we see, it’s really frightening to me.”

READ MORE

Artists such as Deborah Butterfield and Mokha Laget expressed concern about the removal of a Joel Shapiro work from the Kennedy Center.

Trump to Break Ground on “Triumphal Arch” Before Federal Approval | Hyperallergic https://buff.ly/dVCAEbUThe announcemen...
09/06/2026

Trump to Break Ground on “Triumphal Arch” Before Federal Approval | Hyperallergic https://buff.ly/dVCAEbU

The announcement follows a series of recent rollbacks on federal protections of historically significant sites.

by Anna Lee

Excavation efforts are set to begin within the next two weeks for President Donald Trump’s controversial “Great Triumphal Arch,” according to a statement Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted on X on Thursday, September 3. The announcement was made before the project has even received the green light from a federal review panel.

READ MORE

The announcement follows a series of recent rollbacks on federal protections of historically significant sites.

LA’s Lucas Museum Displays “Narrative Art” for the Few, Not the People | Hyperallergic https://buff.ly/ZfmswJlFriction, ...
09/05/2026

LA’s Lucas Museum Displays “Narrative Art” for the Few, Not the People | Hyperallergic https://buff.ly/ZfmswJl

Friction, dissonance, and multiplicity are overall avoided in favor of superficial unity and a flattening of difference at George Lucas and Mellody Hobson’s new institution.

by Matt Stromberg

After nearly two decades of planning and construction, a spate of layoffs, and staffing controversies, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will open its doors to the public later this month in South Los Angeles’s Exposition Park. This week, members of the press were invited to tour the new institution and get a taste of the random and facile smorgasbord of art that awaits visitors.
.. Ironically, there is very little narrative at all in the Museum of Narrative Art, at least curatorially. The collection is spread throughout 100,000 square feet of gallery space, divided into 30 or so thematic galleries — Adventure, Romance, Motherhood, Civic Life, Science Fiction, Comics, Sports, and others — with a few dedicated to individuals such as famed fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, and Norman Rockwell, whose specific brand of folksy Americana can be felt throughout. Artworks are displayed free of context or even any wall text aside from shiny, metal letters announcing each section. The thematic arrangement mashes together artworks of different styles and eras, linked by the flimsiest of threads, as if to say “Look, we’re all the same: we play sports, we work, we raise children!”, with little interest in exploring the specific cultural or social conditions from which they emerged.
.. But according to Ryan Linkof, senior curator and head of film programs, the lack of context is all by design. “The primary experience of walking through the museum is an unmediated one,” he told Hyperallergic. “We’re not necessarily telling people what to think, or how to experience it.” He explained that there are object labels written for every artwork, but they will be accessible through a digital guide. “If you want to dig a little deeper, that’s available to you, but it’s not structuring the entire experience,” he said. At Wednesday’s media preview, an admittedly unscientific perusal of the digital guide yielded scant information on many of the objects on view ...
.. The museum has been referred to again and again as a home for “the people’s art,” a populist stronghold against abstraction, conceptual art, and all the “-isms” championed by the snooty elites in their ivory towers. The question remains, who are “the people?” Judging by who is creating the art on view and depicted in it, they are mostly White and mostly men (though that is by no means unusual in museums across the board). There are exceptions, of course ... but these are generally subsumed within larger thematic categories, smoothing out any sense of individual significance.

READ MORE

Friction, dissonance, and multiplicity are overall avoided in favor of superficial unity and a flattening of difference at George Lucas and Mellody Hobson's new institution.

09/05/2026

The Lucas Museum Doesn’t Have a Narrative | ARTnews https://buff.ly/VSYMN27

by Maximilíano Durón

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles has decided it’s not worth writing a single one.
.. [W]hat is immediately apparent is the lack of didactics anywhere in the museum. The argument here, as confirmed by the museum, is that looking should be privileged. At an art museum, looking should indeed be prioritized, but a museum also serves another important function that the Lucas attempts to sidestep: the production of knowledge and the education of the public. A museum’s primary role, like that of the discipline of art history, is to contextualize the art on view.
.. The lack of didactics speaks to a larger issue with the Lucas. As a new museum, it has always faced a monumental task: convincing both the public and the art world of its mission and purpose. By declaring itself the “Museum of Narrative Art,” its opening hang needed to make a compelling case for “narrative art,” a term it has essentially revived and one that is not widely used in art historical scholarship anymore. Simply put, it is art that tells a story, though that story can often be hard to interpret if a viewer doesn’t know the important visual cues of the work’s respective zeitgeist; that’s where art history and museums come in.

READ MORE

The long-awaited, $1 billion Lucas Museum of Narrative Art doesn’t live up to nearly two decades of hype.

09/05/2026

Beeple Artwork at Wisconsin Museum Generates Controversy over Use of AI: ‘Devoid of Any Critical Engagement’ | ARTnews https://buff.ly/FoDR7Ln

by Alex Greenberger

A Beeple artwork set to appear at Wisconsin’s Madison Museum of Contemporary Art next month has rankled locals who object to the way that the piece uses AI to analyze artworks in the institution’s collection.

An open letter about the piece, titled 'Diffuse Control' (2025), calls into question the ethics of allowing Beeple to utilize images of artworks from the museum’s holdings. (A release did not specify whether these works were used with the permission of the artists or their representatives, but the museum later clarified that the pieces “are either in the public domain or used with permission from the appropriate copyright holder.”) Visitors to the museum will be able to create images displayed on the work’s screens and print them, the museum has said.

READ MORE

A Beeple artwork at Wisconsin's Madison Museum of Contemporary Art has gained controversy over how it uses AI to scrape images of artworks.

Cultural Attraction Financial Stability in a New World | Museum 411 https://buff.ly/QUXa40Jby John AbrahamsonCultural at...
09/05/2026

Cultural Attraction Financial Stability in a New World | Museum 411 https://buff.ly/QUXa40J

by John Abrahamson

Cultural attractions have experienced monumental shifts over the last five to six years.

From 2015 through the beginning of 2020, the business models for museums, zoos, and aquariums remained fairly predictable, and the levers influencing their primary funding sources were tried and true.

Then COVID hit our sector like a traffic accident, closing the doors of our institutions for months or, in the case of the organization I was serving at the time, for more than a year. When earned revenue is almost entirely tied to attendance, that meant we became almost completely reliant on our donors.

From 2025 through today, the world in which we operate has changed again.

READ MORE

Museum 411 is pleased to share this perspective from John Abrahamson, originally published on Medium. John served as vice president of revenue for the Monterey Bay Aquarium and vice president of strategy and revenue for the National Geographic Society as part of their build team for their new Museu...

09/04/2026

The Media Reacts to John Galliano’s Canceled Exhibition at the Met Museum | ARTnews https://buff.ly/W7WlrCA

by Hikmat Mohammed

The canceled John Galliano exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has opened the media floodgates, with many commentators adding their two cents.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, fashion critic Robin Givhan commented that the “exhibition should not have been canceled. Instead, the Met Gala should have been canceled.” She argued that the work of museums is to face these difficult subjects and that the Galliano exhibition “could help us make sense of other contradictions in character, of how hate hides in shadows.”

READ MORE

The Galliano exhibition faced controversy, as many fixated on his antisemitic and anti-Asian comments and 2011 hate crime conviction in France.

Address

610 W 112th Street
New York, NY
10025

Telephone

+12128754704

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Bank Street Leadership in Museum Education posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The University

Send a message to Bank Street Leadership in Museum Education:

Shortcuts

Share