ART MUSEUM IDEA TOOL KIT ©
OVERVIEW

Inspired by Benjamin Ives Gilman’s book, Museum Ideals: Purpose and Method, published during another year of world-wide pandemic, 1918, I created an online resource to aggregate best practices for art museums to meet IDEA (inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility) goals in collaboration with their communities.  During the 2022 Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellowship, I learned about Harvard’s online resource PIDA Tool Kit, as well as The Racial Equity Tool Kit developed by Virginia Gleason, a member of our 2022 Cohort of the Advanced Leadership Initiative for police training.  With the benefit of these models, as well as the CAPE Tool Kit developed by Monique Davis at the Mississippi Art Museum and highlighted among best practices under Programs, I developed the open-source, online Art Museum IDEA Tool Kit ©. 

The Art Museum IDEA Tool Kit responds to key recommendations from those who attend cultural institutions and those who do not offered into two waves of research conducted by CULTURTRAK in 2020 and 2021, from over 80,000 respondents world-wide in each tranche. 

The recommendations, from the full report you can find here, https://culturetrack.com/ are as follows:   

1) Promoting community well-being  

2) Embracing the possibilities of hybrid experiences  

3) Identifying what matters most to your community to co-create new possibilities; and

4) Take a holistic approach to diversity, equity and inclusion. 

We welcome input from art museums professionals and institutions seeking to share their best practices through the Art Museum IDEA Tool Kit. 

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To launch The Art Museum IDEA Tool Kit, I am grateful for the assistance of Christine Anagnos, Executive Director of The Association of American Museum Directors.  Chris advised me to reach out to leaders of art museums representing a range of geographic areas with annual operating budgets of under five million dollars. In addition to those who responded to my outreach and have graciously shared their time and expertise, I included additional pilot projects I was involved with as a project manager or as a director.  Once the Art Museum IDEA TOOL KIT c is launched, I look forward to including additional institutions and individuals willing to share their own best practices through ART @ HEART TM.

The Art Museum IDEA TOOL KIT c  offers best practices in three broad areas, initially covered by Gilman and expanded to meet the needs of art museums today.   

1. PHYSICAL SPACES: This section includes the physical buildings and galleries of art museums, including how real estate is allocated within the institution.  This section also includes how art museums present themselves to their communities by considering their outward-facing appearance, such as monuments, entrances, and other physical features visible from the outside. 

2. PROGRAMS: This section includes a range of offerings to visitors of all ages, whether they are on-site, off-site through outreach efforts, or online.

3. GOVERNANCE: This section includes best practices for art museums, linking to other resources as they become available.