Claire Bown: Hello and welcome to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown.
I'm here to share techniques and tools to help you engage with your audience
and bring art objects and ideas to life.
So let's dive into this week's show.
Hello and welcome back to The Art Engager Podcast.
I'm Claire Bown, and today is the podcast's fifth birthday.
It's also the last episode for now, at least.
In case you miss my announcement yesterday, I've decided to take a
bit of a break, a sabbatical, if you will, and I just want to take
a moment to talk about that, before we get into today's conversation.
So after five years and 166 episodes with listeners in 91, yes, 91 countries.
I'm genuinely so proud of what this podcast has become.
It has brought so many interesting people, great conversations, and really
unexpected opportunities into my life.
And honestly, I wasn't expecting any of that when I sat down to record those first
solo episodes under a blanket in 2021.
I am a little sad too.
This podcast has been such a big part of my working life for five years,
something I've built week by week, episode by episode, largely on my own.
It began as almost entirely solo episodes, just me a microphone, and
a lot to say, and over time it's grown into the mix of solo and guest
conversations it's been ever since.
And I've learned so much from all of my guests.
It's been a real privilege to get to talk to so many people doing such
interesting and important work in museums and cultural spaces all over the world.
And I really think that having those conversations has also shaped
my own thinking in so many ways.
But I also feel ready, ready to make a bit of space for perhaps new books, new ideas,
new things I haven't yet figured out.
And I want to leave on a high note while the podcast is still at its best, where
there's still energy and curiosity in it.
Whether it comes back in what form and when.
I honestly don't know yet, but I'm not closing the door.
I will have more to say at the end of the episode, including a proper thank you to
everyone who has made this what it is.
Now for this final episode, I wanted a guest who felt right for this moment,
not just for the birthday and the sabbatical, but for the moment the whole
sector is currently living through.
Someone who has spent the better part of two decades asking the questions
most of us find too uncomfortable or too speculative to sit with: what does
the future hold for museums and what do we need to do now to be ready for it?
My guest today is Elizabeth Merritt, vice President for Strategic
Foresight at the American Alliance of Museums and founding director of
the Center for the Future of Museums.
Since 2008 through financial crisis, pandemic, acceleration of AI and
everything in between, Elizabeth and the Center have been scanning the
horizon for the museum sector, helping organizations to think further ahead
than their next strategic plan, and challenging them to question assumptions
they didn't even know they were making.
So in this conversation, we look back at how the operating environment for museums
has changed since the center began.
We explore some of the assumptions that are being tested right now around
leadership, philanthropy, and the stability of the non-profit sector.
And we look ahead to what museums need to build and why ultimately, museums matter.
It's a really wide ranging conversation and I think a fitting one to close
five years of The Art Engager on.
I hope you enjoy it and I'll be back at the end to wrap up,
hello Elizabeth.
Welcome to The Art Engager podcast.
Elizabeth Merritt: Thank you, Claire.
I'm so happy to be here with you today.
Claire Bown: So our first question, as always, is who are you and what do you do?
Elizabeth Merritt: I'm Elizabeth Merritt.
I'm the Vice President of Strategic Foresight and founding Director of the
Center for the Future of Museums at the American Alliance of Museums in the USA.
Claire Bown: So, we are lucky enough to have met once before on
this podcast for the Special NEMO Conference, episode that we did.
But I invited you back here because I wanted to hear more
about the amazing work that you do.
So, can you tell us a little bit about what the Center
for the Future of Museums is?
Elizabeth Merritt: Absolutely.
The Center for the Future of Museums actually was founded in 2008, which,
if you think back, is a period that was shaped by two huge forces.
Economically, it was the financial collapse sparked by the mortgage loan
crisis, and technologically it was the rapid acceleration of social media.
Yeah, I'd like to say that actually made it easier to launch CFM
because in times of uncertainty people are more open to new ideas.
So in that environment, um, we came out and I said, center for the
Future of Museums is gonna be a think tank and research and development
lab for fostering creativity and helping museums transcend traditional
boundaries to serve society in new ways.
I've been doing, do the math.
I've been doing this for 17 years now, and in that time I've had A
great run of acting as a kind of agent provocateur, challenging museums
to question their assumptions about traditional practices and experimenting
with new ways of doing business.
I felt this was necessary because humans tend to spend a lot of time
focusing on what has been proven to work in the past, because that
seems like a good way to reduce risk.
And that's perfectly valid in a sort of stable time where you
can use what's worked in the past to be successful in the future.
But as the years since our launch have proven this is not a stable
time, so I help museums assess what traditional practices might not
be working so well any longer and experiment with what could work better.
So I like to encourage our sector to explore the edges of what's
possible given time and circumstances.
Claire Bown: And, I'm gonna throw this question out there to you, but I was
thinking as you were describing yourself there as an agent provocateur, which is
a lovely description, what does a typical day look like for you in that role?
Elizabeth Merritt: Well, let me frame what the work falls into.
'cause then the specifics of the day make more sense.
So my assignments are, first of all, to help museums think on a longer timeframe,
which you'd think would be easy since most museums will tell you that they're
there to preserve whatever they're taking care of for all of posterity.
But in fact, we tend to focus on the next two or three years of our strategic plan.
I teach the basics of foresight, which is an established discipline.
But because most museums are never gonna have a dedicated futurist on
staff, uh, my day involves doing a lot of the groundwork for the field.
So I'm scanning the news and saying, what's happening out there that
could have interesting implications?
What's a little signal of how the future could be different than it is today?
Uh, so flagging potential disruptions, for example, the emerging measles
epidemic in the us, and most importantly, helping museums explore
what I call the cone of plausibility.
Some futures call it the cone of probability or the cone of possibility.
So this is a map.
Imagine a cone extending out from a point that is the present, and
basically it's a map of potential futures and it's establishing the
basic truth of foresight, which is we don't know what the future will be.
It's not a matter of magically figuring out what's gonna
happen and telling people.
It's realizing that it could be any number of things.
We have to imagine different potential futures in order to,
first of all, figure out how to be successful no matter what happens.
Because the future may very well not be what we assume it's gonna be.
Most importantly to realize, if we imagine a preferred future every day
as we make choices about how we spend our resources, whether that's time or
money or connections, we can be making choices that help that preferred future
be the one that actually happens.
Claire Bown: And when we look back to the start of CFM, back to 2008 and
compare it to now, I mean it feels like a lifetime ago, but what feels fundamentally
different over that span of time?
Perhaps what assumptions about museums have changed?
What feels different about the operating environment?
You know, how would you compare the two?
Elizabeth Merritt: First of all, let's remember how many massive disruptions
have happened in that 17 years.
So, I mentioned already the financial collapse and the rise of social media.
Those were two that helped launch the center, but since then,
we've had the COVID-19 pandemic.
That was a global disruption .Here in the US and possibly globally we've seen an
increase in the partisan divide that has people more and more angry and unable to
talk across their political differences.
And now we're actually living in what some would call a previously
unimaginable future, in which here in the US non-profits generally and
museums are under pressure to censor their activities and their content.
So I think that when you look at what's fundamentally different,
it's that we can't assume that anything is unimaginable.
There's no assumption that we can depend on.
We're fundamentally having to say, what happened 10 years ago isn't some magical
normal that we're going to rebound to, and we're just looking to dog paddle
until we get back to that stable state.
It's remaining open to the fact that any area of practice, whether it's
cultural practices, technology, the environment, the economy, politics are
being transformed, and we're having to reimagine our institutions and
the needs of our communities in the face of change that's gonna create
some new normal, that at this rate of change, may not last very long either.
Claire Bown: If we go back to 2018, one thing that, I went back to read was
a Trendswatch scenario that actually explored a future in which the status
of nonprofits were actually threatened by this global pandemic, back in 2018
you talked about financial insecurity.
You talked about a possible probable nationalist presidential administration.
That felt really quite improbable, very speculative at the time, and yet...
Elizabeth Merritt: thank you for that.
Yes.
That was a scenario called Wild Times that was included in a scenario set
we published as our 2018 edition of Trendswatch, our annual Foresight
report, and that's still available as a free download on the web.
And the purpose of that set of scenarios, including Wild Times, which was considered
at the time, 'oh, that's the fringy, improbable future we might wanna keep
an eye on', is to bring home this fact that we don't know what will happen and
that even if you can say the mainstream consensuses were going straightforward,
it's entirely possible we'll get knocked off course and something as crazy as,
yeah, a global pandemic, financial insecurity, and a nationalist President
can reshape our operating environment.
And I think it brings home what a guest of yours from a past episode
Maggie Jackson pointed out when talking about dealing with uncertainty, is
in hindsight, if you look at some of the previously 'inconceivable'
events, uh, to quote Princess Bride, like the 911 terrorist attacks, um,
or the COVID-19 pandemic or Hurricane Katrina, devastating New Orleans.
If you go back in time, there were credible experts, not fringe theorists,
saying this is possible, even probable, it may be the kind of uncertain event
where you know it's going to happen eventually, but you don't know when.
But we can game out what that would look like and we can say, 'great,
how could we take that skill of hindsight and turn it forward'.
So instead of saying, well, if you look back, you can see there were
people saying this could happen.
Say who's right now doing credible, thoughtful analysis of what could happen
and take that into account in our planning so that we're not surprised if it does
turn out to be the future we live in.
Claire Bown: Yeah, absolutely.
And if we bring it up to date and, um, even if we look back to 2025,
I think there's reason to be fairly unoptimistic, even a little bit gloomy
about some of the numbers you shared in the trends watch report, and I
have some of the numbers here as well.
69% of US museums negatively impacted by executive action.
63% anticipating disruption from philanthropy shifts.
59% of art museum directors struggling to build a qualified candidate pool.
And when you look at all of these figures together, how should we read this moment?
Is this a cycle we're going through or is there something more structural happening?
Elizabeth Merritt: I think it's structural.
As I mentioned, I think it's shifting from an old normal to a new normal.
One of the fundamental frameworks for foresight is
called the Three Horizons Model.
And it says, you know, the first horizon is the one we're living in now.
That's characterized by a certain paradigm of what works.
And, over time, that dominant paradigm stops working so well and you struggle
to make it work, and you make tweaks around the edges and you try and
patch it, but fundamentally the boat is leaking and it's gonna sink.
And you realize that at some point.
And I think we're at that point in many ways.
Eventually you're gonna reach the third horizon, which is having arrived at a new
set of successful paradigms that do work.
Unfortunately, in the middle is the second horizon, which is
this messy experimental time.
When you have to do things that fail and go back and rethink it,
it's, it's very uncomfortable.
It's a high degree of uncertainty, but that going through that second
horizon is the only way you're gonna arrive at the new paradigms.
One of the strengths of foresight, is it teaches the sneaky technique of skipping
over the Messy Middle and going straight to that third horizon and saying, ' forget
about the hard part for now, let's dream a bit and imagine what would work, what
would be a preferable future that we think would be stable for these reasons'.
And then, effectively, you do what Dr. Jane McGonigal from the Institute
of the Future calls, remembering the future, you put yourself in that
future, that third horizon you've created that you think is going to
be happy and thriving and successful, and you remember how you got there.
It's kind of like cheating when you go through a maze.
If you enter a maze, you know, you turn right and you hit a dead end, you go
back and you turn left, and then you turn right and you hit another dead end.
It's very confusing, right?
'cause somewhere, you know, there's an exit, but you can't see it.
Skipping straight to the third horizon and trying to remember how you got there is
like being on a hot air balloon floating above the maize and looking down and you
see the end point and you're, 'oh, okay.
I can trace backwards to where I am now', and it's much easier
to see what the path forward is.
Claire Bown: And if we look at this year's Trendswatch report, there are three
kind of strands or perhaps assumptions, these long held ideas that people feel
less secure about than they once did.
So you talk about leadership pipelines, philanthropy, and even the kind of
stability of the nonprofit sector itself.
When you put these three together, what picture are they painting
about the environment that museums might be moving into?
Elizabeth Merritt: So the theme of this year's Trendswatch
was Questioning Assumptions.
Because assumptions are what tend to lead you in the wrong direction for
a long time before you realize you were going in the wrong direction.
So for leadership, for example, the assumption would be everybody
wants to be a museum director or a manager and move up the ranks.
And anytime you advertise a job, there's gonna be lots of qualified
candidates that make it relatively easy to fill the position with somebody
well qualified, who's going to succeed.
That is wrong in so many ways right now.
Uh, I quote a longtime museum director from the US, Laura
Raicovich, who said, I'm paraphrasing.
Nobody wants to be a museum director right now because it's a lousy job.
It's very high stress.
It's all of the expectations of the public and the board of trustees and the staff
who now have the power via social media to be, you know, harassing their directors
from below, holding them accountable.
And part of it's generational.
There's a lot of data saying that millennials and Gen Z don't have
the same views about their life, that it's automatically, you
want to rise through the ranks.
A lot of people are more concerned about work life balance.
They see management as being a lot of stress that isn't
compensated with adequate money.
So I think museums have to spend more conscious time saying, how are we
going to make ourselves supportive, desirable, healthy workplaces that
people want to not only work for, but stay in and take on more responsibility.
And that means, that's a fundamental mind shift from we have a job
we're gonna advertise it to.
We need to be a training ground.
So museums have to think about providing broad training in a
variety of skills for all staff.
So it may not be, you know, we're gonna advertise this development position.
It might be, let's make sure that all staff who might want to become a
development person in the future, have access to mentoring or in internal
internships or training, that help them explore that as a career path.
Uh, so there's cross training and there's mentorship.
There are examples of museums actually doing this.
This isn't just me thinking it up out of my head.
The Bullock Texas State History Museum has created apprenticeship positions
for people with good but non-museum specific experience and training.
The Taft Museum in Cincinnati sees itself as a training ground.
They call themselves a triple A league training ground for the major
leagues, that can launch staff into careers and museums across the country.
I also think that creates a healthy focus on creating an environment
people want to work in because our field has long been sadly underpaid.
There certainly may be constraints about what we could offer in terms
of pay compared to big for-profit businesses, but that doesn't mean we
have to settle for sub minimum wage.
And there are also things that we have the um, ability to do to
create much better work environments that we could take advantage of.
So that's leadership.
Claire Bown: Yeah.
Elizabeth Merritt: Philanthropy.
We can't just assume that the people who used to give to traditional institutions
as they die, their heirs are going to immediately behave the same way.
They're gonna say, I want to support the symphony or the opera, or the big
local art museum because, they're the cornerstones of our community and.
The way I show my prestige in the community is to
give to those institutions.
Uh, younger people are much more, first of all, they're not in
financially a secure shape often.
At least in the US , if you go down below the top 10%, a lot of people are
struggling to make rent and buy groceries and are struggling with student debt.
So it's a big decision to give to nonprofits and a lot of younger
people are saying, 'I care about causes', like saving the environment
or improving this in my neighborhood, not, 'I love that institution, so
I'm gonna give to that institution'.
So I really think museums have to think fundamentally differently
about philanthropy and consciously how to cultivate support.
I read a really great piece of research this week.
It's from the uk and it shows that people who hadn't visited the Natural
History Museum in London for the past three years, okay, so they
hadn't visited, they know about the museum, but they haven't been there.
They're still willing to pay an average of almost 12 pounds, which is
about $16 US, to support the museum.
Even though they're not going, to ensure that the museum is preserved
for current and future generations.
So the researchers called this a measure of 'non-use value'.
One thing I pointed out in Trendswatch is the tendency of nonprofits to
structure, to incentivize fundraising in ways that I think can be problematic.
So how do you make your goal for raising a lot of money?
Go to a few big donors and get large gifts.
But relying on a few large donors can amplify the risks of losing any one of
them, for example, if their interests or financial situation changes.
There have been unfortunate examples of museums relying on promised
gifts that didn't come to be because of financial challenges.
It can also make a museum unwilling to say or do things they fear
would alienate a major donor.
So it's giving one person who, who happens to be wealthy, a
disproportionate amount of influence.
So it may be both more stable and more democratic with a small D to
cultivate a broad base of donors who give smaller amounts, but passionately
believe in a museum's mission or the role it plays in the community.
That could be a lot of work to cultivate, but in the long term, it might be more
stable and it might create a healthier alignment between funding and mission.
So how do we incentivize that kind of fundraising so that it's worth the work?
Oh, and you brought up the last challenge being nonprofit stability.
Well, I think it starts by taking a step back and recognizing that a lot of
visitors don't know what a nonprofit is, don't know the role that the nonprofit
sector plays in society and may not know that a particular museum is a nonprofit.
Right?
So how can you expect people to really support and defend a
structure that they don't understand?
A federal official in the US here in the US recently commented something
to the effect that we cannot have arts institutions that lose money.
So sit with that for a moment, right?
For many years we've said like nonprofit is a tax status, not a business model.
So no, we're not here to lose money, but we need to educate our representatives
and career staffers and local, state and federal government and the public
that nonprofits don't quote unquote, 'lose money' because they can't cover
their costs with earned revenue.
Uh, as the wonderful commenter Emil Kang wrote in a recent post on his
substack which is called The Reprise, highly Recommend, he said, quote, 'tax
exemption isn't a loophole or a subsidy for inefficiency, it's a social contract.'
Building on that.
I'd say we need to raise awareness that nonprofit status and the attached
tax exemption is that social contract.
It's a way for all of us collectively to support activities that make our
nation and our communities better and ensure that arts and culture and
science, first of all,, exist at all.
And secondly, benefit people generally and not just the economic elite.
Claire Bown: So when you step back from all of this, we're talking
about the leadership pressures, the changes in funding, questions
about stability for nonprofits.
What pattern do you see emerging now for museums?
What trends concern you the most and where are you seeing
perhaps some encouraging signs?
Elizabeth Merritt: It may surprise some listeners to learn.
My training is, uh, not in museum studies or arts management.
My training is in evolutionary biology, and I think one of the most promising
things for museums is that the sector as a whole continues to speciate.
If I can use a term of art, we keep spinning off more variations.
Museums that are entirely digital or moved from place to place or created
to address particular critical social or environmental issues.
At the same time, we have our long-term survivors, the museum equivalents
of coelacanths or horseshoe crabs that look practically unchanged from
one or 200 years ago, in a good way.
For example, AM's annual meeting in May is gonna be in Philadelphia.
Today in Philadelphia, you could visit the Wagner Free Institute of Science.
It was founded in 1855, and in many ways, it's unchanged from its 19th century form.
Can go in and see the old exhibit cases and the historic displays of specimens
that collected by the founder and go to fabulous public programming where people
walk in with their own specimens they've picked up and want to have identified
or sit down and sketch the birds.
I wish it was down the block from me so I could visit often.
But at the same time, you could go online and visit the Kramer Museum,
which is a born digital virtual reality museum that launched in
2017 and exists only on the web.
So I think that the bright spot is, as long as we continue to experiment and
show this vast range of variation, we're gonna thrive as a sector in the long term.
Claire Bown: And when we look at all of these assumptions together, and I'm
sure lots of listeners will be nodding along to lots of the things that, that
you are saying, listening to this.
so for people listening, working in different museum systems, in
different parts of the world, what should they take from this?
Elizabeth Merritt: I think the common message, regardless of how
museums in a given country are structured or funded, is the need to
measure and communicate the value of museums as community infrastructure.
Too often when we think about a success, it's numbers, right, which actually,
can be challenging to gather, but theoretically you can measure the number
of people who are attending and how much you brought in from the latest traveling
exhibit, uh, the number of members.
But if you look at the social impact of museums, if you think about the hard but
very rewarding work of showing that we are not just custodians and educators
about history or science or art, but that museums are really fundamental anchor
institutions that promote health and wellbeing, that create livable communities
for the elderly and their caregivers, that foster resilience in the face of climate
disruptions or in the face of cultural and political upheaval, I think then we're
cultivating a common shared understanding of the need to support museums, not just
because, oh, I like going to museums and some people don't, but because
they're essential to the stability and health and future of our countries.
Claire Bown: Yeah.
And if we take that as the environment that museums are moving into, what
do they need to strengthen now, what capacity should museums be thinking about
building that they don't yet fully have?
Bearing in mind that museums as organizations and institutions,
they move quite slowly.
So
Elizabeth Merritt: I wanna tell you a little joke about that.
Uh.
So there, there used to be decades ago, a joke that it was relatively easy to
be a consultant for the museum sector because all you had to do to sound new
and trendy was pick up something that the business community had been doing
for 20 years and say, 'you could do this', and museums would go, awesome.
We could write a strategic plan.
What a concept.
Yes.
But yeah, that doesn't work anymore.
I think if you're looking at the operating environment, we're moving
into two things are top of mind for me that are opportunities for improvement.
One is I think the sector needs to continue an ongoing pivot from teaching
facts to teaching how to think.
So from presenting audiences with a certainty like 'we know this and you
should know it', to actually fostering doubt and curiosity and critical thinking.
One of the basic skills of foresight is recognizing what we can't and don't know
about the future, uh, it's encouraging people to exercise their imagination
to explore many possible futures.
I think the parallel is that museums could take that cone of plausibility
that looks towards the future and pivot it to the other direction, and help
audiences understand how much we don't know about the past, and how, subject to
interpretation and point of view it is.
How we've been wrong about what we thought were established facts, even how different
people in communities may have effectively inhabited different pasts because of
their experience and because of their perspectives and their value systems.
So I think that that's a really important pivot, that we have begun making, but
there's room for continued improvement.
And I think secondly, to go back to the point about leadership that I
made earlier, I think museums should figure out how to make the most of the
freedom that we have as nonprofits to try new organizational structures and
create healthier work environments.
One of my favorite words, this is so geeky, is skew morphism.
Which is a design principle by which the design of a current artifact, whether it's
digital or physical, or a system inherits, the structure of an older system.
So if, you know, if you, I'm looking at my computer and the
save icon is a little floppy disk.
Gen alpha's not even gonna know what that was a, a picture of.
I was just listening to a great podcast about skew morphic systems of healthcare.
In the US, dental insurance is completely separate from health insurance, which
is wacky, it makes no sense because , historically dentists were like not
considered medical professionals.
They were the local barber or the local blacksmith who would pull your tooth.
And because of that historical artifact, we have a dysfunctional
system of healthcare for, for dentistry.
Well, museums have kind of inherited the skew morphic design of for-profit business
hierarchies, and you can argue about whether it's even working for for-profit
businesses, but it's certainly true, that there's no reason as a nonprofit,
that we have to have the same kind of hierarchies or business practices.
At the same time that we're not even able to match for profit salaries.
I think that as a whole, our sector could do a better job of turning our
ability to think about values, not just outwards, how we fulfill our mission, but
inwards, to how we are creating healthy and supportive working environments.
Sometimes that's gonna mean bucking the traditional nonprofit
culture of virtuous poverty.
Museums may find that when they do that, it's actually better business.
Uh, here in the US when the historic site and garden Filoli committed to paying
a living wage, which given where their site is, a pretty high wage, their costs
actually went down because they had better staff retention and they didn't
have all of the loss of institutional knowledge and discontinuities and work.
So it was better for the museum's bottom line, and it was better for the staff.
Sometimes it might mean creating an organizational chart that puts
the, audience at the center, like the daisy diagram that the Oakland
Museum of California did, rather than putting the CEO top on top and
then mapping the stratographic layers of power that go down from there.
So we have a lot of room to experiment.
I think we should do so..
Claire Bown: So when we are looking ahead, to the next decade.
Again as we talked about at the beginning it's very, very difficult to predict
the future, but it's always useful to have that foresight, what kind of
choices will matter the most for museums?
Elizabeth Merritt: Okay.
I think that the choices museums have, are choices that are both going to protect
the influence they have and increase the effect they have on the world.
So bear with me.
I'm a data geek and there are many sources of data, decades long showing
that museum's greatest superpower is the power of public trust.
We have decades of data from the US showing that not only are museums
along with libraries, the most trusted institutional sources of information, they
only come in second to friends and family.
That trust is actually going up.
I have 2026 data showing me that trust is going up, even as other levels of
trust in the government are going down.
But I think we have to be aware, we're surrounded by many forces that
could erode that trust in the face of proliferation, of artificial intelligence,
ai, fakes, and misinformation.
How do we make sure that museum content and the museum voice
continues to be authentic and trusted.
In the face of political pressure to censor our content or conform
to particular points of view, how do we show that we're gonna
remain true to our mission and values and to brave truth telling.
Museums matter because they're basically humanity's collective memory.
They're places where we reposit the knowledge and the feelings and
the memories of our communities.
And they're are places that bring people together to experience
and make meaning of that memory.
I believe that this trust in this role gives museums the power to
change the world for the better.
That's my inspiration for doing this work.
So I think going forward we're faced with a lot of threats to maintaining our
trust and staying true to our missions.
But a lot of opportunities because there are a lot of things in the world that
need fixing, and I really do believe we can contribute to those solutions.
Claire Bown: I think that's a wonderful note to end on.
I would love for you just to add how listeners can find out more
about you and your work at the Center for the Future of Museums.
Elizabeth Merritt: Certainly the Center for the Future of Museums is an initiative
of the American Alliance of Museums, and you can find us on the web at aam-us.org.
We are an independent nonprofit, not a government agency.
Claire Bown: So a huge thank you to Elizabeth Merritt for being a guest on the
show and what a conversation to end on.
I hope it's given you lots to think about.
I promised you a proper thank you at the end.
So here it is.
Thank you to everyone who has listened to this podcast.
Whether you've been here since episode one, or you found it last week,
thank you for making it what it is.
I genuinely could not have done this without you or your support.
Podcasts only exists because people listen.
And knowing that there were people in 91 countries tuning in, thinking about these
ideas, taking them back into their work in museums and cultural spaces around
the world, that has meant so much to me.
And if you're new to the podcast or if you've never had a chance
to dig into the archives.
Please do so.
There are 166 episodes in the back catalog covering an enormous range of
subjects from slow looking and questioning to facilitation, wellbeing, social
connection, leadership, and so much more.
It's all there and it's not going anywhere.
I am also not disappearing.
In June, I'll be running a new live online course designing and facilitating
slow looking, and you can find out more about that through my newsletter.
Curated, my Substack Adventures in slow Looking, and my
website thinkingmuseum.com.
And if you'd like to go deeper into the ideas behind the podcast, my book,
The Art Engager Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums is out now.
All the links are in the show notes, and as for the podcast we'll see.
I'm leaving the door open, but for now, thank you.
Take care of yourselves and keep looking slowly.
Thank you for listening to The Art Engager podcast With me, Claire Bown.
You can find more art engagement resources by visiting my website,
thinking museum.com, and you can also find me on Instagram at Thinking
Museum, where I regularly share tips and tools on how to bring art
to life and engage your audience.
If you've enjoyed this episode, please share with others and subscribe to the
show on your podcast player of choice.
Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.