Theory and Practice
Visitor Promise and Guidelines, The Walters Art Museum
Visitor Promise
Welcome to your Walters Art Museum. Our mission is to bring art and people together for enjoyment, discovery, and learning.
We strive to:
Maintain the museum as a free, welcoming, and accessible environment for all people.
Preserve and share the works of art and buildings in our care for future generations.
Create a partnership of mutual respect, active listening, and open dialogue with our community.
Thank you for your participation and support.
Behaviors that interfere with these goals are not permitted in the museum, including but not limited to: behaviors that harass, abuse, or endanger museum visitors, staff, or volunteers, including discriminatory language or conduct; behaviors that endanger the art, buildings, or grounds; or behaviors that impede the experience of others. Museum staff will ask any individual who engages in these behaviors to leave museum property.
The Future of Learning
Elaine Heumann Gurian at MuseumNext, 2018
World Refugee Day at the Met
The Museum Scholar: New Journal
The Museum Scholar (TMS) accepts manuscripts or multi-media work that provide empirical or theoretical-based material of broad interest to the international museum community. Submissions are welcome from all emerging professionals, museum students, recent graduates, and post-docs from any country.
Texts may consider any type of museum including: Art Museums, Science Museums, History Museums, Children’s Museums, Historic Homes, Libraries, and Archives. There is no fee to publish in TMS, and each article is free to read.
Decolonizing the Art Museum: The Next Wave
“Art can illuminate the fissures in society and in return offer opportunities for healing. But should artists be the only ones to bear the brunt of this responsibility? If museums want to continue to have a place, they must stop seeing activists as antagonists. They must position themselves as learning communities, not impenetrable centers of self-validating authority.”
By Olga Viso—Ms. Viso is an independent curator and museum consultant, and a former museum director.
To Fight Racism Within Museums, They Need to Stop Acting Like They’re Neutral
“In April, the Brooklyn Museum hired a white curator, Kristen Windmuller-Luna to oversee its collection of African art. The appointment outraged skeptics who felt that a black curator should oversee the institution’s African objects. Decolonize This Place, a New York activist group, staged a protest occupying the museum’s Beaux-Arts Court and penned a letter publicly accusing the museum of racism and aiding gentrification, demanding prompt change. One protester flung a pink banner over a balcony that read: “THEY WANT THE ART, NOT THE PEOPLE.”
The sign, for me, gets at the heart of the debate around how to combat racism in cultural institutions, which are both succeeding and failing to address the issue.”