Relationship Between Museum Educators and Museum Curators

The commonplace that museums are venues that either reflect or foster cross-discipline look for and expression helps explain why the professional literature in the social sciences, rhetoric, aesthetics, marketing, history, sociology, anthropology, and art, along with that of museum administration per se, treats in some manner--though not usually comprehensively--of the division of labor at museums and also the nature with the relationship in between museum educators and museum curators.

Beginning in the 1980s and continuing in the 1990s, the role of education became increasingly prominent at major American museums, not eclipsing the curator's role but often being the most visible and public feature of museum exhibition and administration. The educational mission of museums has enlarged in a track parallel towards the development of computer technology. All of the major and quite a few from the minor museums from the United States and also the United Kingdom have Internet sites that supply varying degrees of viewer entry and supporting research to so-called "virtual collections" that may not be on exhibit from the museum venue; the need for reliable scholarship from educators inside a variety of disciplines touching on a museum's art and artifacts may be inferred. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has undertaken a digitization project for museum materials along with development of guidelines for academic use of these kinds of media at colleges (Giral & Dixon, 1996). The Getty can also be involved in deve


Hein, G. (1998). Learning inside the museum (museum meanings). New York: Routledge.

Eisner, E. W., & Dobbs, S. M. (1986). Museum education in twenty American art museums. Museum News, 65, 42-49.

In a lot the exact same vein, Forster-Hahn (1995) describes the increased crucial attention on the social and political implications of collecting and presentation of art and artifacts in methods that shape knowledge and perception, and a decline from the emphasis on analyzing the art per se as an object of knowledge. Using examples within the history of national museums and expositions, Forster-Hahn characterizes curators/museum directors as agents of meaning and mission up to custodians of artifacts and aesthetics, with social and political agency the more compelling subject for modern (postmodern) critics than the artifacts themselves. Social, financial, and political concerns external towards the museum venue may impinge on the educational experience, regardless of whether exhibitions adapt to or deliberately challenge these kinds of concerns.

Lewis, R., Nason, J. D., Wright, R. K., Combs, D. J., Muscat, Ann M. (1994, May-June). New curator. Museum News, 73, 40-43; 57-64.

Williams, B. L. (1997, Fall). Recent changes in museum education with regard to museum-school partnerships and discipline-based art education. Visual Arts Research, 23, 83-88.

Alexander, V. D. (1996, January). Pictures at an exhibition: Conflicting pressures in museums and the display of art. The American Journal of Sociology, 101, 797-811.

Malaro, M.C. (1994). Museum governance: Mission, ethics, policy. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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