Hello Exhibition Working Group,
Thank you all for all of your hard work thus far with the Group. Your collective expertise has been valuable for the further advancement of our field.
I did have a brief conversation with Dr. Coleman-Robinson regarding your current status. As I stated, you all continue to do superb work and exceed our expectations.
Last year was our foundation phase, our current year is collecting data, next year is presenting the findings and the final year will be the exhibition and/or final findings to be presented to Mellon.
AAAM has several surveys occurring including the Mellon Funded Working Group and also a salary survey. We are approaching our members quite a bit and in the interest of not overwhelming members, we recommend that you all focus on continuing to collect data at this point and move to the interview phase after conference.
Understanding where we are, in the meantime, it may be advantageous for us to have a virtual lunch and learn in March and April. The lunch and learn will serve as an opportunity for targeted museum professionals that work with exhibitions, attend, learn about what you all doing, ask questions, and complete the survey. Additionally, it will give you all of May and June to work on your strategy for presenting at the three Working Group Panel presentations.
This will give you all (including the other groups) a specified time to meet with individuals and potentially gauge their interest in being interviewed in your next steps. We may even be able to interview individuals at the conference, but it may be good to wait until after the conference.
As a side note, we will have another report due in October and the survey findings will be a great report to submit to Mellon.
I hope this gives you clarity as to where we are.
As always don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
Regards,
Jada