From Island to Intermountain: Museums as Cultural Bridges

ID: WMA2026_550

Track:

A contemporary Hawaiian mural travels to Salt Lake City as a during and post-conference civic installation. This session explores how museums can build ethical cross-regional partnerships, center Indigenous voices, and extend conference impact into public space. Presenters share logistical models, reciprocity frameworks, and collaborative strategies to move from aspiration to action. Link to mural: https://onipaa.org/aina-aloha

Session Information

Format: Regular session/panel (roundtable, single speaker, etc.)

Uniqueness: Transforms a professional conference into a public cultural intervention—linking Pacific and Intermountain communities through living contemporary Indigenous art.

Objectives:

Participants will:

1. Understand the logistical and institutional considerations involved in transporting and installing large-scale public artworks across regions.
2. Gain a framework for ethical cross-cultural collaboration grounded in reciprocity, shared authority, and Indigenous leadership.
3. Leave with a replicable model for extending conference impact into visible civic space through public art interventions. The session supports museums seeking innovative approaches to community engagement, partnership building, and public-facing leadership.

Engagement: After a 20-minute framing presentation, participants rotate into the fishbowl to discuss partnership ethics, logistics, and replication models. Small-group mapping exercises allow attendees to draft potential legacy interventions in their own communities. Participants receive a digital toolkit for adaptation.

Relationship to Theme:

Audience

Audiences: Curators/Scientists/Historians Development and Membership Officers Events Planning Facilities Management Personnel Other Registrars, Collections Managers Technology 

Professional Level: All levels Mid-Career Senior Level Student 

Scalability:

This model can be adapted to institutions of varying sizes by:

• Hosting temporary installations
• Partnering with regional artists
• Leveraging existing public spaces
• Scaling programming from small workshops to major civic events

Participants