It Takes A State: Making of the Museum of Utah

ID: WMA2026_554

Track:

Reflecting the conference’s “Aspire to Connect” theme, this session will focus on one element fundamental to building a museum: building community relationships and connections. Focusing on the newly-opened Museum of Utah, the session will explore how the museum director and other key collaborators (exhibit and media designers) engaged community members including indigenous tribes and the network of smaller museums across Utah. It is these connections that have allowed this huge project to succeed.

Session Information

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

Uniqueness: The session covers one of Utah’s newest and largest museum projects through the lens of community building and connection.

Objectives:

1. Express the importance of tribal stories to Utah’s history and the museum’s creation. Jill Singer from RLMG filmed eight tribes across the state, and Museum Director Tim Glenn was heavily involved in forging these relationships and connections, including with Utah Division of Indian Affairs’ James Toledo. All three of these individuals can speak to this collaboration. Seeing Tim and James in conversation will inspire the audience to have similar conversations in planning their new work.
2. Demonstrate how museums can uplift each other’s stories. A formative concept in the  “We are Utah” set of exhibits was the idea of hubs and spokes. That is, the “hub” of the big state museum (in this case the Museum of Utah) includes and amplifies ideas from other smaller museums across Utah. The Museum did not want to steal the thunder from the smaller museums, but rather encourage visitors to see all different parts of the state. Session participant Lisa Barr can speak to this process. 
3. Apply this level of collaboration and conversation to other museum work. After hearing the participants speak to various aspects of the museum’s creation, we hope that audience members can bring their own experiences into the conversation. Building a museum from the ground up with so many stakeholders hard work, and we hope that discussing the challenges, and the collaborative effort to address these challenges,  inspires audiences to apply some of these strategies in their own work.

Engagement: While the session will start as more passive learning as the chosen participants are being interviewed, the audience is intended to participate in the last section of the session where they can engage in conversation with the pre-selected participants. After seeing conversational models from Tim and Haille, the audience will be encouraged to expand the conversation and bring in their own experience building museums and creating community connections in the museum space.

Relationship to Theme:

Audience

Audiences: Curators/Scientists/Historians Marketing & Communications (Including Social Media) Other 

Professional Level: All levels 

Scalability: Listening to and learning from one’s community is the centerpiece of building any great museum or museum exhibit. As such, the kind of conversations that this session will model are vital across all sizes of organizations. Not every museum will have the same staffing resources on their projects, but engaging the community network (whether it be historical societies, other museums, the tribal organizations, or others) and encouraging such resource use is a great way to connect across museums of multiple scales.

Participants