MAAM 2026 Annual Conference

Somerset County, New Jersey is home to many small, all-volunteer historic house museums struggling to find and train volunteer staff. The Somerset County Cultural & Heritage Commission, with the support of local museums, developed the Somerset County Docent Training Program - a countywide initiative to recruit, train, and match volunteer docents with open positions. Grounded in museum education best practices and emphasizing inclusive storytelling, the program provides foundational training in interpretation and visitor engagement. This presentation will explore the program’s design, implementation, and outcomes, including how one museum was able to double their open hours within 6 months of participation; as well as discuss how the program can be replicated with similar partnerships between museums and local government agencies.

Session Takeaways:
•Learn how local government agencies can bring museums together to develop collaborative projects and shared solutions.
•Explore how Somerset County, NJ, created a Docent Training Program to help small museums solve one of their most pressing and ongoing challenges – staffing.
•Examine program outcomes, including how participation helped one museum double its open hours within six months.
•Gain practical guidance on the key components needed to replicate a similar volunteer training and placement program in your community.

Museum collections are not static, despite their typically stationary nature. Each item requires active, never-ending tasks to manage condition and utility. How can museums ensure that current and future generations of visitors continue to engage with their collections when maintenance and access are challenged by geography, funding, and environmental conditions? This panel will share how Historic Hudson Valley overcame these challenges and used interdepartmental partnerships to establish physical and intellectual control over historical collections originally held in disparate locations. Audience takeaways include strategies for developing their own collections management practices and utilizing cost-effective methods to meet project and organizational needs.

Session Takeaways:
•Identify strategies to adapt existing infrastructure and cultivate staff capabilities
•Innovate ways to use lower-cost technology to create high-impact solutions
•Understand benefits and challenges of interdepartmental communication, collaboration, and prioritization
•Gain insight on the relationship between providing visitor access to and ensuring protection of historical collections

The Delaware Art Museum turned decades of deferred growth into a bold reinvention—boosting earned income by 250% while advancing accessibility and community engagement. These investments enabled DelArt to address long-standing needs while rethinking its business model, in part, by reconfiguring spaces and strengthening its community connections. This interactive panel discussion shares the practical tools and creative partnerships behind the transformation, offering attendees strategies to increase earned revenue, improve accessibility, and strengthen community engagement.

Session Takeaways:
•Examine practical tools for identifying, diversifying, and maximizing earned revenue, including rentals, retail, admissions, and programming
•Develop a “toolkit for reinvention” by identifying at least one specific strategy (e.g., creating low-effort engagement opportunities, considering new ways to activate public spaces, or reassessing core value) to pilot at their home institution.

How can virtual reality technology benefit museums? What outcomes justify the investment of significant financial and staff resources? For staff at the Intrepid Museum, virtual reality seemed like the key to unlocking unrestored, inaccessible ship spaces. The Museum prototyped a virtual reality experience centered on digital recreations of the ship’s engineering compartments, the most asked-about unrestored spaces on Intrepid. This panel brings together staff from different departments to share what they learned from the development of Explore Intrepid: Engines and Boilers.

Session Takeaways:
•Explore the opportunities and challenges of “digital restoration”
•Understand digital accessibility needs and the role of iterative feedback and updates
•Assess the value of on-site use and app store distribution

New York City is home to 8.5 million people. It is also home to over 7 million trees, covering approximately 22% of the city. Lack of tree cover contributes to summer temperatures that are 20-30 degrees hotter than spaces with canopies. At King Manor Museum in Jamaica, Queens, we see first hand how our green space provides a cooler space during heat waves than anywhere else along Jamaica Ave. We are working with the Forest For All Coalition and Melting Metropolis to not only educate, but provide courses for action with our community.

Session Takeaways:
•Gain a better understanding of the importance of hands-on action events to create an intergenerational community.
•Understand the impact of external partnerships in organizing and supporting museum-based programming.
•Gain a better understanding of the impact of urban green spaces as a call for climate action.

This session will share key findings from the HueArts & Cultures initiative, demonstrating how mapping can illuminate networks of cultural memory, and explore how museums of color anchor community stories in the land itself. Participants will gain insights into how these institutions have been reshaping the museum field by linking storytelling, place, and cultural preservation.

This initiative examines how these museums function as gathering grounds where land, community, and cultural memory intersect. Session speakers will discuss how institutions of color steward stories embedded in place while fostering cultural continuity, community voice, and social change.

Session Takeaways:
•Explore how digital mapping and national research can reveal geographic patterns, networks, and collective impact among museums of color.
•Identify community-centered practices that connect museums’ missions to place, cultural memory, and social justice.
•Apply insights from the HueArts & Cultures initiative to strengthen storytelling, placekeeping, and community engagement within their own institutions.

How can "Please Touch" replace "Hands Off"? This session explores The Active Power of Touch, a landmark exhibition at the Peale Museum curated by a blind professional using a nonvisual curatorial process. By centering tactile engagement from the outset—spanning sculpture, textiles, and kinetic art— this exhibition disrupts traditional museum norms to foster deep visitor connection. We will examine the journey from nonvisual artist selection to the practicalities of tactile installation. Attendees will learn how welcoming touch transforms visitor behavior, inspires sighted artists to create multisensory work, and creates a truly inclusive environment where blind and sighted visitors engage as equals.

Session Takeaways:
•Nonvisual Curatorial Frameworks: Strategies for selecting and organizing artwork through both tactile and visual aesthetics.
•Tactile Installation Logistics: Practical methods for securing works in clay, metal, and wood to allow for safe, high-traffic hands-on exploration.
•Fostering Universal Engagement: touch facilitates intergenerational and cross-ability dialogue among visitors, moving accessibility from "specialized" to "universal."

What does it take for a small or mid-sized museum to use mobile technology in ways that actually meet visitor needs? Lynne Calamia (Roebling Museum, NJ) shares how a small museum funded and scoped its mobile work. Ethan Miller (Night Kitchen Interactive) zooms out into a trifold case study spanning Roebling, Pearl S. Buck House, and Whitesbog Historic Farm and Village — three MAAM-region museums, three approaches to mobile. Samantha Gibson (Jackie Robinson Museum, NYC) brings the engagement lens with the "Citi Field Challenge" and a Harlem walking tour.

Session Takeaways:
•How to fund the work: Roebling’s strategy for stacking grants from New Jersey state agencies with external content partnerships, and how to scope a mobile project to the budget you actually have.
•How small museums can stretch limited staff by repurposing existing collections — oral history clips, historic photos, prior research — into mobile content that reaches new audiences. Drawing on Roebling Museum’s approach of presenting existing material in fresh ways rather than developing everything from scratch.
•A realistic view of the timelines, internal capacity, and stakeholder coordination required to launch and maintain a museum mobile experience.
•Design moves that turn a static digital guide into an interactive engagement tool, drawing on the Jackie Robinson Museum’s "Citi Field Challenge" and Harlem walking tour.

Museums are ideally situated to make a difference in the health of their communities and are especially well-equipped to support individuals living with memory loss and those who care for them. Whether you are thinking of starting a program or looking for inspiration to refresh your approach, this session will provide you with ideas and information to take back to your museum based on sixteen years of experience with Arts & Minds at the Studio Museum in Harlem. This work is adaptable to museums of all kinds.

Session Takeaways:
•Understand the thinking behind effective museum program design for people with dementia and their caregivers
•Understand the clinical basis for museum programs designed to support individuals with dementia and their caregivers.
•Evaluate potential program impact and how it may apply in their community
•Apply new knowledge to explain the value of museum programming for adults with dementia and their care partners.

Technology promises a lot (and sometimes delivers!) but can cause as many problems as it solves if collection-specific needs are not part of the conversation early and often. Three collections professionals at very different institutions will speak to the wins and losses they've had recently with the use of technology to manage their specific collections and lessons learned.

Session Takeaways:
•Recognize that institution-wide technology procurement decisions must account for the specialized requirements of collections management, preservation, and access, which may differ from the needs of other museum departments.
•Identify practical and cost-effective technology solutions that can help collections staff address capacity gaps, streamline workflows, and maximize limited resources.
•Evaluate the appropriate role of technology in collections work, understanding both its benefits and its limitations, and advocate for additional staffing or resources when human expertise and labor remain essential.

Art museums nationwide face declining attendance, aging audiences, shifting donor priorities, and competition. Yet some are growing post-pandemic by redefining relevance, access, and value. This case study shares practical strategies from the Delaware Art Museum that counter these trends and drive growth.

Through audience-centered programming, community co-creation, and mission-aligned revenue diversification, DelArt has rebuilt momentum. The presentation highlights reframing the museum as a civic asset—socially responsive, inclusive, and essential to community life. Attendees will gain actionable ideas, guiding questions, and renewed confidence to lead museums toward a more sustainable, impactful future while adapting to evolving public expectations and financial realities.

Session Takeaways:
•How to create annual SMART goals that align with your strategic plan, mission, and new initiatives while engaging staff across the organization
•Examples of reframing audience-centered, sustained engagement in a post-pandemic context
•Approaches to building authentic, long-term partnerships with both traditional and nontraditional arts and culture organizations
•Strategies for using metrics to prioritize SMART goals and expand programming while balancing your budget

JSA/MIXdesign, Queens Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art demonstrate how an inclusive design firm and art museums can move beyond code compliance to translate progressive principles into projects and guidelines.

JSA/MIX will share findings from the MIXmuseum initiative (2018–present), which developed inclusive design recommendations across partner museums, published in the Making Inclusive Museums Now report with the Architectural League.

The session then highlights two applications: the Queens Museum, from a 2019 pilot to a current capital project creating an Older Adult Hub; and the Whitney Museum, where accessibility guidelines address digital and physical visitor experience.

Session Takeaways:
•Understand how accessibility and inclusion in museums is evolving and how it shapes expectations for physical space and visitor experience.
•Identify gaps between accessibility goals and how they are realized in capital projects, and strategies for addressing them.
•Learn how participatory design processes can be used to engage diverse stakeholders and inform decision-making across multiple project types
•Explore real-world examples and strategies for translating inclusive goals into spatial outcomes, whether through policy/guidelines or architectural interventions.

Cultural preservation plays a vital role in telling the nation’s full history, including advocating on behalf of African American historic places. Hinchliffe Stadium in Paterson, NJ, played a vital role in Negro League baseball history, a precursor to the Civil Rights movement. The renovation and reinterpretation of Hinchliffe Stadium is a success story exploring architectural renovation, local and national advocacy, community engagement, use of historic tax credits, reinterpretation, and modern-day use. Hinchliffe highlights the importance that historic places represent in the diverse heritage of our nation and serves as a model in preserving the most important landmarks in American history.

Session Takeaways:
•Understand the process of cultural preservation of an African American historic site for modern-day use
•Learn how to create local and national advocacy to support a project
•Understand the role historic tax credits play in the private rehabilitation of income-producing historic structures
•Reinterpret an historic sporting structure and the Negro Leagues for a modern-day audience

Surratt Historic Site and Museum successfully deployed its Archives Together: A Community Approach (ATCA) initiative with funding from the Maryland Center for History and Culture. This program engaged community members in family history preservation, recruited archives fellows, and developed sustainable approaches to community-minded archival practices. ATCA increased the museum’s intellectual control of its archives, and heightened community investment in the museum’s resources. The success of ATCA can serve as a model on which other institutions can build archives-based, community-centered programming. This session will explore lessons learned and offer participants a chance to ideate on similar projects on a small budget.

Session Takeaways:
•Effective community engagement on a shoestring budget
•Fostering trust in your institution as a resource beyond traditional perceptions
•Providing critical career experiences to emerging professionals with measurable impacts on collections control

Design constraints can be frustrating, but they can also inspire more engaging and accessible solutions. How can docents present images in a space where nothing can be mounted? How can we bring documents to life without using screens? How can we teach young visitors to play a game without using words? This session explores case studies in historic buildings and children’s exhibits, where creative digital media interfaces addressed fundamental challenges.

Session Takeaways:
•Evaluate the types of digital media interfaces that may work in your exhibit space.
•Identify digital media approaches that can be used when space, power, and mounting options are constrained.
•Apply universal design principles to innovative user interfaces.