An exhibition of materials from the Arab American National Museum is on display at the Caroline Kennedy Public Library in Dearborn Heights through the end of May. The Library is located at 24590 George Street, west of Telegraph and north of Ford Road. It showcases changing exhibitions made up of materials of local interest. Our exhibit features books, CD's, ceramics and textiles that are available in the Museum's library and store. The Library is visited by 17,000 patrons per month. Its visitors include senior citizens and students from the nearby charter school, Star Academy. We are hopeful that the display will inspire many of the Library's patrons to visit the Museum.

Labels: Public Outreach, Temp Exhibits

The AANM's Collections Committee meeting is coming up May 11th! As usual members and staff are looking forward. Our proposals for next month are only a handful and we can share some more about those in an upcoming blog, but the highlight acquisition from our last meeting, held here at the museum in January, was this Karkey(left); a donation from Mr. Raff Ellis who resides in California and has recently published a book "Kisses From a Distance" . A Karkey is used to distill 'arak' a favorite alcoholic beverage of Lebanon. To learn more about arak and arak making, follow this link:

Labels: Announcements, arak, arak making, collections

Back in February, the Brooklyn Museum collaborated with other leading museums on an inventive month-long initiative called Wikipedia Loves Art. This project sought to illustrate Wikipedia articles through a free, online photo contest. Each of the sixteen participating museums created a scavenger hunt list of subjects for visitors to photograph. Participants added their images to the popular photo sharing website Flickr.com.

This sounds like a great project! I would love to hear what participants thought about it. I imagine a similar project could fit in nicely with our current photography exhibition A Yemeni Community: Photographs from the 1970s by Milton Rogovin. If this sounds like something you might be interested in, then please let us know!

Point your browser to the Wikipedia Loves Art Flickr group to see photographs from the project.

Read reflections on the project at the Brooklyn Museum's blog: Pre-competition, Competition, Almost Done, The Stats.

Labels: social media, visitor participation

Social media is on the rise and it continues to alter the ways in which we communicate and interact. According to a recent Nielsen report, social networking now accounts for almost 10 percent of all online time, making it the fourth most popular activity on the Internet. The growth in this sector is changing the ways in which information is both produced and consumed. This has many implications for museums. For one, museums are utilizing social media as a means to better connect with constituents. These "networking communities", including Twitter and Facebook, afford the opportunity of disseminating institutional information. Second, social media permits museums the opportunity to receive feedback from the public. And third, it is a promising tool for building community; an inherent principle of the medium itself. The real challenge for museums is to create an authentic voice that will connect with an audience that is becoming less susceptible to highly-targeted ads that are deemed an invasion of privacy.

At the Arab American National Museum, we have been spending a reasonable amount of time exploring our social media options. Because we are a community-based museum, the medium has great appeal and seems to be a proper fit for interacting with our audience. Currently, the museum has a profile on Flickr, Facebook, Delicious, and Twitter. Further, we are looking into creating our own social networks for specific audiences that can build on some of our core programs (perhaps a Ning community for artists?).

As we continue to develop our strategies for optimizing these tools, we are open to hearing back from you. Also, please feel free to join us online!

Labels: social media

We are currently conducting some preliminary research on Motawi Tileworks for a possible exhibition in the near future. Here is a short, interesting video from Concentrate Media that features Motawi.

Labels: Temp Exhibits, Visual Art

Welcome to the Arab American National Museum Curatorial Department's blog. Here you will find musings on exhibits, collections, design, new media initiatives and other aspects of curatorial work. This blog is meant to be a conversation, so please feel free to leave comments, suggestions, and/or a haiku or two.

Labels: Announcements