Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums conference

Our UK staff member, Alex von der Becke, attended the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums conference last month as an exhibitor.

I travelled to Philadelphia, the ‘city of brotherly love’, to attend the annual meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums. It was my first time at a MAAM event, an organisation that represents museum interests in Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

Although an exhibitor, I had the chance to listen in on some of the presentations given. One of the more interesting of these was delivered by the Harlem Gallery of Science who discussed their travelling exhibition, ‘Video Games: the Great Connector’. This emphasised how today’s young people use games in a positive way. As they put it, “video games are more than a mode of entertainment for today’s youth. They have become a means for developing personal and professional skills, such as teamwork, complex problem solving, and building social networks.”

I also chatted with delegates and even fellow exhibitors at my table. It was a familiar picture of lots of folk researching new options because they were dissatisfied with the functionality of existing, ageing systems. There was even the concern expressed by one at the significant price rise of a competing, more modern solution.

I then had a couple of days off to visit some of the many historic sites and collections such as the “first true zoo”, Philadelphia Zoo, which opened in 1874. There was an amusing moment when a small child cried out, “Is that a rhino?” In fact it was an elephant shrew!

Later I was privileged to see the fabulous art collections of both the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art and the Barnes Foundation, the former with a particularly striking trompe l’oeil portrait by the American artist Charles Willson Peale of two of his sons, Raphaelle and Titian, on a staircase.