The Rubin is a global museum dedicated to sharing Himalayan art with the world. It brings together diverse perspectives—from Buddhist practitioners to neuroscientists and contemporary artists—to offer insights into the art and its meaning in life today. Through three phases and as many years, Spellerberg Associates supported the Rubin as it closed its NYC building and transitioned to a global presence. Read more
The California Migration Museum preserves and shares the diverse stories of California’s immigrant communities. It serves as a platform for education, dialogue, and celebration and emphasizes the rich cultural diversity that shapes the state. In 2023/24, Spellerberg Associates collaborated with the Museum to design and develop two digital projects that advance this mission. Read more
The Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum, a new institution in Washington, D.C. needed a redesigned website to support its launch. The Museum sought to create a visually appealing, user-friendly website to support its mission through visitation and fundraising. The website needed to generate excitement within its community and buzz around the Museum’s launch in a city with no shortage of attractions. And it had to be delivered on a compressed timeline. Read more
During COVID, as museums took their institutions online, event programming became a viable space to adapt to new monetization paths and presented potential new business practices. After we published our research into how the pandemic affected and shaped museum website visitation, colleagues in the museum technology field (shoutout MCN!) Read more
I spoke with journalist Alexander Panetta of CBC News for a story on museums’ use of technology during the pandemic:
Despite this historic opportunity for online learning, with hundreds of millions of people locked out of public spaces, [Spellerberg] says traffic to museum websites plummeted last year. Read more
The pandemic of 2020 presented an unprecedented challenge for cultural institutions. We’ve been with with our clients every step of the way, creating projects that run the gamut of adaptations undertaken by the industry. We built “At Home” sections for the Andy Warhol Museum and the Akron Art Museum; we designed and developed virtual events for the Chinese American Museum, Los Angeles, and Pleasure Dome, Toronto; and we created a bring-your-own-device web app for the Hammer Museum. Read more
Since COVID-19 first hit, I have been conducting a cross-institutional research study about the effects of shelter-in-place on museum website visitation. Researcher Grace Poole and I have been working hard over the past several months to analyze the pandemic’s impact across the sector’s digital activity. Read more
On August 16, 2017, Cloudflare revoked its cyber-protection service from the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website (Newman, 2017). The ethical issue at stake concerns internet censorship and who gets to decide what speech stays online. Did Cloudflare ethically act when it made this exception to its position of neutrality?
We are living through history. Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping society. When Americans began practicing “social distancing” and following orders to shelter-in-place, museums and cultural organizations moved quickly to cease public visitation. But even as our institutions closed their physical doors, we have opened digital windows. Read more
NAMPUS at St. Mary's needed a facility to tell stories with their historic objects and photographs. We transformed an unused lobby into a flexible display space, complete with the inaugural exhibition. The result is the one of the most beautiful and atmospheric spaces on campus.
We showed a lot of great art this year. Exhibitions at the Main St Gallery focused on photography: I curated Elijah Barrett’s Rockport, an examination of the impact of our changing climate on communities along the Texas coast; and then Elijah curated Cristina Velásquez’s New World, a consideration of agricultural labor in her native Columbia...
This piece is cross-posted on the MCN Blog.
MCN is all about facilitating connections for museum professionals. For the 2018 conference in Denver, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to help introduce a new format, MCN Field Trips, that opened up opportunities for spatial and dialectic exploration. Read more
