Making publicly available data about museums easier to find will be good for museums and good for the public. That's why our new Museum Research Guide (built with the help of Jen Benoit-Bryan at SMU DataArts) includes only reports built on publicly-available data. Data accessibility is connected to museum accessibility. If you have publicly available research we didn't include, or want o share previously private data with the public, let us know and we'll add it to our list. Check out the Remuseum Research Guide today: https://lnkd.in/eZGSQY7j
Remuseum
Non-profit Organizations
Remuseum is a think tank promoting mission-based innovation in American art museums.
About us
Remuseum is an independent research project seeking to promote innovation among art museums across the U.S. Inspired and supported by entrepreneur and arts patron David Booth, powered by the disruptive spirit of Crystal Bridges, and with additional support from the Ford Foundation, Remuseum is a three-year project aiming to help U.S. museums fully embrace their missions by developing new approaches to relevance, governance, and financial sustainability.
- Website
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remuseum.org
External link for Remuseum
- Industry
- Non-profit Organizations
- Company size
- 2-10 employees
- Type
- Nonprofit
- Founded
- 2023
Employees at Remuseum
Updates
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Museums need to innovate in response to their current challenges, but it's tough to innovate without data. In that spirit, and with the help of Jen Benoit-Bryan at SMU DataArts, we've published the Remuseum Research Guide - a compilation of publicly available research on the art museum sector. We hope anyone interested in museum data - museum leaders, trustees, researchers, or members of the public - will use this resource to help museums matter to more people and thrive: https://lnkd.in/eZGSQY7j
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Welcome to the Remuseum Museum Research Guide! It was inspired when a convening of art museum researchers in 2025 (co-hosted by Remuseum and Art Bridges Foundation) revealed there was no easy way find all publicly-available art museum research in one place. It was compiled with help from Jen Benoit-Bryan at SMU DataArts (and others who joined that convening) and organized it into five major categories. Many of us have made private versions of this list for ourselves. Now you can save the time, and gain insights from a long list of art museum researchers like American Alliance of Museums, ASSOCIATION OF ART MUSEUM DIRECTORS, AEA Consulting, Art Bridges Foundation, Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, the Burns Halperin Report (Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin), the Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experiences Studies (COVES) (at the Museum of Science and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), CultureTrack, Knology, I/O Research, Inc., Ithaka S+R, Museums Moving Forward, the National Endowment for the Arts, NORC at the University of Chicago , Slover Linett at NORC, SMU DataArts, Wilkening Consulting, and more. Check out the Research Guide at https://lnkd.in/eZGSQY7j. We hope its a useful starting point for anyone interested in art museum data (like we are!).
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In a brand-new survey on a field facing many challenges, museum directors remain committed to their public missions as a path forward. In terms of what functions they rank most important: • 96% name educational programming • 94% name being "a trusted source of information and learning,” and • 88% name providing “a physical space for social and community engagement”. • They also named education departments as the #1 place they would add staff (and were low on the list of areas that would receive reductions) The good news: these priorities align with their mission statements (90% of which, Remuseum has documented, center the public in their work) The big question: will museums and their boards approve budgets and org. structures that align with these priorities? At a time of radical transitions in our political order, philanthropic priorities, and civic need, we remain bullish on museums: if they fully fund and embody their actual missions, they can generate relevance, attendance, revenue, while also fulfilling their highest mission of allowing art to build a stronger pluralistic civic union. The have the right missions and their leaders have the right priorities. Will they fund and prioritize the work? Thanks to our friends at Ithaka S+R, American Alliance of Museums and ASSOCIATION OF ART MUSEUM DIRECTORS for this latest Museum Director survey: https://lnkd.in/gmmUQ2yG
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Museum missions have changed radically but they continue trying to serve them with old structures - and wonder why it’s so hard for their leaders to succeed or for their successful leaders to survive. Thanks to Sylvain Levy for this perspective: “Leadership becomes less a position of authority than the art of orchestrating complexity across two irreconcilable temporalities: the slow time of conservation and deep curatorial thought, and the fast time of public engagement and digital circulation. Too much of one leads to irrelevance; too much of the other, to spectacle. The museum of the future will not be defined by the authority of its walls, but by the quality of the tensions it is able to sustain.”
The Museum After the Director For more than a century, the museum rested on a quietly authoritarian premise: that culture could be organized from the top. One building, one collection, one director as the embodiment of legitimate knowledge. In an era of stable hierarchies and slowly expanding institutions, it worked — audiences deferred, donors gave, curators obeyed, and the pyramid held. What we are witnessing today is not a reform of that model. It is its structural exhaustion. Across Europe and the United States, museums face a convergence of pressures no single figure can absorb: collapsing public funding, rising operating costs, political scrutiny, and audiences whose expectations — shaped by digital abundance and horizontal access — have permanently changed. The supply of culture has multiplied; the architecture of institutions has not. In this context, the traditional museum director has become almost geometrically impossible. The role now demands incompatible simultaneities: scholar and fundraiser, manager and public intellectual, media strategist and political diplomat. This is not a staffing problem. It is a design failure. The myth of singular cultural authority has quietly become an institutional bottleneck. Calls for decentralised leadership are therefore understandable. A museum cannot function as a rigid pyramid when the cultural world behaves like a network. Distributed expertise, collaborative governance, and porous institutional boundaries are no longer ideological preferences; they are operational demands. Yet decentralisation alone resolves nothing. Institutions do not collapse because they are hierarchical. They collapse when they lose coherence — when the structure of shared meaning that makes a museum different from a fair or a festival dissolves. A museum is not simply a forum. It is a place where time accumulates and meaning is stabilised long enough to be transmitted. This is where durum becomes useful: durability as design rather than rigidity. Institutions survive not by replacing one director with many undifferentiated voices, but by constructing an architecture in which those voices coexist without dissolving the institution itself. What this requires is a polyphonic architecture. In music, multiple voices can contradict and enrich one another while still producing a coherent composition. Curators, artists, researchers, collectors, technologists, and audiences are all participants in a living score — but scores require structure. Leadership becomes less a position of authority than the art of orchestrating complexity across two irreconcilable temporalities: the slow time of conservation and deep curatorial thought, and the fast time of public engagement and digital circulation. Too much of one leads to irrelevance; too much of the other, to spectacle. The museum of the future will not be defined by the authority of its walls, but by the quality of the tensions it is able to sustain.
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An important new survey of museum directors from our friends at Ithaka S+R (with American Alliance of Museums and ASSOCIATION OF ART MUSEUM DIRECTORS ) reminds us that the key challenge facing American museums may not be the one we want to talk about most: it’s REVENUE. By a wide margin, museum directors cited a “lack of financial resources” as their #1 constraint to fulfilling their mission. 70% of them see contributed revenue as the most likely source of the increased dollars they need to fund their operations and support their missions, and a majority identify a greater need of fundraising skills (across their colleagues and for themselves) to generate this growth in revenue. I don’t know an enterprise that can increase revenue without investing in it. And what this survey doesn’t reveal is whether museums (and museum boards) will approve an increased investment in the fundraising and revenue they need to survive. What do you think? At a moment of fiscal crisis and radical transitions (generational, philanthropic, political), are museums willing to invest in the revenue they need? Read the full survey report here: https://lnkd.in/gmmUQ2yG
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We know the public trusts museums, but why? A 2025 survey has tried to answer that question. It turns out that THE WAY museums do their work is the primary reason: their practices are fact-based and accurate, present diverse and multiple perspectives, and are carried out with care and professionalism. What survey respondents didn't mention was WHAT museums own: few respondents mentioned objects or artwork as the source of their trust in museums. This doesn't mean that the public would trust museums that are careless with objects. But it is a good sign for museums that focus as much on how they serve and engage the public as on what they acquire and preserve. Read this and other "data stories" from the 2025 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers (conducted by American Alliance of Museums and Wilkening Consulting) here: https://lnkd.in/e5RDHxWh
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I recently went to the opening of NODE, a digital art museum in Palo Alto. Most traditional museums have kept digital/AI art at arm's length, but there's a lot they can learn from it, including the fans and patrons it attracts and the new sources of revenue it may enable. It opened the eyes of this aging collector. And made me ask: What else can traditional museums learn by engaging in digital art? (Stay for the Beeple reveal)
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Museum leaders recently told American Alliance of Museums that their biggest worry comes from shifts in philanthropy - 10% points higher than any other topic. That's why Remuseum and our generous partners at Christie's Museum Services department co-hosted a gathering of SF/Bay Area art museum leaders (directors, curators, and trustees) during FOG Design+Art to discuss generational shifts in philanthropy, collecting, leadership and governance. Aside from a great conversation, during challenging times we all remembered the value of connecting with old and new colleagues to talk about issues that matter. Thanks to leaders from SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, de Young Museum and Legion of Honor (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), Asian Art Museum, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, Further Triennial, Headlands Center for the Arts, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Anderson Collection at Stanford University, San José Museum of Art, Stoa Foundation, and Frye Art Museum (all the way from Seattle!) for joining us.
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