And of course, we didn’t start here. Exotic World, our name before the move to Vegas, was in Helendale, CA, a tiny little place on a stretch of old Route 66 near Victorville, hardly a burlesque hotspot! They could have just as easily moved to LA when Exotic World had to be closed, it’s just a historical accident that Las Vegas was chosen instead.

Now, as a person charged with the *business* of running a museum, it is my job to recognize the value of the “glitz, glitter, gambling and gangsters” image and try to make it work for us. With the Mob Museum opening here earlier this year and the Neon Museum just about to open its doors to the public, both only a few blocks from our location, there’s a real synergy. I’ve taken to saying “The people on our walls dated the people on the Mob Museum’s walls under the signs at the Neon Museum.” But if we were somewhere else, we’d adapt — lots of other museums end up in places with no direct connection to their content (Seattle’s Rock and Roll Experience and Los Angeles’ Holocaust Museum come to mind). And of course, natural history museums, science centers, and zoos are found just about everywhere.

But it’s true, historical museums do tend to take advantage of their place, most notably in that the vast bulk of them are housed in historical buildings, like the MLK museum at the spot where he was assassinated, or the many, many museums dedicated to particular people in the houses where they lived. In quite a few cases, the building is part of the collection, or even *is* the collection (like the Tenement House Museum in New York). Place has power — going along with my discussion of the “aura” of objects in the last post. There’s no specific reason why it would be easier to learn certain lessons about the past at the place where it happened, but Western museum culture is hardly unique in taking advantage of the fact that, apparently, it does — culture after culture marks specific places as “sacred” and ties aspects of its cultural, historical, and moral instruction to those places.

Thank you for the kind shout-out in your post. I went back and read the previous one and wished I had come to visit you when I was in the area in the spring. I strongly believe that small, idiosyncratic museums (which I can only imagine yours is) have the greatest potential to lead the field in a shift towards community-centered practice. As a fellow executive director, I sympathize with the “community organizer” role.

That said, I think your characterization of the role as being “charged with using the resources at hand to empower others in my community to change their lives” as a bit one-sided. One of the things I’ve learned over the past 1.5 years as an ED is how much other people–community members–bring assets and resources that empower our institution in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Maybe it’s more about being charged to energize people and connect diverse resources to co-create a stronger community.