Ever wanted to curate an exhibition? Work side-by-side with a museum professional to develop a program or educational resource? Dig deep into a collection of art and artifacts? Or just have fun participating in the local cultural scene? Museums and society students have many opportunities like these, both in the classroom and outside of it.
In 2011, a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recognized the Program in Museums and Society for its unique offerings with a grant that to support museum-based projects with our campus museums and with partner institutions in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. This grant was renewed in 2013 as part of a larger program in support of the arts and humanities at Hopkins and funded more than a dozen collaborative projects between 2013 and 2017 at institutions as diverse as the Baltimore Museum of Art, Jewish Museum of Maryland, Maryland Zoo, Baltimore Museum of Industry, JHU Archaeology Museum and others. Many smaller grants in pedagogy, the arts, and practical ethics continue to launch innovative digital projects, art installations and archives.
Since 2017 the program has offered an annual course in partnership with the Baltimore Museum of Art as part of their ongoing collaboration with that museum. In 2021 a collaboration with JHU’s Inheritance Baltimore project launched community-based work with stewards of Baltimore’s Black cemeteries.
See below for a list of recent projects, or check this list of pre-2015 projects.
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BMA Off the Shelf
Stemming from Spring 2016 course, AS.389.354 Paper Museums: Exhibiting Artists’ Books at the Baltimore Museum of Art, students from JHU, Loyola, and MICA, alongside BMA staff, worked with the BMA collection of artists’ books to develop an exhibition of more than…
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Homewood Stories & Archaeology of Knowledge Audio Tours
Drawing from oral histories and archival materials, Homewood Histories builds on the Sense of Place project to expand and diversify the stories of the people who have lived and worked on the site of today’s Homewood campus from the days it was a farm up to the present.…
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Zoo Activity Booklet for Conservation Education
In Spring 2016, undergraduates in Lori Finkelstein’s Zoos and Communities worked in partnership with elementary school students enrolled in the STEM Achievement in Baltimore Elementary Schools (SABES) program to create a summer activity booklet for conservation education. Zoos and Communities examines zoos and living collections…
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Shriver Hall Murals
In 1939, Johns Hopkins alumnus Alfred Jenkins Shriver died, leaving funds for a lecture hall to be decorated with a set of murals. Shriver’s directives for the murals were very precise and required significant help from the university registrar, Irene Davis,…
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The Literary Archive Project
The Literary Archive blog is the product of Gabrielle Dean’s teaching in Museums and Society and English. In the spring 2015 version of the class, student contributors focused on three American modernist prose writers with roots in Baltimore: Dashiell Hammett,…
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JUBILEE: Roman Catholic Pilgrimage Culture in Papal Rome, 1500 – 1675
Senior, and Museums & Society student, Taylor Alessio curated, “JUBILEE: Roman Catholic Pilgrimage Culture in Papal Rome, 1500 – 1675,” a rare book exhibition featuring beautifully illustrated books from the Italian Renaissance.” Taylor will be giving a talk about the…