Milan-Bound: Exploring the Cultural Landscape

In a few days, I'm headed to my first-ever ICOM triennal conference, with the theme of Museums and Cultural Landscapes, joining thousands of museum colleagues from around the world in Milan, Italy. For most American museum professionals, ICOM is a bit out of our professional networks, but thanks to my German colleague Katrin Hieke, it entered my view in a more substantive way when we combined forces with two other colleagues to cover, in social media, the tri-national Museums and Politics conference in Russia in 2014.  I'm excited to expand my networks and meet and learn from colleagues around the world over the course of a week.

ICOM is organized by interest committees and I'll be presenting in two of them.  With Rainey Tisdale, I'll be talking about the Creative Cultural Landscape in the CAMOC section--that's the Committee for the Collections and Activities of Museums of Cities.  We'll be focusing on the way that museums can be players in building cities' creative capital.

I'll also be presenting a talk entitled, "Terra Incognita: Museums Studies Students and the Global Museum Landscape,"  at ICTOP, the International Committee for the Training of Personnel.  This talk is inspired by the course I taught last fall online for the Johns Hopkins University Museum Studies Program, where students worked with five museums from around the world to develop community engagement projects.  I'm curious about how we, particularly Americans,  can expand our understanding of museums around the world as a way of enhancing our own practice.

Plus, trying to get to as many other sessions as possible, meeting colleagues from around the world, recruiting new museum partners for this fall's course, exploring Milan's architecture and museums, and having an aperitivo or two.  I'll be tweeting and instagramming as @lindabnorris, from July 3-10, so if you want to see what's up, find me there!  If you're in Milan, I'd love to meet you and learn about what you do...so please be in touch for that aperitivo (to get you thinking, below, at Bar Basso).