Penn Museum launches three-year study on collecting decisions of U.S. museums

The Penn Museum’s Penn Cultural Heritage Center announced the launch of a three-year study on the collection practices of museums across the United States. 

The Museums: Missions and Acquisitions Project will feature current collecting practices and highlight case studies in the U.S. museum sector. It will conclude with a comprehensive state-of-the-field report to be released in 2027. 

This project aims to “convene thought leaders on museum collections and missions to advise the project team, gather data on museum collections' acquisitions, loans, deaccessions, repatriations, practices, and policies, and prepare and disseminate findings to museum stakeholders, scholars, and the public,” M2A Project research coordinator Kayla Kane said. 

PennCHC Director of Research and Programs and Brian I. Daniels will lead the project as the principal investigator alongside Executive Director Richard M. Leventhal as co-principal investigator. 

“Ultimately, the report will offer both a real, honest, retrospective look at what's going on,” Daniels said. “This whole project isn't interested in 'gotcha' moments, but it's interested in being able to provide museums with a roadmap of what needs to be done next and how museums can rethink the relationship between their collections and the public interest.”

The project is based on the PennCHC’s Cultural Property Experts OnCall Program. CPEOC is a partnership with the U.S. Department of State’s Cultural Heritage Coordinating Committee that acts as a resource for law enforcement to identify cultural property that has been looted, stolen, or trafficked. CPEOC has been in place informally for around five years and formally for four-and-a-half years.

Leventhal said that the study will center around ethical concerns of museums acquiring cultural artifacts from Indigenous communities.

“I think part of this is perhaps rethinking how we identify a great museum and shifting it away from saying great museums equal great collections,” Leventhal said. “We want to begin to talk about how great museums represent communities and cultures well in the 21st century, through objects that could be borrowed from countries as well as communities, rather than stolen and then purchased.”

The team is supported by Kane and PennCHC administrative coordinator Corinne Muller, who are both early-career professionals. Leventhal and Daniels emphasized the importance of including young but experienced professionals in the project.

“It's clear to me that there is the generational shift going on in American museums, and it's where the most urgency is,” Daniels said. “It's with this early-career group of professionals [where] the most urgency and interest is, and we want to make sure that we're really robustly including them in the leadership of the project.”

The M2A Project is funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The team started writing the IMLS grant in June 2023 and submitted it in November 2023. They were awarded $1.1 million in the spring of 2024 with an official project launch date of May 1, and the initiative was announced to the public in October 2024. $750,000 will be allocated to the M2A Project and $250,000 to the CPEOC program over three years.

“Our team is pretty young but not necessarily young in terms of experience we've put together,” Muller said. “We have a really impressive and functional and diverse team with a wide array of expertise, with people who have backgrounds in law and art history, indigenous rights, and all those perspectives, which are really going to inform how we approach this project.”  

Currently, the project is in the preliminary data collection phase, where research analysts and assistants are looking through open-desk research of museum collections. The project includes undergraduate and graduate student researchers from Penn and beyond.

“I’m really looking forward to discovering positive models and come up with creative solutions,” Kane said. “I hope to actually understand what the current challenges are and what creative solutions we can individually come up with in order to navigate the challenges facing acquisition and ownership.”