An Evolution of MoMA Programming for Older Adults
hope that by increasing the visibility of older adults at the museum, amplifying their voices, and advocating internally on their behalf, we can help our MoMA colleagues to be more inclusive of people of various ages and abilities in their work. Training workshops for frontline staff teach ways to better engage, serve, and value older visitors, and topics related to the older adult experience are regularly discussed at MoMA’s accessibility task force meetings.18 This internal advocacy effort to make the museum more age-friendly further enables Prime Timers to engage with MoMA’s collection, exhibitions, and broader community. Prime Time is our means of contributing to a larger movement to create a more age-friendly society. While museums cannot address all the diverse needs of older adults, cultural institutions can have a positive impact on their overall quality of life by fostering a sense of well-being, connectedness to others, purpose, and value through engagement with art. We hope that through this work MoMA can support members of our community as they age and, in turn, serve as an example to other cultural institutions around the world.
1 Irene Porges, online survey response submitted March 23, 2017. 2 “Census 2010: Changes in the Elderly Population in New York City, 2000–2010,” New York City Department for the Aging (2012), 3. According to this report, the city’s sixty-plus population has been growing at a rate of 12.4 percent, compared to a 2.1 percent growth rate for the city’s total population. 3 Francesca Rosenberg, Amir Parsa, Laurel Humble, and Carrie McGee, eds., Meet Me: Making Art Accessible to People with Dementia (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 26–30. 4 Mary Mittelman and Cynthia Epstein, “Research,” in Meet Me, 87–105. This chapter constitutes the executive report for the NYU evaluation of Meet Me at MoMA. 5 Ibid., 92. This self-rating scale asked family care partners to indicate the number of people to whom they felt close and about their level of satisfaction with social support. Responses given directly before the program, compared to those given eight days later, increased by an average of 2.38, from 7 to 9.38 people. 6 The MoMA Alzheimer’s Project: Making Art Accessible to People with Dementia was made possible thanks to a generous grant from MetLife Foundation and ran from 2007 to 2014. I initially joined the community and access programs team in 2007 to work on this outreach project. 7 MetLife Foundation funding for the MoMA Alzheimer’s Project came to an end in 2014, which curtailed our broader outreach efforts. However, Meet Me at MoMA and other programming for individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and their care partners remain an integral part of our departmental offerings. We serve roughly 1,000 individuals with dementia and their care partners every year. 8 “Profile of Older New Yorkers,” New York City Department for the Aging (2013), 1. 9 United States Census Bureau, 65+ in the United States: 2010 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2014), 3. 10 Christian González-Rivera, The New Face of New York’s Seniors (New York: Center for an Urban Future, 2013), 3. 11 “Profile of Older New Yorkers,” 6. 12 Jennifer M. Norton, Leze Nicaj, Laura DiGrande, Catherine Stayton, Carolyn Olson, and Bonnie Kerker, “Health of Older New Yorkers. NYC,” NYC Vital Signs 8, no. 4 (2010): 1. 13 “Profile of Older New Yorkers,” 4. 14 Norton et al., “Health of Older New Yorkers,” 2.
Aging is a fact of life, yet we often ignore this inevitability as it pertains to ourselves. Museum professionals are by default working-age adults; accordingly we must draw on older adults’ experiences to properly understand their circumstances. We must work to offer them opportunities to participate within our institutions to the extent to which they desire, and invite them and their proxies to shape our approach. This is not an act of altruism; doing so will help to develop an infrastructure within cultural institutions that supports learners across the life span, which will of course, one day, include ourselves. Thus, it behooves us to consider the world in which we want to grow old and the ways we want to stay engaged as we continue to age.
15 Catherine Li, e-mail message to author, June 8, 2017. 16 Jerald Frampton, e-mail message to author, June 12, 2017. 17 Katharine Langford, Peter Baeck, and Martha Hampson, More than Medicine: New Services for People Powered Health (London: Nesta, 2013), 8–13. 18 MoMA’s accessibility task force is comprised of staff from across the institution, including the departments of operations, finance, human resources, general counsel, information technology, digital media, graphic design, visitor engagement, exhibition design and planning, curatorial, and education.
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