Lord at AAM 2025

Thank you to all who joined us for the 2025 AAM Annual Meeting & MusuemExpo! Read here some higlights of the event.

How can we inspire trust within our communities?

This year, the conference theme was Museums & Trust. We asked visitors to our booth to share their thoughts on how we can inspire trust within our communities, and LA-based interdisciplinary artist Terrick Gutierrez created an art piece live in our booth with the answers.

Download the poster

Museum Communities and our Future: Engaging for Longevity

Yvonne Tang, Senior Director, moderated this conversation, which explored how museums connect with their communities and how internal change can inspire external impact.

Featured:

Germonique Ulmer, Non-Profit Leader
Lori Fogarty, Executive Director, Oakland Museum of California
Marianna Pegno, Director of Engagement and Inclusion, Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block
Stephen Aron, President and CEO, Autry Museum of the American West

The presentation was organized around four central themes:

1. Engagement Across Departments: Marianna Pegno, Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block, discussed strategies for fostering cross-departmental collaboration within museums to strengthen engagement. She highlighted internal collaboration as essential to responsive community building, and shared a quote that deeply resonates and informs her approach: “Receptivity is a two-way movement. To be receptive, one has to turn oneself into a responsive mold. The simultaneously passive-active process enables one to be tuned by one’s changing environment while also developing the ability to tune oneself independently to any environment.” - Trinh T. Minh-ha

2. Inside Out, Outside In: Lori Fogarty, Executive Director of the Oakland Museum of California, shared how OMCA transformed its outdoor spaces into a civic commons. Initiatives like “Friday Nights at OMCA”—a weekly block party—helped make the museum’s inner workings more visible and accessible to the public. She focused on the importance of using physical space and values-based leadership to combat social fragmentation and foster cohesion.

3. Building New Communities: Germonique Ulmer described efforts like the Community Pop-In Library Event Series at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art to bring programming into LAneighborhoods, and emphasized the importance of having staff orientation rooted in community context and partnerships with public institutions to foster trust and belonging.

4. Coalition Building and Policy: Stephen Aron, Autry Museum of the American West, highlighted the Los Angeles History Collaborative, which he launched. One of their projects included the exhibition Wildfires: Past, Present, and Future, exploring environmental history and collective memory. He shared Autry’s Native Collections Policy as a model for ethical and collaborative stewardship with Indigenous communities.

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