Evaluating Community Engagement with the Baltimore Museum of Art’s “Outpost” Mobile Museum
Client: Baltimore Museum of Art | Location: Baltimore, MD | Funding: Institute of Museum and Library Services
We worked with the Baltimore Museum of Art to understand community members’ experiences at the Outpost, a mobile museum that invited conversations about place, home, and why the city of Baltimore matters to its residents.
OVERVIEW
We partnered with the Baltimore Museum of Art to deepen their understanding of community members’ experiences at the Outpost, an experimental mobile museum program that brought replicas of artworks from the Museum’s collection to sites across Baltimore. The goal of the Outpost was to prompt exchange and candid conversations about place, home, and why the city of Baltimore matters to its residents.
Our evaluation sought to help the Museum learn from community members’ experiences with the first “season” of the Outpost and use these findings to make it more responsive to community needs.
APPROACH
Over several months we led reflective case studies of 10 former Outpost sites—ranging from centers serving people experiencing homelessness and addiction to youth centers and libraries to public markets and gardens—to understand the depth and breadth of the Outpost’s impact. This involved:
Site visits, to understand the contextual factors affecting the Outpost at each site, and
In-depth interviews with partners at each site, community members who visited the Outpost, and Museum staff, to hear diverse perspectives on the Outpost’s impact
Our analysis focused on identifying trends that were unique to individual sites and common across sites. With these trends in hand, we also hosted a working session with Museum staff to strategize about the Outpost program’s future.
CLIENT TAKEAWAYS
We found that community members had positive experiences with the Outpost and that the first Outpost season’s theme of “home” deeply resonated with community members. We also found that the Outpost inadvertently took on a healing role at many of the sites, prompting Museum staff to think in new ways about the Outposts’ broader role in Baltimore.
There were also some challenges—logistical challenges, lack of deep interaction with art from the museum’s collection, and the need to balance structure and spontaneity. We advised that longer durations at sites might address these issues.
