Museums in a Climate of Change

The North sits at the center of many of the most urgent questions facing the world. Questions of land use, food systems, community resilience, Indigenous sovereignty, migration, infrastructure, energy, security, and geopolitical strategy are increasingly converging here. For those of us living in Alaska, this shift is familiar. 

Museums, too, are changing.

For much of their history, museums defined themselves by collecting, preserving, and interpreting the past. Those responsibilities remain important. But increasingly museums are being asked to do something larger: help communities understand change while also helping imagine what comes next.

Today museums are becoming civic spaces as much as cultural ones. They are places where artists, researchers, elders, scientists, community leaders, and the public gather. They can convene conversations across disciplines and across ways of knowing. They can make visible what is often fragmented or hidden. And they can support communities and generations think not only about where we have been, but where we are going.

At the Anchorage Museum, we think often about what role museums should play in a changing world. We are an institution rooted in Alaska but connected across the Circumpolar North and beyond. We work at the intersection of art, science, history, design, technology, and Indigenous and local knowledge. Increasingly, we see our role not simply as presenting information, but as creating platforms where people can think together.

That is why we created Climate of Change: Museums Imagining the Future, now in its third season of Chatter Marks, hosted by journalist Cody Liska and developed in collaboration with museum thinker and curator Sandro Debono of Malta. Together, we began with a simple premise: many museums are already redefining their role.

Across the world, cultural institutions are becoming places where communities gather, where knowledge systems intersect, where conversations happen, and where people actively shape possible futures. This series asks what we can learn from those institutions and why museums may matter more to the future than ever before.

This series brings together museum directors, curators, scholars, and cultural leaders working across Northern regions and beyond. Some lead institutions deeply embedded in Arctic communities. Others come from larger international organizations wrestling with many of the same questions. Together, these conversations explore how museums are responding to the natural world, how institutions are working with their communities, how emerging technologies may impact our land and work, and how museums can become more responsive, resilient, and relevant.

These are not conversations about museums as isolated institutions.
They are conversations about museums as community infrastructure.

Museums increasingly operate as gathering places, research partners, cultural stewards, storytellers, and civic spaces. They participate in language revitalization, environmental documentation, youth engagement, public dialogue, and knowledge-sharing across communities. In many cases, they are becoming places where different forms of expertise meet one another on equal footing.

This series is not simply about the future of museums. It is about the future of communities and the role cultural institutions and innovative thinking can play within them. At their best, museums help societies understand change, connect people across disciplines and experiences, and create space for collective imagination.

The future may not emerge from the places we once assumed were at the center. It may emerge from places willing to experiment, adapt, and think differently.