Tegan Kehoe

 Many months ago, I co-wrote a couple of posts with Camille Myers Breeze, director of Museum Textile Services, about the history of rayon fabric. I left Museum Textile Services last summer to start my graduate studies at Tufts, but I recently noticed that I never re-posted those last few blog entries here. In November, I had the pleasure of working with Camille again as a panelist in a round-table discussion she led at the New England Museum Association conference. I presented on our experience with e-Hive, a cloud-based collections management system. Below is the introduction to the rayon posts, and links to read for yourself. "A surprising number of historic clothing and textile items we’ve treated at Museum Textile Services in 2013 have been made of rayon -- and we've added some rayon pieces to our study collection, such as the "reliable" rayon yarn we blogged about in April. This has prompted us to refresh our knowledge of this important fiber and take n...

As many of you know, I've been the blogger for the Yoko Miwa Trio, a Boston-based jazz group led by the inimitable pianist Yoko Miwa, since January 2013. I am about to wrap up my work for them, but I still encourage music fans to check out their website and, more importantly, their music. Here are a few of my favorite posts from my time writing for them: Piano Cookies Jazz with Teens When “Listen to This!” is a Gift Women in Jazz, and in JAZZ The Most Wonderful Time of the Year? Wake Up and Smell the… Music Most of these are favorite posts because of what I put into them: my research, or my creative thinking. This last one is among my favorites for the opposite reason. Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing, anyone in the city with a keyboard was writing almost the same thing, and it was better that way. Best Wishes for Boston  

I had the honor and pleasure of being a Createquity Writing Fellow in Spring 2013. Here Ian David Moss, the site's lead editor, collected links to all of the pieces by the semester's fellows.

The Potential of Partnerships in Arts and Healthcare Imagine a hospital with musicians on call, able to come to your bedside to play for you. Arts and crafts workshops tailored to the needs of patients with a specific type of illness. Healing gardens with visual arts classes. Weekly lunchtime poetry readings. While it’s not the harsh white light and smell of antiseptic cleaners most people associate with healthcare, this model is gaining in popularity. For decades, some organizations have incorporated the arts into healthcare, and now, as more and more of them are forging partnerships across a variety of organizations, the practice has a broader reach than ever. All of the examples above are real , and they are from one program, Shands Arts in Medicine at UF&Shands, the teaching hospital at the University of Florida. Read more at Createquity...

Createquity features a section of reviews of important arts policy research papers, the Arts Policy Library. I reviewed Ann Markusen's 2003 paper "The Artistic Dividend: The Arts’ Hidden Contributions to Regional Development," which aims to reveal what economists typically miss when they measure the impact of the arts sector on regional economies.  I present both my full response and a condensed version .

During my time as a Createquity Writing Fellow I’ve written a lot about museums partly because I am a museum professional, and largely because, being already keyed into the museum world, I find that there is just so much to write about. Although I had been aware of Fractured Atlas’s work for a long time, I first heard about Createquity when a well-known museum blogger, Nina Simon, wrote about it on her blog Museum 2.0 . Simon appreciates that Createquity provides “ exposure to a broader arts world .” She’s correct in her assessment that the museum world can be an insular bubble – for all the work we do on engaging our audiences and our communities, we do most of it through a museum-specific lens. Later in that same post, though, Simon writes, “the American ‘arts’ field is in as much of a bubble as the museum industry–perhaps even a smaller one.” She refers to the museum and arts bubbles as separate, even though many people would consider museums to be a part of the arts...

Free to a Good Home? Or For Sale to the Highest Bidder? One of eleven extant copies of the Bay Psalm Book, among the first books printed in British North America, will soon be up for sale . Experts estimate it will go for $10 to $20 million. Did a private book collector die or decide to prune their collection? No, this particular volume is being sold by the Old South Church, a congregation in Boston. Opponents of the decision have expressed concerns that the book would be sold to a private collector . This despite the fact that the Old South Church owns two copies of the book and is only selling one. Controversies like the one over the sale of the Bay Psalm Book have become increasingly common since the mid-twentieth century. Many museums and other institutions that hold cultural objects no longer believe they must hold such objects in the public trust in perpetuity. Much of the museum community has agreed on best practices for deciding whether to give up an object, yet t...