SANTA FE, NM—Renowned individuals from the international art community will participate in a two week-long virtual discussion, “Museums of Tomorrow: An Internet Conference”, October 6-19, 2003, which will take place on the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum website and will be moderated by Maurice Berger, Senior Fellow, The Vera List Center for Art & Politics, New School University.

“We are very pleased to host this exciting conference as it will provide an open forum for the art community to discuss one of its most pressing and important issues: the future of the art museum,” said Barbara Buhler Lynes, The Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Reseach Center.

Given the increasing commercial as well as global-direction of culture, the future of the museum as we now know it is it no longer certain. Scholars, artists, and curators will discuss and debate the future of the art museum in this Internet conference. Participants will explore a range of issues about the viability, relevance, effectiveness, responsibility, and role of the museum in an ever-changing world. The interchange of ideas will be on-going during the two-week period of the conference, because the discussion will be active and available on the internet 24-hours-a-day.

“This online event will allow museum professionals from all over the world, as well as the interested public, to enter a significant and productive dialogue about the future of their discipline,” commented Maurice Berger. “The museum will have an opportunity to examine itself in light of the complex challenges—of audience, cultural relevance, and funding—that it faces in the 21st Century.”

The public will be able to access the conference at any time and will be invited to ask questions and offer commentary via a special e-mail address. Supporting pages posted on the website will allow visitors to acquire information, bibliographic references, and participant biographies. And while the discussions will be viewable by the public, a password will be required to post to the discussion.

The online conference will be accessible on the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum website: www.okeeffemuseum.org/center/onlinesymposium. The technical aspects of the site are created by the Santa Fe based Web design firm Panorama Point (www.panoramapoint.com), which also created the Museum’s website.

Barbara Buhler Lynes is the Curator at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and The Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center. She has published numerous books and articles on O’Keeffe and American Modernism.

Maurice Berger is a Senior Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics of the New School University, New York and Curator of The Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has authored numerous books on the issues of modern art, culture, gender, and race, and his essays have appeared in many journals and newspapers.