Lonnie G. Bunch, Founding Director, National Museum of African American History

April 9, 2018, 4:30pm

The Challenge of Building a National Museum

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Lonnie G. Bunch

Lonnie Bunch will explore the history and struggle to create the National Museum of African American History and Culture, focusing on a variety of challenges —including building on the National Mall, conceptual frameworks, public expectations, and the contextual terrain of race. He will reveal the strategies used to successfully navigate these challenges, and will also briefly survey the difficulties of chronicling race in American museums. Bunch will provide updates on the new institution’s current status and on future projections, and share how the National Museum will help the Smithsonian transition from a 19th-century institution to a 21st-century enterprise.

Historian, author, curator, and educator, Lonnie G. Bunch III is the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened to critical and public acclaim in September 2016. As a public historian, a scholar who brings history to the people, Bunch has spent nearly 30 years in the museum field where he is regarded as one of the nation’s leading figures in the historical and museum community. A prolific and widely published author, he has written on topics ranging from slavery, the black military experience, the American presidency, and all black towns in the American West —to diversity in museum management and the impact of funding and politics on American museums. Among his numerous honors in an incredible career, in 2016 he received the Visionary History Award from the DC Historical Society, the National Newspaper Publishers Association Torch Award, and was listed # 1 in the Washington Business Journal’s Power 100 ratings and in Vanity Fair’s Hall of Fame.