Glenn Perkins is a curator of community history at the Greensboro History Museum in North Carolina, US. He has been in this role since 2017, and in 2022 also took on the role of chair for ICOM’s city museums committee. He works to amplify community voices and explore how museum practice can promote democracy and dialogue.
Perkins was part of the team behind the 2020 rapid-response exhibition “Pieces of Now: Murals, Masks, Community Stories & Conversations”, an exhibition that was co-created with artists, protestors and business owners. This showcased street art created in solidarity with racial justice protests in Greensboro and the exhibition won an AAM MUSE Gold Award in Research & Innovation; a 2021 History in Progress Award and an Award of Excellence from the American Association of State & Local History (AASLH). Perkins’ colleague at Greensboro History Museum, exhibition curator Robert Harris, was also recognised on the blooloop 50 Museum Influencer list in 2021 for work on this project.
Since then, Perkins has written the Greensboro History Museum’s current exhibit, “NC Democracy: Eleven Elections” which looks at the state’s history of democracy and the fragile future of our current culture. He has also organised history bike tours exploring underrepresented parts of Greensboro’s history.
In 2020, he obtained a grant from the National Communications Association (NCA) Center for Communications, Community Collaboration and Change to create Democracy Tables, an experiment in community dialogue. This has brought together more than 300 participants to talk about issues important to Greensboro, from voting and housing to police, community & justice. Building on that, he helped the museum be selected as one of nine Smithsonian Affiliates nationwide to pilot the Fostering Critical Community Conversations collaboration with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience in 2022.
He has organised panels and presented on city museums, dialogue and democracy for national meetings of the AASLH, NCA, Smithsonian Affiliations, AAM, and, most recently, at the ICOM General Conference in Prague.