The Toonseum in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. A place to explore the world of Comic Books

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Museum Studies, grade: 1,0, , language: English, abstract: This paper will show how the Toonseum interacts with its community in Pittsburgh. It will become clear that it uses a lot of different approaches in order to reach out to its surrounding community and to offer a beneficial and also entertaining educational program. Furthermore, it will be shown that, in order to interact in the best possible way, the Toonseum itself moves away from being a classical type of an art museum and transforms itself into a more hybrid version of museum that combines different cultural institutions in order to fulfill its mission in the best way. The Toonseum is part of the rich museum landscape in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is an independent art museum located in the Downtown of Pittsburgh, which is dedicated to the pop culture of comics and cartoons. Established in 2007 it is one of only a handful of museums which deal with comics and cartoons in the whole United States, together with the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York and the Schulz Museum. It is an independent non-profit organization that is mainly volunteer run. In comparison to other museums the Toonseum is of a smaller nature. Nevertheless on average there are 100 pieces exhibited all the time. The exhibitions rotate every month in order to provide a variety of content for visitors. At the beginning the Toonseum was designed to be a partner institution of the Pittsburgh Children´s museum before it became an independent institution and moved to Pittsburgh´s Cultural District in 2009. It was founded by Joe Woe, a cartoonist and storyteller who also worked for the Children´s museum and who provided a lot of the objects for the museum from his own private collection in the first months.