Museum Hours November 2022
The museum was open to the public Tuesday through Friday from 10AM – 4PM and on weekends from 10AM – 5PM. The museum was closed to the public on Mondays. The museum was closed Nov 23 & 24 for Thanksgiving. Please note the museum was opened on Friday Nov. 25 hosting nearly 150 people. Masking is optional as of November 18, 2022.
Attendance
In November 2022 the Beneski Museum staff facilitated 15 onsite group visits, working directly with 288 people and one virtual visit of 84 for a total of 372 facilitated visits. Casual visitors accounted for 2,356 people. Groups combined with casual visitors totaled 2,728 people. In addition, the museum staff hosted 898 people that were part of campus admission tours. The November foot traffic in the museum was 3,626 people (Foot traffic Nov 2019 was 3,100). The total number of visitors (w/o admission tours) since opening as of Nov 30, 2022 is 320,650.
Beneski Museum Scheduled Group Visits
PK12
- CES K12 Teacher Training 1 Session 14 People Guided
- The Berkshire School 1 Session 14 People Guided
- Lighthouse School Holyoke 1 Session 13 People Guided
- JFK Middle School TEAM 1 Session 84 People Virtual
- PK 12 Totals 4 Sessions 125 People
College/University
- Family Weekend Tour (Bones and Stones Tour) 1 Session 60 People Guided
- Hampshire College Sculpture Class 1 Session 16 People Guided
- Amherst College English (Emily Dickson) W/Fiona 1 Session 18 People Guided
- Smith College – Museums Class “On Display” 1 Session 18 People Guided
- UMASS Animal Origins Class 1 Session 10 People Guided
- College/University Totals 4 Sessions 122 People
Community
- Suruchi Thapar-Björkert (Bones and Stones Tour) 1 Session 10 People Guided
- A Progressive Museum Crawl NEMA W/Hayley 1 Session 30 People Guided
- Identify It Day w/Hayley-Margery-Stan-Rachel 1 Session 75 People Guided
- Forest Explorers – Homeschool 1 Session 10 People Guided
- Community Totals 4 Sessions 125 People
Bassett Planetarium Scheduled Programs. (Bassett is currently closed for renovation)
Wilder Observatory. (Wilder is currently closed for renovation)
Student Support Services
- Fall 2022 Docents
- Jay Baldwin ‘25 Dalya Ackerman ‘23 Adela Thompson Page ‘26
- Ben Clark-Eden ‘25 Ellie Kerns ‘24 James Knowlton ‘25
- Catherine Charnoky ‘24 Lexi Olson ‘25 Pierre Venne ‘24
- Yasmin Hamilton ‘24 Ariana Ravitch ‘24 Alexia Lapadat ‘26
- Connor Farquhar ‘26 Tracy Huang ’23 Fiona Anstey ‘24
- Taku Mhuru ‘24 Macie Kilgore ‘23 Breanda Gomez ‘24
Faculty Support Services
- Center for Community Engagement
- Christina Santana, Associate Director of Community Learning, Center for Community Engagement is facilitating on behalf of Physics Professors Kate Follett and David Hanneke a local Astronomy Night in December. The museum staff will be hosting a few hours of portable planetarium programming for the event Friday evening December 9, 2022. Three student docents have offered to assist with the event.
- Assist Zoë Jacobs Feinstein, Associate Director, Center for Community Engagement working with Professor Sara Brenneis helped to facilitating a Spanish Museum Social Story student project. The project was under the direction of the museum. A final product including both and English and Spanish “Social Story” was completed just prior to the Thanksgiving break by Maya Foster ’23 the project lead. The stories are posted on the Beneski Museum webstie and are housed on the Beneski Museum YouTube channel.
College Support Services
- College President’s Reception with Town Leader (Wednesday Nov 9, 2022 8AM – 9:30AM). We hosted nearly 70 people for the Breakfast reception. Nearly 45 people from the town of Amherst were on hand. In addition, 25 folks from the Amherst College campus were available during the event. A brief 15-minute tour of the trackway collection was attended by around 20 Amherst town leaders.
- Family Weekend (Fri Nov 4-Sun Nov 6) – Extended hours and “Stones and Bones Tour”. A total of 654 people were hosted on Saturday Nov. 5, 2022. This was the largest single day attendance on record. I believe much of this increase over prior years can be attributed to the two-year gap in Family Weekend programming. For many 2nd and 3rd year students families have been unable to visit campus for a number of years. There was clearly an uptick. This year we saw 654 people on Saturday and in 2019, the last pre-covid year we hosted 399 people.
Community Outreach
- Identify It Day 2022
- Sunday November 6, 2022 – 389 People were hosted on the Nov. 6. Nearly 75 of those in attendance can be attributed to folks visiting with the sole intent of the Identify It Day Program. Experts in attendance included AC Geology Professor Rachel Barnard, UMass and Mount Holyoke Emeritus Professors Margery Coombs and Stan Racootin, Head of Collections Hayley Singleton and a number of Beneski Museum Student docents.
Other Outreach Support Services
- Bassett Planetarium
- The planetarium in Morgan Hall continues to be closed to the public. The facility is closed for future maintenance and repair associated with an Aug 2021 ceiling failure. Facilities has moved this work tentatively into the FY24 academic year.
- Wilder Observatory.
- The observatory is currently closed to the public awaiting maintenance.
- Ives Weather Station
- Functionality - all data uploading to our website and underground weather as of August 22, 2022. The next step shall be to have IT move all the existing weather data from the original 20+ year old server to a new system. A service request was sent to IT in early November 22 and Andy Anderson was noted as the person who will facilitate the weather station upgrade.
Respectfully Fred Venne
@amherst.edu
