Date: Thursday, June 19, 2025 at 1:00 pm
Join the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums for a brief info session on our Annual Conference Awards: Katherine Coffey Award, Making an Impact Award, and Emerging Museum Professional Award. Learn how to submit a strong nomination and get your questions answered live. Nomination deadline: July 11, 2025. Registration for the info session is required. Register online.
The submission deadline is Friday, July 11. Submit a nomination.
The MAAM Awards Committee will review all nominations following the close of the Call for Award Nominations. Nominating parties will be notified of the committee’s decision by the end of August. Recipients will be announced publicly in September and recognized during the 2025 Annual Conference in Pittsburgh, PA, October 28-30, 2025.
Reprinted from the Museologist, No.125
Awards for outstanding service are too seldom given by organizations of the museum profession. It is true that occasionally persons in the field receive certificates of merit, plaques and sometimes, although very rarely, honorary degrees. As a rule, such awards when given are presented by chambers of commerce, service clubs, and once in a while, by colleagues and universities.
Unfortunately, however, our own profession has rarely regarded the contribution of its own notables.
Therefore, it was unusual that in 1972 the Board of Governors of the Northeast Museums Conference (now MAAM) agreed to solicit nominations from a broad area to recognize distinctive and worthy projects within the museums field. They also decided that a professional museum staff member should be cited for outstanding service to museology. The award took the name of the late Katherine Coffey (1900-1972), one of the outstanding museum leaders and administrators of the nation.
A graduate of Barnard College in the class of 1922, Coffey first joined the Newark Museum staff in 1923, left and returned in 1925 to remain on permanent basis until her retirement in 1968. She was in charge of all exhibitions and educational programs and directed an apprentice-training program from 1929 to 1942. During that period the course graduated 110 young people, many of whom became prominent in museums across the country. In 1949, Miss Coffey became the Newark Museum’s fourth director and served 19 years in that position. By the time she retired in 1968, she had devoted 43 years of service to the museum. Upon her retirement, the Newark Museum established the $100,000 Katherine Coffey Endowment Fund in her honor.
With this background of the honor as a basis it is more clearly evident why the action of the Conference was most appropriate when it conferred the first Katherine Coffey Award upon Hanna Toby Rose in 1972, who had just retired from the Brooklyn Museum.
Coffey Award Reception, 2018 MAAM Annual Meeting in Baltimore