NAAM Annual conference

NAAM Annual Conference –

CALL FOR SESSION PROPOSALS

Beyond the Garage: Driving Automotive Museums Forward  

April 1-5, 2025 – Petersen Automotive Museum

The 2025 NAAM Annual Conference will be hosted by the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, California from April 1-5, 2025. Conference organizers are seeking session proposals in both lecture and interactive/roundtable formats.

The theme for the 2025 conference is Beyond the Garage: Driving Automotive Museums Forward. NAAM strongly believes that automobiles are a high-profile representation of humankind’s material culture offering an infinite array of interpretive possibilities. Despite this prominence, museums and cultural institutions struggle with how to collect and interpret automotive history. Our goal is to give automotive museums the means to properly showcase and document the automobile as a true cultural and artistic treasure, deserving the same recognition and prestige as other forms of art and material culture. By highlighting its value and significance, we aim to elevate the standing of automotive museums, making them more appreciated by visitors, donors, and the communities we serve. This effort also reflects our commitment to adopting professional standards and best practices, ensuring the future growth and success of our field.

We seek proposals that highlight success through the elevation of the automobile or  adaptation of professional standards leading to success for your institution(s). Topics may cover any area of museum science including interpretation, collections management, programming, education, fundraising and administration.

This year we are prioritizing the selection of panel discussions and interactive sessions to engage more voices across our growing organization. Case studies and lecture style programs will also be considered. We encourage you to submit a proposal for a session at the 2025 conference.

Proposals should be emailed to [email protected] by January 15th, 2025.

NAAM Annual Conference

Beyond the Garage: Driving Automotive Museums Forward  

April 1-5, 2025 – Petersen Automotive Museum

Join us for the 2025 NAAM Conference hosted by Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, California, April 1st through 5th, 2025. The conference theme will be Embracing Scholarship where topics pertinent to museum excellence and the scholarly study of the automobile will be discussed. Further details, including host hotels, suggested transportation options, schedule, and registration costs will be released in the coming weeks as they are finalized. 

Conference Preview: 

Automobiles are more than transportation. They are high profile representations of humankind’s material culture that offer an infinite array of interpretive possibilities and are as worthy of collecting, preserving, and interpreting as any other consequential category of artifact. Because they are fundamentally populist, automobiles have not always been considered worthy of scholarly study.

Although automobiles have been an integral part of our material culture for more than a century, professionals at many of the most prestigious museums and cultural institutions around the world are at a loss when it comes to deciding what vehicles to collect—or even if they should—let alone how to preserve and interpret them. Yet the importance of automobiles and their worthiness of scholarly study looms so great that UNESCO now counts select automobiles among its Heritage Objects.

Seizing its goal to promote academic and scholarly excellence in all aspects of automotive/automobile museum endeavor, the National Association of Automobile Museums is uniquely positioned to encourage member organizations to operate according to the most rigorous professional guidelines regardless of their current institutional standards even as they enhance public awareness of automobile museums as valuable cultural institutions with ambitions that transcend time.

Deadline to Register: TBA