NAAM Annual conference

NAAM Annual Conference

Embracing Scholarship – 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