June at the BMI
Check It Out!
Slow Flow Yoga

Take some time for self-care in this gentle yoga class led by Baltimore yogi and photographer E. Brady Robinson.

Date: Monday, June 8
Time: 8:00-9:00 PM
Visit the BMI from Home!

Keep kids of all ages engaged during this time at home with these FREE activities designed and collected by the education staff at the Baltimore Museum of Industry.

Check back regularly for new activities!
BMI Events: Virtual Tour Now Available!

While the museum is closed temporarily to support Maryland’s effort to contain the spread of COVID-19 you can still see the museum spaces with our virtual tour!
Photo courtesy of Erick Ferris
BMI City Kits
An estimated one quarter of all children in Baltimore City do not have reliable internet access, making online learning difficult. To help bridge the digital divide, the BMI is launching City Kits, boxed activities for school children based on the learning they would typically experience while on field trips to the museum. The kits are inspired by the BMI’s award-winning Kids’ Cannery program, an immersive experience for grades 3-8. 

The City Kits are aligned with the state social studies curriculum. The activities inspire students to think about the work involved in the process of preparing, preserving, and providing food to communities.The kit is complete with multiple lesson and activity packets, components to make a cardboard can, crayons, and dice for a game activity. Instructions have been translated into Spanish for schools that serve Spanish-language communities.
The BMI education staff partnered with Baltimore City Public Schools and Great Kids Farm to advise on the creation and distribution of the kits at the City food distribution sites. The guidance of these partners was key in making sure that the kit was aligned, accessible, and available to as many students as possible. The initial 2,000 kits were assembled by the museum’s education staff and were distributed free of charge to students in Baltimore City at meal distribution sites on Wednesday, June 3. Thanks to board members Jeff Cooper, CEO of Len The Plumber and Phil Tulkoff, CEO of Tulkoff Foods, for providing trucks and labor to load and distribute the kits. We are also grateful to the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore for providing funding for creation and distribution of the kits.

More than 30,000 school children visit the BMI each year on field trips to take tours and engage in hands-on learning about Baltimore’s industrial legacy. With school field trips suspended for the foreseeable future, the City Kit project is among several initiatives the museum is undertaking to provide home learning opportunities. 
Keeping Up With Collections
Our doors may be closed but the BMI is still at work! The BMI Collections department and their volunteers are working on various projects remotely. Digitizing the Helen Delich Bentley motion picture collection (with support from a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services) and dedicating time to data entry and organizing electronic files are just a few of the projects the department is working on as they are dedicated to enhancing our visitors online experience by making our collections more accessible.
The Collections department also welcomed their first virtual intern!

Meet Erica Hann

Erica Hann is an Art History Graduate from the College of William and Mary who is currently working on her M.A. in Museum Studies and a certificate in Digital Curation from Johns Hopkins University. Erica has been working with Curtis Durham, the BMI’s Assistant Registrar, on a data cleanup project migrating collection data in  PastPerfect,  a museum software application for archiving. This project is part of the museum's initiative to make our collections more accessible. With previous experience in fine art museums, Erica is excited to use her BMI internship to learn more about collections management as well as interact with other departments to have a more well-rounded museum experience.
From the BMI in Support of Black Lives Matter
The Cannery exhibit explores the roles that women, children, Blacks and immigrants held in the canning industry.   
History museums are intentionally designed to make sure the past is not forgotten, that stories are preserved for future generations. 

As a museum located in an 1860s oyster cannery, we know that our site was once complicit in systems of racial discrimination.  Black workers were relegated to the most dangerous and undesirable jobs, and were paid less.  This is a truth that still exists in industry today.    

The work we do at the BMI is designed to foster a dialog about equity, which we hope will change the world of work going forward. We realize every day how much work we as an institution have yet to do.  

We don’t have all the answers, but there are other organizations that can help provide clarity, guidance and assistance to those seeking to learn more, and get involved:  




Baltimore Museum of Industry | www.thebmi.org