1st Edition
Institutional Change for Museums A Practical Guide to Creating Polyvocal Spaces
Institutional Change for Museums: A Practical Guide to Creating Polyvocal Spaces demonstrates how museums can enact institutional change by implementing systematic and structural approaches to anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-elitist practices.
This practical guide brings together museum and heritage experts, artists, organizers, and cultural workers to present thoughtful, polyvocal critiques and solutions for conceptualizing museums of the future. These authors embrace hybrid identities, complicate concepts of nationalism, straddle disciplines, and extend the concept, function, and literal place and definition of the “museum.” The book shows that museums must cultivate practices that center people, interrogate colonial legacies, take new approaches to curatorial ethics and caring for objects, and imagine new strategies for asserting the relevance of museums, to create institutional change. This resource challenges traditional approaches to museology by offering scholarly research and case studies alongside personal narratives and speculative fiction.
Institutional Change for Museums will be an invaluable resource for museum professionals and cultural workers, including curators, educators, and researchers. It will also be beneficial to those studying or researching in Museum and Heritage Studies, Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, Visual Culture, Social Justice, and Postcolonial Studies.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
About the Cover
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Marianna Pegno and Kantara Souffrant
Part I: Interrogating and Redressing Colonial Legacies
Chapter 1 – Diasporic Notes on the Future and Death of Museums
Patricia Nguyễn
Chapter 2 – Framer Framed: Constituting, Instituting and the Making of a Radical Museum
Eric Otieno Sumba and Mahret Ifeoma Kupka
Chapter 3 – The Museum is a Portal
Ck Ledesma
Part II: Rethinking Structures and Operations
Chapter 4 –“I Just Want It to Feel Like Something Real”: What Museums Can Learn from Independent Black Feminist Curating
Ifeanyi Awachie
Chapter 5 – A Case Study From Chicago: The Challenges and Opportunities of Curatorial Diversity Initiatives
Felicia Mings
Chapter 6 – A Restorative Approach to History: Prototyping New Practices at a National Museum
Dani Merriman, Tsione Wolde-Michael, and Jasmine Reid
Chapter 7 – Mildura Migration Stories: Scenographic Exhibition Design Strategies for the Staging of Co-Authored Community Narratives
Sven Mehzoud
Chapter 8 – Good Morning Museum Workers: A Satire of Museums of Future Pasts
Grace Needlman and Jeremy Kreusch
Part III: Agency and Ethics of Care
Chapter 9 – Foreign Exhibit: a tale of theft and reclamation in fourteen parts
Laila Halaby
Chapter 10 – Uneven Terrain: Stewarding New Archaeological Collections
Elysia Poon
Chapter 11 – Spirits of the Jewel Case: Initiating An Ethics of Care for Africana Sacred Arts in the Museum World Kyrah Malika Daniels
Chapter 12 – Ethical Curating for the 21st Century: Curating Black and African Art Joseph L. Underwood
Chapter 13 – Sustainability and Sociality: Two Urgent Commitments in Today’s Museum Policies
Modesta Di Paola and Javier Arnaldo
Conclusion
Marianna Pegno and Kantara Souffrant
Contributing Author Biographies
Index
Biography
Marianna Pegno is the Director of Engagement and Inclusion at the Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block. In this role, Pegno focuses on building a culturally relevant, community-based institution through programs, exhibitions, and partnerships. In practice and research, she is committed to exploring the implications of collaboration and multivocal narratives in art museums. Pegno holds a PhD in Art and Visual Culture Education and an MA in art history from the University of Arizona as well as a BA from New York University. In 2018, her dissertation was awarded the Elliot Eisner Doctoral Research Award in Art Education from the National Art Education Association.
Kantara Souffrant is the inaugural Curator of Community Dialogue at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where she oversees art experiences rooted in vulnerability, feeling interconnected, and building sustainable community partnerships. Souffrant is a Haitian-American artist-scholar who brings her passion for community engagement, dialogue, and facilitation to her work as a performer, educator, and community member. She holds a PhD in performance studies from Northwestern University, with certificates in critical theory, African and diaspora studies, and teaching, an MA in performance studies from New York University and a BA from Oberlin College. Her scholarship examines visual and performance art in the Black Atlantic, Black feminist aesthetics, and museum pedagogy. She is the founder of Souffrant Creative Consulting, LLC a firm that leverages the power of dialogue, the arts, and the humanities to build authentic connections and facilitate individual and collective transformation.
“A remarkable compendium of insight into the relevance of museums as cultural institutions in the resistance to, and against, concentrated control over public imagination and life. This much-needed collection of case studies demonstrates the power of inter-connecting global narratives of polyvocal engagement.” ~ Manisha Sharma, PhD, The University of North Texas
“The constellation of views in this volume, echoes the professionals in the museum field whose voices demand to be heard and scholarship deserves to be acknowledged. Chapters are a testimony to inclusion as we seek to unlearn outdated, harmful ways of working and relearn practical ideas for reimagining systems" ~ Monica O. Montgomery MA, Professor, Consultant, Curator, Co-Founder of Museum Hue
