Memory and Preservation
Power and Opportunity in the Global Shift to Community Engagement in Art Museums
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Johanna Taylor
The image of an art museum as an austere encyclopedic archive of fine art objects for audiences to observe is antiquated. Today museums are placing engagement and cooperation with audiences at the center of their mission, working to make programming directly relevant to the daily lives of neighboring communities. This connects community organizing to work established by social practice artists from Suzanne Lacy to Pedro Reyes who take art practices to the people to shift socio-political structures. This community engagement is place-based and operates outside of the confines of a typical museum setting, making public spaces from plazas to community centers the sites of cooperative art making and local social change. This paper uses the Queens Museum in New York City as the central case study. The Queens Museum’s community-driven programs are critical in surrounding Corona, a neighborhood exemplary for international diversity, rapidly changing demographics, and limited access to resources. The museum collaborates with residents to target local concerns from housing and sanitation to educational access and legal status. Additional global examples are referenced to suggest that emphasis on this place-based, community engaged programming is energizing museums worldwide.
EMI Music Canada Archive and the Preservation of Popular Music
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Annie Murray, H. Thomas Hickerson
In 2016, the University of Calgary began to acquire the EMI Music Canada Archive from Universal Music Canada. The archive consists of 5,500 boxes of archival material, including more than 2 million documents and photos and 40,000 audiovisual recordings in more than 40 media formats. It is remarkable that this complete corporate archive of a major record label is now available in a public research institution. With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Calgary will migrate and preserve 100% of the audio recordings in this archive. Digitization efforts often involve a process of selection and canonization; however, in the case of this archive, every audio recording will be migrated, digitized and preserved. In this paper, we will examine the importance and implications of preserving and making available the totality of a record label’s output for posterity, and we will describe methods by which preservation efforts of this nature can inform the study of popular culture and society.
