Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

How do you create connections in your collection between time, place, and gender when you work at an encyclopedic museum? In 2016, the Art Institute of Chicago received a grant to produce a short video series that visually explained critical analysis terms through the lens of artworks in our collection. The catch? We had to chose three works per video that were representative of our collection’s diversity through time, geography, medium, and maker. With over 300,000 works in our collection and only a handful of works allowed for selection, we needed to think strategically about the works we selected. This exploration runs through the criteria we determined to help pick artworks, the challenges in selecting works, and how we created unique connections across works that seemingly had nothing in common.