Critical Connections
Looking Beyond What We've Done Before:: Minding Potential Blind Spots in Diversifying U.S. Museums
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Antonio C. Cuyler
In 2015, the Mellon Foundation funded a diversity study in museums that revealed that 38% of people in the U.S. identify as Asian, Black, LatinX, or multi-racial. However, only 16% of people of color held art museum leadership positions. Similarly, staff and leadership at many art museums do not reflect other marginalized groups such as the differently abled, LGBQ individuals, trans people, and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds. In response, the Ford and Walton Family Foundations announced that they would fund the Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative with $6 million in 2017. While this investment in diversifying museums is commendable, it is not unlike previous diversity programs in the arts such as Americans for the Arts’ Diversity in Arts Leadership Internship, Getty’s Multicultural Undergraduate Internship Program, or the Cultural & Ethnic Arts Executive Leadership Program at the Institute for Ethical Leadership. In addition, although Cuyler (2015) determined that Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts’ Multicultural and Economic Diversity internships were effective at recruiting, developing, and retaining diverse individuals in Arts Management, a lack of systems thinking in approaches to diversifying museums may impede their ability to think holistically and explore additional solutions to fully addressing the enduring “diversity” problem. Therefore, this study explores the research question: beyond diversity programs that develop diverse professionals, what additional systems should funders and museums consider to enhance and inform their pursuit of diversity? This paper uses a systems thinking theoretical approach to examine museums’ diversity problem more holistically.
Museum Research: Museology's Blind Spot
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ólöf Gerður Sigfúsdóttir
As one of museums’ core activities, research holds an ambiguous status. And as a topic in new museology, it remains obscure and neglected. Museological discourse indicates conflicting views and antagonistic approaches to the topic, sometimes creating counterproductive division lines between research and other museum activities. Furthermore, museology predominantly approaches museum research from a traditional scientific viewpoint. At the same time, museum research holds a unique position in today’s knowledge economy not only by crossing the inherently different epistemic domains of culture and science, but also for the distinct museums-specific qualities it holds. This study illustrates museological approaches to museum research since its disciplinary reinvention in the early 90’s. It seeks to understand why research has been left behind in museology’s theory of museums, and points to useful models in other research fields as a means to escape the neglect.
Embodiment at the Edge of the Archive: Private Audience and Public Experience
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Seth Ellis
With the re-examination of the role of “public space” within an expanded, post-colonial idea of public cultural institutions, comes the dilemma of the continuing representation of the archives on which galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) institutions were founded—archives that form an important historical record, but that were themselves formed by colonialist imperatives. How can de-contextualised archival objects be re-embodied in experience, given the innate demands of archival practice? Most importantly, for whom are these objects re-embodied? This paper examines the Queensland Museum’s 2015 exhibition “This Is My Heritage” as a case study—the roles of art and audience, and the creation of affect in historical display. In this exhibition, Indigenous artists were given access to the Museum’s collected Indigenous materials, and asked to find one that “spoke” to them across time; the show itself consists of photos of the artists holding their chosen objects, along with the stories they tell about the moment of encountering the object. The “exhibition” thus exhibits not the objects themselves, to an abstract audience called the public, but the historical affect those objects engendered in a number of individuals—specifically, Indigenous persons, whose heritage is represented in the archive, but whose presence is often unacknowledged in the rhetorical structure of the museumgoing “public”. The role of primary audience of the archive is undertaken by these artists; the public is the secondary audience. The end result is a record of a transient moment of embodied experience, with objects that, as always, remain distant from the visitor.
ningina tunapri - to Give Knowledge and Understanding: Aboriginal Voice and Perspectives Reshaping the Colonial Construct of Museums
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Zoe Rimmer
The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) is one of the oldest museums in Australia with its founding collections established by the Royal Society of Tasmania, this first established outside of the United Kingdom. TMAG is undeniably a colonial archive and a site of conflict and trauma for the islands Aboriginal people. Both the museum and the Royal Society were not just benefactors of objects from the colonial frontier and dispossession but also the dealers in Aboriginal ancestral remains and cultural material. For over one and a half centuries the collection and curation of Tasmanian Aboriginal people and culture was heavily informed by ideologies of ‘primivity’ and ‘extinction’, both narratives used to justify colonisation. Weighed down by decades of these false narratives TMAG have, over the past twenty years, begun to redress past wrongs and slowly build better relationships with the Aboriginal community. The 2008 exhibition ‘ningina tunapri: To Give Knowledge and Understanding’, the first to be collaboratively curated and to include Aboriginal voice and perspective, challenged the former 160 years of TMAG’s interpretation of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. It also inspired several subsequent cultural projects and exhibitions that confront and reshape colonised spaces through a culmination of Aboriginal resistance, resilience, and cultural revitalisation. This paper discusses the development of these more inclusive museum practices that are underpinned by Aboriginal knowledges, anti-colonial methodologies, and self-determination that support the aspirations of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community.
