Diverse Approaches
Culture Pals: Building Bridges between Young People with and without Disabilities through Culture
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Odette Peterink
The Plantin-Moretus Museum has always been a meeting point for very different people. We continue this tradition with the Culture Pals project. During one school year sixteen-year-olds from a college meet up with pupils from a school for mentally (and sometimes physically) disabled pupils. They see each other about seven times in or around the museum. The students are duos during the project. Both pupils learn from each other. Teachers, parents, and museum staff participate as well. All participants change and grow through the project. We try to expand the project and keep it made-to-measure at the same time. This ‘format’ can be used by other museums.
Merchandise and Museological Objects: The Souza Lima Collection of Asian Ivories
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rafael Bezerra
This paper is based on ongoing post-doctoral research that has been describing and analyzing the different systems value of the Souza Lima collection belonging to the Museu Histórico Nacional (MHN). It is a collection of Catholic ivory sculptures made in the Portuguese Possessions in Asia. It consists in 572 Christian images made in Goa, Ceylon, Philippines, and China. A collection of this size and uniqueness allows us to develop a series of historical, cultural, and ethical questions that can be enhanced by a research that seeks to analyze these objects as merchandise and as museological objects. We have been describing: 1) the different contexts of production and circulation of these sculptures as merchandises linked to the slave trade and the Carreira das Índias; 2) Its insertion in the market of antiquities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period in which large collections of Eastern Lusitanian or Hispanic ivories were built; 3) the process of musealization, cataloging and exhibition of the Souza Lima Collection, meaning the ethical issues involving the exhibition of objects like these that are linked to the slave market and the European Colonialism.
Museums as Meaning: How a University Art Museum Provides Twenty-first Century Skills for Diverse Youth through the Arts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lisa Abia-Smith, Keith Tinsley
As a university art museum, it is our mission to provide engagement and research opportunities for all our students. Through a series of workshops, curriculum (STEAM, VTS, and interpretive writing), mentorship programs which offer paid internships that support racialized and marginalized students, and a unique study abroad program to France and Senegal, the JSMA at UO provides access to underserved K-12 and university students. The museum's endeavors reach beyond the academic and also serve as a space for healing as well as a place for processing trauma and stress. In some cases, the museum's programs have served as an intervention for gang-affiliated youth and integrates our university students as mentors.
