Thirteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

I focus on the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, or MoRUS, a small, largely volunteer-run museum located in Manhattan’s East Village. The space examines the activist histories of reclaiming urban spaces on the Lower East Side through gardening and squatting. MoRUS is situated in the storefront of C-squat, one of the neighborhood’s last remaining squats. C-squat began in the late 1970s, as the city was rolling back services and protections for thousands of lower income denizens and communities of color who lived in Alphabet City, as well as parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx. C-squat came under renewed municipal scrutiny during the early 2000s; the building’s occupants successfully secured their building’s ownership, a feat achieved by leveraging the protections guaranteed by a 501(c)(3) non-profit institution and transforming the building into a museum. By historicizing MoRUS’s founding in 2012, I examine how the legal and federal recognitions associated with the category of the museum were strategically instrumentalized against themselves to safeguard a historic example of anarchic, urban occupation. While MoRUS’s exhibitions explore how economic, class, and racialized structures shape urban landscapes, the museum’s most radical contribution to Museum Studies is not its content. Rather, it is its performative appropriation of the category of museum as such. Such a re-working of whom museums should serve, suggests a means of imagining one blueprint for a more inclusive museum: i.e., one that rejects colonial histories, imperialist presents, and dynamics of power embedded within display practices, funding structures, and municipal oversight.