Centering Community
Featured The Fallout of the Pandora Papers: How Museums Are Responding and How to Handle Future Tainted Wealth and Art in the Market View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katie Prinkey
In 2021 the Pandora Papers were released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, revealing a global network of secret financial dealings by wealthy individuals and world leaders who took advantage of shell companies, off shore accounts, and tax havens. Although the data leak was shocking, the Pandora Papers sent waves through the museum world, revealing a darker side to art dealers, wealth, and museums.The art and museum world has latched on to one major player; Douglas A.J. Latchford (1931-2020). Latchford was the pre-eminent collector and dealer of Cambodian antiquities. Prior to the Pandora Papers Latchford was under investigation for forging documents and dealing in looted art/artifacts. With the release of the Pandora Papers museums have had to take the brunt of the criticism surrounding the data regarding Latchford’s shell companies and off shore accounts. Museum responses have been lukewarm but are important and will set precedence for museum ethics, art dealers, collectors, and what happens when dealers/donors of objects lose their reputation. The response to the Pandora Papers from museums is an opportunity to restructure relationships between the market and the public museum. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) has guidelines regarding provenance and monetary donations, but there lacks clear procedure on a situation such as Latchford and the Pandora Papers. I focus my response on three museums; the Met, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Denver Art Museum and exam current policy and scholarship regarding tainted monetary donations and provenance guidelines, relying on ICOM codes.
Citizen Managed Museum Volunteer Program in Japan: Case Study of the Sayamaike Museum in Osak View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yoshiko Ishihara
In Japan the number of museums with a formal volunteer program increased from 13.9% in 1997 to 31.7% in 2019. This significant increase can be largely seen as a response to the government’s advocacy of museum volunteerism as an instrument for adult education and lifelong learning. Volunteerism at public museums gained policy prominence in the mid-1980s when the education ministry recognized its potential to strengthen community relationships and increase visitorship. As the Japanese society continued to age, public museums, designated by law as social education facilities in Japan, have been increasingly expected to serve as places for lifelong learning and museum volunteerism is considered to be one of its forms. Much of the existing literature on museum volunteerism focuses on how programs are formalized or strengthened in order to make them useful to the museums, and little was researched on attempts to create opportunities for them to provide more than auxiliary services. The present research examines the case of the Osaka Sayamaike Museum in Japan with a view to shedding light on the characteristics of an independently managed museum volunteer program. The museum exhibits artifacts in relation to the Japan’s oldest irrigation reservoir, and its management includes representatives of a local community organization, which took over the responsibility of its volunteer program in 2008. More specifically, the research compares volunteer activities under two management modalities – one directly under the museum and the other by the community group – and analyzes key factors that differentiate them.
Bioma - We Are Community: Art, Environment, and Mental Disability in Urban Areas View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Silvia Pireddu
The paper describes a joint project developed by an experimental art centre, PAV, and the University of Turin, Italy, and discusses the inclusion of marginalised communities in urban areas. I present the realisation of a bottom-up approach to community engagement and show how co-creation can be meaningful to individuals ‘in need’. PAV is a park museum located in a former industrial area which aims to preserve industrial memories while regenerating space through landscape art. The project involves young people with mental disabilities attending sensory experience workshops to implement their cognitive abilities. The participants take part in a bio-art performance called BIOMA. The performance/workshop takes place during multiple sessions and allows them to understand the museum space and construe the memories of the industrial site. Art, images, experiences, nature and words blend into self-made exhibits. The participants develop their sense of community by exploring unconventional ways to communicate heritage. The project implements collaboration among institutions to support local communities in a suburb facing economic decline, ageing and deindustrialisation but at the same time experiencing a quick green renewal. The museum, in particular, explores forms of networking with ‘marginal’ citizens and how to respond to psychic frailty conditions. The project enhances interdisciplinarity and promotes academic research in unconventional settings.
Community Curators : Advocacy in the Public Art of New Orleans View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarah Hirsch
This paper focuses on community art projects that underscore forgotten narratives and identities integral to the city of New Orleans. Public art in the city takes many formations, including that of street art, murals and graffiti, embedded into the city’s landscape, on its walls, street corners, and houses. For instance, in 2021 when the pandemic put Mardi Gras parades to a halt, residents decided to turn their houses into stationary “house floats.” Houses became the palette for innate sculptures and other forms of large-scale artwork. Similarly, the People for Public Art, a community funded art imitative inspired by the house floats has transformed a home in the 7th Ward into a permanent installation, “The New Orleans Queens of Sound & Soul” showcasing 6-foot mural portraits of local women musicians. Through the lens of rhetoric and writing studies, and applying a visual-material rhetorical approach, I analyze how the public art collectives of the Backstreet Cultural Museum, the House of Dance and Feathers, and People for Public Art, articulate different histories and traditions by taking art out of its institutional boundaries into a space where it is community curated. Because the art becomes part of the neighborhood’s makeup, attached to and encompassed within it, the notion of place invokes the art with a visual materiality that is immersive and tactile in its experience. A viewer does not only experience the art, but the history of the neighborhood that informs and inspires the art that adorn its walls.
Accessibility and Inclusion in the Art Museums of the Landscape of Light: Difficulties and Perspectives View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amaya Matesanz Muñoz
UNESCO recognized the World Heritage Site Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro, a Landscape of Arts and Sciences, in Madrid (Spain), also known as Landscape of Light, on July 25, 2021. This Cultural Landscape, shaped by man throughout history and with exceptional value, concentrates on cultural and artistic spaces highly recognized nationally and internationally, like the Prado Museum. Along the Landscape of Light with this museum coexist the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum, the Reina Sofia Museum, and the Museum of Decorative Arts, all national and art museums. Coinciding with the change in the definition of the museum by ICOM in 2022, which explicitly includes accessibility and inclusion in its text, this paper presents the conclusions of the interviews conducted with these four institutions. These interviews aimed to learn about their perception of themselves about accessibility and inclusion, their difficulties in achieving them, and their future perspectives on this issue. Thanks to the MAXQDA software, it is possible to translate qualitative data into quantitative data, going from particular answers of each museum to generalizable results.
