Featured The Social and the Sacred View Digital Media

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Jose Galvan Mora  

Through questions of community, place, identity, and belonging, this paper proposes a work-in-progress approach to representing religious identity through curatorial and collection work at the Chicago History Museum (CHM). Chicago is a city embedded with spiritual and sacred legacies, from Indigenous communities to the city’s first built places of the worship; from the complex legacies of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to hosting the contemporaneous first interfaith gathering of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Centuries of migration have shaped and reshaped Chicago as different communities come to create a spiritual home. Questions this study explores include: How do we show adequate care in daily operations/collection work with sacred and spiritual objects? How do we best partner with communities in discussing and describing belief through lived experiences in a museum setting? Through a decolonized lens, how might we be able to centralize shared authority? How might both tangible and intangible elements of religious identity be activated within and beyond the walls of the museum? How can the museum activate its reach on social media to share religiously diverse narratives and stories? We use the Chicago History Museum's ongoing collaboration between its curatorial and communication departments which focuses on centering sacred spaces and artifacts to activate ongoing internal efforts to address collections and representation in preparation for broader community engagements as a case study.