Abstract
In recent years, US art museums have been subject to renewed and intensified critiques vis-à-vis their complicity with white supremacy, labor exploitation, and funding streams drawn from extractive industries or arms manufacturers. Increasingly central to such critiques are museum governance structures, most particularly the power and constitution of their boards. I begin with a genealogy of museum boards, which emerged from the charters of capitalist colonial ventures like the Dutch East India Company, as a means of revealing how the inequity and colonial plutocracy of museum structures is not a fluke but intentional and purposeful. From there, I examine a series of artist-lead projects that envision radically different forms of institutional governance. I focus particularly on Simone Leigh’s The Waiting Room (2016), presented at the New Museum in New York, and the work of Philadelphia-based collective Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) at documenta 15 (2022) in Kassels, Germany. Meditating on time and temporality, they propose Black political subjectivity and decolonial practices of revolution, performed through collective care and solidarity, as a blueprint for a new type of institution, grounded in its relationship to community. Unlike the model of centuries long stability—colonial charters translated to corporate governance practices and then to the not-for-profit sector—art museums’ boards proffer, Leigh and BQF marshal the temporariness of performance and the provisional nature of collective care as a political respite from the violent longevity of colonial forms made manifest through the museum, imagining new ways of forming and forging community.
Presenters
Gwyneth ShanksAssistant Professor, Performance, Theatre, & Dance, Colby College, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2023 Special Focus—Museum Transformations: Pathways to Community Engagement
KEYWORDS
Care, Museum governance, Community-based art collectives, Black Radical Traditions
