Strategic Shifts
How Inclusive Are Museums?: Understanding White Spaces in Three Well-Known Museums
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David G. Embrick
This paper examines three internationally recognized museums – Art Institute of Chicago, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and Nacional Museo de Catalunya – as white sanctuaries, i.e., white institutional spaces within a racialized social system that serves to reassure whites of their dominant position in society. The aim of this paper is to highlight how these museums create and maintain white spaces within the greater context of being an institution for the general public, to better understand how museums can become more inclusive spaces. The empirical analysis of this study is based on collaborative ethnographic data collected over ten years and consists of hundreds of photos and hundreds of hours of participant observations and field notes. The data are analyzed using descriptive methods and content analyses. The findings highlight three specific racial mechanisms that speak to how white spaces are created, recreated and maintained within nationally and internationally elite museums: spatiality, the policing of space, and the management of access. Sociological research on how white spaces are maintained in racialized organizations is limited. This paper extends to museums’ institutional role in maintaining white supremacy, in order to better understand how such spaces can be made to be more inclusive in terms of content as well as patrons.
Green Deals: Climate Protection and Sustainability in German Art Museum and Exhibition Policy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Birgit Mersmann
Since the European Green Deal Year 2019, art museum and exhibition policy in Germany and parts of Europe has begun to realign itself with a green transformation agenda. In an open letter to the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (November 7, 2019), directors of leading German art museums called for Germany to make a more ambitious commitment to environmental protection to achieve the European climate policy goals and advocated a "Green New Deal" for museums and depots. The study discusses the significance of the European Green Deal for current and future art museum and exhibition policy in Germany: What goals, strategies and measures does it include? How is the action plan being implemented? Based on Garthe's theory of the sustainable museum (Garthe 2023), exemplary pilot projects on the way to a climate-neutral art museum are presented, including the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Bundeskunsthalle (Federal Art Hall) in Bonn. The focus of the analysis is on the interplay between internal sustainability, i.e. the optimization of museum operations in terms of climate protection and sustainability, and external sustainability, i.e. the eco-social impact of museums on visitors and society as a whole.
Indigenized Museums: Chumash and Cahuilla Indian-Run Museums in Central and Southern California
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sonja Salminiitty
Grass-root Indigenous community revitalization programs have long focused on sustainable environmental, social, cultural, economic, and linguistic rejuvenation. These community revitalization programs share many similarities with the goals outlined by SDGs. However, many cultural institutions have ignored these Indigenous led efforts for decades. Even museums that occupy traditional Indigenous homeland territories fail to initiate cultural exchanges between Native and non-Native audiences, promote wider learning of Indigenous history, acknowledge colonial resistance, or even recognize the continued existence of local bands in the region. However, since the 1960’s, Native American tribes in the United States have founded and built their own museums and cultural centers to aid their community revitalization efforts. Effectively, these institutions are the most 'Indigenized' or under the most influence by local Indigenous people or bands. In this paper I examine three museums: Chumash Indian Museum of Thousand Oaks, Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center at the Santa Ynez Reservation, and the Malki Museum on the Morongo Reservation in Banning. Using an autoethnographic approach, I consider how the museums themselves, as well as their associated programs and events, help strengthen relationships between both Native and non-Native audiences through various interpretation materials and displays. I also explore the theme of multilateralism as evidenced by the cultural exchanges and cooperation between federally recognized tribes, who in the United States have tribal sovereignty, and their associated museums. Lastly, I analyze how these multilateral efforts are also used to support non-federally recognized bands and their specific revitalization programs.
