How can the traditional, “canonical” art museum—reliant upon wealthy donors, chained to private money, and often staffed via privileged pipelines—change to better meet the needs of the community it resides in and the public it seeks to educate?
, and curators calling attention to colonialist and racist museum practices, art workers, critics, and museum-goers are calling for an overhaul of the very idea of the art museum itself. Those actions strike at the very paradox of art museums; though exhibitions might have a progressive point of view and artists themselves might be making radical statements, as institutions, museums often possess retrograde politics, beholden to traditional forms of influence and power.
People of color have always said that the narrators of the overarching ‘American Story’ are unreliable narrators. They’ve deliberately left parts out and deliberately left voices out. Part of this desire for celebrating what this country is, it’s about restorative justice and the history that we tell. You can’t do that without a reckoning of museums. Erasure is saying you don’t warrant an inquiry or even a look. You aren’t worth the time, effort, and the resources to acknowledge you.
, I think it was really shocking to people to watch a museum attack not just a curator, but a curator who did an immensely successful show and who was also a black woman. I think that that was just a very public spillover as to what happens when gatekeepers are not ready for change. We know theoretically that you have to allow expertise to come through and we also need voices that speak to that experience to come through, so those voices may be Latinx or Black or Native or Asian.
The French have it right in that they consider a curator to be an artist from working with another artist’s work. There’s something really beautiful about being able to take the energy and life’s work of another human being and make something from that that we haven’t seen before. I think that that transformative energy can really help transform society when it’s deployed correctly. I think museums have a responsibility to be better not just for society, but for the art.
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