October is a great time to talk about LGBTQ+ identity in museums! You may be thinking, “Isn’t Gay Pride in June?” and you’d be right, but October is also a key month for discussing more than just pride. Not only was National Coming Out Day held …
On Saturday, the National Law Enforcement Museum opened to the public in Judiciary Square in Washington, D.C. The Museum, which cost $103 million to construct, has a collection of 21,000 objects, and is intended to educate visitors about the experience of working in law enforcement. Featuring …
In honor of Indigenous Peoples Day, we’d like to share a roundup of articles about efforts to decolonize museums around the world.
With “Donors Force a Point at the Met that Never Should Have Had to be Made”, Nonprofit Quarterly looks at the shift in location for Native American art in a new exhibit opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this month. The shift was demanded by the donors backing the exhibit, and forced the Met to locate Native American art within the American Galleries, instead of their galleries for Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, where it is usually relegated, thus separating it from “America” conceptually.
“Sarah Cascone, writing for ArtNet, says, ‘In other countries, it is common to present indigenous art as part of the wider arc of a nation’s art history.’ Sylvia Yount, the curator in charge of the wing, told Brigit Katz at Smithsonian that US museums, including the Met, are ‘really behind the curve…when it comes to displaying indigenous artworks within the framework of America’s art history.'”
NPR’s “Where ‘Human Zoos’ Once Stood, A Belgium Museum Now Faces Its Colonial Past” looks at the history of The Royal Museum for Central Africa, where Belgian King Leopold once imprisoned more than 200 Congolese to be on display for Belgian crowds. The museum, and Belgium generally, has long resisted acknowledging its violent and colonial heritage, but is currently under the auspices of a Belgium director who is attempting to rectify some wrongs.
“‘They brought me here just to reform it,’ Gryseels says. ‘Obviously, our colonial past is something that we have to deal with.’ The museum finally closed for massive renovations in 2013, after years of planning. ‘We walk a tightrope,’ Gryseels says, between those who fear this transformation won’t go far enough and others who fear it will go too far.”
In “Decolonizing the Museum Mind”, a guest post for the American Alliance of Museums’ Center for the Future of Museums blog, Frank Howarth, former director of the Australian Museum discusses the value of “welcome to country” practices that center traditional aboriginal owners of land and encourages European and US museums to embrace the idea and the values centered.
“A bit later I went to the then Getty Museum Leadership Program in 2010, with my New Zealand and Australian colleagues expecting to be welcomed to the Native American country on which the Getty Museum is situated (a comparable program in Australia or New Zealand would have a significant and very meaningful welcome to country by the traditional owners). We were surprised and disappointed that not only was there no acknowledgement of Native American place, there was negligible mention of anything Native American within the whole course. Nor was there any discussion around contemporary issues in museums and collections of the materials of first peoples.”
Happy October! Here’s the jobs roundup for the week of October 1st: Northeast Native History Educators and other positions [Plimoth Plantation- Plymouth, MA] Assistant Museum Preparator [Currier Museum of Art- Manchester, NH] Director of Collections and Exhibitions [The Olana Partnership- Hudson, NY] Visitor Services Manager …
Humans have always been interested in unusual, curious, and odd things. For this reason unusual collections, both personal and in museums, exist throughout the world. This interest in collecting the unusual and interesting can be traced back to the cabinets of curiosity popular in 16th …
Spiraling ramp ways, dizzying spatial effects, metal beams that emulate a flapping wingspan, and multimillion-dollar converted industrial buildings: these are just some of the many characteristics we find in the recent cultural phenomenon known as the “spectacularization” of museums. From Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, art museums have quickly become places not just containing great art, but works of art in themselves. Yet again, another museum architectural wonder is set to open next week- the Glenstone Museum, in Potomac, Maryland. With a hefty renovation price tag of $200 million, the new museum design features a network of glass-enclosed passageways surrounding an 18,000 square foot water court. Although aesthetically intriguing, does this flamboyant architecture detriment the art viewing experience?
From the mid-twentieth century onward, in part as a result of Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, there has been a shift from the Neoclassical-type museum design to more open, airy, and dynamic building projects. This approach is global; from I.M Pei’s construction of the glass pyramids at the Musée du Louvre, to Thomas Heatherwick’s conversion of a grains silo into the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, there has been an increased use of “blockbuster” museum building types. Not only do these facilities boost attendance, revenue, and local economies, they also act as a catalyst for greater interest in art.
In 2016, for instance, SFMOMA received a $305 million-dollar facelift from Snøhetta, a Norwegian design and branding firm. Two floors of the seven-story building are now free and accessible to the public. With daily free public tours, the space encourages anyone to visit and learn. The multitude of seating arrangements in these spaces also invites visitors to sit down, relax, and digest the art surrounding them. Similarly, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles – another renovated contemporary art museum – offers free tours that facilitate engaging conversation about both the art and architecture that are available to the public on a weekly basis.
According to the Glenstone Museum’s website, “architecture is as essential as artwork and landscape, providing a minimal design to complement the collection and visitor experience.” Because so many museums that undergo these extreme updates ensure that their changes will positively serve the local population, instead of only capitalizing on tourists, I find that overall dramatic architecture types are inherently good, and that visitors are just as eager to discover the art inside as they are to experience the architecture itself. Similarly, the couple who is responsible for funding Glenstone has recently shared that one of the reasons why they decided to expand was to bring in more local school groups, “where arts education is at risk.” While it may be true that some visitors are more interested in the architecture than the art that lies within, I argue that these waves of dramatic architecture construction and conversion actually promote serious inquiry, encourage critique, and invite conversation.