Following three months of contract negotiations and protests over labor issues at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the MoMA Local 2110 Union reached an agreement this Friday for their new contract with the management of the institution. The five-year contract sets salary …
This week, the British Museum announced that it would return eight looted artifacts of antiquity to Iraq’s National Museum. These objects, including a 4,000 year old clay-fired cone inscribed in cuneiform, were illegally taken from the country following the US-led Iraq invasion in 2003. While thousands of priceless …
Here’s the weekly jobs roundup for the week of August 13th!
Northeast
Associate Curator of Education and Experience [Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA]
Museum Educator [USS Constitution Museum, Boston, MA]
Public Art Curator [Arlington Commission for Arts and Culture, Arlington, MA]
Development Assistant [JFK Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA]
Assistant Education Director [Museum Institute for Teaching Science, Quincy, MA]
Mid-Atlantic
Curatorial Research Assistant (American Art) [Cooper Hewitt, New York, NY]
Development Coordinator [American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, MD]
Assistant Manager, Membership [Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY]
Southeast
Collections Manager [Marco Island Historical Society, Marco Island, FL]
Collections Manager/Registrar [Appalachian State University, Boone, NC]
Assistant Registrar [The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, LA]
Midwest
Interpretations Coordinator [Mackinack State Historic Parks, Mackinaw City, MI]
Director, Education and Community Engagement [Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, IN]
Site Manager [Fulton Mansion State Historic Site, Rockport, TX]
Managing Archivist [Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX]
West
Development Manager [Pasadena Museum of History, Pasadena, CA]
Manager of Docent Programs [Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA]
Registrar [Center for Sacramento History, Sacramento, CA]
Curatorial Support Group Administration [Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA]
Director of Decolonizing Initiatives [San Diego Museum of Man, San Diego, CA]
Assistant Curator [Tucson Museum of Art, AZ]
Exhibit Projects Manager [California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, CA]
I recently had the pleasure of going on a tour of the New-York Historical Society‘s special exhibit on Citizenship, entirely curated and presented by Teen Leaders. The exhibit is located on Governor’s Island, a park in New York Harbor that hosts a variety of art …
Description: The Fitchburg Art Museum is seeking a Collection Management Intern for Fall 2018 (September 4 – December 20). The Intern will assist the Collection Manager in overseeing the care of FAM’s collection of over 5,500 works of art including sculpture, painting, prints, drawings, and …
The International African American Museum, a museum planned to trace African-American history in America from slavery to today, has hired a rapid response educator to help create exhibits in response to current events. Brenda Tindal had previously done this work at the Levine Museum in which she created an exhibit on modern race relations in the months after police brutality riots in 2016.
The choice to hire an educator focusing on rapid response and current events follows a new trend in museums. Whereas most new exhibitions take months, even years, of planning before coming to fruition, museums are consciously choosing to incorporate current issues and events to better serve their communities. This new trend has gone hand in hand with rapid response collecting. A practice in which museums begin collecting items from current events they deem important to our current society.
While this has been a growing trend for some time, our current political and social climate has accelerated the need for exhibits to give a voice to social issues. Just this month, the National Civil Rights Museum (NCRM) in Memphis opened an exhibit I AM A CHILD, to shed light on our current immigration crisis and the separation of children from their parents at the border. This exhibit was the result of a photoshoot by Paola Mendoza and Kisha Bari on the steps of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency in New York City. These photos, only taken one month prior to the exhibits opening, went viral. This led to NCRM to contact the pair via twitter about a rapid response installation at the museum. I AM A CHILD, speaks not just to a current human and civil rights crisis, but also to the power of social media to fight for social change.
While many museums are turning towards rapid response exhibits and installations to promote social awareness and change, the practice is also a necessary step to changing the narrative around museums. Museums for far too long have curated the dominant narrative of many cultures. It is time for us to step back and tell the story as it happens and embrace the fact that museums are biased.
Further Reading
National Civil Rights Museum harnesses social media for ‘rapid response installation’