Museum exhibitions focusing on Native American history have long been curator controlled. However, a shift is occurring, giving Indigenous people a larger role in determining exhibition content. ...InDecolonizing Museums, Amy Lonetree examines the complexities of these new relationships with an eye toward exploring how museums can grapple with centuries of unresolved trauma as they tell the stories of Native peoples. She investigates how museums can honor an Indigenous worldview and way of knowing, challenge stereotypical representations, and speak the hard truths of colonization within exhibition spaces to address the persistent legacies of historical unresolved grief in Native communities.Lonetree focuses on the representation of Native Americans in exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Mille Lacs Indian Museum in Minnesota, and the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways in Michigan. Drawing on her experiences as an Indigenous scholar and museum professional, Lonetree analyzes exhibition texts and images, records of exhibition development, and interviews with staff members. She addresses historical and contemporary museum practices and charts possible paths for the future curation and presentation of Native lifeways.
This edited volume critically engages with contemporary scholarship on museums and their engagement with the communities they purport to serve and represent. Foregrounding new curatorial strategies, ...it addresses a significant gap in the available literature, exploring some of the complex issues arising from recent approaches to collaboration between museums and their communities. The book unpacks taken-for-granted notions such as scholarship, community, participation and collaboration, which can gloss over the complexity of identities and lead to tokenistic claims of inclusion by museums. Over sixteen chapters, well-respected authors from the US, Australia and Europe offer a timely critique to address what happens when museums put community-minded principles into practice, challenging readers to move beyond shallow notions of political correctness that ignore vital difference in this contested field. Contributors address a wide range of key issues, asking pertinent questions such as how museums negotiate the complexities of integrating collaboration when the target community is a living, fluid, changeable mass of people with their own agendas and agency. When is engagement real as opposed to symbolic, who benefits from and who drives initiatives? What particular challenges and benefits do artist collaborations bring? Recognising the multiple perspectives of community participants is one thing, but how can museums incorporate this successfully into exhibition practice? Students of museum and cultural studies, practitioners and everyone who cares about museums around the world will find this volume essential reading.
The influence of digital media on the cultural heritage sector has been pervasive and profound. Today museums are reliant on new technology to manage their collections. They collect digital as well ...as material things. New media is embedded within their exhibition spaces. And their activity online is as important as their physical presence on site.
However, 'digital heritage' (as an area of practice and as a subject of study) does not exist in one single place. Its evidence base is complex, diverse and distributed, and its content is available through multiple channels, on varied media, in myriad locations, and different genres of writing.
It is this diaspora of material and practice that this Reader is intended to address. With over forty chapters (by some fifty authors and co-authors), from around the world, spanning over twenty years of museum practice and research, this volume acts as an aggregator drawing selectively from a notoriously distributed network of content. Divided into seven parts (on information, space, access, interpretation, objects, production and futures), the book presents a series of cross-sections through the body of digital heritage literature, each revealing how a different aspect of curatorship and museum provision has been informed, shaped or challenged by computing.
Museums in a Digital Age is a provocative and inspiring guide for any student or practitioner of digital heritage.
Museums are at a critical moment in their history. In order to ensure survival into the next century, museums and galleries must demonstrate their social relevance and use. This means developing ...their public service functions through becoming more knowledgeable about the needs of their visitors and more adept at providing enjoyable and worthwhile experiences.Museums and Their Visitors aims to help museums and galleries in this crucial task. It examines the ways in which museums need to develop their communicative functions and, with examples of case-studies, explains how to achieve best practice. The special needs of a number of target audiences including schools, families and people with disabilities are outlined and illustrated by examples of exhibition, education and marketing policies. The book looks in detail at the power of objects to inspire and stimulate and analyses the use of language in museums and galleries.This is the first book to be written to guide museum and gallery staff in the development of provision for their visitors. It will be of interest to students of museum, heritage and leisure and tourism studies, as well as to international museum professionals.
Museums may not seem at first glance to be engaged in social work. Yet, Lois H. Silverman brings together here relevant visitor studies, trends in international practice, and compelling examples that ...demonstrate how museums everywhere are using their unique resources to benefit human relationships and, ultimately, to repair the world. In this groundbreaking book, Silverman forges a framework of key social work perspectives to show how museums are evolving a needs-based approach to provide what promises to be universal social service. In partnership with social workers, social agencies, and clients, museums are helping people cope and even thrive in circumstances ranging from personal challenges to social injustices. The Social Work of Museums provides the first integrative survey of this emerging interdisciplinary practice and an essential foundation on which to build for the future.
The Social Work of Museums is not only a vital and visionary resource for museum training and practice in the 21 st century, but also an invaluable tool for social workers, creative arts therapists, and students seeking to broaden their horizons. It will inspire and empower policymakers, directors, clinicians, and evaluators alike to work together toward museums for the next age.
'Silverman provides an informative, readable, and entertaining addition to any museum studies library.' – Visitor Studies 'Timely and important ... so well researched and carefully argued that it is bound to become a classic reference for those who wish to maximize the public value of museums ... The Social Work of Museums is an invaluable resource – one that is well worth owning and returning to again and again ... Lois Silverman has written a brilliant book.' – Mary Ellen Munley, MEM & Associates, Museum Management and Curatorship
'A sympathetic call to action. Silverman artfully weaves together a number of seemingly disparate threads ... The resulting tapestry is a reader-friendly introduction to social work principles for museum professionals … which is simultaneously an introduction to museum studies for social workers. … This is a thought-provoking, inspiring book that many are sure to find is a useful tool for professional development, organizational change, teaching, research, and planning.' – Phaedra Livingstone, University of Oregon, USA, caa.reviews
1. In the Service of Society 2. Social Work Perspectives 3. From Body to Soul 4. Solve et Coagula 5. Treasures of Home 6. Birds in Flight 7. Toward the Next Age
International Perspectives on Museum Management is the first volume of the ICOM Museum Practice series. Exploring contemporary practices in the field of museum management, the book demonstrates how ...strategic vision and effective leadership can enable museums to fulfil their varied roles and empower staff to achieve their individual and collective objectives. Gathering together contributions that shed light on key aspects of running a museum in different parts of the world, the volume examines a wide range of topical issues from a management perspective. Chapters within the volume focus on governance and operations, communication and marketing, accessibility and community engagement, the decline in public funding, sustainability and risk management and planning a new museum or a renewal. As a whole, the book demonstrates that competent and creative museum management is vital to museums’ ability to survive and thrive in the face of decreased investment in culture and shifting expectations on the roles that museums should play within society. Containing insights from respected museum professionals around the world and focusing on topical issues, International Perspectives on Museum Management will be essential reading for museum practitioners working in all types and sizes of museum. The book will also be of great interest to students and academics who have an interest in museum management.
What is the future of curatorship? Is there a vision for an ideal model, a curatopia, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia? Or is there a plurality of approaches, amounting to a curatorial ...heterotopia? This pioneering volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of curatorship. It reviews the different models and approaches operating in museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world and discusses emerging concerns, challenges and opportunities. The collection explores the ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into more reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorship in the present, arguing that this is the most effective way for curatorial practice to remain meaningful. International in scope, the volume covers three regions: Europe, North America and the Pacific.What is the future of curatorship? Is there a vision for an ideal model, a curatopia, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia? Or is there a plurality of approaches, amounting to a curatorial heterotopia? This pioneering volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of curatorship. It reviews the different models and approaches operating in museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world and discusses emerging concerns, challenges and opportunities. The collection explores the ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into more reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorship in the present, arguing that this is the most effective way for curatorial practice to remain meaningful. International in scope, the volume covers three regions: Europe, North America and the Pacific.
During the Mao era, China's museums served an explicit and uniform propaganda function, underlining official Party history, eulogizing revolutionary heroes, and contributing to nation building and ...socialist construction. With the implementation of the post-Mao modernization program in the late 1970s and 1980s and the advent of globalization and market reforms in the 1990s, China underwent a radical social and economic transformation that has led to a vastly more heterogeneous culture and polity. Yet China is dominated by a single Leninist party that continues to rely heavily on its revolutionary heritage to generate political legitimacy. With its messages of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and class struggle, that heritage is increasingly at odds with Chinese society and with the state's own neoliberal ideology of rapid-paced development, glorification of the market, and entrepreneurship. In this ambiguous political environment, museums and their curators must negotiate between revolutionary ideology and new kinds of historical narratives that reflect and highlight a neoliberal present.InExhibiting the Past, Kirk Denton analyzes types of museums and exhibitionary spaces, from revolutionary history museums, military museums, and memorials to martyrs to museums dedicated to literature, ethnic minorities, and local history. He discusses red tourism-a state sponsored program developed in 2003 as a new form of patriotic education designed to make revolutionary history come alive-and urban planning exhibition halls, which project utopian visions of China's future that are rooted in new conceptions of the past. Denton's method is narratological in the sense that he analyzes the stories museums tell about the past and the political and ideological implications of those stories. Focusing on "official" exhibitionary culture rather than alternative or counter memory, Denton reinserts the state back into the discussion of postsocialist culture because of its centrality to that culture and to show that state discourse in China is neither monolithic nor unchanging. The book considers the variety of ways state museums are responding to the dramatic social, technological, and cultural changes China has experienced over the past three decades.
Design Objects and the Museum brings together leading design historians, curators, educators and archivists to consider the place of contemporary design objects within museums. Contributors draw on a ...wide range of 20th century and contemporary examples from international museums to consider how design objects have been curated and displayed within and beyond the museum. The book continues contemporary global debates on the ways in which museums of design engage and educate their public. Chapters are grouped into three thematic sections addressing The Canon and Design in the Museum; Positioning Design within and Beyond the Museum; and Interpretation and the Challenge of Design, with chapters exploring museological practice and issues, the roles people play in creating meaning, and the challenges contemporary design presents to interpretation and learning within the museum.
