The Changing Museum

"By examining the ways in which museums involve refugees and asylum seekers, Changes in Museum Practice: New Media, Refugees and Participation explores the opportunities around new media. Leading artists, curators, and academics come together to outline different degrees of participation by audiences and communities and explore a range of topics from video games to theatre, from photography to participatory video and digital storytelling. Case studies are used throughout to highlight the unique ways that various approaches to inclusion and participation can be used successfully." --Book Jacket.

A leading activist museum director explains why museums are at the center of a political storm In an age of protest, cultural institutions have come under fire. Protestors have mobilized against sources of museum funding, as happened at the Metropolitan Museum, and against board appointments, forcing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders to resign at the Whitney. That is to say nothing of demonstrations against exhibitions and artworks. Protests have roiled institutions across the world, from the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim to the Akron Art Museum. A popular expectation has grown that galleries and museums should work for social change. As Director of the Queens Museum, Laura Raicovich helped turn that New York muni- cipal institution into a public commons for art and activism, organizing high-powered exhibitions that doubled as political protests. Then in January 2018, she resigned, after a dispute with the Queens Museum board and city officials. This public controversy followed the museum’s responses to Donald Trump’s election, including her objections to the Israeli government using the museum for an event featuring Vice President Mike Pence. In this lucid and accessible book, Raicovich examines some of the key museum flashpoints and provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding conservative, capitalist values. And she suggests ways museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.

Capturing the richness of the museum studies discipline, Museum Revolutions is the ideal text for museum studies courses, providing a wide range of interlinked themes and the latest thought and research from experts in the field.

Museums and Social Change explores the ways museums can work in collaboration with marginalised groups to work for social change and, in so doing, rethink the museum. Drawing on the first-hand experiences of museum practitioners and their partners around the world, the volume demonstrates the impact of a shared commitment to collaborative, reflective practice. Including analytical discussion from practitioners in their collegial work with women, the homeless, survivors of institutionalised child abuse and people with disabilities, the book draws attention to the significant contributions of small, specialist museums in bringing about social change. It is here, the book argues, that the new museum emerges: when museum practitioners see themselves as partners, working with others to lead social change, this is where museums can play a distinct and important role. Emerging in response to ongoing calls for museums to be more inclusive and participate in meaningful engagement, Museums and Social Change will be essential reading for academics and students working in museum and gallery studies, librarianship, archives, heritage studies and arts management. It will also be of great interest to those working in history and cultural studies, as well as museum practitioners and social activists around the world.

As museums worldwide shuttered in 2020 because of the coronavirus, New York-based cultural strategist András Szántó conducted a series of interviews with an international group of museum leaders. In a moment when economic, political, and cultural shifts are signaling the start of a new era, the directors speak candidly about the historical limitations and untapped potential of art museums. Each of the twenty-eight conversations in this book explores a particular topic of relevance to art institutions today and tomorrow. What emerges from the series of in-depth conversations is a composite portrait of a generation of museum leaders working to make institutions more open, democratic, inclusive, experimental and experiential, technologically savvy, culturally polyphonic, attuned to the needs of their visitors and communities, and concerned with addressing the defining issues of the societies around them. The dialogues offer glimpses of how museums around the globe are undergoing an accelerated phase of reappraisal and reinvention. Conversation Partners: Marion Ackermann, Cecilia Alemani, Anton Belov, Meriem Berrada, Daniel Birnbaum, Thomas P. Campbell, Tania Coen-Uzzielli, Rhana Devenport, María Mercedes González, Max Hollein, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Mami Kataoka, Brian Kennedy, Koyo Kouoh, Sonia Lawson, Adam Levine, Victoria Noorthoorn, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Anne Pasternak, Adriano Pedrosa, Suhanya Raffel, Axel Rüger, Katrina Sedgwick, Franklin Sirmans, Eugene Tan, Philip Tinari, Marc-Olivier Wahler, Marie-Cécile Zinsou

From Knowledge to Narrative shows that museum educators—professionals responsible for making collections intelligble to viewers—have become central figures in shaping exhibits. Challenging the traditional, scholarly presentation of objects, educators argue that, rather than transmitting knowledge, museums' displays should construct narratives that are determined as much by what is meaningful to visitors as by what curators intend. Lisa C. Roberts discusses museum education in relation to entertainment, as a tool of empowerment, as a shaper of experience, and as an ethical responsibility. The book argues for an expanded role for museum education based less on explaining objects than on interpreting narratives.

Reinventing the Museum presents iconic essays from the 20th century and the latest thinking of the 21st century on ideology, public engagement, and new frameworks. Its 44 seminal articles and selected bibliography guide students through nearly a century of museum thought and theory.

Using the example of New Walk Museum, Leicester, and its collections, the complexity, multi-causality, and reasons for change in museums are examined and explained. The 170 years history of New Walk provides an original basis and innovative approach to be adopted towards explaining museum change. The book makes use of original interview and archive material to examine how and why social, economic, political, and professional developments affected the work that was undertaken in New Walk. The time-span covered is much longer than is normal for a book on museum history and is longer than for almost all the national museums in the UK, with this allowing for a nuanced understanding of the causes and consequences of museum change over time. The problems and possibilities of undertaking museum history research are also discussed. Detailed examination of the ways in which a variety of societal developments fed into museum change is a key feature of the book. The book is aimed at all those with an interest in understanding how and why change affects museum practice and will be of interest to museum professionals, academics, and students in museum studies, history, politics, and sociology as well to the general museum visitor who would like to discover more about the institutions that they visit.