Culture Strike
Culture Strike

Author: Laura Raicovich

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1839760524

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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.

Museum Culture
Museum Culture

Author: Daniel J. Sherman

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780816619511

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Museums display much more than artifacts; Museum Culture makes us on a tour through the complex of ideas, values and symbols that pervade and shape the practice of exhibiting today. Bringing together a broad range of perspectives from history, art history, critical theory and sociology, the contributors to this new collection argue that museums have become a central institution and metaphor in contemporary society. Discussing exhibition histories and practice in Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, Israel and the United States, the authors explore the ways in which museums assign meaning to art through various kinds of exhibitions and display strategies, examining the political implications of these strategies and the forms of knowledge they invoke and construct. The collection also discusses alternative exhibition forms, the involvement of some museums with the more spectacular practices of mass media culture, and looks at how museums construct their public.

National Museum of African American History and Culture
National Museum of African American History and Culture

Author: Nat'l Museum African American Hist/Cult

Publisher: Smithsonian Institution

Published: 2016-09-27

Total Pages: 66

ISBN-13: 158834570X

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This souvenir book showcases some of the most influential and important treasures of the National Museum of African American History and Culture's collections. These include a hymn book owned by Harriet Tubman; ankle shackles used to restrain enslaved people on ships during the Middle Passage; a dress that Rosa Parks was making shortly before she was arrested; a vintage, open-cockpit Tuskegee Airmen trainer plane; Muhammad Ali's headgear; an 1835 Bill of Sale enslaving a young girl named Polly; and Chuck Berry's Cadillac. These objects tell us the full story of African American history, of triumphs and tragedies and highs and lows. This book, like the museum it represents, uses artifacts of African American history and culture as a lens into what it means to be an American.

Crossroads of Culture
Crossroads of Culture

Author: Chip Colwell

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2010-05-15

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1607320258

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The hectic front of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science hides an unseen back of the museum that is also bustling. Less than 1 percent of the museum's collections are on display at any given time, and the Department of Anthropology alone cares for more than 50,000 objects from every corner of the globe not normally available to the public. This lavishly illustrated book presents and celebrates the Denver Museum of Nature & Science's exceptional anthropology collections for the first time. The book presents 123 full-color images to highlight the museum's cultural treasures. Selected for their individual beauty, historic value, and cultural meaning, these objects connect different places, times, and people. From the mammoth hunters of the Plains to the first American pioneer settlers to the flourishing Hispanic and Asian diasporas in downtown Denver, the Rocky Mountain region has been home to a breathtaking array of cultures. Many objects tell this story of the Rocky Mountains' fascinating and complex past, whereas others serve to bring enigmatic corners of the globe to modern-day Denver. Crossroads of Culture serves as a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum's anthropology collections. All the royalties from this publication will benefit the collections of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science's Department of Anthropology.

Cataloguing Culture
Cataloguing Culture

Author: Hannah Turner

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2020-07-15

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0774863951

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How does material culture become data? Why does this matter, and for whom? As the cultures of Indigenous peoples in North America were mined for scientific knowledge, years of organizing, classifying, and cataloguing hardened into accepted categories, naming conventions, and tribal affiliations – much of it wrong. Cataloguing Culture examines how colonialism has operated through the technologies of museum bureaucracy: the ledger book, the card catalogue, and eventually the database. As Indigenous communities reclaim what is theirs, this timely work shines a light on the importance of documentation for access to and return of cultural heritage.

The Art of Being a World Culture Museum
The Art of Being a World Culture Museum

Author: Barbara Plankensteiner

Publisher:

Published: 2018-09-25

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9783735605122

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World Cultures and Ethnographic Museums are the museums of our time in Europe. They are in the spotlight in a changing society, confronted with public discourse about the legacies of colonialism and the challenges to live together in a society shaped by migration and globalization.The Art of Being a World Culture Museum sketches the variety and practices of these museums by giving a lively insight into the exhibition ambiances, working conditions and practices, the collections and the museum architecture.'We want a variety of stories, we want new questions, and we want questions that are provocative and make people think [...] Collections have values and purposes today that supersede the reasons for, and contexts of, their formation.' -- Nicholas Thomas (Director, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Cambridge)The book contains excerpts of interviews with museum directors and beautiful photographs capturing the sites, displays, work environments and dynamics of 10 ethnography museums.The museums in focus include: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge (England), National Museums of World Culture, Stockholm/Gothenberg (Sweden), and Weltmuseum Wien, Vienna (Austria).Published in the frame of SWICH - Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage. Ethnography, Museums World Culture and New Citizenship in Europe.

The Brutish Museums
The Brutish Museums

Author: Dan Hicks

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781786806833

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Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objectsare all stolen. Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of brass plaques and carved ivory tusks depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of BeninCity, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections. The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.

Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture
Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture

Author: Christie Brown

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-06-17

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1317160878

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This groundbreaking book is the first to provide a critical overview of the relationship between contemporary ceramics and curatorial practice in museum culture. Ceramic objects form a major part of museum collections, with connections to anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines that engage with the cultural and social history of humankind. In recent years museums have provided the impetus for cutting-edge artistic practice, either as a response to particular collections, or as part of exhibitions. But the question of how museums have staged contemporary ceramics and how ceramic artists respond to museum collections has not been the subject of published research to date. This book examines how ceramic artists have, over the last decade, begun to animate museum collections in new ways, and reflects on the impact that these new initiatives have had in the broad context of visual culture. Ceramics in the Expanded Field is the culmination of a three-year AHRC funded project, and reflects its major findings. It brings together leading international voices in the field of ceramics, research undertaken throughout the project and papers delivered at the concluding conference. By examining the benefits and constraints of interventions and the dialogue between ceramics and museological practice, this book will bring focus to an area of museology that has not yet been theorized, and will contribute to policy debates and art practice.

Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture
Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture

Author: Christie Brown

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-06-17

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 131716086X

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This groundbreaking book is the first to provide a critical overview of the relationship between contemporary ceramics and curatorial practice in museum culture. Ceramic objects form a major part of museum collections, with connections to anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines that engage with the cultural and social history of humankind. In recent years museums have provided the impetus for cutting-edge artistic practice, either as a response to particular collections, or as part of exhibitions. But the question of how museums have staged contemporary ceramics and how ceramic artists respond to museum collections has not been the subject of published research to date. This book examines how ceramic artists have, over the last decade, begun to animate museum collections in new ways, and reflects on the impact that these new initiatives have had in the broad context of visual culture. Ceramics in the Expanded Field is the culmination of a three-year AHRC funded project, and reflects its major findings. It brings together leading international voices in the field of ceramics, research undertaken throughout the project and papers delivered at the concluding conference. By examining the benefits and constraints of interventions and the dialogue between ceramics and museological practice, this book will bring focus to an area of museology that has not yet been theorized, and will contribute to policy debates and art practice.

Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Author: Laurence Talairach

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-05-27

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 3030725278

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Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties explores the relationship between the zoological and palaeontological specimens brought back from around the world in the long nineteenth century—be they alive, stuffed or fossilised—and the development of children’s literature at this time. Children’s literature emerged as dizzying numbers of new species flooded into Britain with scientific expeditions, from giraffes and hippopotami to kangaroos, wombats, platypuses or sloths. As the book argues, late Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian children’s writers took part in the urge for mass education and presented the world and its curious creatures to children, often borrowing from their museum culture and its objects to map out that world. This original exploration illuminates how children’s literature dealt with the new ordering of the world, offering a unique viewpoint on the construction of science in the long nineteenth century.