All tagged museums

Re-Engaging Islamic Materials and their Heritage Values

Re-Engaging Islamic Materials and their Heritage Values

Sara Ann Knutson
Peer Reviewed, Articles

Coins have long been important materials for examining values and exchange networks in the past. Housed today in museum collections around the world, Islamic coins are no exception. But Islamic coins are more than simply material traces of the past, they also hold important contemporary meanings that have been overlooked and undervalued by academics. In this peer-reviewed article, Sara Ann Knutson shares how she has begun to explore the possibilities for, and ethical commitment to, community involvement in the meanings and values that are constructed around museum-based materials. She discuss some results from her cultural heritage survey of people culturally connected to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and how stakeholder voices revealed the understated importance of museum-housed assemblages for cultural heritage and community values, including those that span across national borders, languages, and religious beliefs. This work envisions transformative approaches to collections and museum practice in which communities are recognized for their values regarding materials from the Islamic World’s vibrant past, rather than remaining the “recipients” of museum narratives and academic research.

White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle

White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle

Kajal Nisha Patel
Articles

Over the past decade, postural-yoga classes have grown to become “museum yoga” attracting new audiences to North American and Western European museums and galleries. The author argues that the museum yoga spectacle is a derivative trend that follows International Yoga Day as a virtue-signalling performance. These annual events are largely attended by a global cultic milieu of affluent white women, who organise themselves into a grand spectacle of mass participation. Through their involvement in the museum yoga spectacle, programming staff and participants are “spiritually bypassing”. As an alternative, the author moves towards examples of museum-yoga education that better engage learners.

Curating Ornament and Textile Exhibitions as Highwire Acts: On Guest Curator Negotiations with Lenders and Museum Director

Curating Ornament and Textile Exhibitions as Highwire Acts: On Guest Curator Negotiations with Lenders and Museum Director

Susan Rodgers
Articles

In studying museum exhibitions, there is value in looking at hidden negotiations (even combat)  among academic guest curators, museum directors, and collector/lenders. These often-veiled interactions occur as different ideological stances and positionalities come into contact and friction with each other regarding what is important in displaying material culture. In this essay, I provide a close-up view of such negotiations in the planning and implementation of three shows that I guest curated as an anthropologist (one at the Asia Society Gallery, two at Cantor Art Gallery at Holy Cross). All concerned indigenous arts from island Southeast Asia. Judicious compromises and consensus resulted in stronger exhibitions.

(Mostly) Indigenous Readings that Challenge Imposed Euro-Enlightenment [aka Colonial] Perspectives in Museums

Laura Phillips
Bibliographies

The Enlightenment era names an 18th-century European philosophical movement whereby reason or human intellect informed what was considered knowledge and understanding of the world. As collecting institutions, museums founded with these logics use processes of acquisition to collect items, objects, and specimens to understand the world, supposedly to move humanity forward in the name of progress. Mechanisms that (re)named and classified the world enabled Euro-Enlightenment minds to feel they (we) knew and understood the world, through this mastery of placing complex beings within predefined structures. This annotated bibliography presents resources for museum professionals to understand the errors of the past in our inherited present so we can move towards more equitable, decolonizing, and Indigenizing futures. 

2023 Spring Editorial: What Matters in Museums and Cultural Heritage?

2023 Spring Editorial: What Matters in Museums and Cultural Heritage?

Emily Levick and Urmila Mohan
Editorials

This issue turns to Museums as sites for heritage with new approaches to questions of decolonization, community engagement, and the display and interpretation of often sensitive media and narratives. Aspects discussed include ensuring the correct practices of care and conservation of sacred, “living” objects; furthering the decolonizing and Indigenizing efforts of museums; including contemporary Islamic communities in the interpretation and appreciation of ancient coins; and the joint efforts of curators and collectors to create fresh and stimulating exhibitions. In addition, this issue covers heritage-focused activism and iconoclasm.

Handling Textiles: Rebuilding Object Lives in Museums

Handling Textiles: Rebuilding Object Lives in Museums

Emily A. Levick
Articles

Textiles are imbued with the multifaceted and complex values, beliefs, and ideals of the cultures in which they were produced and consumed. They have been used as clothing, shelter, and ornament, and are often remade and repurposed throughout their ‘lives’, constantly acquiring new layers of meaning along the way. As such, they are ideal media for museums attempting to widen their audience reach and more effectively represent world history and culture. How can museums rebuild the stories and lives of textiles in exhibits? This essay explores the possibility of building connections between visitors and textiles through multisensory engagement and, in doing so, suggests the remaking of the museum experience.

Monument Lab Town Hall: Shaping the Past

Monument Lab Town Hall: Shaping the Past

Lillia McEnaney
Reviews

In October 2020, Monument Lab hosted their annual town hall, “Shaping the Past.” Through conversations between memory works, artists, and interdisciplinary scholars, “Shaping the Past” asked questions surrounding the future of monuments and monumentality, setting the stage for the future(s) of public space, artistic and curatorial activism, and community-building in the wake of 2020.

Gazing to Africa: A Conversation with Art and Ethnology at the Museum

Gazing to Africa: A Conversation with Art and Ethnology at the Museum

Alexandra Antohin
Articles

This short essay explores how museum displays have traditionally shaped static public knowledge about Africa and Africans. Impressions from the spectator’s experience of the exhibit Beyond Compare: Art from the Bode Museum will serve as a springboard to reimagine how art and ethnological collections can dismantle ideologies of cultural domination embedded in these items’ preservation and presentation to the public.

The Church-Museum: Context and (Dis)connection in Public Religion

The Church-Museum: Context and (Dis)connection in Public Religion

Alexandra Antohin
Articles

Museum-ification of churches in Ethiopia, Russia and the U.S. establishes active reference points for new forms of public engagement. Antohin draws upon her experience of these sites as well as contextualization theory to explore how religious media are included in the interpretative space of ‘church-museums’. She suggests that in Ethiopia, where tourism is still a new industry, multiple subjectivities and modes of interpretation may emerge through the display and reception of religious media in a public context.