Museums and communities
Subtitle: curators, collections and collaboration
By: edited by Viv Golding and Wayne Modest
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2013
Place of publication: London; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 290
ISBN-13: 9780857851307; 9780857851314; 9780857851321; 9780857851338
Subjects: Collection management; Museums; Cooperation; Museum curators; Social aspects; Community life
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction / Viv Golding; title: Part I. Community matters?; title: Collaborative museums : curators, communities, collections / Viv Golding; title: The city, race, and the creation of a common history at the Virginia Historical Society / Eric Gable; title: Negotiating the power of art : Tyree Guyton and Detroit communities / Bradley L. Taylor; title: Learning to share knowledge : collaborative projects in Taiwan / Marzia Varutti; title: Community engagement, curatorial practice and museum ethos in Alberta, Canada / Bryony Onciul; title: Co-curating with teenagers at the Horniman Museum / Wayne Modest; title: Part II. Sharing authority?; title: Museums, migrant communities and intercultural dialogue in Italy / Serena Iervolino; title: Community consultation and the redevelopment of Manchester Museum's ancient Egypt galleries / Karen Exell; title: "Shared authority" : collaboration, curatorial voice and exhibition design in Canberra, Australia / Mary Hutchison; title: One voice to many voices? : displaying polyvocality in an art gallery / Rhiannon Mason, Chris Whitehead and Helen Graham; title: A question of trust : addressing historical injustices with Romani-people / Åshild Andrea Brekke; title: Part III. Audiences and social justice? Audience experiences?; title: Creolising the museum : humour, art and young audiences / Viv Golding; title: Museums and civic engagement : children making a difference / Elizabeth Wood; title: Community consultation in the museum : the 2007 bicentenary of Britain's abolition of the slave trade / Kalliopi Fouseki and Laurajane Smith; title: Interpreting the shared past within the world heritage site of Göreme, Cappadocia, Turkey / Elizabeth Carnegie and Hazel Tucker; title: Testimony, memory and art at the Jewish Holocaust Museum, Melbourne, Australia / Andrea Witcomb; title: Afterword: A view from the bridge : in conversation with Susan Pearce / Kirstin James, Petrina Foti and the editors.