Towards a People's Museum

In July 2019, Warren Kanders, CEO of tear gas and weapons manufacturer Safariland, was forced off the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art following 9 Weeks of Action by Decolonize This Place, a coalition of organizing groups dedicated to rooting out the colonial violence of cultural institutions and rethinking how art can be integral to social movements. I was a core organizer of these actions, leading the “Queer Youth Power” week of action, which calls upon fellow students and youth organizers to challenge how our universities and schools are active prepretators of settler colonialism and imperialist violence same as the Whitney, and also confer value of art based on colonial modes of governance. As a collective, Decolonize This Place believes that “the museum can be made responsive to people rather than to the dictates of capital, that it can foster creativity and memory rather than functioning as a tool to launder the reputations of the ultra-wealthy.” I will speak about our efforts to imagine a third museum and decolonial curatorial practice through these experiences in grassroots organizing, as well as examining other case studies in my former employer Museum of Chinese in American in NYC, which started off as a community-based museum in a basement into an institution with dirty money, and Mahakon Model, a community-based effort by longtime residents of the historic Pom Mahakon village in Bangkok to protect their village from eviction through the creation of a people’s museum.