A Third Museum Is Possible: Towards a Decolonial Curatorial Practice
K Wayne Yang (la paperson)’s A Third University Is Possible (2017) attends to the “how” of settler colonialism, whereby we examine “the mechanisms, not just the motives, of colonialism” in order to “forecast colonial[ism’s] next operations and to plot decolonial technologies” (5). As Decolonize This Place, #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, and #museumsrespondtoferguson remind us, the art museum requires a critical redress of its origins and institutional investment in colonial systems of exhibition, collection, and ways of seeing. This roundtable considers la paperson’s call to action as it may be found in the settler colonial technology of the exhibitionary space. How can we think through these questions in relationship to art history’s exclusionary past and present? What futures are we building, and for whom? How have artists like Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Ja'Tovia Gary, Adrian Piper, or Titus Kaphar engaged with these questions, futures, and imaginations? As Joanne Barker reminds us, “Art is part of the struggle to reclaim a future that is not about the future at all but a present in which Indigenous territories, stories, bodies, and sensualities are unoccupied and uncivilized: I want to live there; that is where I live.” In amplifying this world vision, we ask: How has settler colonialism framed our understanding of the museum, the exhibition of art, and the production of art historical scholarship? How can we forward a decolonial curatorial practice that does not replicate oppressive frameworks? How can we imagine the art museum, and art curatorial practice, as engaging with and advancing such futures?
Field of Study:
Canada
North America
United States of America
Twenty-First Century
Twentieth Century
Chair:
Anni Ankitha Pullagura,Brown University - anni_pullagura@brown.edu
Discussant:
Anuradha Vikram,UCLA Department of Art - anu@curativeprojects.net
