Where Do We Go from Here?: Museums and Latin America’s Indigenous Heritage

This session explores the future of curating pre-Hispanic Indigenous arts of the Americas in museums. Some questions that might be explored include the following: How do museums of various kinds envision the future of their collections, especially in light of their histories, with acquisitions at times assembled haphazardly or subjected to the interests of individual dealers, collectors, or curators? How do curators today imagine new configurations, categorizations, or juxtapositions in their curating practices, and what implications arise from such experiments or innovations? What role has the international loan exhibition had in shaping the relevant fields of study and museum practice? Can relationships be developed with private collections that now face obstacles to donation at many museums? Conversely, what does it mean when museums deaccession pre-Hispanic art collections? Also, how do these practices align with or diverge from the curating of art from other regions of the world? Finally, and of particular interest, we encourage presenters to probe the issues that curators face today in installation and interpretation, and to discuss the 21^st-century decisions that contribute to shaping our views of the pre-Hispanic past.

This is a companion to the proposed session, “Histories of Collecting, Displaying, and Caring for Pre-Hispanic Art.” Both should be scheduled for the same day.