This past week, I attended Open Engagement (OE), a conference focused on socially engaged art whose theme this year was “Justice.” The full program can be found online and I’m happy to talk more about my experience. One of the key questions for the conference that the organizers encouraged participants to think about was: “As artists, curators, and cultural producers, how are we implicated in the particular conditions we are working in, all the while engaged in challenging and changing these conditions?”
In thinking about Eve’s post and the question of “Why museums?” I’m left wondering whether museums have acknowledged their role in creating damaging conditions (e.g. their colonial histories) and if they are the best suited to challenging and changing these conditions. Like Sandell asks, “What role might museums play in tackling inequality through their ubiquitous and long-established functions of collection and display?” (8)
One of the sessions I attended at OE was at the Smart Museum and focused on building an ethical practice of collecting socially engaged art and whether it was possible for a museum to not deaden or make static the work it collects. Can collection and display be opportunities for conversation, for connections to lived experience? With this question, I’m also thinking about the following quote from Sommer: “Teasing elements apart is just what theater does, Boal explained, simply by staging a problem” (57). Can museums “tease elements apart” by using their collections or do they need to reexamine their fundamental functions?
An initiative that seeks to tackled these questions is the Museum As Site for Social Action (MASS Action) project: a national convening of museum practitioners, artists, community organizers, and scholars working to build a resource dedicated to social justice in museum practices.
In addition to the resource list of blogs and hashtags (posted below), one of the most interesting parts of the MASS Action session at OE was imagining the headlines we’d like to see about museums 100 years from now: “Community Curators at an All Time High,” “Formerly Incarcerated Individual Becomes Director of MoMA,” “Quaker Group Takes Over Museum,” “Museum Develops New Public Transportation System,” and “50th Annual Deaccession Day.”
Resources from MASS Action Discussion: