{"title":"Barring Freedom: Art, Abolition and the Museum in Pandemic Times","authors":"Alexandra Moore, Rachel Nelson","doi":"10.1386/jcs_00055_1","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\nBarring Freedom, a travelling exhibition featuring artworks engaging the histories and current conditions of prisons and policing in the United States, was to open in April 2020. While COVID-19 disrupted that plan, the realities of inequity in the United States placed into stark relief by the pandemic and the uprisings of summer 2020 brought urgency to rethinking the curatorial vision of the exhibition to reach audiences beyond the gallery walls. Buoyed by the idea that, in the words of Angela Davis, art can ‘propel people towards social emancipation’, the exhibition and related programming was reconceived as an ongoing, interdisciplinary, public scholarship initiative reaching across the borders normally perceived between museums, prisons and universities. Opportunities arose for expanded forms of community building and participation that welcomed different forms of knowledge, furthering the political and aesthetic aims of the project to shift the social attachment to prisons.","PeriodicalId":41456,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Curatorial Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Curatorial Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jcs_00055_1","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Barring Freedom, a travelling exhibition featuring artworks engaging the histories and current conditions of prisons and policing in the United States, was to open in April 2020. While COVID-19 disrupted that plan, the realities of inequity in the United States placed into stark relief by the pandemic and the uprisings of summer 2020 brought urgency to rethinking the curatorial vision of the exhibition to reach audiences beyond the gallery walls. Buoyed by the idea that, in the words of Angela Davis, art can ‘propel people towards social emancipation’, the exhibition and related programming was reconceived as an ongoing, interdisciplinary, public scholarship initiative reaching across the borders normally perceived between museums, prisons and universities. Opportunities arose for expanded forms of community building and participation that welcomed different forms of knowledge, furthering the political and aesthetic aims of the project to shift the social attachment to prisons.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Curatorial Studies is an international, peer-reviewed publication that explores the cultural functioning of curating and its relation to exhibitions, institutions, audiences, aesthetics and display culture. The journal takes a wide perspective in the inquiry into what constitutes ''the curatorial''. Curating has evolved considerably from the connoisseurship model of arranging objects to now encompass performative, virtual and interventionist strategies. While curating as a spatialized discourse of art objects remains important, the expanded cultural practice of curating not only produces exhibitions for audiences to view, but also plays a catalytic role in redefining aesthetic experience, framing cultural conditions in institutions and communities, and inquiring into constructions of knowledge and ideology. As a critical and responsive forum for debate in the emerging field of curatorial studies, the journal will foster scholarship in the theory, practice and history of curating, as well as that of exhibitions and display culture in general. The journal supports in-depth investigations of contemporary and historical exhibitions, case studies of curators and their engagements, and analyses of the critical dynamics influencing the production of exhibitions in art and broader display culture. The Journal of Curatorial Studies invites contributions from scholars within curatorial studies, art history, museum studies, cultural studies, and other academic disciplines. The journal publishes both thematic and open issues, and features research articles, contemporary and historical case studies, interviews with curators, artists and theorists, and reviews of books, exhibitions and conferences.