Curator: The Museum Journal最新文献

This article discusses a cocurated hybrid (online + onsite) exhibition Apart/Together, which was specifically created to support the community during the challenging times of COVID-19. Its primary aim was to highlight and foster the theme of friendship, while also showcasing the artworks of two contemporary artists, one from the United States and the other from China. The curatorial team forming the backbone of Apart/Together consisted of students from China and the United States and this diverse team of curators played a crucial role in shaping the exhibition's content and approach. This article examines the curatorial process of Apart/Together, focusing on how it was carried out through the perspective of cultural competency. Cultural competency is a dynamic developmental process that develops the ability or sensibility to collaborate effectively with individuals from different cultures. During a collaborative curatorial process, the curatorial team employed appropriate methods to engage participants, leveraging their cultural diversity to foster intercultural communication and integration. The curatorial experience of Apart/Together during the COVID-19 pandemic confirmed the importance of cultural competency in curation and contributed to the literature on online collaborative curation and visitor-centered exhibitions.

Grave goods are among the most common, but at the same time most powerful, objects on display in many museums. They possess the rare—often latent—ability to convey both particular and universal themes and to collapse chronological and cultural differences by connecting the shared embodiment of museum visitors and past people. To explore these values, this study draws on the results of two phases of in-depth, mixed-methods audience research before and after a rapid and low-cost interpretative intervention: the “Death, Memory and Meaning” trail in the later prehistoric galleries of the British Museum. The analysis highlights the importance of fore-fronting intimacy and the complex relationship between bodies and objects. It also demonstrates the importance of contextual, emotionally and spiritually connected approaches to the presentation of grave goods. Our findings are especially timely given the intensification of ethical concerns surrounding displays of prehistoric European human remains in museums.

Conversion to a museum is a common destiny of many cultural assets that cannot continue to serve their original functions. They are usually re-functioned to provide public benefits in return for the expenditures made for their preservation. However, their architectural features may not always meet the expected results when functioning as a museum. The spatial limitations arising in such conversions are the main design gaps in the museumization projects. This article aims to address these gaps using a sample project of a museum on Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror converted from a medieval education structure.

This article explores aspects of the “unfinished” using notions of human-centered design in African public infrastructure and the importance of involving the “users” and “beneficiaries” in infrastructure development and delivery. Infrastructure, both conceptually as an idea and in its constructed material reality, has a huge impact on society, socially and economically, and has been promised as one of the most effective drivers of economic growth in South Africa. Increasingly in South Africa, facilities are falling into disrepair. Infrastructure is being adapted and used in unintended ways that often do not provide the socio-economic benefits intended. In considering medical infrastructure across three sites in post-apartheid South Africa, my argument asks how factors such as statecraft, governance and funding models, design considerations, project implementation methodologies, operational and maintenance policies affect the promise of infrastructural change in contemporary South Africa?

The museum space is continually evolving and, not surprisingly, we have seen significant and rapid expansion in both digitized records and online exhibitions, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2023. In this article we examine three comparable museum collections of tokens of love and loss in the Foundling Museum in London, the Museo degli Innocenti in Florence, and the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. Using a case study approach as visitor-researchers, we explore how post-qualitative theories speak to the affective experience of museums in the physical and the virtual space. We ask if the online visitor experience can be imbued with affective possibilities and, if so, how might they be maximized to best support, replicate, or replace an in-person museum experience.

This article looks at the ways museums can collaborate with the gaming community to better preserve, curate, digitize, and understand video games. Museums have become increasingly drawn to the collection and study of video games. Ideally, the acquisition and preservation of video games would need to be overseen by museum professionals specializing in digital collections, however, the museum sector lacks such specialists and resourcing. Often curators and museum staff do not have the necessary cultural and technological skills to properly care for gaming material culture. To remedy this problem, this paper suggests a more collaborative approach whereby gaming communities could be included in the collection, preservation, and display of gaming history and culture in museums. Using examples from the United States and Australia, this article examines the many ways the gaming community can help museums understand, acquire, display, and preserve video games.

This study focuses on the diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI) practices of informal science institutions (ISI) that are part of a statewide grants program. Data were collected to understand how ISIs interpret and implement DEAI in thought and action in their efforts to create more welcoming spaces for members of communities that are often underrepresented or marginalized in informal learning spaces. Modeled after the Cultural Competence Learning Institute's (CCLI) Framework, survey data were collected to understand DEAI practices being used to create welcoming environments. Interview data were collected 2 years later to understand how ISIs collaborate with others to center communities in their work. Results indicated that while DEAI was considered a high priority, strategies were limited. A positive relationship was found between the number of strategies used and perceived success. ISIs' stories of collaboration focused most often on transactional relationships with organizational partners. Those working with communities directly collaborated in needs-based or reciprocal ways. Results are interpreted in relation to the CCLI Framework's potential to provide benchmarks for both individual institutions and groups like our statewide grants program to use as comparison points for their own DEAI practice.

Set in the tradition of museum ethnography, this article looks at museum participation through the lens of labor. Based primarily on interview material, it analyzes the lengthy—and laborious—participatory process behind the creation of “Berlin Global,” an exhibition at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, Germany. The authors explore three aspects of participation related to labor, as identified in their research: the different types of knowledge and experience that participants bring with them, the organization of the participatory work process, and the presentation of the participants' contributions within the exhibition. The authors argue that because museum participation tends to be viewed as an act of civic duty, individually and socially meaningful, the different kinds of labor involved in it are often overlooked, resulting in power imbalances between curators and their external partners. A greater awareness of the labor demanded by participatory work is able to address this problem, decreasing the number of frictions and tensions, and thus making mutual beneficiality, participation's main goal, more achievable.

The use of digital museum objects has become an essential part of museums' communication and marketing strategies, research and teaching, and curatorial practices. This new visibility, amplified by the COVID-19 crisis, has not only revealed the possibilities of digital museum objects but has also underscored significant challenges, including the intricate relationship between digital museum objects and physical objects, the impact of digital museum objects on knowledge creation, and the online interaction with art and cultural heritage. Furthermore, it has drawn attention to the digital platforms that host digital museum objects, ranging from museum collection databases to online encyclopedias, cultural heritage platforms, and social media. The present paper explores these issues by examining how digital platforms are changing the way digital reproductions of artworks are used and reimagined, both inside and outside the institutions that house the artworks. To illuminate these dynamics, it looks at specific case studies, including the Getty Challenge, the online circulation of Delacroix's La liberté guidant le peuple, and the collection databases of Belgian museums and of the Mauritshuis. Theoretically, it combines the art historical concept of circulation with the notion of gray and colored memory drawn from digital memory studies. In doing so, it conceives of museum databases and cultural heritage platforms, as spaces of participation and neglect, of memory and oblivion, with a vast potential for producing new perspectives on art and cultural heritage and telling new (art) histories. In conclusion, the paper advocates for “circulation” as a key concept for revitalizing online collections of digital reproductions of artworks.

This article analyses the structure and results of a report published in April 2022 by the Danish Ministry of Culture on the feasibility of “shedding light on the possibilities of strengthening museum communication of Denmark's colonial history.” This article seeks to expose the underlying assumptions accompanying the term “colonial history” in the report. It suggests that “decolonization” and “decoloniality” would be more appropriate frameworks for museum development, as evidenced by current scholarship as well as curatorial trends elsewhere in Europe. Ultimately, it imagines how differently a report focusing on how Danish museums might embrace the process of decoloniality would look.