How museums are changing to embrace a more inclusive vision of American artUS museums have faced increasing pressure to reckon with their histories in light of movements against racism, violence, and the erosion of human rights here and abroad. Self-reflection and transformation have emerged in tandem with a focus on incorporating antiracism and decolonization in museum practice. Fundamental to these shifts is the idea that one cannot tell the story of American art without Native American, African American, Asian American, and Latinx art.
Featuring innovative scholarship and approaches from art history, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, history, and ethnic studies, the curators and scholars in this volume write about transforming theory and methodology into museum practice as they reflect on the challenges and possibilities for expanding the canon of American art. Beyond the shortcomings of traditional curatorial approaches, they demonstrate how sustained dialogue, community engagement, and curatorial collaboration have fueled important changes to art curation. A progress report and a how-to guide, this collection considers the flawed past and inclusive future for how American art is displayed and taught.
Table of Contents:
Introduction. Beyond the Land Acknowledgement, by Michael W. Hartman & Jami C. Powell
Section 1: Complicating Histories: Curating Across Disciplinary Boundaries
1. Collaborative Methodologies for an Expanded American Art: This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World, by Morgan E. Freeman & Thomas H. Price
2. A Site of Struggle, A Methodology of Accord, by Janet Dees & Alisa Swindell
3. Generative Collaboration: Toward a More Expansive American Art, by Karen Kramer & Austen Barron Bailly, with Michael Hartman & Jami Powell
Section 2: Reframing Collection Practices and Care
4. Reflection and Representation: Native Art Acquisitions for the 50th Anniversary of the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, by Anya Montiel
5. Recontextualizing and Reckoning Historic American Art, by Mindy N. Besaw
6. Feke's Kincemoss: Collaboratively Rewriting a Colonial Painting, by Layla Bermeo & Roger Paul
Section 3: Interrupting Colonial Structures
7. "Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?": The Aesthetic and Curatorial Politics of Invitation and Interruption in Imperial Museums, by Kirsten Pai Buick
8. Imagining Otherwise, by Hazel V. Carby
9. Braiding, Stitching, Sweeping: Black Feminist Domesticity and Art History, by Alexandra M. Thomas
10. Tyrus Wong's Asian Americana, by Yinshi Lerman-Tan
Conclusion. An Invitation, by Michael W. Hartman and Jami C. Powell
About the Author :
Michael W. Hartman is Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. Jami C. Powell (Osage) is associate director of curatorial affairs and curator of Indigenous art at the Hood Museum and a faculty lecturer in Dartmouth’s Department of Native American and Indigenous Studies. She is editor of Form and Relation: Contemporary Native Ceramics.
