Museums as Systems
The multi-day, annual Museums as Systems symposium gathers together arts workers to discuss alternative approaches to museum structures.
How are museums systems of artistry, archives, education, labor, care, communication, and community?
Each year the panel discussions explore various theoretical and practical aspects of museum work, putting established arts and cultural workers in dialogue with the next generation of thinkers and workers.
The symposium creates a space of multivocal, multigenerational, circular learning about how museums currently function, what never was, and what could come next.
Museums as Systems III: Interdependence
Museums as System 2024 program embarks on a series of insightful discussions centered around the theme "interdependence."
Day One
Museums as Systems: Museums and Artists | This panel focuses on artists and art spaces that facilitate connections between Black diasporic people and people Indigenous to Turtle Island (North America). |
Day Two
Museums as Systems: Museums and Arts & Culture Workers | This conversation examines the barriers to entry within museums while reflecting on how we have seen and hope to further advance the Black imagination. |
Day Three
Museums as Systems: Museums and the Next Generation | Bringing together youth and early career artists, cultural workers, and community organizers, this panel discussion explores the systems of exchange between museums and the communities around them. |
Museums as Systems: Resources 2023
Day One
DEV 101: Thinking outside the Bag | This panel aims to spotlight how, through creative ingenuity, development departments play integral roles in ensuring the survival of institutions, art, and artists, at every level. |
Access and Accessibility as an Act(ion) of Radical Hospitality | This panel offers the perspectives and tactics of art workers and artists who are willing to go beyond tokenizing accessibility and who instead promote a rich, expansive form of equity. |
Day Two
For Future Generations | This panel focuses on “extractivism” as it pertains to belongings from the Global South and the African continent that were stolen from their origins. How can agency be given back to populations who were stripped of or denied their cultural identities and/or possessions? |
The Question of Love and Community Care | Inspired by bell hooks’s book Salvation: Black People and Love, this panel will consider the possibilities of museums caring for their communities to the same degree as their objects. |
Museums as Systems 2022
Day One
Safeguarding Our History | What is our responsibility to the archive, or by extension, our responsibility to history? This session will look at the importance of safeguarding histories and the archive as a potential tool for envisioning the future. |
How Museums Speak to People | How do museums communicate with people? Design, media, and communication systems act as translators of institutional values, visions, and missions, as well as mechanisms for problem solving, accessibility, and world building. |
Day Two
The Role of Care and Wellness within Institutions | How can you care for others when you’re not cared for? Who is doing care work in museums? |
Intersections: Educational and Curatorial Practices | If an exhibition is a learning space, where do the values, intentions, and processes of education and curatorial converge? |