Museum and other Curated Spaces
For the past year and a half, a small group has been meeting informally to think about "curated spaces" - museums, libraries, and other institutions that collect, preserve, and interpret objects of scholarly study and cultural value. We are interested in these institutions as subjects of critical study and as sites for various kinds of scholarly and professional practice. We have interpreted "museum" broadly to include museums of art, anthropology, and natural history; zoos, herbaria, and sometimes gardens and parks; and archives and libraries. We understand "collections" to include both assemblages of objects and the places and spaces within which such assemblages may be held. We take "interpretation" to mean everything from how objects are selected for exhibition, to how they "perform" together within a designed space, to how the curator chooses to frame the exhibition for the audience; and we are interested in the contested spaces within these acts of interpretation. And we take "institutions" to embrace both private and public collections, and our inquiry to include their history; their significance to the cultures within which they exist; the practices by which they are interpreted, organized, managed, and perpetuated over time; and the laws (of property, for example) and the economic arrangements that make them possible. The group draws on a wide range of disciplinary and professional fields, including anthropology, architectural and art history, history, librarianship, and performance studies.
We would like to identify other faculty whose teaching or research interests might overlap with museum studies thus understood. We envision a loosely constructed "cluster" of faculty reading groups, guest speakers, courses, internships, field trips, and student advising that would enrich faculty and student appreciation and critical understanding of these complex institutions, and that might prepare students to go on to advanced training in this field.
Date: Thursday, April 12, 2007 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m.
Facilitator: Lesley Wright
Attending:
Jon Andelson
Victoria Brown
Leslie Delmenico
Richard Fyffe
Kathy Kamp
Cecilia Knight
Bobbie McKibbin
Sarah Purcell
Catherine Rod
Emma Lee Running
John Whittaker
