Confront the Canon: Examine Museum Collection and Exhibition Practices
Proposal Overview: In 2019, a statistics and art history team from Williams College and the University of California conducted a diversity study on eighteen U.S. museums and found that overall 85% artists in the collections are white and 87% are men. I envision the project as a way to explore the institutional bias reflected in the skewed diversity ratios prevalent in museum collections and reflected in their exhibition history that consistently privileges art created by white Western artists. The central question being explored is: How does the institution’s collection and curatorial practices contribute to the marginalization of non-Western art, women artists and artists of color?
Project Objective and Inspiration: The objective is to confront the art canon (which constitutes the general standards set to judge ‘greatness’ in art) and examine the practices that determine whose history is represented in the institution’s collection and whose story is told in the displays. I propose a mediation in the spirit of Fred Wilson’s brilliant intervention in his Mining the Museum project, where the artist culled forgotten African-American artifacts from the Maryland Historical Society’s permanent collection and juxtaposed the objects in their conventional display issuing a powerful statement against institutional racism. The entrance to Mining the Museum featured the Truth Trophy, where three busts of white men from the collection who were not Marylanders was placed in front of three empty black pedestals that represented Black Marylanders missing from the collection, namely Harriet Tubman, Benjamin Bannekar and Frederick Douglass (Figure 1, right). Another introspective intervention was seen in the form of slave shackles placed in a metalwork display which adds the context of invisible slave labor hidden behind the glimmering objects (Figure 1, left).
Project Method and Execution Phases: My project aims to mount a comparable interrogation of museum practices that allows users to intervene in select past exhibitions, curate an equitable display highlighting absences and provide relevant context by studying the collection through a decolonizing lens. Roopika Risam proposed the postcolonial digital pedagogy approach as a means to understand the role of knowledge production in privileging Western voices and employing active engagement of the audience as creators and not just consumers to begin decolonizing the archives. In a similar approach, the Confront the Canon interface will enable users to curate their own equitable exhibitions and empower them to participate as creators in the decolonizing effort.
To execute the project within a semester, the scope is narrowed down to a single exhibition catalogue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the aim of creating the basic framework for the selection of interventions resulting in the final outcome of the virtual equitable exhibition. The project can eventually be scaled up.
The project execution is planned in four phases (Figure 2):
- Phase 1: Select a past exhibition catalog, cull the selected catalog to create the past exhibition dataset.
- Phase 2: Identify relevant search parameters such as art period, style, gender, race to create the basis of the intervention object dataset selection.
- Phase 3: Provide display panels to swap out objects from the exhibition and accept intervention objects or suggestions where appropriate interventions are unavailable with relevant context labels.
- Phase 4: Display newly curated equitable exhibition.
DH Context: The environment scan revealed several institutional attempts to address canon exclusions through digital exhibitions such as the ones seen on the NMWA, Palmer Museum of Art websites that feature online exhibits around Women in Art, Asian and Asian American Art, African art etc. However, these exhibitions focus on the themes in isolation, in a way ‘othering’ the subject. My project’s approach differs from these efforts because the attempt is to emphasize the exclusions and the flawed premise of the canon from within and visualize equity as an alternative.
Confront the Canon will seek guidance from the simple yet effective platform and design choices employed in the Palmer Museum exhibitions (Figure 3). Their design layouts are impressive because the humble google slides are used to great effect providing an immersive experience of the exhibition with simple navigation through the galleries and clickable art objects moving to text or video content that elaborate on the context.
