Decolonization

Peering Over the Next Horizon of Museum Practice

By Elizabeth Merritt

Why is it so hard to make change?! Even when we (museum people) know that parts of our work are in urgent need of reform, progress can be glacially slow. In fact, that’s natural. Humans are hardwired for caution, and it often seems …
The Earnest Work of Dreaming: Chicanafuturism in Visual Art

By Jadira Gurulé

Visions of the future created by and centering the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) are essential to our collective potential to transform the world as we know it. For decades, BIPOC artists working in …
Taking a Stand: A Q&A with Micah Parzen, CEO of the Museum of Us

By Adam Rozan

While for some museums the pandemic was a wake-up call to reimagine how they engaged and served their communities, for others it was an opportunity to go deeper. One of those museums, the Museum of Us, had been on a trajectory for several …
The Messy and Vulnerable Truth about Trust and Museums

By Dawn DiPrince

You could almost hear the cheers across the museum field early in March when Colleen Dilenschneider’s email hit inboxes announcing that “More People Trust Museums Now Than Before the Pandemic.” The numbers are compelling—nearly 75 …
In Good Relation: Reimagining the Grant Process for Community-Based Projects

By Kate Hadley Toftness & Lois Taylor Biggs

In recent years, there have been renewed calls for museums to adopt more inclusive and equitable practices, with significant changes to the ways we work and collaborate at all levels of our institutions. As a grants manager, I think about …
An Afrofuturist School Program Empowers Children to Envision the Future

By Nina Woodruff-Walker

Futurism is a powerful tool to share with kids—equipping them to think about the world they want to live in when they grow up, challenging them to make it better. Today on the blog, Executive Director Nina Woodruff-Walker tells us how the …
Remarks from Benin Bronzes Repatriation Ceremony

By American Alliance of Museums

On October 11, 2022, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art hosted a repatriation ceremony in which officials of the museum transferred ownership of twenty-nine Benin bronzes and the National Gallery of Art transferred ownership …
‘Relationships Don’t Have an End Goal’: A Q&A with the Burke Museum’s Decolonization & DEAI Team

By Joseph O'Neill

Some of the newest, and most defining, jobs in the current era of museums are those focusing on decolonization and diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion. In recent years, as more institutions have come to prioritize undoing …
Recasting the Civic Imperative of the Museum

By Clémentine Deliss

This article originally appeared in the November/December 2021 issue of Museum magazine, a benefit of AAM membership. Liberating collections from their imperialist pasts can occur through a new model: the museum-university. As a curator …
Rethinking Our Human Resources Practices to Build a More Equitable Museum

By Micah D. Parzen, Ph.D., J.D.

Less than three weeks after COVID forced museums around the globe to close their doors last year, an article by Arundhati Roy in The Financial Times titled “The Pandemic is a Portal” stopped me in my tracks. In the midst of an …