Download or read book Curating America s Painful Past written by Tim Gruenewald and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2021-07-28 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the global Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, many called upon the United States to finally face its painful past. Tim Gruenewald’s new book is an in-depth investigation of how that past is currently remembered at the national museums in Washington, DC. Curating America’s Painful Past reveals how the tragic past is either minimized or framed in a way that does not threaten dominant national ideologies. Gruenewald analyzes the National Museum of American History (NMAH), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The NMAH, the nation’s most popular history museum, serves as the benchmark for the imagination of US history and identity. The USHMM opened in 1993 as the United States’ official Holocaust memorial and stands adjacent to the National Mall. Gruenewald makes a persuasive case that the USHMM established a successful blueprint for narrating horrific and traumatic histories. Curating America’s Painful Past contrasts these two museums to ask why America’s painful memories were largely absent from the memorial landscape of the National Mall and argues that social injustices in the present cannot be addressed until the nation’s painful past is fully acknowledged and remembered. It was only with the opening of the NMAAHC in 2016 that a detailed account of atrocities committed against African Americans appeared on the National Mall. Gruenewald focuses on the museum’s narrative structure in the context of national discourse to provide a critical reading of the museum. When the NMAI opened in 2004, it presented for the first time a detailed history from a Native American perspective that sought to undo conventional museum narratives. However, criticism led to more traditional exhibitions and national focus. Nevertheless, the museum still marginalizes memories of the vast numbers of Indigenous victims to European colonization and to US expansion. In a final chapter, Gruenewald offers a thought experiment, imagining a memory site like the recently opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Montgomery, Alabama) situated on the National Mall so the reader can assess how profound an effect projects of national memory can have on facing the past as a matter of present justice.

Download or read book Curating the American Past written by Pete Daniel and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2022-02-04 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Curating the American Past, Pete Daniel takes readers behind the "Staff Only" door at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History to reveal how curators collect objects, plan exhibits, navigate public-sector politics, and bring alive the events, characters, and concepts that define our shared history"--

Download or read book Curating America written by Richard Rabinowitz and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-09-14 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do history museums and historic sites tell the richly diverse stories of the American people? What fascinates us most about American history? To help answer these questions, noted public historian Richard Rabinowitz examines the evolution of public history over the last half-century and highlights the new ways we have come to engage with our past. At the heart of this endeavor is what Rabinowitz calls "storyscapes--landscapes of engagement where individuals actively encounter stories of past lives. As storyscapes, museums become processes of narrative interplay rather than moribund storage bins of strange relics. Storyscapes bring to life even the most obscure people--making their skills of hands and minds "touchable," making their voices heard despite their absence from traditional archives, and making the dilemmas and triumphs of their lives accessible to us today. Rabinowitz's wealth of professional experience--creating over 500 history museums, exhibitions, and educational programs across the nation--shapes and informs the narrative. By weaving insights from learning theory, anthropology and geography, politics and finance, collections and preservation policy, and interpretive media, Rabinowitz reveals how the nation's best museums and historic sites allow visitors to confront their sense of time and place, memories of family and community, and definitions of self and the world while expanding their idea of where they stand in the flow of history.

Download or read book Hurts So Good written by Leigh Cowart and published by Public Affairs. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of why people all over the world love to engage in pain on purpose--from dominatrices, religious ascetics, and ultramarathoners to ballerinas, icy ocean bathers, and sideshow performers Masochism is sexy, human, reviled, worshipped, and can be delightfully bizarre. Deliberate and consensual pain has been with us for millennia, encompassing everyone from Black Plague flagellants to ballerinas dancing on broken bones to competitive eaters choking down hot peppers while they cry. Masochism is a part of us. It lives inside workaholics, tattoo enthusiasts, and all manner of garden variety pain-seekers. At its core, masochism is about feeling bad, then better--a phenomenon that is long overdue for a heartfelt and hilarious investigation. And Leigh Cowart would know: they are not just a researcher and science writer--they're an inveterate, high-sensation seeking masochist. And they have a few questions: Why do people engage in masochism? What are the benefits and the costs? And what does masochism have to say about the human experience? By participating in many of these activities themselves, and through conversations with psychologists, fellow scientists, and people who seek pain for pleasure, Cowart unveils how our minds and bodies find meaning and relief in pain--a quirk in our programming that drives discipline and innovation even as it threatens to swallow us whole.

Download or read book Curating Difficult Knowledge written by E. Lehrer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume inscribes an innovative domain of inquiry, bringing museum and heritage studies to bear on questions of transitional justice, memory and post-conflict reconciliation. As practitioners, artists, curators, activists and academics, the contributors explore the challenges of bearing witness to past conflicts.

Download or read book Curated Stories written by Sujatha Fernandes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Curated storytelling -- Charting the storytelling turn -- Stories and statecraft: why counting on apathy might not be enough -- Out of the home, into the house: how storytelling at the legislature can narrow movement goals -- Sticking to the script: the battle over representations -- Rumbas in the barrio: personal lives in a collectivist project

Download or read book Curating Fascism written by Sharon Hecker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-17 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the centenary of the fascist party's ascent to power in Italy, Curating Fascism examines the ways in which exhibitions organized from the fall of Benito Mussolini's regime to the present day have shaped collective memory, historical narratives, and political discourse around the Italian ventennio. It charts how shows on fascism have evolved since the postwar period in Italy, explores representations of Italian fascism in exhibitions across the world, and highlights blindspots in art and cultural history, as well as in exhibition practices. Featuring contributions from an international group of art, architectural, design, and cultural historians, as well as journalists and curators, this book treats fascism as both a historical moment and as a major paradigm through which critics, curators, and the public at large have defined the present moment since World War II. It interweaves historical perspectives, critical theory, and direct accounts of exhibitions from the people who conceived them or responded to them most significantly in order to examine the main curatorial strategies, cultural relevance, and political responsibility of art exhibitions focusing on the Fascist period. Through close analysis, the chapter authors unpack the multifaceted specificity of art shows, including architecture and exhibition design; curatorial choices and institutional history; cultural diplomacy and political history; theories of viewership; and constructed collective memory, to evaluate current curatorial practice. In offering fresh new perspectives on the historiography, collective memory, and understanding of fascist art and culture from a contemporary standpoint, Curating Fascism sheds light on the complex exhibition history of Italian fascism not just within Italy but in such countries as the USA, the UK, Germany, and Brazil. It also presents an innovative approach to the growing field of exhibition theory by bringing contributions from curators and exhibition historians, who critically reflect upon curatorial strategies with respect to the delicate subject of fascism and fascist art, into dialogue with scholars of Italian studies and art historians. In doing so, the book addresses the physical and cultural legacy of fascism in the context of the current historical moment.

Download or read book Curating Art written by Janet Marstine and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Curating Art provides insight into some of the most socially and politically impactful curating of historical and contemporary art since the late 1990s. It offers up a museological framework for understanding watershed developments of curating in art museums. Representing the plurality of theory and practice around the expanded field of relational curating, the book focuses on curating that prioritises the quality of relationships between people and objects, between institutions and people and among people. It has wide international breadth, with particularly strong representation in East and Southeast Asia, including four papers never before translated into English. This Asian cluster illuminates the globalisation of the field and challenges dichotomies of East and West while acknowledging distinctions within specific, but often transnational, cultural spheres. The compelling philosophical perspectives and case studies included within Curating Art will be of interest to students and researchers studying curating, exhibition development and art museums. The book will also inspire current and emerging curators to pose challenging but important questions about their own practice and the relationships that this work sustains.

Download or read book Report of the Assistant Director and of the Curators of the U S National Museum written by United States National Museum and published by . This book was released on 1886 with total page 1564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Curating Post Socialist Environments written by Philipp Schorch and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In which ways are environments (post-)socialist and how do they come about? How is the relationship between the built environment, memory, and debates on identity enacted? What are the spatial, material, visual, and aesthetic dimensions of these (post-)socialist enactments or interventions? And how do such (post-)socialist interventions in environments become (re)curated? By addressing these questions, this volume releases ›curation‹ from its usual museological framing and carries it into urban environments and private life-worlds, from predominantly state-sponsored institutional settings with often normative orientations into spheres of subjectification, social creativity, and material commemorative culture.

Download or read book Curating in a Time of Ecological Crisis written by Felicity Fenner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Curating in a Time of Ecological Crisis reaffirms the relevance and impactful role of art, revealing how contemporary art exhibitions can capture the zeitgeist and advance new and collaborative approaches to a more sustainable inhabitation of Earth. The book is largely focused on biennales, which it argues are the contemporary exhibition models with the greatest capacity to offer new perspectives and propose alternative ways of connecting with our social and natural environments. Felicity Fenner demonstrates this by showing how curators of these high-profile exhibitions are responding in creative and engaging ways to the issues that preoccupy artists and society more broadly, of which the ecological crisis is paramount. Drawing on case studies from different parts of the world, the author reveals how biennales can make a constructive contribution to debates and attitudes around climate change, and how the role of the curator has evolved to re-embrace a duty of care not just to art but to the natural world as well. Curating in a Time of Ecological Crisis investigates how large-scale exhibitions of contemporary international art can become agents of change. As such, the book will be essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners with an interest in exhibitions, curating, contemporary art, and environmental sustainability.

Download or read book The Anthropologist as Curator written by Roger Sansi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do contemporary art curators define their work as ethnography? How can curation illuminate the practice of contemporary anthropology? Does anthropology risk disappearing as a specific discipline within the general model of the curatorial? The Anthropologist as Curator collects together the research of international scholars working at the intersection of anthropology and contemporary art in order to explore these questions. The essays in the book challenge what it means to do ethnographic work, as well as the very definition of the discipline of anthropology in confrontation with the model of the curatorial. The contributors examine these ideas from a variety of angles, and the book includes perspectives from anthropologists who have set up their own exhibitions; those who have conducted fieldwork on the arts, including participatory practices, digital images and sound; and contributors who are currently working in a curatorial capacity at a museum.With case studies from the USA, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, India and Japan, the book represents an international perspective and is relevant to students and scholars of anthropology, contemporary art, museum studies, curatorial studies and heritage studies.

Download or read book Curators and Culture written by Joel J. Orosz and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2002-06-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author researched ten museums founded prior to 1870, using primary sources. Those chosen comprised a geographically diverse sample of pre-1870 American museums and covered a range of disciplines, among them art, history, and natural science.

Download or read book Curating and Re Curating the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq written by Christine Sylvester and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We have long saved--and curated--objects from wars to commemorate the war experience. These objects appear at national museums and memorials and are often mentioned in war novels and memoirs. Through them we institutionalize narratives and memories of national identity, as well as international power and purpose. While people interpret war in different ways, and there is no ultimate authority on the experiences of any war, curators of war objects make different choices about what to display or write about, none of which are entirely problematic, good, or accurate. This book asks whose vantage points on war are made available, and where, for public consumption; it also questions whose war experiences are not represented, are minimized, or ignored in ways that advantage contemporary militarism. Christine Sylvester looks at four sites of war memory-the National Museum of American History, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, and selected novels and memoirs of the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq-to consider the way war knowledge is embedded in differing sites of memory and display. While the museum shows war aircraft and a laptop computer used by a journalist covering the American war in Iraq, visitors to the Vietnam Memorial or Arlington Cemetery find more prosaic and civilian items on view, such as baby pictures, slices of birthday cake, or even car keys. In addition, memoirs and novels of these wars tend to curate ghastly horrors of wars as experienced by soldiers or civilians. For Sylvester, these sites of war memory and curation provide ways to understand dispersed war authority and interpretation and to consider which sites invite viewers to revere a war and which reflect personal experiences that show the undersides of these wars. Sylvester shows that scholars, policymakers, and other citizens need to consider different types of situated memory and knowledge in order to fully grasp war, rather than idealize it.

Download or read book Curating Transcultural Spaces written by Sarah Hegenbart and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-01-11 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Curating Transcultural Spaces asks what a museum which enables the presentation of multiple perspectives might look like. Can identity be global and local at the same time? How may one curate dual identity? More broadly, what is the link between the arts and processes of identity construction? This volume, an indispensable source for the process of engaging with colonial history in Germany and beyond, takes its starting point from the 'scandal' of the Humboldt Forum. The transfer of German state collections from the Ethnological Museum and the Museum for Asian Art, located at the margins of Berlin in Dahlem, into the centre of Germany's capital indicates the nation's aspiration of purported multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism; yet the project's resurrection of the site's former Prussian city palace, which was demolished during the GDR, stands in opposition to its very mission, given that the Prussian rulers benefited from colonial exploitation. By examining the contrasting successes of other projects, such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, Curating Transcultural Spaces compellingly argues for the necessity of taking post-colonial thinking on board in the construction of museum spaces in order to generate genuine exchange between multiple perspectives.

Download or read book Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities written by Arjun Sabharwal and published by Chandos Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-11 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archives and special collections departments have a long history of preserving and providing long-term access to organizational records, rare books, and other unique primary sources including manuscripts, photographs, recordings, and artifacts in various formats. The careful curatorial attention to such records has also ensured that such records remain available to researchers and the public as sources of knowledge, memory, and identity. Digital curation presents an important framework for the continued preservation of digitized and born-digital collections, given the ephemeral and device-dependent nature of digital content. With the emergence of analog and digital media formats in close succession (compared to earlier paper- and film-based formats) came new standards, technologies, methods, documentation, and workflows to ensure safe storage and access to content and associated metadata. Researchers in the digital humanities have extensively applied computing to research; for them, continued access to primary data and cultural heritage means both the continuation of humanities scholarship and new methodologies not possible without digital technology. Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities, therefore, comprises a joint framework for preserving, promoting, and accessing digital collections. This book explores at great length the conceptualization of digital curation projects with interdisciplinary approaches that combine the digital humanities and history, information architecture, social networking, and other themes for such a framework. The individual chapters focus on the specifics of each area, but the relationships holding the knowledge architecture and the digital curation lifecycle model together remain an overarching theme throughout the book; thus, each chapter connects to others on a conceptual, theoretical, or practical level. Theoretical and practical perspectives on digital curation in the digital humanities and history In-depth study of the role of social media and a social curation ecosystem The role of hypertextuality and information architecture in digital curation Study of collaboration and organizational dimensions in digital curation Reviews of important web tools in digital humanities

Download or read book Curating Access written by Amanda Cachia and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-14 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an interdisciplinary collection of twenty-four essays which critically examine contemporary exhibitions and artistic practices that focus on conceptual and creative aspects of access. Oftentimes exhibitions tack on access once the artwork has already been executed and ready to be installed in the museum or gallery. But what if the artists were to ponder access as an integral and critical part of their artwork? Can access be creative and experimental? And furthermore, can the curator also fold access into their practice, while working collaboratively with artists, considering it as a theoretical and practical generative force that seeks to make an exhibition more engaging for a wider diversity of audiences? This volume includes essays by a growing number of artists, curators, and scholars who ponder these ideas of ad-hoc, experimental and underground approaches within exhibition-making and artistic practices. It considers how, through these nascent exhibition models and art practices, enhanced experiences of access in the museum can be a shared responsibility amongst museum workers, curators, and artists, in tandem with the public, so that access becomes a zone of intellectual and creative "accommodation," rather than strictly a discourse on policy. The book provides innovative case studies which provide a template for how access might be implemented by individuals, artists, curators, museum administrators and educators given the growing need to offer as many modalities of access as possible within cultural institutions. This book shows that anyone can be a curator of access and demonstrates how to approach access in a way that goes beyond protocol and policy. It will thus be of interest to students and scholars engaged in the study of museums, art history and visual culture, disability, culture, and communication.