Ibram X. Kendi, director of BU’s Center for Antiracist Research (left), and Bina Venkataraman, Boston Globe editorial page editor. Photos by Janice Checchio (left) and courtesy of VenkataramanJOURNALISM & MEDIA The ever-visionary Ibram X. Kendi has just announced an exciting project– a collaboration between his Boston University Center for Antiracist Research and The Boston Globe. Kendi and…
Over the coming year, MASS Action is committing itself to holding our institutions accountable to the statements they’ve made committing to racial justice. We are holding up a mirror to our organizations to generate alignment between their words and their actions, and collaboratively working towards the abolition of racism and all its manifestations in…
As a longtime museum professional who is white, I do not presume to speak for my colleagues of color at this moment. I speak only for myself. But I wish that this statement or something like it could be published by the still predominantly white museum field. And I include myself as an individual who…
In his opinion piece in the New York Times on July 26, 2019, (Museums Need to Step into the Future) Ford Foundation President Darren Walker applauds museums’ greater involvement in social justice issues. And he calls for increased efforts toward diversity and inclusion. Walker correctly takes a holistic approach, touching on hiring, collecting, exhibitions, and…
Racist images pervade our public spaces and mental landscape If you missed the live feed of the symposium, Mascots, Myths, Memorials, and Memory on Saturday, March 3, you can still find the agenda on the program’s Facebook page, and a number of recordings of the talks on YouTube. There is also a great summary of the day…
How to transform museums into places of greater inclusion and equity? This is the key question of the MASSAction (Museum as Site for Social Action) initiative, begun in 2016 and coordinated out of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. A few weeks ago 36 museums (art, history, science) from across the country gathered for…
[We propose a paradigm] for how museums address their responsibility for fair and inclusive staffing, collections, and interpretation, and equality of access to their resources. This paradigm will examine a vocabulary and a set of theories not usually found in current museum discourse: Oppression: identifying the complex – and too often unacknowledged – ways in…
Lisa Gilbert@gilbertlisak What is the role of museums & sites in responding to current events? Key Q even before this past week #YalePH2016#museumsrespondtoFerguson This tweet, posted just the other day, caught my attention not because it was unique, but because it was similar to others. I am struck by the contrast (small yet noteworthy) between…
What is The Rule of Three? Iceland has been called “a feminist paradise” in terms of health, education, economics, politics, and justice.Women figure prominently in the upper levels of its government (Johanna Sigurdardottir was PM 2009-13); and they are well represented in banking and business. A group of Icelandic woman leaders, in a recent…
[We propose a paradigm] for how museums address their responsibility for fair and inclusive staffing, collections, and interpretation, and equality of access to their resources. This paradigm will examine a vocabulary and a set of theories not usually found in current museum discourse: Oppression: identifying the complex – and too often unacknowledged – ways in…