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 initiative – a collaboration between his Boston University Center for Antiracist Research and The Boston Globe. Kendi…
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 our…
Join Museum Workers Speak for a listening session on Wednesday, July 22, 2020 at 7:30 pm ET. Go to this invitation for more information on the event and on how to participate. The Museum Workers Relief Fund MWS is a collective of activist museum workers interrogating the relationship between museums’ stated commitments to social value…
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…
See timely advice from The Empathetic Museum: How to Be an Empathetic Museum in these Troubled Times”
In the century that has followed the rise and near-triumph of Nazism between the 1920s and 1945, history has judged not just Adolf Hitler, his government, paramilitary organizations, and army. We have also become aware of the almost total submission of German civic institutions to Nazism: the courts, universities, banks, hospitals, arts organizations – all…
On July 22, 2014, almost four years ago, I raised this issue on AAM’s Future of Museums blog: Unacompanied Children at our Borders: Can Museums Help? It didn’t attract much attention, but this was before #museumsrespondtoFerguson, #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, Museums and Race, MASSAction, and countless other disussions and initiatives regarding museums’ engagement with and responsibility to the world outside…
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…
I’m still gathering my thoughts on the fast and furious Twitter conversation of the week of December 18, 2017, sparked by Rebecca Herz’s post, Can Museums Be Neutral? While I’m working on my response I’d like to add to the discussion by publishing the thoughts of Dan Spock (formerly Director of the Museum at the…
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…