LEAD 301
Museums: History and Practice Spring 2024
Division II
Cross-listed ARTH 501 / LEAD 301 / ARTH 401

Art museums express the cultural, aesthetic and social ideals of their period of formation and many of those ideals are embedded in the values and practices of institutions today. Comparing institutions past and present internationally, seminar participants will envision the art museum’s future while addressing programmatic and organizational challenges at this moment of participatory civic engagement and social, political unrest. With growing skepticism of institutional collecting practices and authoritative narratives, art museums, especially those in the United States, face internal and external pressure to “decolonize” as they attempt to alter their canon. There is pressure, as well, to embrace a more active role in climate and social justice movements. It is a time marked by calls for compensation transparency, participatory decision making, staff and trustee diversity, and greater scrutiny of funders. The seminar will consider this environment against past and current norms of governance, management and curatorial policies and practices. We will examine the traditional role of architecture and installation in interpretation and experience, prevailing and proposed guidelines in the accessioning and deaccessioning of works of art and both internal and external attitudes towards the repatriation and restitution of cultural property. Studying museums ranging in size and type from the “encyclopedic” to newly established contemporary arts institutions and alternative spaces, seminar participants will hear how museum leaders are dealing with challenges to current practice through weekly zoom sessions. Participants will also ponder how future museums might strive to balance the institution’s traditional scholarly and artistic role with new civic and social responsibilities, mindful of financial stability in a market-driven, metric-conscious, not-for-profit environment; doing so while addressing, in proposed program and practice, the demands on museums emanating from a more ethically insistent internal and external world.