Wayne Modest

Viv Golding

This edited volume critically engages with contemporary scholarship on museums and their engagement with the communities they purport to serve and represent. Foregrounding new curatorial strategies, it addresses a significant gap in the available literature, exploring some of the complex issues arising from recent approaches to collaboration between museums and their communities. The book unpacks taken-for-granted notions such as scholarship, community, participation and collaboration, which can gloss over the complexity of identities and lead to tokenistic claims of inclusion by museums. Over sixteen chapters, well-respected authors from the US, Australia and Europe offer a timely critique to address what happens when museums put community-minded principles into practice, challenging readers to move beyond shallow notions of political correctness that ignore vital difference in this contested field. Contributors address a wide range of key issues, asking pertinent questions such as how museums negotiate the complexities of integrating collaboration when the target community is a living, fluid, changeable mass of people with their own agendas and agency. When is engagement real as opposed to symbolic, who benefits from and who drives initiatives? What particular challenges and benefits do artist collaborations bring? Recognising the multiple perspectives of community participants is one thing, but how can museums incorporate this successfully into exhibition practice? Students of museum and cultural studies, practitioners and everyone who cares about museums around the world will find this volume essential reading.

Curators, Collections and Collaboration

Museums and Communities

Annette B. Fromm

Per B. Rekdal

Museums are usually seen as arenas for the authorised presentations of reality, based on serious, professional knowledge. Yet, in spite of the impossibility of giving anything but a highly abstract and extremely selective impression in an exhibition, very few museums problematize this or discuss their priorities with their public. They don’t ask “what are the other truths of the matter?” Though the essays in this collection are not written with museums and truth as their explicit subject, they highlight contested truths, the absence of the truth of the underprivileged, whether one truth is more worthy than the other, and whether lesser truths can dilute the value of greater truths. One of the articles included here lets youngsters choose which truth is most probable or just, while another talks about an exhibition where the public must choose which truth to adhere to before entering. One shows how a political change gives a new opportunity to finally restore valuable truths of the past to the present, and another describes the highly dangerous task of making museums and memorials for the truths of the oppressed. Lastly, one explores whether we live in a period where the sources for authorized truths are fragmented and questioned, and asks, what should the consequences for museums be?

Museums and Truth

With contributions from key scholars in a range of disciplines, this engaging new volume explores the complex issues surrounding collaboration between museums and their communities.

Viv Golding

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