Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity

That Lady Thing

| Dana

Gender play gap: behind the fun facade of a feminist pop-up museum

That Lady Thing, an installation in San Francisco, gives issues of sexism an unlikely coat of color in a lighthearted way of communicating a serious message.

The Lady Thing exhibition

A portion of That Lady Thing’s $28.45 entry fee will donate funds to the National Women’s Law Center and other women’s organizations. Photograph: Nicole Henderson/The Lady Thing.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/aug/06/that-lady-thing-feminist-museum-san-francisco?CMP=share_btn_fb

To Fight Racism Within Museums, They Need to Stop Acting Like They’re Neutral

| Dana

https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/pavpkn/to-fight-racism-within-museums-they-need-to-stop-acting-like-theyre-neutral?__twitter_impression=true

“In April, the Brooklyn Museum hired a white curator, Kristen Windmuller-Luna to oversee its collection of African art. The appointment outraged skeptics who felt that a black curator should oversee the institution’s African objects. Decolonize This Place, a New York activist group, staged a protest occupying the museum’s Beaux-Arts Court and penned a letter publicly accusing the museum of racism and aiding gentrification, demanding prompt change. One protester flung a pink banner over a balcony that read: “THEY WANT THE ART, NOT THE PEOPLE.”

The sign, for me, gets at the heart of the debate around how to combat racism in cultural institutions, which are both succeeding and failing to address the issue.”

CfS from Fwd: Museums

| Dana

Submission topics may include, but are not limited to:
· Museums as sites of social and political resistance
· Museums as sanctuary spaces
· The politics of representation
· Investigating the ways objects are labelled within collections
· Issues of repatriation of cultural heritage
· Community engagement/detachment
· Examples of resistance in digital spaces
· Alienated labor
· Migration
· Terminology
· Othering of marginalized groups
· Queering museum spaces
· Experiences of alienation as a visitor
Fwd: Museums invites academic articles, essays, exhibition/book reviews, artwork, creative writing, experimental forms, and interviews. All submissions should follow the guidelines and relate to the journal’s mission statement. We strongly encourage reviews and interviews and require all other submissions to connect to the third issue’s theme, “alien.” Scholars, artists, practitioners, and activists from all fields are welcome to submit.

– Deadline: January 5, 2018 by 11:59 pm (CT)

https://fwdmuseumsjournal.weebly.com/

Curatorial Activism

| Dana

http://www.artnews.com/2017/11/07/what-is-curatorial-activism/

The following is adapted from Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, by Maura Reilly (to be published April 2018 by Thames & Hudson). ©2018 Maura Reilly. Reprinted by permission of Thames & Hudson Inc.

“Curatorial Activism” is a term I use to designate the practice of organizing art exhibitions with the principle aim of ensuring that certain constituencies of artists are no longer ghettoized or excluded from the master narratives of art. It is a practice that commits itself to counter-hegemonic initiatives that give voice to those who have been historically silenced or omitted altogether—and, as such, focuses almost exclusively on work produced by women, artists of color, non-Euro-Americans, and/or queer artists. The thesis of my forthcoming book, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, takes as its operative assumption that the art system—its history, institutions, market, press, and so forth—is an hegemony that privileges white male creativity to the exclusion of all Other artists. It also insists that this white Western male viewpoint, which has been unconsciously accepted as the prevailing viewpoint, “may––and does––prove to be inadequate not merely on moral and ethical grounds, or because it is elitist, but on purely intellectual ones.”