Art Exhibit Intervention Proposal Pitch

Confront the Canon

Overview

A 2019 diversity study of eighteen U.S. museums found that 85% artists in the collections are white and 87% are men (Topaz 2019). A similar trend was observed in the racial make-up of the curatorial staff and the resultant displays tend to propagate a largely Western perspective. Exhibitions play a crucial role in promoting and perpetuating the myth of greatness concretized in the art historical canon. Critical examination of the collection can uncover problematic institutional practices and allow the display to be viewed in a new light that reveal relevant hidden context. Confront the Canon (CTC) is visualized as a tool designed to reflect on the institutional bias integral in museum collection/ exhibition practices with the aim of highlighting marginalized or missing voices. The central question being explored is: How does an institution’s collection and curatorial practices contribute to the marginalization of artists based on race/gender/nationality?

Why CTC?

The inspiration for CTC is Fred Wilson’s brilliant project, Mining the Museum that delivered a powerful statement against institutional racism. While Wilson culled forgotten African-American artifacts from the Maryland Historical Society’s permanent collection to create compelling interventions in their conventional display, CTC will empower the users to challenge the represented histories. The project will provide contextual information on the exhibited objects that highlight potential exclusionary aspects and allow the informed user to introduce an alternate intervention object that could initiate important conversations around biased institutional practices.

Apart from art institutions, CTC can be adapted to examine collections hosted in museums of natural history, libraries and other custodians of history. The platform audience could include art historians, researchers, students from art history/ digital humanities/ gender studies, curatorial staff, museum educators and others interested in exploring exclusions in preserved histories. Institutions can use CTC to evaluate their collections, invite collaborators to diversify their displays and make their audience interactions more inclusive. Since several institutions have a digital presence when it comes to the exhibition space, there is an opportunity to adapt CTC with the express aim of engaging their audience to examine their collections. CTC is also intended to work as a pedagogical tool that will allow students to participate in their learning process and use the platform as an alternative to standard evaluations.

Vision for the Final Product

The project will encourage users to examine how curatorial practices enact the canon and reinforce the set narrative. To this end, CTC will showcase a past exhibition featuring additional contextual information in the object labels, produce relevant visualizations and allow the user to insert strategic replacements in the display. The project website will host the following panels using the WordPress platform:

  • Past Exhibition Panel: Display selected past exhibition.
    • Research past exhibitions on museum websites to finalize a display.
    • Create basic dataset design.
    • Create the display utilizing Google Slides* to provide an immersive experience. The accompanying object labels will provide insightful contextual information.
  • Intervention Panel: CTC seeks alternative perspectives and insights into the collection in the form of these interventions.
    • Users will have the option to intervene in the display in a meaningful way by choosing to replace an exhibit in the original display with an appropriate intervention object.
    • For replacement objects, the option is to partner with a smaller collection and use Omeka* to provide a searchable object list to choose a replacement intervention object.
    • Create the new display after integrating the intervention object into the exhibition display.
  • Data Visualization Panel: Provide additional context about the exhibit.
    • A separate page will feature Tableau generated data visualizations displaying statistics involving the race, gender, nationality of the featured creators.
    • Visualization data will analyze the objects in the display. Depending on the availability of usable data, additional visualizations analyzing the entire collection will be included.

* Contingent on the theory that Google Slides and Omeka can be embedded into WordPress.

One of the challenges is to locate a manageable dataset because collection datasets are typically huge and will require considerable investment of time in data cleaning and data management. At the prototype stage, the solution is to either work with a smaller collection so both the intervention selection and the visualizations can benefit from having access to the entire collection OR feature just the exhibition data on the project site and direct the user to the original museum site to explore intervention objects while the visualizations will be limited to the available data. There are also access restrictions to consider and the issue of permission rights will have to be addressed by taking appropriate steps to seek permission or locate alternatives in the public domain.

CTC will be disseminated with the help of the project team and consultants. The team will approach academic institutions (departments of fine art/ art history/ history), libraries, museum curatorial and education departments. CUNY GC Digital Initiatives team and GC Digital Fellows Team will be consulted to reach the CUNY community along with platforms such as CUNY ACADEMIC COMMONS to spread awareness of the project and invite collaborations to enhance CTC’s capabilities as well as advance the project into its next phase of expansion to work with different collection types.

STAFF/PARTNERS

  • Project Lead/Researcher: Review collections to select one for the project, initiate intervention object options and collaborate with programmers and consultants on visual design and usability.
  • Programmer, Data Analyst: 1-2 team members with programming expertise on Python to scrap data, build datasets and website. Expertise in Omeka.
  • Consultants:
    • CUNY GC Digital Initiatives team and GC Digital Fellows: Consult for project approach and optimum digital tool options.
    • CUNY GC Art History Department: Consult Art History graduates for perspectives on project approach and suggestions on making meaningful interventions.
    • Museum Curator: Perspective on the collection and curatorial practices, appropriate collections and intervention objects to consider.

The project will be a team effort, truly collaborative and we will make all critical decisions collectively as a group.

Tentative Work Plan

3 thoughts on “Art Exhibit Intervention Proposal Pitch”

  1. Leonard Santos (he/him)

    Hi Lini! This project is excellent, and this is such a great way to investigate the ways that we can interrogate the ways that recollection and cultural memory are shaped by white, patriarchal systems. The only piece of constructive criticism I have is one that you already mentioned, but it’s the dataset for the project. Do you have a goal for what specific kinds of data points you’d like, or an estimate for what you think would be a manageable yet fruitful amount? Also, are there any organizations that you feel like we should start investigating first for the data, or is this a part of what we’re going to do this semester?

    Can’t wait to see where this goals, and great pitch!

  2. Cathy Melamed (she/her)

    Hi Lini; your ideas for this project, especially for its use as a pedagogical tool, are incredibly important for anyone interested in public art collections. I can see tremendous value in both the experience of recognizing bias in an institution’s collection/curation history and in the task of curating the objects that will try to correct the injustice. How long do you think it will take to choose a focus collection, and similarly, how much time do you think the team will need to locate the replacement objects? Having a collection in mind before the work begins might help streamline the process.

    Excited to hear your pitch!

  3. Lini Radhakrishnan (she/her) Post author

    Hello Leonard and Cathy,

    Thank you for your comments.

    As both of you pointed out the dataset is a major decision and yes, it would have been really useful to have finalized one before the start of the project. However, with the intention of developing the project as a tool that can be adapted by various collections we could focus on that aspect instead of the findings. For instance, the idea now is to extract data for a period or a movement from the humungous MET museum collection that is available on GitHub. We begin working on the tool with that data which will need to be cleaned and managed. Simultaneously, we begin approaching smaller collections maybe at CUNY and I blocked a period of 4-5 weeks since the talks to gain access might take some time. We can probably afford that time since the development would be underway with the extracted data. Once we have access to the collection, we can test. In a way, we also test that it works with at least two collections.

    For the replacement objects, the interface will provide the user with a view of the collection that can be filtered through search criteria. Additional details such as race, gender, nationality will be displayed so the users have some context to make their selections.
    The data points of both the exhibited objects and the collection will be around race, gender, nationality and the team can brainstorm if there are any other attributes that could be useful.

    I hope I answered your questions.

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