Art is an object of aesthetic value.

Art History Education

Abstract: Inclusion strategies and approaches in interpretive planning processes for exhibitions are often resisted because they challenge precedents in museum practice. Maintaining traditional models may seem more comfortable for many museum professionals than to do the work of closely examining, fracturing, and transforming the practices that prioritize dominant cultural knowledge to the exclusion and alienation of multiple, increasingly diverse communities museums serve. This article asserts that when interpretive planning is rigorously and authentically visitor-centered and community-engaged, museums have the potential to perform decolonizing work. Examples of strategies in racial and cultural representation from recent projects at the Detroit Institute of Arts offer not a blueprint, but rather a variety of engagements that can support steps toward more responsible, equitable practice.

Museums and exhibitions

Abstract: The emergence of the nation-state, the public, and the public museum in the late eighteenth century, were intimately bound together. The French Revolution of 1789, regarded as a key moment in the dawn of the nation-state era in Western Europe, was a revolution of 'the people' which saw the replacement of an aristocratic order with a new more horizontal and democratic conception of a collectivity of equals. As such, the opening up of the formerly princely collections was an eloquent symbolic assertion of the new ideals of 'egalité, fraternité et liberté'. That which was private and aristocratic was made public and 'of the people'; the special, exclusive sphere of the elite was breached and opened up to the scrutiny of those who had previously been denied access to such treasures.

Abstract: Ensconced throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s in institutions dedicated to Native art, in recent years Native artists and curators have turned their attention to the opportunities for global visibility afforded by international exhibitions and art fairs, with particular focus on the Venice Biennale. Formerly focused on issues specific to the history of settler colonialism in the United States and Canada—land, treaty rights, and sovereignty; citizenship and the legal fictions of identity and blood quantum—the work of Native artists in the 21st century has come to share much with the work of a current generation of “itinerant artists” active in the international art world. Taking recent Native participation in the Venice Biennale as a case study, this article considers the new global visibility of Native artists and the problematics of “going global” for Native artists, whose aesthetic authority has been figured as literally “grounded” specific local landscapes.

Art Theory

Excerpt: "The aim of restorers is (deceptively) simple to state: show as best as possible what the artist intended us to see. We desire to see what the artist made, without later additions to or subtractions from the artwork.

Queer & Feminist art

Excerpt: "JC: The most important thing my programs contributed to The Dinner Party was in how clear they made it that there was a big audience and deep hunger for female-centered art - and that was something I really saw with the response that grew out of Womanhouse, which was a project of the CalArts Feminist Art Program. I was also compiling a feminist art history archive from slides that I gathered as I traveled or shot from books, usually black-and-white crappy little shots, because there was almost nothing available. Later, I got my students working on that project - which educated them about the absence of information about women artists."