The British Museum’s complicity in BP’s artwashing ranks alongside the museum’s continual refusal to engage with its own colonial history.
Decolonizing Museums
Posted inBooks
Peeling Back the Hidden, Colonial Layers of Museum Objects
With her recent book, Alice Procter shows us the things many museums hide, the parts of objects’ histories that aren’t warm and fuzzy (or flattering for the institutions that now hold them).
Posted inBooks
Shaking Up the Ethnographic Museum
In a new book, the curator and art historian Clémentine Deliss proposes that “ethnographic” artifacts be reconsidered, remediated — and maybe even returned to their original owners.
Posted inNews
Dutch Art Museum Chooses to Change Its Colonialist Name
The Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam is named for a 17th-century naval officer who worked for both the Dutch West India and the Dutch East India companies.
Posted inArt
Why the Rijksmuseum Is Removing Bigoted Terms from Its Artworks’ Titles
If you’re browsing the digital collection of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, you might come across a 1594 painting by Cornelisz van Haarlem, “Bathsheba at her Toilet,” picturing “the beautiful Bathsheba” bathing outside the castle of King David.
Posted inArt
Join Us to Discuss #KimonoWednesdays and the Decolonialization of Museums #ArtTalk
In light of the recent Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s “Kimono Wednesdays” controversy, we’d like to explore the issues of minority representation in mainstream US museums and who gets to decide how cultural artifacts are represented and presented to the public.
