Globally, museums are increasingly tasked with re-contextualizing themselves and their historic entanglements with racism, colonialism, homophobia and other forms of oppression. As museums try to craft new narratives they must wrestle with the question: What happens when the museum itself becomes an artifact? How can problematic histories be made visible, and how might justice be served? What new narratives can be crafted, and to what ends? What could they be? What forms do they take?
This studio partners with the American Natural History Museum in New York City to explore these questions. Focusing on the existing "Man in Africa" Hall, which opened to the public in 1968, we will prototype ways to contextualize and understand the hall. How might visitors to this now 60-year-old space participate in a range of questions and narratives about the people and places that created the hall, those who the hall depicts, and larger questions about museums more generally? Moving beyond typical questions of exhibition design, this studio will draw from archival documents, current collections, and the hall itself, to explore design techniques of the "meta:" re-contextualizing existing material by adding visual layers, leveraging technology, crafting commentary, and curating slices, rather than starting from scratch.
Requisites
Must be 5th Term or higher