Museums After Modernism: Strategies of Engagement

Museums After Modernism is a diverse set of essays that addresses the urgent question of how the museum can be a public institution, a focus for critical debate and knowledge in an era when museums and galleries are increasingly being subsumed into national heritage and civic tourist industries through blockbusters and managed education programs. The book uniquely brings together artists, curators, art historians, and users to explore the strategies for non–canonical and creative fostering of the museum as a public space for dialogue and transformation in the postcolonial era. Combining theoretical reflections on the histories of the museum with recent case studies, Museums After Modernism goes beyond current museology and reconsiders the strategies of engagement with what the museum could be “after modernism.”

List of Figures. Notes on Contributors. Series Editor’s Preface. Preface. 1. Un–Framing the Modern: Critical Space/Public Possibility (Griselda Pollock, University of Leeds). 2. Women’s Rembrandt (Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam). 3. Museums and the Native Voice (Gerald McMaster, Art Gallery of Ontario). 4. Exhibiting Africa after Modernism: Globalization, Pluralism, and Persistent Paradigms of Art and Artifact (Ruth B. Phillips, Carleton University). 5. Mirroring Evil, Evil Mirrored: Timing, Trauma, and Temporary Exhibitions (Reesa Greenberg, independent scholar and museum consultant). 6. A Place for Uncertainty: Towards a New Kind of Museum (Vera Frenkel, artist). 7. The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi: Notes on Gesture, Medium, and Mediation (Mary Kelly, University of California, Los Angeles). 8. Riksutställningar: Swedish Traveling Exhibitions (Ulla Arnell, Curator and Project Manager at Riksutställningar). 9. Reframing Participation in the Museum: A Syncopated Discussion (Janna Graham, PhD, University of London and Shadya Yasin, student, York University, Toronto). 10. “There Is No Such Thing as a Visitor” (Judith Mastai, d. 2001). 11. “Anxious Dust”: History and Repression in the Archives of Mary Kelly (Judith Mastai, d. 2001). 12. On Discourse as Monument: Institutional Spaces and Feminist Problematics (Juli Carson, University of California, Irvine). Bibliography. Index.

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds, where she is also Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History (CATH). Joyce Zemans is an art historian and curator. She is a University Professor and Director of the MBA Program in Arts and Media Administration at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto.