Reading list, 27 October 2019

Nathan Mudyi Sentance reviews Natalie Harkin's Archival-Poetics for the Sydney Review of Books: "poet Dr Natalie Harkin (Narungga) knows what many First Nations people know, that official archives are a powerful colonial weapon as well as a site of mourning".

Talia Marshall's River monster: My elusive and charismatic father, for North & South

The Whitewashing of “#WhitePeopleDoingYoga” by Chiraag Bhakta: "My artwork was about appropriation. San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum tried to appropriate it".

Improving records for First Nations collections at the National Library of Australia

Nina Siegal rounds up decolonising efforts in Dutch museums: A Dutch Golden Age? That’s Only Half the Story

Shelley Angelie Saggar's The Decolonial Dictionary

Miriama Aoake's Making sense of Tuia 250 through Barry Barclay’s prescient work for The Spinoff

Karin Chernick for Hyperallergic: How Women Artists Flourished in Northern Italy During the Renaissance

Robin Pogrebin and Zachary Small on the complexities of overhauling NYC's racist and sexist public monuments, for the New York Times: New York’s Race to Build Monuments Runs Into Friction on the Ground

Reading list, 5 October 2019

Sometimes an exhibition turns out so much better than the core idea suggests it might. Two reviews (the Guardian, the New York Times) suggest Gossamer, an exhibition at Carl Freedman Gallery in Margate, England, curated by Zoe Bedeaux and including artists from Sarah Lucas to Man Ray to Enam Gbewonyo who have worked in some way with woman's stockings, is one of these shows. (Check out the articles for some extraordinary images.)

Charlotte Burns of Art Agency Partners gives Max Hollein, director of the Met, a good poking on repatriating taonga, the stats on women artists & the market & collections & exhibitions,  ethics & governance, and the museum's one billion dollar package of capital projects.

Dropping this here because I'm still working cancel culture out but it's full of useful links: Osita Nwanevu for The New Republic, The “Cancel Culture” Con

And ticketing this one up for value-clashes: Massey University's statement on providing venue hire to a group called Speak Up 4 Women for an event called 'Feminism 2020' that throws the university's commitment to fostering free speech into opposition with its commitment to fostering a campus environment welcoming to all identities.

The latest from the MuseuPunks podcast: Decolonization and its Discontents featuring Sumaya Kassim and Nathan “Mudyi” Sentance.

A request from The Spinoff about gender diversity in exhibition programming circulated around public and private art galleries a couple of months ago - the outcome is Anna Knox's lengthy article Gender bias and art in Aotearoa: a Spinoff survey reveals the harsh reality which ends up focusing on dealer galleries and has some interesting insights / observations (and reveals data is indeed a slippery fish)

Aligned to the proposed re-definition of a museum by ICOM and growing focus on ethical leadership, in the NYT: Shareholder Value Is No Longer Everything, Top C.E.O.s Say:

 Breaking with decades of long-held corporate orthodoxy, the Business Roundtable issued a statement on “the purpose of a corporation,” arguing that companies should no longer advance only the interests of shareholders. Instead, the group said, they must also invest in their employees, protect the environment and deal fairly and ethically with their suppliers.

Kara Walker takes over the Tate's Turbine Hall

By me (cough, cough)

• On RNZ talking about the Amsterdam Museum's decision to no longer use the phrase 'Golden Age', and the theft of Maurizio Cattelan's golden toilet
• A short speech given to remember Paul Reynolds at the event to celebrate Gareth Seymour's award of the scholarship set up in Paul's name.

Reading list, 14 September 2019

Wow, I have a lot of reading to catch up on ...

Daniel Weiss, Adam Weinberg and other museum leaders speak out following the fallout from the resignation of the Whitney’s vice chairman and the ongoing Sackler affair - for The Art Newspaper

There was “next to nothing” about Muslims in the Brooklyn Historical Society’s century-old archives. Now there are 54 oral histories, which serve as the foundation for a new art exhibition.

The Amsterdam Museum will no longer use the descriptor "Golden Age" to for the 17th century:

The Golden Age occupies an important place in Western historiography that is strongly linked to national pride. But positive associations with the term such as prosperity, peace, opulence and innocence do not cover the charge of historical reality in this period. The term ignores the many negative sides of the 17th century such as poverty, war, forced labour and human trafficking.

The Wellcome Collection's new long-term exhibition Being Human has been designed "accessibility first" and has garnered a lot of well deserved press: No art lover left behind: how galleries are finally welcoming disabled people (Guardian); Is This the World’s Most Accessible Museum? (NYT);

A British survey shows that four in ten cultural organisations pay their junior front of house staff less than a living wage.

Lorraine Boissonneault for Slate: The Complicated Decisions That Come With Digitizing Indigenous Languages

Look, I haven't engaged with the Jeffrey Epstein thing at all so just dropping this in here for future reference: Martin Levine, Must Modern Philanthropy Be So Corrosive?, on Epstein's philanthropic relationship with MIT.

The Ford Foundation's president Darren Walker in conversation with artnet's Andrew Goldstein: ‘We Don’t Need to Demonize Wealthy People’: Ford Foundation President Darren Walker on the Unnerving Aftermath of the Warren Kanders Protests

ICOM shrugged off the vote on the proposed new definition of a "museum": Should Art Museums Be More or Less Ideological? After Pushback, a Gathering of Museum Leaders Refuses to Address the Question

Suse Anderson is teaching a new first-year course on museum ethics at George Washington University, and the course outline looks like a primer in contemporary museum discussions

Reading list, 4 May 2019

Still chewing this over with a lot of discomfort: Is this ‘Common’ Language? A College’s Misguided Guide by Rand Richards Cooper on Commonweal and a copy of the Amherst common language guide referred to in the opinion piece, since redacted by the university.

Recent writing by Nathan “Mudyi” Sentance: Queering [the museum] needs to be anti-colonial

Three pieces of catch-up reading from the Pantograph Punch:

• Hanahiva Rose on Matthew McIntyre's The New Net, shown at The Dowse as part of SOLO 2018
• Jane Groufsky on Areez Katki's embroidered works at Malcolm Smith Gallery
• Elle Loui August on Peter Hawkesby's return to ceramics 

Speaking of which, the Pantograph Punch is looking for a new director: a 0.5 role working alongside the Editor in Chief to run the platform

I'm sure I've linked to this before, but an extract & link to the full statement: Germany reveals Framework Principles for Dealing with Collections from Colonial Contexts

Recently from Nina Simon: evaluating and ranking potential risks of failure, to get organised & reduce stress

NPR's guide to saying "foreign" names on air

Thousands of articles of everyday women’s clothing are being preserved in lockers in a college basement. But where, exactly, does their value lie?