Shelving the Empire: Anxiety, Control, and Performative Change in Postwar Museum Storage

Description

Join Johns Hopkins' Professor Rebecca M. Brown from the Department of the History of Art as she moderates the next installment of Curated Conversations: "Shelving the Empire: Performative Change in Postwar Museum Storage." Brown will host Claire Wintle, director of the Centre for Design History at the University of Brighton, UK, who will explore the dire state of museum storage in postwar Britain and the strategies museum practitioners used to meet challenges, including the relationship between collections care, professionalization, moves for cultural and political freedom, and imperial entrenchment. The lecture will be followed by a reception.

This is a hybrid event; to attend virtually, please register in advance.

While museum storage has historically remained a key site for performative change and bound up with disciplinary and professional traditions that seek to control, there is a pressing need for transparency and openness of museum storage in the present moment. Museums across the globe are working to revolutionize public access to their storehouses, aiming to transform them into sites of creativity and community engagement. Museum storage is increasingly on open display, and at the heart of debates around culturally appropriate collections care and restitution. But questions of accessibility, method, and the very validity of museum storage itself have long been at the heart of museum practice. What might be next for museum storage today?

This event is co-hosted by the Department of the History of Art and the Museum Studies and Cultural Heritage Management programs.

Co-sponsors of this event include the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, Program in Museums & Society, Global South Humanities Institute, Department of History of Science and Technology, Department of Anthropology, and Baltimore Museum of Art.