Curated Conversations Presents "Evolving Issues of Material Culture"

Description

Join Karina Wizevich, moderator and associate director of the MA in Museum Studies program, as she hosts art educator, writer, and curator Daniela Fifi and sociocultural anthropologist Ruth Toulson for a stimulating conversation about material culture and ever-evolving issues of repatriation and decolonization. The discussion will include an examination of case studies, ranging from Caribbean and Asian museums to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and examples of digital and physical repatriation to highlight the impact of sharing objects and stories across modalities.

Daniela Fifi has worked as an arts educator, writer, and art curator in galleries and museums in the U.S. and the Caribbean. She is a doctoral graduate in art and art education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in New York and a Master of Arts in art gallery and museum studies from the University of Manchester, UK. Fifi's research interests are primarily on inclusive art museum programming with a particular focus on examining museums' foundational ideological frameworks to formulate collections and programming. She currently serves as the editor-in-chief for ViewFinder: Reflecting on Museum Education e-journal and has also served on the editorial board of Art Education, the official journal of the National Art Education Association. She was formerly the managing editor of Small Axe Visualities: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism, a project of the Small Axe Journal (Duke University Press).

Ruth E. Toulson is a cultural anthropologist whose research in the funeral industry in Southeast Asia and Mainland China focuses on troubling material culture, particularly the dead body whether in museum collections or exhumed from a grave. She received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge, where she trained at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. She is the author of Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore, coeditor of The Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Death (forthcoming, University of Cambridge Press) and editor, with Zahra Newby, of The Materiality of Mourning: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives (Routledge 2018).

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