For Museums
These resources will be helpful to museum professionals. Here, you will find examples and case studies of museums that have decolonized exhibits and instituted programs that nurture healing in their community. These examples are museums of varying sizes. Click each image to view the resource.
Blueprint for Transformation
Blog Post
Portland’s Five Oaks Museum was founded in 1956. In 2019 a new director was in place and the museum began to re-evaluate exhibits, particularly those featuring the area’s Indigenous history. This blog post details how the museum went about transitioning into one that incorporated the reality of the history without sanitizing it
or ignoring it, as had been done in the past. They also restructured their board so that
it became more inclusive and diverse.
Evaluation: This is an excellent accompaniment to the resource, “Decentering Whiteness in the Museum” because it is another viewpoint about the same museum and gives readers a deeper insight about their process of decolonizing materials and exhibits. Just as people can learn from other individuals, one museum can learn by the example of another. This is an excellent model to follow.
[Disclosure: graphic image used on article’s front page]
This article is about the transformation of “The Redneck Store” in Laurens, SC, that sold Confederate memorabilia, neo-Nazi items, and was a headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan; it is in the process of becoming an African American history museum and does not sanitize the facts of history. It will be useful in its example of the healing power this has for a community. It should be noted that there was a book titled “Burden” written about this, as well as a film.
Evaluation: This will be useful to readers because it offers real-life situations and issues. History is painful and complicated, and this article features that fact while also illustrating how healing is possible even in places where hate has been embedded for centuries. It highlights that if there is a passion to change things, no matter how difficult or painful it might be, transformation is possible. Museums and other institutions can lead the way in learning from past mistakes. Additionally, this article offers a grassroots perspective and exemplifies that small groups of people can accomplish just as much, if not more, than big institutions.
A Center for Healing
Article
Decentering Whiteness
Blog Post By Guest Curator
This is a blog post written by a guest curator, Steph Littlebird Fogel, at the Five Oaks Museum in Portland, Oregon. The author details their experience with redeveloping an Indigenous history museum exhibit to correct errors and add information to tell the whole story, which was previously the version told from a white perspective and not the actual history.
Evaluation: This offers an insider’s view and will help readers to feel inspired to re-evaluate their own collections for inaccuracies, bias, and racism. The author gives good insight into the process, which was to show the original exhibit with red marks highlighting additions and deletions so that viewers could gain a sense of the depth of what was missing or incorrect. This also illustrates the impact the reframing of the exhibit has had on the museum’s mission, increased diversity of visitors, and the effect on the wider community. It highlights a positive example of success with decolonizing an exhibit.
Inclusion and Museums
Article
Although this focuses on art museums, it still offers relevant ideas. The author,
a museum professional at the University of Virginia’s Fralin Museum of Art, discusses his realization about the lack of inclusivity in museums and the need to make actionable goals to correct this.
Evaluation: This article defines inclusivity and situates it within practical and actionable ways of incorporating it within the museum landscape. The author is very specific in detailing the events, outreach activities, and methods taken by the Fralin Museum of Art. This can benefit other museum professionals or archivists reading the piece.
Transparency & Truth
Article
This article focuses mainly on Baltimore's Walters Art Museum. The museum was founded by William T. Walters and his son Henry, who were supporters of the Confederacy and whose wealth came through profits from slavery, thereby allowing them to collect art that formed the museum's collection.
Evaluation: This article details the museum's history and their approach at owning up to the truth of not only the museum's founding and history but also the role it played in segregation and exclusion, as well as their collection's development. The executive director offers some insight into how they came to this decision and what the path forward should look like. The article mentions other museums, both art and history related, that have similiar histories and how some are grappling with their truths. This is a good article that gives space for other museums to consider examining their own histories and offers some ideas for embracing painful truths as a healing path forward.
What is Decolonization?
Article
"Decolonization" is a well-used term these days. But what does it actually mean? What does this look like within the scope of a museum or historical repository? This article offers an in-depth understanding.
Evaluation: This article offers an understanding of decolonization within museums, particularly those featuring Indigenous artifacts and art. But it takes this a step further to explain how museums can expand this practice for a depper transformation. The author discusses concepts like changing the decision makers within museum settings, the perspectives that guide exhibit design, exclusivity of museums by cost, diversifying museum staff, language used in exhibits, and collection development policies.