Re-Thinking the Art Museum

Moderated by Marsha Semmel and Avi Decter, editors of Change is Required: Preparing for the Post-Pandemic Museum (2022).

Art museums, like other types of museums, address issues of equity, inclusion, representation, and shared authority. Confronting these challenges requires re-thinking art historical narratives, restructuring staff and work culture, and negotiating new terms of collaboration with both communities and living artists. This panel will identify some of the critical issues at stake in changing organizational priorities and practice and suggest some of the ways change can be affected for the benefit of staff, audiences, and art history.

As Chief Curator of the Princeton Art Museum at Princeton University,  since 2019, Juliana Ochs Dweck has been overseeing the reinstallation of the museum’s collections and galleries in anticipation of opening a new museum in 2025. To do so, she has been building a culture of collaboration across diverse areas of curatorial expertise. She has curated exhibitions on African sculpture, Mexican retables, and political protest and…