Results by title

111 books match the query 'Museum Studies' and 5 start with s

cover of Sacred Modern: Faith, Activism, and Aesthetics in the Menil Collection

Sacred Modern

Faith, Activism, and Aesthetics in the Menil Collection

By Pamela G. Smart

University of Texas Press, 2010

Renowned as one of the most significant museums built by private collectors, the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, seeks to engage viewers in an acutely aesthetic, rather than pedagogical, experience of works of art. The Menil's emphasis on being moved by art, rather than being taught art history, comes from its founders' conviction that art offers a way to reintegrate the sacred and the secular worlds. Inspired by the French Catholic revivalism of the interwar years that recast Catholic tradition as the avant-garde, Dominique and John de Menil shared with other Catholic intellectuals a desire to reorder a world in crisis by imbuing modern cultural forms with religious faith, binding the sacred with the modern.

Sacred Modern explores how the Menil Collection gives expression to the religious and political convictions of its founders and how "the Menil way" is being both perpetuated and contested as the Museum makes the transition from operating under the personal direction of Dominique de Menil to the stewardship of career professionals. Taking an ethnographic approach, Pamela G. Smart analyzes the character of the Menil aesthetic, the processes by which it is produced, and the sensibilities that it is meant to generate in those who engage with the collection. She also offers insight into the extraordinary impact Dominique and John de Menil had on the emergence of Houston as a major cultural center.

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cover of Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display

Sex Museums

The Politics and Performance of Display

Jennifer Tyburczy

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Winner of the 29th annual Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies

All museums are sex museums. In Sex Museums, Jennifer Tyburczy takes a hard look at the formation of Western sexuality—particularly how categories of sexual normalcy and perversity are formed—and asks what role museums have played in using display as a technique for disciplining sexuality. Most museum exhibits, she argues, assume that white, patriarchal heterosexuality and traditional structures of intimacy, gender, and race represent national sexual culture for their visitors. Sex Museums illuminates the history of such heteronormativity at most museums and proposes alternative approaches for the future of public display projects, while also offering the reader curatorial tactics—what she calls queer curatorship—for exhibiting diverse sexualities in the twenty-first century.

Tyburczy shows museums to be sites of culture-war theatrics, where dramatic civic struggles over how sex relates to public space, genealogies of taste and beauty, and performances of sexual identity are staged. Delving into the history of erotic artifacts, she analyzes how museums have historically approached the collection and display of the material culture of sex, which poses complex moral, political, and logistical dilemmas for the Western museum. Sex Museums unpacks the history of the museum and its intersections with the history of sexuality to argue that the Western museum context—from its inception to the present—marks a pivotal site in the construction of modern sexual subjectivity.    
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cover of Spirit of the Place: From Mauthausen to Moma

Spirit of the Place

From Mauthausen to Moma

Péter György

Central European University Press, 2008

These essays are case-studies, the cases unraveling our cultural roots, memory itself. If a museum is the subject, then for instance the way the museum changes face, function, its manner of speech; how, a repository of collections and the cultural memory of humankind itself turns into one of the objects, memories, a custodian and exponent of its own history, or the opposite: how it connects with its modernized environs and changing audience: us. How has, or might the sanctum be transformed into a public venue, go from an inward looking, reverential enclosure to a space full of life. In other studies included here the author speaks of spatial and incarnate remembrance: the radical difference between a monument and a memorial. The duality of “always remembering” and “never forgetting”: a past depersonalized and dehistoricized as it was seized and processed. Of the layers of meaning attached to concentration camps, transmuting essence of artworks, and the difficult, the contradictory but inescapable processing of history and the past, of self-identical existence in history. So that we know we are alive. And how that is so.
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cover of Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum

Still Life

Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum

Fernando Domínguez Rubio

University of Chicago Press, 2020

How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters.

Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still.

As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.
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cover of Stronger Together / Kammanatut Atausigun / Iknaqataghaghluta Qerngaamta: Bering Strait Communities Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Stronger Together / Kammanatut Atausigun / Iknaqataghaghluta Qerngaamta

Bering Strait Communities Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Amy Phillips-Chan

University of Alaska Press, 2024

A collection of first-person narratives offering a vivid, nuanced look at the lived and shared experiences of Bering Strait communities in the COVID-19 era, Stronger Together is a unique collaboration between the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum in Nome, Alaska, and over forty community members, artists, and poets from across the Bering Strait region.
 
The featured artists narrativize works inspired by the pandemic, from walrus ivory masks and sealskin face coverings to scenes of subsistence activities and informal family portraits. Full-color illustrations enliven the text with vibrant images of local community members, activities, and artwork from those who call this northern expanse of rolling tundra and icy seas home.
 
Stronger Together features hopeful and redemptive behind-the-scenes perspectives of how remote Alaskan communities endured the COVID-19 pandemic and appeals to anyone looking for hopeful and redemptive stories of this time, as well as museum, public arts, and culture program administrators; student and scholars of Indigenous and Alaska Native languages and culture; the Alaska anthropology community; artists and art enthusiasts; and those with a general interest in Alaska.
 
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