Rachel Chapman @ CSU Pueblo

  Children's Museums in Pittsburgh  Source The museum industry is suffering because of its lacks responses to activism, open letter complaints, or suggestions on how to improve their infrastructure. Museums are playing both sides of the issue when it comes to financial paying employees and the treatment of their employees.     They are writing responses explaining their wrongs or hiring people to make it seem like they atoned for their unethical actions. But they fail to change their system that keeps allowing them to make these actions.   Over the course module on labor, museums cannot seem to do the decent thing and treat their employees with respect. It is not just museums that are ignoring for paying internships or hiring a more diverse staff without causing a token or just keep them as numbers so the museum can say they have some sort of diversity. Museums seem to get a lot of backlash when they prioritize their executive or board of trustees over their s...

                       Representation matters in all forms of media and needs to include subcultures it tends to leave out. There is no way to dodge the expectation each person has to see someone that looks like them or has the same feelings as them. It can bolster confidence and reassure an individual they are valued and matter to others. Reality has a whole lose pieces when others pick and chose what is shown and what is not shown because that does not make reality it makes a false narrative. Jan Zita Grover’s “Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs” calls for the change of idealizing images in a photograph because it is not the truth. Photographs are made to influence a person feeling when they view that photograph. It is why mass media photographs tall, thin, blonds it invokes the desire to be a tall blond or have a relationship with a tall blond.       ...

  Guerrilla Girls, Top Ten Signs That You're An Art World Token, 1995  Source It is to no surprise that museums all across the globe are rooted in systemic racism left behind by colonization. This has allowed trustees, boards, and any higher executives to abuse their staff that works below them, especially with people of color, since most of the higher held positions are occupied by white males. There have always been activists, community leaders, and visitors calling for a change in the establishment when it comes to the treatment of Asian Americans, Blacks, Indigenous, and LatinX artists and museum’s staff. Those calls are ignored or silenced by museums when they virtue signal on social media or makes statements that activism does not have a place in their field of work. So, the problem of mistreatment is still well rooted and continues to be perpetrated on minority groups. During the summer of 2020 there has been more of a call for denouncement of racism in the museum sys...

  Honey Lee Contrell Source      Images of people have always captivated audiences. There seems to be a deep connection between the still images in a snapshot of time and space and audience. A photograph can transport a person into the setting of a picture, and it is the responsibility of the photographer to depict what the reality is to themselves and to the viewer.  When pictures are displayed, the stories, it tells can be counterproductive, misleading, or even dangerous. But those are not the stories most audiences want to see, but by discounting those photographs that are challenging, it creates a problem by under-representing an entire part of life. Jan Zita Grover’s “Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs” explains how photographs are not a true source of reality.      Lesbian photography before the 1990s were not about the sexual desire of these women taking these photographs. It was about a portr...

  Source Art has always been allowed to challenge culture. Artists have changed the rules of art and questioned who can even do art. It is the idea that art is expressive enough to where it can have an identity outside of the proper word.  Artists have created a place where they can bring their ideas to the table and be judged or admired for their talent. With that being said, art culture has put constraints on people that are deemed apart from the establishment. Since art culture is influenced by society. Examples of these influences is the rejection of John Singer Sargent Portrait of Madame X, and the accepting of makeup artists that perform drag. Art culture can benefit from the teaching of Judith Butler, but mainly art culture is an example of leaving certain society’s limitations behind too.    In “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” by Judith Butler informs the reader that gender identity and ge...

     San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)  Source     Museum ethics have been called into question over the years and the calls keep getting louder. Soon museums cannot remain quiet or have one person resign to keep the eyes off museum’s laundry list of wrongdoings. Not only can a museum’s ethics be called into question when they take sponsorship from major companies that are benefiting from the opioids crisis or the companies that have spilt over 200 millions of gallons of oil into the ocean. It calls attention to how museums are using the money major companies are giving them. Understandable museums will need financing to keep up conservation, curation, and paying wages of employees, but not when money is only going towards paying the top executives. Museums have failed their own standards.        The wrongdoings of the British Museum have made a Board Trustee remove himself from the museum completely when they refused...

                                                                                     Marina Abramovic still from  Rhythm 0, 1974  Source      The world's a stage, and everyone is thespian. The actors are tasked with the deciphering of words that are on the script and giving those words life, giving them a reason to exist. However, the stage will always require a director to control the aspects of what is happening on the stage. The same can be said about a culture and society that dictates the aspect of gender identity. It is culture that has manufactured the gender role and punish those who dare step out of the boundaries. Culture is the director, the visionary for the play, and individuals are the actors ...

                                                                              It went down at the Guggenheim! @chaedria is the first Black curator to exhibit with the institution with her show Basquiat: Defacement The Untold Story. They left her off the panel and..... pic.twitter.com/UjM5NlpBRz — bad news women (@badnewswomen) November 6, 2019                                                                                   Source The year 2020 has been full of unsuspecting events even with less than two months before the year comes to an end there seem to be more surprises than hope for. One...

Nicholas Galanin, Where will we go?, 2008 Source      Western methodologies and epistemology have overshadowed and plainly removed Indigenous ways in the realm of academia. The reason can only be because the United States government has colonized the nation, set out war, and vanquished the Indigenous people and carries this mindset when dealing with the Indigenous people. This has allowed western academia to prosecute holistic and metaphysical ways of epistemology in the various Native American cultures. In Margaret Kovach essay, “Epistemology and Research: Centering Tribal Knowledge, ‘Indigenous Methodologies, Characteristics, Conversations and Context’” gives a glimpse in the epistemology of the Plains Cree natives.       Research is one pillar of the academic world. For the Plains Cree research can be best described in a story of a buffalo hunt. Kovach explains, “in many ways, the story of the buffalo hunt is a research teaching story, an allegory f...

Source The Field Museum in Chicago  Museums have an aura of timelessness; museums seem to have been around since the dawn of time. The stature of the building that are designed to impress but also to impose a sense of betterment. This has allowed museums impose their own will. So how can an establishment that seems genuinely wise be naive to the world around them? The problem is museums is that they are sticking to their old ways and not inviting change that would benefit the art world. It has put a chokehold in the progression of museums ultimately leading to the decay of the establishment since it has turned itself into an irrelevant subject.  Museum have neglected audiences outside of their normal goer making them complacent. They also have failed to offer outside arrangements to encourage people to further their art careers. Museums are ultimately leaving out different perspectives and not allowing the revival of the art culture.      Data collected proves t...

  Nicholas Galanin,  Operation Geronimo , Silkscreen, 2013 Source      Indefinitely people think differently from one another and there is no way around this fact of life. People choose to either share their ideas or keep them a secret. Through this exchange each idea needs to be placed in a category of knowledge. To place ideas and thoughts into said category, this term is epistemology. Epistemology is used to separate opinion from fact, and epistemology is still debated in the academic fields. And there is a need from this debate because it has placed a social scale on knowledge. Margaret Kovach, an Indigenous scholar points out the difference in knowledge is how it’s used and gained through the Cree culture.       In her writing, “Epistemology and Research: Centering Tribal Knowledge” epistemology has an Eurocentric influence. This influence can be seen in the highest esteem of academia because all knowledge must be cut and dry, there is n...

  The statue of Queen Nefertiti Source      Over the course of learning about reparations and deaccessioning art there seems to be so much of a red tape, it seems impossible to penetrate the core issues. Museum and visitors have grown attached to their collections. But they do not see the harm in keeping stolen art or the lack of diversity in the collections. Fixing these problems seems to result in one person making a hasty decision on what the solution should be. One person’s input cannot be the deciding factor, there needs to be communication on all fronts. There needs to be a deep change in the way people view the solutions. The demand for a system to be put in place that brings awareness to the conversation and actions of professionals to the regular museum visitors.       There seems to be a hypocritical and racist standard with returning stolen artifacts to their place of origin. In Ekpo Eyo writing, “Repatriation of Culture Heritage: ...