BEYOND CHAPTER 12 · Museums and communities

How can curating address social questions? Representation and accountability

Whom does an exhibition bring into history, and which decisions remain out of the audience’s sight?

In this chapter

Curators select works and determine the names, sequence and context through which they are encountered. Those decisions can bring overlooked artists into public memory or compress complex communities into a single image. Exhibitions addressing race, gender, colonialism or public health also raise questions about hiring, education, collecting and institutional power.

This feature uses historical cases to separate three questions: who gets represented, who helps decide how, and how can affected people raise concerns and receive a response? Inclusion has no single checklist that settles every institutional situation. It requires sustained responsibility towards particular histories, works, resources and relationships.

The canon is made through choices

The canon consists of works and artists repeatedly studied, displayed and taught, rather than a naturally occurring list that needs no explanation. Inclusion can change how art history is organised: women, Black artists, other artists of colour, sexual and gender minorities, and non-Western traditions can shape the central questions rather than appear only in supplementary units. This involves research criteria, acquisition budgets and curricula, beyond adding names.

Chronological display can make time legible, but treating Western development as the standard for every region can cast other cultures as merely behind. Thematic display allows works from different times and places to meet, while still explaining their purposes, languages and historical conditions. Collection galleries can also be reinstalled. Rearrangement acknowledges an existing narrative as one organisational choice rather than erasing history.

The barriers to a diverse field begin before recruitment

The lecture places representation within civil rights, postcolonial studies and critical race theory, reminding us that different groups did not gain equivalent opportunities at the same time. The US Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 prohibited racial and related exclusions from voting, and the Nineteenth Amendment of 1920 prohibited sex-based exclusions. Black voters continued to face systematic barriers; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 strengthened federal enforcement against discriminatory restrictions. It was not the first grant of voting rights to Black people.

Similarly, a requirement for qualified candidates should prompt questions about who can obtain degrees, cover living costs, undertake internships and build networks. The lecture proposes earlier educational opportunities, financial support and university partnerships. Sotheby’s Institute’s collaboration with Queens College/CUNY and its 2020 announcement with Spelman and the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective provide examples. Whether such programmes broaden careers requires evidence about later opportunities, beyond the announcement itself.

Expertise, representation and trust require joint attention

In 2018, the Brooklyn Museum’s appointment of white scholar Kristen Windmuller-Luna as consulting curator of African arts prompted objections. Decolonize This Place and allied groups linked the appointment to wider questions about colonial collections, the institution’s local relationships and access to decision-making roles. These were the critics’ arguments; one group should not be treated as the sole voice of an entire community.

The museum defended her research, language skills and museum experience, while curator Okwui Enwezor opposed disqualifying her on racial and gender grounds. The case need not become a choice between identity and expertise. Ask together about scholarly rigour, community knowledge in decisions, fair recruitment and training, and responses to accumulated distrust. Shared identity does not guarantee quality, and qualifications do not automatically resolve unequal power.

Asco: who constructs a community’s public image?

The Los Angeles collective Asco used performance, photography and media interventions during the 1970s and 1980s to address stereotypes, political conflict and the Vietnam War context affecting Chicano communities. Its core comprised Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie F. Herrón III and Patssi Valdez, alongside a wider network. The name draws on Spanish for disgust or nausea; its “No Movies,” stills from films that did not exist, challenged access to cinematic and artistic visibility.

Decoy Gang War Victim (1974) staged Gronk as a victim of violence and offered the photograph to news media. MOCA’s collection account records that one local television station ran it. The work asks how images become evidence and why certain portrayals of a community are readily accepted. The 2011 retrospective organised by LACMA and Williams College Museum of Art, curated by Rita Gonzalez and C. Ondine Chavoya, adds another question: when art opposing exclusion enters a museum, does its social conflict remain legible?

What changes when activist graphics enter a museum?

AIDS activist imagery requires distinguishing related organisations. The pink-triangle SILENCE=DEATH image originated with the Silence=Death Project and became closely associated with ACT UP, founded in 1987. Gran Fury formed in 1988 and did not originate that poster. A triangle used by the Nazis to mark gay men was reoriented and reclaimed as a demand for political response. Posters, stickers, clothing and street actions carried messages into everyday spaces beyond museums.

New Museum curator William Olander invited ACT UP members to make Let the Record Show… in 1987, bringing a neon slogan, figures of institutional power and crisis information into a street-facing window. That collaboration also preceded Gran Fury’s formation. The window belonged to the institution while addressing passers-by directly. Later collecting that discusses only graphic impact misses the original purposes of public health, governmental accountability, access to treatment and collective survival.

Fred Wilson: rearrangement makes absence visible

In Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992–93, Fred Wilson reorganised existing collection objects. Ornate silver appeared alongside shackles used in slavery: objects sharing the category of metalwork revealed histories of comfort and forced labour previously treated separately. Instead of adding a commemorative sculpture, the work made the collection’s own classifications and silences its material.

The method makes curatorial power visible: who decides which objects belong together, and how do titles, lighting, empty cases or juxtapositions frame history? An artist’s intervention can open questions, but the institution must decide whether research and collecting practices change with it. One celebrated exhibition cannot establish completed decolonisation or lasting reform. Ask which knowledge and working methods remain after the installation ends.

Decolonial questions extend from displays to land and institutions

Decolonize This Place connects museum questions with Indigenous rights, Black liberation, Palestine, global labour and resistance to displacement. Artists Space documents a three-month programme in 2016 that made the venue a shared resource for research, gathering, printing and organising. The movement also took action concerning institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History; its entire origin should not be reduced to one protest at one museum.

Questions of return, staffing and land require separating the addition of different works from changes in decision-making power. Revised labels may improve narratives without changing ownership, funding or consultation rights. Record the particular demand, its proponents, the institutional response and subsequent action before assessing change. Agreement or disagreement with a protest should not replace verification of object histories and institutional facts.

Open Casket: responding to harm and artistic expression

Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), shown in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, drew on the murder of Black teenager Emmett Till in 1955. The dispute concerned the power of a white artist depicting Black suffering, the limits of empathy and institutional responsibility in display. Critics including Hannah Black called for removal, and Black’s open letter also called for destruction; Schutz explained her motivation through identification with Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. These differing positions cannot stand for every Black viewer or every artist.

Coco Fusco opposed identity-based prohibitions and destruction while calling for rigorous engagement with racial and visual history. The Whitney subsequently held a public discussion with Claudia Rankine and the Racial Imaginary Institute. These are responses that can be examined, not proof that harm or disagreement disappeared. Curators need to explain why the work is shown, what context and objections are available, and how audiences can participate without being required to accept one answer.

Accountability turns commitments into traceable work

Asco, ACT UP and Wilson expand collecting beyond self-contained paintings or sculptures to performance photographs, leaflets, activist objects, fundraising editions and records of collection interventions. Preserve authorship and collaboration, original settings, intended recipients and purposes alongside the objects. Saving only the most attractive poster without why it appeared on the street may preserve its appearance while losing its action.

The lecture closes with the COVID-19 pandemic and protests following George Floyd’s murder in 2020 as reminders that curating responds to social change. A response should extend beyond a declaration or single event: examine paid opportunities, participation in decisions, budgets, research and concrete revisions following criticism. Accountability does not require perfect answers in advance; it makes reasons, limits and changes visible and open to continued questioning.

Your turn to investigate

Which clue would you check first?

Suppose a museum receives specific criticism of how an exhibition presents community trauma. Which next step best supports accountability?

Choose a clue to see what it can tell you.

READING COMPANION

A few useful terms

Art-historical canon: A dominant narrative formed through repeated collecting, exhibition, research and teaching; its selection criteria can be examined and revised.
Representation: Who and what is presented, and who interprets it; not the assumption that one person speaks for an entire group.
Equity: Attention to differing starting points and barriers when assessing the distribution of opportunities, resources and decision-making.
DEIA: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility: membership, resources, participation and the practical conditions of access.
Institutional critique: Art or research that examines display, collecting, classification, funding and power as its subject.
Decolonization: Examining and seeking to change colonial relations involving land, objects, knowledge and institutional power; not a task completed by renaming.
Activist ephemera: Posters, leaflets, stickers and related materials made for particular actions, whose preservation requires their original purposes and contexts.
Accountability: Making the reasons, resources, effects and responses behind decisions answerable, with later revisions documented.

Explore primary and secondary markets

YOUR TURN

A museum exhibits overlooked artists but leaves its research, hiring and collecting practices unchanged. How would you assess the scope of that inclusion?

Consider another way to think about it

Recognise the opportunities for viewing and research, then examine participation in decisions, resources that remain and continuing collecting or scholarship. It is possible to value a particular achievement while identifying unchanged institutional conditions, without calling one exhibition either a complete success or entirely ineffective.

TAKE THIS THOUGHT WITH YOU

Curating social questions reshapes relationships between works while making the institution’s own choices, resources and responses open to examination.

Reading notes & references

Art Value Lab reorganised the full How Curators Address Social Issues transcript into a thematic study, checking cases against museums, archives, programme organisers and participants’ published accounts. Historical dates are retained, disputed positions are attributed separately, and organisational names and chronology are corrected against public records.

Connect the ideas

Continue into people, works and research.