Abstract
Some art museums are challenging the standard mission of collecting, conserving, and disseminating knowledge about encyclopedic archives of art objects. These museums place art engagement and cooperation with local organizations and audiences as core principles which drive their work, encouraging programming that is directly relevant to the daily lives of neighboring communities. The Queens Museum’s community engaged practices are the focus of the book. Located in Corona, Queens, New York City’s most diverse borough, the museum’s neighborhood shares the social, political, and economic stresses of many cities globally. Cooperative art practice is central to enacting the right to the city for all residents. Foundational literature and key terminology are introduced: socially engaged turn in museums, socially engaged art, museum, place, community engagement, cooperation, and equity.
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Notes
- 1.
Museums have long been perceived as exclusionary spaces. In the Renaissance, art became desirable objects validating the owner’s wealth, power, and cultural taste. This led to the creation of public exhibitions and salons in the eighteenth century, which made art accessible to the public for the first time across Europe. In response, early museums opened to present art collections of the elite classes to the public. Founded in 1793, the Louvre is one example of a public display of a princely art collection where lower classes were welcome to visit but were made conspicuous by their dress and lack of cultural capital to understand the artwork. This history is further detailed in a concise essay by Andrew McClellan introducing his edited volume Art and its Publics (2003).
- 2.
Community organizing developed after World War II in the United States, a mix of social activism and organization building that initially meant creating a membership organization around a specific cause. This evolved into different networks of community organizing, each with their own set of principles and theories they adhere to in working with people to activate social change (Sen, 2003).
- 3.
Creative placemaking was formalized in 2009 by the National Endowment for the Arts along with cultural policy scholars who saw an opportunity to extend creative capacity across a city or town to directly affect the physical and social landscape in order to create new jobs that raise income, improve livability, and encourage diversity (Markusen & Gadwa, 2010; Schupbach & Ball, 2016). With a slightly different focus, placekeeping does not just build new infrastructure but maintains the cultural and social histories of a place and its people to challenge displacement (Bedoya, 2014; Dempsey & Burton, 2012). City planners often give less emphasis to placekeeping, seeing it as too expensive and time consuming but also without fully understanding the concept and its social benefits (Dempsey & Burton, 2012). Funders came together to support the development of creative placemaking by collaboratively starting ArtPlace, a ten-year initiative that has built infrastructure in the field and will sunset in 2020 creating a gap for other foundations and local governments to take over that will likely shift the landscape of this growing field. This is an opportunity for continued work to unite placemaking and placekeeping strategies in communities as museums and other arts organizations consider how to best approach and maintain their programming for and with communities.
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Taylor, J.K. (2020). Art Museums and Community Cooperation. In: The Art Museum Redefined. Sociology of the Arts . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21021-2_1
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