backstory: How we are rooted.
I was back in the museum today, looking at blank walls again, and thinking: “What is a museum without art on view?” That’s when my mind started wandering back into my training about the origins of the “museum.”
The “museum” stems from the Greek Mouseion in Alexandria, which was home to the Muses—the nine daughters of Zeus who presided over arts and learning in the areas of history, epic poetry, lyric poetry, music, tragedy, dance, comedy, astronomy, and religious music. It was an institution, not for the stewarding and display of works of art, but for the assembly of the great scholars of the Hellenistic world. Already that makes the academic museum closer than any other kind of museum to the origin.
Amid the project of the present day to take action to stem systemic racism, I’m a proponent of starting at “home,” whether it be your individual or institutional space. It’s not about soul searching, but rather it’s about taking a hard look at origins as a critical first step, a way to understand how people and institutions come to see and understand their own ways of thinking and being.
Sure, the notion of what constitutes a museum has shifted significantly over time, arriving at our modern concept. But what does it mean for museums to root in that Hellenistic world, critical but narrow and specific, privileging particular ways of thinking and particular casts of characters? In what ways may that frame have created and reinforced systemic inequalities in the arts? It’s a big question and I don’t have all the answers, but I’m throwing it on the table.
Amid the project of the present day to take action to stem systemic racism, I’m a proponent of starting at “home,” whether it be your individual or institutional space. It’s not about soul searching, but rather it’s about taking a hard look at origins as a critical first step, a way to understand how people and institutions come to see and understand their own ways of thinking and being.
Sure, the notion of what constitutes a museum has shifted significantly over time, arriving at our modern concept. But what does it mean for museums to root in that Hellenistic world, critical but narrow and specific, privileging particular ways of thinking and particular casts of characters? In what ways may that frame have created and reinforced systemic inequalities in the arts? It’s a big question and I don’t have all the answers, but I’m throwing it on the table.
Tracy Fitzpatrick
Director
Neuberger Museum of Art
Find me on Twitter @tracyfitzart