Institutional Change for Museums: A Practical Guide to Creating Polyvocal Spaces

Institutional Change for Museums: A Practical Guide to Creating Polyvocal Spaces demonstrates how museums can enact institutional change by implementing systematic and structural approaches to anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-elitist practices.

This practical guide brings together museum and heritage experts, artists, organizers, and cultural workers to present thoughtful, polyvocal critiques and solutions for conceptualizing museums of the future. These authors embrace hybrid identities, complicate concepts of nationalism, straddle disciplines, and extend the concept, function, and literal place and definition of the “museum.” The book shows that museums must cultivate practices that center people, interrogate colonial legacies, take new approaches to curatorial ethics and caring for objects, and imagine new strategies for asserting the relevance of museums, to create institutional change. This resource challenges traditional approaches to museology by offering scholarly research and case studies alongside personal narratives and speculative fiction.

Institutional Change for Museums will be an invaluable resource for museum professionals and cultural workers, including curators, educators, and researchers. It will also be beneficial to those studying or researching in Museum and Heritage Studies, Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, Visual Culture, Social Justice, and Postcolonial Studies.

Marianna Pegno is Director of Engagement and Inclusion at the Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block. In this role, Pegno focuses on building a culturally relevant, community-based institution through programs, exhibitions, and partnerships. In practice and research, she is committed to exploring the implications of collaboration and multivocal narratives in art museums. Pegno holds a PhD in Art and Visual Culture Education and an MA in art history from the University of Arizona as well as a BA from New York University. In 2018, her dissertation was awarded the Elliot Eisner Doctoral Research Award in Art Education from the National Art Education Association.

Kantara Souffrant is the inaugural Curator of Community Dialogue at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where she oversees art experiences rooted in vulnerability, feeling interconnected, and building sustainable community partnerships. Souffrant is a Haitian-American artist-scholar who brings her passion for community engagement, dialogue, and facilitation to her work as a performer, educator, and community member. She holds a PhD in performance studies from Northwestern University, with certificates in critical theory, African and diaspora studies, and teaching, an MA in performance studies from New York University and a BA from Oberlin College. Her scholarship examines visual and performance art in the Black Atlantic, Black feminist aesthetics, and museum pedagogy. She is the founder of Souffrant Creative Consulting, LLC, a firm that leverages the power of dialogue, the arts, and the humanities to build authentic connections and facilitate individual and collective transformation.