From This Moment: Museum Futures. Conversations with Tom Freudenheim, Anika Walke, and Geoff Ward

Abstract

The past year has seen museums, monuments, and memorials hostage to competing narratives of affirmation and condemnation of the very foundations of the United States. Protests and demonstrations demanding a racial reckoning for Black Americans specifically, and all racial/ethnic minority groups, more generally, were added to an existing tsunami of social upheavals. The months of institutional lockdowns, restricted population movement, and a precipitous economic downturn that resulted from the global COVID-19 pandemic have taken a toll. As of this writing, the outcome of the 2020 presidential election portends either a continuation of the present or some relief to the recent governmental instability. After the initial disbelief, as COVID-19 spread unabated, museums around the globe turned to the internet as an alternative to their physical presence. Some pivoted with agility drawing on internal resources and creativity; others lumbered and needed external help. Most created digital analogs of physical offerings, others imagined new forms of interaction and many scurried to document and collect stories and material evidence from the pandemic. In this issue, the responses of cultural institutions and consortia, from Los Angeles, California and Washington, D.C. to Biel, Switzerland and Xi’an, China provide vivid examples. Very few institutions strayed from their avowed missions and collected or distributed food, assisted community members with emergency needs, or provided desperately needed practical and emotional support (DOERING 2020). Museum responses to the calls for a racial reckoning have been mostly eloquent but vapid in support of Black Lives Matter; many promises limited, however, in constructive or innovative approaches to solving institutional racism, enacting major changes in managerial or operational structures, in plans to decolonize collections, or include