Cross-Cultural Museum Bias: Undoing Legacies of Whiteness in Art Histories

When museums are used as sites of knowledge production and research, what are their responsibilities for anti-racist public education? Examining the racial logics that govern, organize, and fund museums, this essay focuses on institutional bias within knowledge production and argues that locating racial logics within museums can be an act of radical pedagogy. Museums are being challenged to become sites of social change, making it vital to study their power structures and the ways in which they organize and study other cultures, illuminating imperial and colonial biases existing at their foundations. The Canadian Museum of Civilization’s exhibition The Lands within Me: Expressions by Canadian Artists of Arab Origin, is a relevant case study as it opened within weeks of September 11, 2001. The moral panic surrounding the show provides a powerful glimpse of the ways in which certain narratives are excluded from Canadian national projects and how these racial projects exist within museums. Works by Camille Zakharia, an artist included in the exhibition, will be analyzed and the fragmented forms of his photo collages will be used as an organizing metaphor to discuss Canadian multiculturalism, racialization, and citizenship.