FWD: MUSEUMS: “Power/Potential” (2024), Edited by Therese Quinn & Miguel Limon

Museology / Museum Studies
Written By Michael Workman

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Power: Having control or authority to dictate or influence people and organizations’ behavior and actions. ​

Potential: Having the capacity to build or develop a positive outcome in the future.

Power and the potential for power shape the relationships we have between ourselves, our institutions, and our governments. We relate these two words in this issue of Fwd: Museums to highlight how those being unjustly or unfairly treated have the potential to create their own power and invite submissions related to this theme.

Central Questions:

  • How are museums inherently political spaces?

  • Who holds authority in museum spaces?

  • How do governments claim control over museums and other institutions?

  • How do marginalized groups claim leadership in institutions?

  • How do museum exhibits have the potential to act as catalysts for social and political change?

Institutions:

  • Museum hierarchies

  • Work experiences

  • Bureaucracy

  • Pay transparency

  • Exhibits as catalysts for positive change

  • Carceral logic in museums

  • Accessibility

Community:

  • Protest as power/collective power

  • Museum labor/unionization

  • Storytelling

  • Cultural preservation and community archiving

  • Grassroots movements

State:

  • State/national/governmental museums

  • Public museums

  • Non-profit industrial complex

  • Fascism

  • War

  • Repatriation

  • Reparations

  • Prison-industrial complex

Self:

  • The privilege of knowledge

  • Identity/expression

  • Self-empowerment

  • Spirituality

  • ​Mindfulness

Produced and edited by the University of Illinois at Chicago Museum and Exhibition Studies graduate students and published by Chicago-based, Bridge Books, Fwd: Museums strives to create a space for challenging, critiquing, and providing alternative modes of thinking and production within and outside of museums.

Michael Workman

Michael Workman is a choreographer, language, visual and movement artist, dance and performance artist, writer, reporter, and sociocultural critic. In addition to his work at the Chicago Tribune, Guardian US, Newcity magazine, WBEZ Chicago Public Radio and elsewhere, Workman is also Director of Bridge, an artistic collective and 501 (c) (3) publishing and programming organization (bridge-chicago.org). His choreographic writing has been included in Propositional Attitudes, an "anthology of recent performance scores, directions and instructions" published by Golden Spike Press, and his Perfect Worlds: Artistic Forms & Social Imaginaries Vol. 1, the first in a 3-volume series, was released by StepSister Press in October 2018 with a day-long program of performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Most recently, two of his scores were accepted for publication in a special edition of the Notre Dame Review focusing on the work of participants in the &NOW Festival of Innovative Writing.

https://michaelworkmanstudio.com
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FWD: MUSEUMS: “Power/Potential” 2024 (Alternate Cover), Edited by Therese Quinn & Miguel Limon