Fwd: Museums: Inaugurations

Museums, like all other social institutions, reflect the tensions and contradictions of their times. The Museum and Exhibition Studies (MUSE) Graduate Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago proposes that museum problems, including declining attendance, homogenous employee and visitor demographics, and inequitable workplaces, and are deeply seeded in the field and its professions and that remedies will require radical reimagining and change. Responding to the urgencies of the moment and recognizing the need to transform museums and our cultural work within their spaces, MUSE offers this new journal. Fwd: Museums signals a desire to lift up and forward ideas that might push our collective thinking about cultural work. This volume explores the theme of inaugurations, or firsts and beginnings, with over 20 contributions from scholars and creative practitioners.

TABLE OF CONTENTS2 Welcome by Therese Quinn3 Introduction by Devin Malone4 Acknowledgements & Publication Team5 My Art Museum Mission by LaTanya S. Autry6 The Visitors of Color Project: Centering and Privileging People (in the Margins of Museums) by Porchia Moore and nikhil trivedi7 A Doodled Vision for a Latino Museum by Ranald Woodaman8 Querida Xicanita by Stephanie Hernández9 Exhibit Review - Stevie Hanley's "Synaesthetica" by Evelyn Yeung 10 The First Time I was Made into an Art Object by Melissa Romeo11 The Object Effect by Nora Sternfeld12 Her Room as an Exhibit by Elizabeth Anh Thomson13 Exhibit Review - Lonely Amid the Crowd: Laura Davis at Threewalls by Elizabeth Lalley14 My First Digital Exhibit: Mr. Boller's Scrapbook by April Lynne Earle15 Face Value: Identity and Adaptation in Chicago's Chinatown by Jacob Yeung16 The Virtual Museum of the Bulgarians in North America: Shared Heritage and Intercultural Communications by Dilyana Ivanova17 My First Scathing Letter to the Editor by Javairia Shahid18 Trauma Memory Healing: Exhibiting the August 7th 1998 Bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi by Dr. Kiprop Lagat19 Book Review - Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display by Emese R. Toth20 Jotería Undocumented by Gabriela S. Hernandez Martinez21 It Would Be My Honor to Work for Free by Sarah Padilla22 Museums Respond to Black Lives Matter & Beyond: A 5 Part Retrospective by Monica O. Montgomery23 Human Rights Abuses Committed by the Guggenheim and Louvre Museums on Saadiyat Island by Kara Hendrickson24 Audio Description; Say What You See by Elizabeth Anh Thomson25 A Very Brave and Courageous Thing: Museums and the Power to Reshape Historic Narratives of People of Color by Jackie Peterson26 Book Review - Anarchist's Guide to Historic House Museums by Elizabeth Lalley27 #FERGUSON_SEA: A 10 Day Study in Social Media and Responsive Programming by Leilani Lewis and Chieko Phillips28 De museos, identidades, jóvenes y desplazamientos en el Trópico de Capricornio by Jorge Arturo Albuja Tutivén29 Promises to My Future Self by Courtney Sass