Museum Archives - Public Seminar

History

“Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

An excerpt from American Relics and the Politics of Memory

April 24, 2023 • by Matthew Dennis

Relics’ ability to bridge space could match their facility in transcending time—they are conventionally transportable, sometimes through their fragmentation and multiplication, and their mobility enhances their usefulness to their possessors, who are thus able to deploy their power where they might have the greatest effect....

Reviews

James Joyce’s Ulysses at 100

An exhibition at the Morgan Library

July 8, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

One hundred years ago, James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in Paris. This year, the Morgan Library in New York is celebrating with a remarkable exhibition, “One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses,” on display until October 2. ...

History

When Disasters Are Good For Museums

A conversation with historian Sam Redman about his new book, The Museum: A History of Crisis and Resilience

May 17, 2022 • by Claire Potter and Samuel J. Redman

Samuel J. Redman is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The author of two previous books about American museums and the sciences that flourished there in the 19th and early 20th century, this spring, he published his third book: ...

Art & Design

Archives of the Everyday

Finding what is hidden in the dress archive

April 10, 2020 • by Ellen Sampson

Much has been written in recent years about the role, position and display of dress in museums, about the ways that fashion exhibitions function as manifestations and metaphors for the predominant preoccupations of our times. Less explored, however, are the numerous garments that reside within museums archives, things which are ...

Art & Design

Silenus’ Cup, Drained by AI

A Review of The Dead Walk into a Bar

August 30, 2019 • by Kanad Chakrabarti

Set within an ‘orbital facility’ in an un-specified future, the film opens inside a cavernous hall. The scene carries a strange echo for visitors to Steyerl’s show: a musty provincial gallery, sepulchrally lit, clad in dark wood -- that is, much like the Armory, where the entire work was filmed. ...

Feature

Artist-as-debtor, Debt-as-Creator

The unseen debt sustaining the art market

April 15, 2019 • by Noah Fischer

This article is part of a series of texts published on Public Seminar in the lead-up to the Digital/Debt/Empire symposium in Vancouver in late April 2019, convened by Benjamin Anderson, Enda Brophy and Max Haiven. Is there a better place to glimpse the logic of capitalism than at art fairs, those ultra luxury trade shows ...

Feature

Warhol: The Revolution that Failed

A review of the Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again exhibition at The Whitney Museum.

March 27, 2019 • by Laura Nelson

The recent reappearance of Andy Warhol’s paintings, films, sculptures, and silkscreens at The Whitney in New York City reminded me of the writings of Arthur C. Danto (1924-2013), a professor of philosophy at Columbia University as well as art critic for The Nation from 1984 to 2009. Like many philosophers of his ...

Feature

The Story of the “Good War” Must Change

Seeing WWII as an American triumph prevents understanding Russia and Europe today

August 9, 2018 • by Bruce A. Williams

In his recent trip to Europe, President Donald Trump criticized NATO, expressed a willingness to accept Russian annexation of Crimea -- calling it a Russian-speaking area -- and failed to challenge Vladimir Putin's support of separatists in eastern Ukraine where 10,000 people have died and a civilian airliner was shot ...

Feature

To the Directors of the National Museum in Krakow

An open letter

February 6, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

This letter addressed to Andrzej Betlej and Andrzej Szczerski, the directors of the National Museum in Krakow, came across my screen on Sunday. We are publishing it here today both for what it says about the struggle against the new authoritarianism in Poland, and also because, it seems to me, it ...

To the Directors of the National Museum in Krakow

Feature

Radical Objects – A Response

Migration and Museums

January 25, 2018 • by Chris Whitehead

This post is a response to Bryan Sitch’s Radical Objects: A Refugee’s Life Jacket at Manchester Museum. Migration as a primary focus for museums only has a recent history, with particular development over the last decade or so. In that time, we’ve seen the development of migration museums focusing on emigration, immigration ...

Feature

Radical Objects

A Refugee’s Life Jacket at Manchester Museum

January 22, 2018 • by Bryan Sitch

In early December 2016, I found myself in a small twin propeller aeroplane above the Aegean Sea buffeted by strong winds, the sea beneath us roiling whilst my fellow passengers quietly crossed themselves. I was travelling to Lesvos to collect a refugee’s life jacket for Manchester Museum’s collecting life project. In ...

Feature

Beyond Ekphrasis

Writing your heart out in a museum

January 18, 2018 • by Maureen Buchanan Jones

Enter any museum, traditional, contemporary, technological, scientific, historical, and you see people moving slowly, standing quietly, observing. All well and good. People arrive in museums to learn and understand art. They study the installation; they ingest the presented explanation and interpretation. Perfectly reasonable and expected. As a young person taken to ...