Public programs facilitate dialogue between academics and professionals, informing scholarship and strengthening practice.
Multiple day conferences, year-long colloquia, individual lectures, “conversations” between individuals, hands-on workshops, and Museums at Noon talks featuring our graduate students all contribute to the remarkable richness of MSP offerings.
Video recordings of some MSP lectures are archived for viewing in our Media Gallery.
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What Do Curators Know?
March 27, 2018 @ 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Tuesday, March 27 at 6:30 pm
Michigan League (Michigan Room)
Presentation by Steven Lubar Professor of American Studies, History of Art and Architecture, and History, Brown University and Museum Studies Program Visiting Scholar
Curators are experts on an astonishing range of topics. But what else do they know? I believe that curators’ hands-on work with art, artifacts, and specimens provides them a kind of knowledge unavailable in any other way. Handling objects, understanding their materiality, offers insights into their histories of creation, meaning, and use. Organizing them for storage, research and exhibition allows new insights that allow understandings of connections across space and change over time. Curatorial knowledge matters, even as the role of the museum and curator changes.
Steven Lubar is professor in the Departments of American Studies, History, and History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. He was previously curator at the National Museum of American History, and Director of Brown’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage and Brown’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. He is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. His most recent book is Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present.
co-sponsored by the University of Michigan Museum of Art
