In its Midtown district, Detroit boasts a concentrated set of high-powered cultural institutions. Clustered around the DIA, they include the Detroit Historical Museum, The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the Michigan Science Center, and the Detroit Public Library. In recent years,...
In this conversation, two participants will discuss a different project that they were involved with at The Henry Ford Museum: Reconstructing History/Reimagining Originality: The Case of Henry Ford’s English Preservations (Bradley Taylor, Associate Director Emeritus, Museum Studies Program) As the Stock Market Crash of...
Dr. Margaret Bruchac, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, will discuss strategies for recovering Indigenous object histories through material analyses, consultation, and re-assessments of imposed museological categories that may have distanced objects from their origins. She will reveal how memories can...
William S. Pretzer, Senior Curator of History at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) explores the American story through the lens of the African American experience as displayed at the NMAAHC — a museum regarded as exhibiting one of...
This presentation will explore salvage anthropology, a movement spurred by threats of extinction faced by indigenous societies that brought millions of material culture objects into museums. As a result, questions have arisen for museums such as what to do with stolen artifacts, stolen knowledge,...
The Jim Crow Museum is the nation’s largest publicly accessible collection of racist artifacts. Located on the campus of Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, the museum houses more than 12,000 objects—primarily, but not exclusively, segregation era artifacts and everyday anti-black caricatured objects....
