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.
Negotiating Slavery? The Politics of Memory and the Transformations of a State Museum in Colombia
University of Michigan Museum of Art, First Floor, Multi-Purpose Room 525 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI, United StatesIn a context of controversy surrounding the peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla movement, the country’s museums are currently experiencing deep transformations. State museums in particular face the challenge of becoming more democratic and inclusive institutions even as they remain...
Taking a Look in the Mirror: Transformative Change within Museums
U-M Museum of Art, Helmut Stern Auditorium 525 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI, United StatesLocation: University of Michigan Museum of Art, Helmut Stern Auditorium Museums do not exist in a vacuum. The external environment around museums is in a state of constant change. Yet, it seems as though museums continue to approach diversity and inclusion work through community...
Tactics for the Anthropocene: Not an Alternative
Michigan Theater 603 E. Liberty, Ann Arbor, MILocation: Michigan Theater (603 E. Liberty Street in downtown Ann Arbor) Not An Alternative is a NY-based collective that works at the intersection of art, activism, and critical theory. Its mission is to affect popular understandings of histories, symbols, and institutions through the occupation...
Supporting Youth through Environmental Education: Teaching, Learning, and Design at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens
University of Michigan Museum of Art, First Floor, Multi-Purpose Room 525 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI, United StatesEfforts to enhance the scientific capacity of youth often target schools and focus on reforming the existing science curriculum. An often overlooked and underestimated venue for science teaching, learning, and design are out-of-school settings. Everyday experiences in these settings can support science learning for...
What if? Demand the Impossible. On Museums and the Struggle for Social Justice
U-M Museum of Art, Helmut Stern Auditorium 525 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI, United StatesLocation: University of Michigan Museum of Art, Helmut Stern Auditorium What if museums were to acknowledge their complicity with systemic forms of oppression, and commit to a reparations movement as part of a process of truth and reconciliation? What if museum and exhibition programs...
FAILURE:LAB
U-M Museum of Art, Helmut Stern Auditorium 525 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI, United StatesLocation: University of Michigan Museum of Art, Apse FAILURE:LAB provides a great opportunity to come together with members of your community and crush the stigma of failure. FAILURE:LAB is filled with storytellers and entertainers recounting their most memorable brush with failure. The audience is...
Access and the Archive: The Role of Documents Projects in a Digital Age
University of Michigan Museum of Art, First Floor, Multi-Purpose Room 525 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI, United StatesThis brown bag will examine my practicum experience working with the Documents Project at the International Center for Art of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The ICAA is the research institute arm of the Latin American Art Curatorial Department,...
Inclusion Requires Fracturing
U-M Museum of Art, Helmut Stern Auditorium 525 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI, United StatesLocation: University of Michigan Museum of Art, Helmut Stern Auditorium As museums strive to serve broad, ever-diversifying publics, it is no longer possible to deny the ways museums mirror and reinforce racial, cultural, and class inequities of the broader society. Skillful racial and cultural...
Specimen Backlogs in the Age of Digitization: Strategies for Shedding Light on “Dark Data” before They Become Black Holes
Millions of specimens and their associated data are housed in museum collections, but only a small fraction of these are readily accessible through electronic means. These are now being referred to as “dark data” after a term coined in the business/IT community for the...
“History Compels Us to be Daring”: Sites of Conscience in Action Around the World
University of Michigan Museum of Art, First Floor, Multi-Purpose Room 525 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI, United StatesThe International Coalition of Sites of Conscience was founded in 1999 with the radical idea that historic sites had an obligation to draw a connection between the history of their sites and their contemporary implications. Today, we are more than 200 museums, historic sites,...
