May 18th – International Museum Day 2022

According to ICOM , the International Council of Museums, International Museum Day, or IMD “was celebrated for the first time 40 years ago. All around the world, more and more museums participate in International Museum Day. Last year, more than 37,000 museums participated in the event in about 158 countries and territories.”

This year’s theme is appropriately “The Power of Museums”

Museum professionals are encouraged to explore the potential of museums to bring about positive change in their communities through three lenses:

• The power of achieving sustainability: Museums are strategic partners in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. As key actors in their local communities, they contribute to a wide variety of Goals, which include fostering short-circuit and social economy and disseminating scientific information on environmental challenges.
• The power of innovating on digitalisation and accessibility: Museums have become innovative playing-grounds where new technologies can be developed and applied to everyday life. Digital innovation can make museums more accessible and engaging, helping audiences understand complex and nuanced concepts.
• The power of community building through education: Through its collections and programmes, museums thread a social fabric that is essential in community building. By upholding democratic values and providing life-long learning opportunities to all, they contribute to shaping an informed and engaged civil society.

These three points provide timely goals for institutions, and hopefully they will inspire museum leaders and individuals who are on the board of directors for museums to take purposeful actions throughout 2022.

For museums that contain sensitive cultural material and represent communities that have been and continue to be marginalized, recognizing the power of achieving sustainability and supporting ways to disseminate “scientific information on environmental challenges” is so important. Environmental justice is a growing area of concern. Consider the Asmat people of Papua, Indonesia. Indonesia is now floating a plan that would likely increase development, further disrupting the challenging lives people live. It would carve out three new provinces and relegate the area of Asmat into a small entity, “South Papua” that could easily be further ignored by Jakarta.

The third bullet also underscores the potential change-making power of museums and holds possibilities for constructive community engagement – “The power of community building through education: Through its collections and programmes, museums thread a social fabric that is essential in community building. By upholding democratic values and providing life-long learning opportunities to all, they contribute to shaping an informed and engaged civil society.”

In terms of its collection, cultural material from Asmat, Papua, Indonesia the American Museum of Asmat Art (AMAA) at the University of St. Thomas could help students across the entire university understand the relevance of Asmat culture and complex challenges facing Asmat people. Unfortunately, the AMAA was and continues to function primarily as a hands-on training tool for one small department, the Art History department. In this way, it is not about a museum engaging constructively, it’s about a museum shoring up decades of marginalization and exploitation.

Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of this is, the AMAA does not even have its own website. When visitors go to the Centers and Institutes link they are taken to a page that promotes an entirely different entity – Visual Arts at St. Thomas. The image that is shown is that of a Black person but it is not of an Asmat individual. It’s also not painted by an Asmat artist. It’s not even an image from “The Gallery” a space that houses the Asmat collection. Its from the art history departments gallery.

The layers and layers of marginalization reflect a perspective students learn – marginalized cultures can be used to shore up established ones. It’s hardly surprising a graduate from the art history department’s Museum Studies program state  “The local history of Edina which goes way back especially with Native American populations in Minnesota,….”  Yep… no matter the time, place, or culture,…it’s always about shoring up the privileged.