The Decolonizing Museum & Curatorial Studies & Public Humanities Project is an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional project meant to build with colleagues regionally and internationally to interrogate current and possible pedagogies and practices at our arts, cultural and educational institutions and implement change.

Rutgers University-Newark Department of Arts, Culture and Media and Paul Robeson Galleries in collaboration with the Price Institute and American Studies Program present the inaugural program with the Decolonizing Curatorial and Museum Studies and Public Humanities Project’s Colloquium: Practice and Pedagogies that is supported by Terra Foundation for American Art and will take place on October 28, 2021 from Noon-5:30pm EDT on Zoom. The virtual colloquium will kick off the project with a series of four panels and presentations.

The global reckoning with postcolonial legacies that are embedded into our systems of museums and curatorial, presentation, and teaching practices has been slowly pushing forward this past century, gaining momentum and hitting walls along the way. However, we are currently at a pivotal moment in which important structural changes are not only being thought through, but are happening and change is on the table. Those invited to this historical gathering are involved with this movement in the interdisciplinary fields of Curatorial, Museum, and Public Humanities both locally, nationally, and internationally. How can we take their example and build onto it, incorporating and our sharing ideas so that we can move forward from a point that is not just changing our ways of doing, but more radically shifts the ways in which we even think of beginning in terms of our research and practice and our responsibilities to others and selves.

The colloquium will touch upon practice and pedagogies in terms of collections building and reparations; narrative-making, presentation and representation; site, land, and self-determination; including but not only art history, visual cultures, history, design, and the framings of care and repair and access as we build our work in our fields as well as courses and programs.