Museum as a Place to Return to Yourself and Your City: A Curatorial Philosophy for Local Institutions
February 6, 2026
Museum, Body, Locality
MOMA PS1 in 1994, Photo:
Wikimedia Commons.
Growing up as a girl meant being constantly evaluated by my appearance, a kind of quiet violence that shaped how I existed in the world, and eventually, how I related to art. As someone who moved from city to city, who struggled with her physical self, and who found her first sense of safety inside museums, I have come to think about museums through the double lens of the body and locality.
Writers like Renée Engeln describe how beauty culture makes us "beauty sick," trapping us in self-surveillance instead of allowing us to live in our bodies as instruments of experience. She also reminds us that one way to reconcile with the body is to notice what it feels — to see it not as an object to be judged, but as a medium that perceives, responds, and survives. The body is not our enemy. It is the threshold through which we meet the world. I am also slowly learning this. Inside museums, I discovered another version of myself, one capable of wandering, questioning, and imagining. But even after accepting that, another question emerges: how do we live well in the specific place where this body stands? The museum, I have come to believe, might offer more of an answer than we typically allow it to.
This is where museums return for me. Local institutions must be honest about their own ecologies. They should tell place-specific stories while also opening doors to other worlds. Ideally, they let people love their city a little more, love themselves a little more, or both. A museum should be distinct from everyday space to support concentration and deep experience, but it should not be alienated from everyday life. It can be a place of rest that prepares visitors to return to their daily routines. It can be a space for education and events that connect to local realities instead of floating above them. It should be a place where bodies and minds can wander and loosen yet eventually return to themselves with more clarity. Museums accomplish this by rooting their programming in community, by designing spaces that hold rather than overwhelm, and by making the experience of art feel continuous with the experience of being alive somewhere in particular.
Why here, and for whom
To ask why a museum must exist "here" is to examine the layered histories, violences, and relationships embedded in place. A museum that understands its locality can articulate why its exhibitions matter now, for this community, in this moment. Specificity is not a limitation; it is a route to universality. To be clear about what this means: a museum rooted in place is not a parochial museum. It knows why it is standing on this particular ground, whose stories have been suppressed there, and what it owes to the people who still inhabit it.
This is why museums need boards and advisory councils that reflect the realities of the communities they serve. It is also why staff must have a clear understanding of their institution's scale and position within the broader art ecosystem. Vision must be grounded in context — in the physical, social, and political conditions of the place and community it exists to serve.
Exhibition: Curatorial Activism and Representation
Curatorial activism, as Maura Reilly argues, begins by taking seriously the fact that canonical art history has not adequately included women artists and artists of color, and then designing exhibitions and collection strategies that deliberately counter that exclusion. This cannot be reduced to simply adding a few "diverse" names into existing structures. Exhibitions should be created by people who know the community intimately and can represent them with integrity so that everyone may find themselves naturally within the museum.
Yet this work cannot be understood apart from the histories of colonial dispossession that shaped what museums collect, display, and silence. As scholars have shown, the Western art museum emerged alongside empire, and its very architecture of universality often functioned to organize and legitimize racial hierarchy. Decolonizing the museum, then, is not simply a matter of adding underrepresented voices; it requires an institutional reckoning with why those voices were excluded in the first place.
Carbone's idea of the dialogic museum as a place to explore various identities suggests that exhibition development must be a collaborative process in which ethnocultural communities help shape themes, narratives, and interpretive strategies that speak to their lived realities. James Clifford describes museums as "contact zones," sites of asymmetrical encounter where histories of dispossession and power are negotiated in the present. Building on these insights, I imagine exhibitions that start from the local community and expand outward.
Having touring exhibitions and presenting collections is meaningful, but museums should always articulate why they are hosting a particular exhibition here and now for their community. What relationship does this exhibition, or this body of work, have to the people who live in this place? The connection does not have to be direct, since art is a universal language, but it should not simply reproduce the canon without any critical engagement. Featuring local artists alongside major touring exhibitions and demonstrating how different artistic practices are interconnected can be a productive approach. Museums should also actively practice their own forms of curatorial activism in response to the needs and realities of their communities.
A strong example of this practice is the Detroit Institute of Arts' recent exhibition of Native artists. The DIA brought Native artists into the process as advisory panel members and community partners, allowing them to shape exhibition content, interpretive strategies, and public programs. In Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation, Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi artists worked directly with the museum to select artworks, define themes, and guide programming. The exhibition visibly centered Anishinaabe language and voices in labels and media, demonstrating what genuine collaboration can look like. This shows that local artists, especially those from marginalized communities, should not only be incorporated into curatorial processes but should, at times, be centered as the primary voices of the exhibition. Amy Lonetree's foundational work on decolonizing museums offers an essential framework here: true collaboration requires institutions to confront painful histories and cede interpretive authority rather than simply borrow community voices for institutional legitimacy.
Collaboration with the education department is essential in the exhibition development process. Research on edu-curator collaboration at the Detroit Institute of Arts shows how cross-departmental teams and shared authority can create more powerful visitor experiences and better integrate education into exhibition planning.
Clear communication in exhibition design
Visitor-centered approaches remind us that interpretive strategies should be designed with specific visitors in mind rather than only with the canon in mind. Museum writing and communication must become more thoughtful and succinct, especially in a technological society where sustained concentration is increasingly difficult. The audiences I care most about include residents, migrants, students, artists, and especially those who feel that museums are not "for them." This feeling often arises not from indifference to art but because the writing feels inaccessible, and they cannot find any point of connection when they stand in front of an exhibition. My audiences also include people who are navigating mental health struggles, those who feel culturally peripheral, and those who are simply tired and looking for a place to rest their eyes and minds. Centering the needs of all these audiences is not a lowering of standards; it is the actual practice of public service.
To serve these audiences, exhibitions need to be structured around clear "Big Ideas" that visitors can grasp and carry with them. Beverly Serrell describes the "big idea" as the central message that holds an exhibition together and guides every interpretive choice. In my ideal practice, labels are written in collaboration with educators, include artists' own words whenever possible, and respect visitors' intelligence without assuming specialized prior knowledge.
Aesthetics are important and beautiful exhibitions matter, but legibility and accessibility come first in exhibition design. I care about good graphics and exhibition design because I care about visitors' cognitive and sensory experiences. This includes thoughtful lighting, reasonable text size, and enough space between works so that the body does not feel crowded or exhausted. The physical experience of moving through an exhibition is inseparable from how meaning is made. What a curatorial philosophy establishes intellectually, the design of space must confirm in practice.
Museums are not only about exhibitions: Locality, programming, and economic survival
Pursuing locality is not the same as hiring only local staff or showing only regional artists. It is about refusing to build a museum that floats above its surroundings. A museum is fundamentally a house where beauty and art live, yet that house needs a real address and real neighbors. When this relationship is taken seriously, visitors and the institution can encounter one another in more meaningful ways. There are many practical methods to cultivate this sense of place. A museum shop can feature local artists and small businesses. A museum café can build relationships with local food cultures rather than relying on a generic menu. A small reading area can partner with local independent bookstores or publishers.
Events and workshops are another vital part of creating confluence within this ecology. I want museums to be places where people gather to think and collide with one another, not only to consume images quietly. This can include lectures that link exhibitions to broader social issues, hands-on workshops, evening hours with music, and other formats that invite people to inhabit the museum differently and strengthen the local community. Touring exhibitions can be paired with locally curated shows or locally produced programs that contextualize the touring content. These are not peripheral amenities; they are the connective tissue between an institution and the place it calls home.
How does a museum fund this kind of practice without compromising it? That is the central question. None of the art museum's work is possible without money. Working with art means having a complicated relationship to capitalism. One must care about value while also keeping a certain distance from market logic. Funding structures can even censor exhibitions, as seen when the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University had to withdraw the show of Palestinian artist Samia Halaby. As Yuha Jung argues, when art museums cater to and are mainly funded and governed by a few powerful people in the community, who often do not represent the community where the museums are located, access to works of art by the public is limited.
At the same time, MoMA PS1 recently became the largest free-admission museum in New York City, made possible by a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar gift from donor Sonya Yu. This is one example of how philanthropy can directly shift access structures, even if it is not a full solution to deeper equity issues. Certainly, diverse funding models such as expanded and equitable membership programs, community-aligned donors, micro-donations, and revenue from museum shops are the primary work of the development office. However, curators must also understand where the money comes from and where compromises begin, because curatorial choices can impact everyone in the museum.
Curatorship, labor, and institutional practice
My curatorial philosophy ends with the broader goals of this museum ecosystem because within it, the curator cannot be understood alone. The curator cannot be imagined as a solitary genius who controls everything. Curators are arts administrators and cultural entrepreneurs who operate in the field between politics, economy, and art, negotiating among stakeholders who do not always share interests or values. I see the curator as a translator who works in multiple directions. Curators translate between artists and publics, between internal staff and external partners, and between institutional constraints and artistic risk. They should know art history and visual culture deeply enough to situate artworks in broader narratives, but they should also understand how decisions are made and who they are made for.
They need to know how labor conditions are part of curatorial ethics. If only people with family wealth can afford to work in museums because wages are low and unionization is discouraged, then the staff will not reflect the publics they are supposed to serve. Museums Moving Forward's 2025 survey shows that 49% of art museum workers are considering leaving the field because of low pay and lack of opportunity for growth; this is not a small side problem but a structural crisis. We still see museums get unionized and speak for themselves, and I consider this solidarity among museum workers a necessary condition for long-term institutional health.
In this sense, institutional practice is already part of curatorial practice. The politics of hiring, pay scales, unionization, and internal culture are not separate from what appears on the wall.
Ultimately, I believe museums should be places where people return to themselves — to their bodies, their histories, their communities, and their capacity to imagine otherwise. If museums are to remain public institutions, they must cultivate care as structure, clarity as practice, and collaboration as power. Institutional change begins from within, but its impact radiates outward. This is the horizon toward which my curatorial philosophy moves.urban counterculture rather than Anishinaabe heritage, directly challenging the expectation that Native artists must confine themselves to overtly Native subjects or themes. Its placement alongside Holly Trevan’s For Martha (2024), which honors an aunt who burned down an Indian boarding school as an act of resistance, underscores the exhibition’s refusal to confine Anishinaabe contemporary art within any single mode of address.
The exhibition’s design supports its interpretive commitments without overwhelming them. The deep blue saturating every gallery evokes the Great Lakes waterways central to Anishinaabe life, a legible and well-sustained environmental metaphor. The centrally positioned birchbark canoe in the primary gallery reads initially as an ethnographic object, but as its context unfolds, it becomes a symbol of navigation, continuity, and presence. Lighting is calibrated to maintain readability without sacrificing atmosphere; text is uniformly accessible in scale and contrast. These are not minor accomplishments. Many exhibitions at major institutions sacrifice legibility for aesthetics. A Continuationconsistently prioritizes legible communication over spectacle.
Where the exhibition is less fully resolved is in its relationship to institutional self-reflection. DIA Director Salvador Salort-Pons’s letter, included in exhibition materials, frames the show as a beginning rather than an endpoint: a commitment to an ongoing relationship with Native communities and renewed institutional accountability. This framing is welcome. Even so, the letter stops short of naming what that commitment would require in concrete structural terms, whether sustained curatorial positions, long-term acquisition strategies, or changes to governance. The exhibition does not require such self-critique to succeed on its own terms; its critical horizon would nonetheless be deepened by a more direct reckoning with the institutional conditions it is trying to change.
That limitation notwithstanding, Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation is a significant and rigorously conceived exhibition. It sustains its argument steadily across more than sixty artists and multiple thematic registers without sacrificing coherence for comprehensiveness. More critically, it models exhibition-making that takes representational ethics seriously at the level of structure, not merely in stated intentions, but in typographic choices, organizational hierarchies, and the allocation of interpretive authority. Spivak’s provocation reminded us that the subaltern is not simply one who has not yet spoken; the subaltern is one whose speech has been systematically rendered unintelligible. This exhibition creates the conditions for a different kind of listening. That is no small thing.