Critical Museum Studies

Catalog description

The primary purpose of the course is to provide students with a critical vocabulary for understanding how museums, galleries, and exhibitions produce knowledge, and the ways in which history, geography, cultural difference, and social hierarchies are mapped through exhibition practices. We will discuss the histories and political stakes of encyclopedic museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and The Art Institute of Chicago. We will consider the missions of various national museums around the globe, the changing aims of modern and contemporary museums, and the challenges of developing museum programming that serves diverse audiences.