Museums and Social Justice: Towards Reckoning and Change

The influential art critic, curator, and museum director Maura Reilly examines the future of museums when acquisitions policies, permanent collections, and exhibitions become increasingly important battlegrounds for social justice.

Museums face a reckoning. Thrust to the forefront of difficult conversations around toxic philanthropy, increased corporatization, decolonization, repatriation, and legacies of theft and looting, many of our cultural institutions are undergoing a period of radical transformation; seemingly redefining their very function and mission to address new public concerns, such as: Who owns the past? How bloody is too bloody? And whose museum is this, truly?

Museums and Social Justice addresses these questions and more, shedding light on pressing issues such as why an oil giant attempted to sponsor an Arctic exhibition at the British Museum, why Berlin’s Humboldt Forum is exhibiting British looted objects from Benin, and why the Baltimore Museum of Art has made a public commitment to acquire more works by women artists. Using such events as case studies, author Maura Reilly engages with pioneering arguments in and around matters of diversity, access to heritage, decolonization, patrimony, and racial equality. She outlines specific action plans to confront these challenges, avoid reputational controversy, and maintain confidence in our public institutions. The result is a provocative book by a leading voice within the museum community addressing the defining issues facing these institutions today and for years to come.

18 color illustrations