A leading activist museum director explains why museums are at the center of a political storm In an age of protest, cultural institutions have come under fire. Protestors have mobilized against sources of museum funding, as happened at the Metropolitan Museum, and against board appointments, forcing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders to resign at the Whitney. That is to say nothing of demonstrations against exhibitions and artworks. Protests have roiled institutions across the world, from the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim to the Akron Art Museum. A popular expectation has grown that galleries and museums should work for social change. As Director of the Queens Museum, Laura Raicovich helped turn that New York muni- cipal institution into a public commons for art and activism, organizing high-powered exhibitions that doubled as political protests. Then in January 2018, she resigned, after a dispute with the Queens Museum board and city officials. This public controversy followed the museum’s responses to Donald Trump’s election, including her objections to the Israeli government using the museum for an event featuring Vice President Mike Pence. In this lucid and accessible book, Raicovich examines some of the key museum flashpoints and provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding conservative, capitalist values. And she suggests ways museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.

As museums worldwide shuttered in 2020 because of the coronavirus, New York-based cultural strategist András Szántó conducted a series of interviews with an international group of museum leaders. In a moment when economic, political, and cultural shifts are signaling the start of a new era, the directors speak candidly about the historical limitations and untapped potential of art museums. Each of the twenty-eight conversations in this book explores a particular topic of relevance to art institutions today and tomorrow. What emerges from the series of in-depth conversations is a composite portrait of a generation of museum leaders working to make institutions more open, democratic, inclusive, experimental and experiential, technologically savvy, culturally polyphonic, attuned to the needs of their visitors and communities, and concerned with addressing the defining issues of the societies around them. The dialogues offer glimpses of how museums around the globe are undergoing an accelerated phase of reappraisal and reinvention. Conversation Partners: Marion Ackermann, Cecilia Alemani, Anton Belov, Meriem Berrada, Daniel Birnbaum, Thomas P. Campbell, Tania Coen-Uzzielli, Rhana Devenport, María Mercedes González, Max Hollein, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Mami Kataoka, Brian Kennedy, Koyo Kouoh, Sonia Lawson, Adam Levine, Victoria Noorthoorn, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Anne Pasternak, Adriano Pedrosa, Suhanya Raffel, Axel Rüger, Katrina Sedgwick, Franklin Sirmans, Eugene Tan, Philip Tinari, Marc-Olivier Wahler, Marie-Cécile Zinsou

A young boy learns that art is all around us in this captivating picture book about a day at the museum. We all remember what it was like to be a child in a crowded art museum. It was hard to see, let alone appreciate the art. It got tiring. And there was so much else to look at! That’s the lesson of this ingeniously simple yet profound book about art. It is everywhere—from another visitor’s elaborate tattoos to the way the sun makes patterns of light on the floor. While other visitors are busy trying to find their way through the museum’s galleries, or fighting for room to view a masterpiece, our hero examines the gallery upside down from a bench, plays with his shadow, and makes friends with the custodian. With a wink and a nod to serious museum-goers everywhere, Joanne Liu’s whimsical illustrations remind us that sometimes the best kind of art is the kind you make yourself.

Milo is excited about her class trip to the museum. The docent leads them on a tour and afterward Milo has time to look around on her own. But something doesn't feel right, and Milo gradually realizes that the people from her community are missing from the museum. When her aunt urges her to find a solution, Milo takes matters into her own hands and opens her own museum!

A debut story collection of spectacular imaginative range and lyricism from a Pushcart Prize–winning author. In Ayse Papatya Bucak’s dreamlike narratives, dead girls recount the effects of an earthquake and a chess-playing automaton falls in love. A student stops eating and no one knows whether her act is personal or political. A Turkish wrestler, a hero in the East, is seen as a brute in the West. The anguish of an Armenian refugee is “performed” at an American fund-raiser. An Ottoman ambassador in Paris amasses a tantalizing collection of erotic art. And in the masterful title story, the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialize, and make sense of, generations of war. A joy and a provocation, Bucak’s stories confront the nature of historical memory with humor and humanity. Surreal and poignant, they examine the tension between myth and history, cultural categories and personal identity, performance and authenticity.

Natural history museums contain many thousands of zoological specimens and each has a tale to tell an often involving extraordinary people, daring explorations, unquenchable scientific curiosity, and strange coincidences. This perfectly presented book, with its engaging pictures, is rich in stories and unveils many secrets. Read about: the fate of a tortoise given as a gift by Captain Cook - the epic international voyage of the biggest known moa egg - the admiration induced by an ape from the jungles of Borneo - the barn owl of mysterious origins - the unfortunate fate of an angry young elephant - the quest to discover how a New Zealand heron turned up in a Florence museum - the strange arrival of an Australian banjo frog - and many other mind-boggling mysteries.