ASU-LACMA Lecture Series: Navigating Change in Museums with Shimrit Lee

Please join us for our next lecture in the ASU-LACMA Navigating Change in Museums public lecture series. Shimrit Lee will discuss themes from her book “Decolonize Museums” (OR Books, 2022).

Museums are often seen as politically neutral spaces designed to present a shared, universal history. But for generations, activists, artists and communities have understood that to be a veneer. Museums, they know, have traditionally served as extensions of colonialism and white supremacy. In this talk, Shimrit Lee will survey recent artistic and curatorial initiatives that illuminate the connections between exhibition and empire as well as ongoing processes of dispossession and erasure perpetuated by mainstream Western museums.

How, she’ll ask, can museums serve as sites for truth-telling? How can artists—working collaboratively within the museum or beyond its institutional confines—generate new forms of critical knowledge production that engage with centuries of historical trauma? To what extent have these interventions served as models for decolonial repair and to what extent have they fallen short? Ultimately, Lee’s talk will explore what it means to decolonize the museum as we know it.

RSVP: C.FajardoHill@asu.edu by Wednesday, Jan.18, 2023

In–Person: Farmer Education Building Room ED 204

Zoom link: https://asu.zoom.us/j/9289475370

Image credit: Haley Weiss