This debut book by the popular collaborative team--heralded as one of the first truly new critical voices of the 21st century-- blends real-world experience and poignant storytelling into a provocative and heartfelt portrait of the life of an artist today.

At a moment in which working as a professional artist is an increasingly unattainable luxury, art criticism duo The White Pube investigate why so many artists try anyway. Labeled the Diet Prada of the art world by British Vogue, in Poor Artists, writers Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad ridicule a contemporary art world that has turned art into artworks, art schools into art universities, and creative expression into cut-throat competition.
Poor Artists follows aspiring artist Quest Talukdar as she embarks on a surreal journey into the creative industry, where she must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true to herself. Featuring dialogue from anonymous interviews with real people who have all had to ask themselves the same question-- including a Turner Prize winner or two, a recluse, a Venice Biennale fraudster, a communist messiah, a ghost, and a literal knight--The White Pube tell the story of art like never before.

If you think art history has to be pale, male and stale - think again.
Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to 'decolonise' our galleries? Must Rhodes fall?

From the stolen Wakandan art in Black Panther, to Emmanuel Macron's recent commitment to art restitution, and Beyoncé and Jay Z's provocative music video filmed in the Louvre, the question of decolonising our relationship with the art around us is quickly gaining traction. People are waking up to the seedy history of the world's art collections, and are starting to ask difficult questions about what the future of museums should look like.

In The Whole Picture, art historian and Uncomfortable Art Tour guide Alice Procter provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art, and fills in the blanks with the stories that have been left out of the art history canon for centuries.

The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space:
The Palace
The Classroom
The Memorial
The Playground

Each section tackles the fascinating and often shocking stories of five different art pieces, including the propaganda painting that the East India Company used to justify its control in India; the Maori mokomokai skulls that were traded and collected by Europeans as 'art objects'; and Kara Walker's controversial contemporary sculpture A Subtlety, which raised questions about 'appropriate' interactions with art. Through these stories, Alice brings out the underlying colonial narrative lurking beneath the art industry today, and suggests different ways of seeing and thinking about art in the modern world.

The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.

'Eloquent and powerful ... an invaluable collection of forgotten histories. The authors show that colonial conquest was not only about erasing, expropriating, dispossessing, extracting, exploiting, but also looting and trafficking. They make the case for unconditional restitutions and returns' Françoise Vergès, author of A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum

'Brings much-needed diversity to a debate that has for too long focused on a very few cases mainly seen from a European perspective. A great introduction to the history behind the restitution process' Felicity Bodenstein, Lecturer, Sorbonne Université

'By focusing on colonial violence, this book not only reminds us of the nature of colonialism itself, but also of the unabated necessity to continue scrutinising museum collections and work towards restitution' Larissa Förster, Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Debates around restitution and decolonizing museums continue to rage across the world. Artifacts, effigies, and ancestral remains are finally being accurately contextualized and repatriated to their homelands.

Fifteen Colonial Thefts amplifies and adds to these discussions, exploring the history of colonial violence in Africa through the prism of fifteen African belongings -- all looted at the height of the imperial era and brought to Western museums.

Each chapter is accompanied by an original illustration, commissioned especially for the book, from established and emerging African artists, bringing these stories to life for the reader. With contributors from across the continents of Europe and Africa, including scientists, museum professionals, artists, and activists, the book illuminates the collective trauma and loss of cultural, historical, and spiritual knowledge that colonial theft engendered.

Sela K. Adjei is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher. He is a lecturer at the University of Media, Arts and Communication, Institute of Film and Television, Accra, Ghana.

Yann LeGall is a postdoctoral researcher on the project 'The Restitution of Knowledge: Artefacts as Archives in the (Post) Colonial Museum' at the Technical University in Berlin. As a member of the initiatives Berlin Postkolonial and Postcolonial Potsdam, he leads guided tours on colonial history in both cities.

The book includes a foreword by Peju Layiwola, an art historian and visual artist from Nigeria. She is Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Lagos. Her works can be found in Yemisi Shyllon Museum, Lagos, and in the homes of many private collectors. Her maternal grandfather was Oba Akenzua II, King of Benin, who ruled from 1933 until 1978. Layiwola has led public advocacy for the return of artworks stolen from Benin during the Punitive Expedition of 1897.

What do the London Science Museum, California Shakespeare Theater, and ShaNaNa have in common? They are all fighting for relevance in an often indifferent world. The Art of Relevance is your guide to mattering more to more people. You'll find inspiring examples, rags-to-relevance case studies, research-based frameworks, and practical advice on how your work can be more vital to your community. Whether you work in museums or libraries, parks or theaters, churches or afterschool programs, relevance can work for you. Break through shallow connection. Unlock meaning for yourself and others. Find true relevance and shine.

A powerful reflection on the universal art museum, considering the values critical to its history and anticipating its evolving place in our cultural future

Art museums have played a vital role in our culture, drawing on Enlightenment ideals in shaping ideas, advancing learning, fostering community, and providing spaces of beauty and permanence. In this thoughtful and often personal volume, Daniel H. Weiss contemplates the idea of the universal art museum alongside broad considerations about the role of art in society and what defines a cultural experience. The future of art museums is far from secure, and Weiss reflects on many of the difficulties these institutions face, from their financial health to their collecting practices to the audiences they engage to ensuring freedom of expression on the part of artists and curators.

In grappling with these challenges, Weiss sees a solution in shared governance. His tone is one of optimism as he looks to a future where the museum will serve a greater public while continuing to be a steward of culture and a place of discovery, discourse, inspiration, and pleasure. This poignant questioning and affirmation of the museum explores our enduring values while embracing the need for change in a rapidly evolving world.

The days when museums were dusty, stuffy institutions displaying their wealth and wisdom to a reverential public are over. Museums today are a cultural battleground. Who should decide what is put on display and how it is presented? Who gets to set the narrative?

In this passionately argued book, Jon Sleigh maintains that museums must be for all people and inclusion must be at the heart of everything they do. But what does good inclusion look like in practice? Cleverly structured like a museum tour, Sleigh uses seven illustrative museum objects from seven very different museums to explore such wide-ranging issues as trust-building, representation, digital access, conflicting narratives, removal from display and restitution.

The rich history of a centuries-old document security technology--folding and securing a letter into its own envelope for delivery--and a comprehensive guide to learning how to make your own locked letters.

Before the invention of the gummed envelope in the 1830s, how did people secure their private letters? The answer is letterlocking--the ingenious process of securing a letter using a combination of folds, tucks, slits, or adhesives such as sealing wax, so that it becomes its own envelope. This almost entirely forgotten practice, used by historical figures ranging from Elizabeth I and her spies to Japanese samurai lords, was an everyday activity for centuries, across cultures, borders, and social classes. In Letterlocking, Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith, experts who have pioneered the field over the last ten years, tell the fascinating story of letterlocking within epistolary history, drawing on real historical examples from all over the world.

Fully illustrated with more than 300 images and diagrams, including a dictionary of sixty technical terms and concepts, Letterlocking describes the essential precepts of the practice and provides sources of practical support needed for beginner and advanced users of letterlocking. The authors also advocate for the understanding of letterlocking and for its inclusion in a range of intellectual and cultural research, from conservation science and archival databases to historical television shows. By the end of the book, readers will learn how to make locked letters, study letters that may have been locked, and categorize those letters using systems the authors developed while studying more than 250,000 historic letters.

Letterlocking is accompanied by a website, freely accessible scholarly articles, and instructional videos and diagrams, as well as foldable tear-out sheets with instructions on how to fold and lock models of extant historical letters.

Imagine leading lively museum discussions with confidence, knowing exactly which questions to ask and when, engaging your audience effortlessly in the process.

The Art Engager is your comprehensive guide for designing and facilitating meaningful, interactive museum experiences. Through the innovative Thinking Museum(R) Approach, you'll discover how to create inquiry-led discussions that are both structured and flexible, using tools like the 10 Questioning Practices, the CHOOSE framework, and the Discussion Cycle.

Full of well-researched insights and easy-to-apply strategies, this book is an invaluable resource for educators working in a wide variety of museums and heritage settings.

Whether you're new to the field or a seasoned professional looking to refine your approach, The Art Engager will empower you to foster deep engagement, share knowledge intentionally and build collaborative communities through effective facilitation techniques.

This go-to guidebook offers the tools to enhance your practice and transform your participants' experience, bringing art and objects to life.

Culture and power have been bedfellows since ancient times. But now, more than ever, exhibits and the organizations responsible for them have become part of our troubled politics. Protests force out problematic patrons and curators, and pressure museums to abandon fossil fuel sponsorship. Campaigners demand equality and diversity, and condemn exploitation, of artists and staff alike. Those confronting racism and imperial legacies call for restitution of cultural objects.

Arts journalist Rachel Spence has watched these institutions become a flashpoint for today's social divisions. She interviews those on the frontlines, from artists and activists to directors and donors, revealing stories of elitism, inequality and injustice. Business and finance launder their reputations through art fair and museum patronage, while governments bolster their authority by weaponizing or attacking the arts-and ordinary museumgoers mobilize to demand better. How did we get here, and what lies ahead for these institutions?

From China and Russia to Cuba and New York, from the British Museum and the Louvre to the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, Battle for the Museum uncovers a dark nexus of capital, culture and power-and a radical shift in attitudes, driven by resistance movements fighting fiercely for exhibition spaces that serve today's public.

The world's most influential contemporary-art curator explores the history and practice of his craft

Hans Ulrich Obrist curated his first exhibit in his kitchen when he was twenty-three years old. Since then he has staged more than 250 shows internationally, many of them among the most influential exhibits of our age.

Ways of Curating is a compendium of the insights Obrist has gained from his years of extraordinary work in the art world. It skips between centuries and continents, flitting from meetings with the artists who have inspired him (including Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, and Gilbert and George) to biographies of influential figures such as Diaghilev and Walter Hopps. It describes some of the greatest exhibitions in history, as well as some of the greatest exhibitions never realized. It traces the evolution of collections from Athanasius Kircher's seventeenth-century Wunderkammer to modern museums, and points the way for projects yet to come.

Obrist has rescued the word curate from wine stores and playlists to remind us of the power inherent in looking at art--and at the world--in a new way.

Celebrates the resilience of American cultural institutions in the face of national crises and challenges

On an afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. Dazed soldiers and worried citizens could only watch as the flames engulfed the museum's castle. Rare objects and valuable paintings were destroyed. The flames at the Smithsonian were not the first--and certainly would not be the last-- disaster to upend a museum in the United States. Beset by challenges ranging from pandemic and war to fire and economic uncertainty, museums have sought ways to emerge from crisis periods stronger than before, occasionally carving important new paths forward in the process.

The Museum explores the concepts of crisis as it relates to museums, and how these historic institutions have dealt with challenges ranging from depression and war to pandemic and philosophical uncertainty. Fires, floods, and hurricanes have all upended museum plans and forced people to ask difficult questions about American cultural life. With chapters exploring World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic, the Great Depression, World War II, the 1970 Art Strike in New York City, and recent controversies in American museums, this book takes a new approach to understanding museum history. By diving deeper into the changes that emerged from these key challenges, Samuel J. Redman argues that cultural institutions can--and should-- use their history to prepare for challenges and solidify their identity going forward. A captivating examination of crisis moments in US museum history from the early years of the twentieth century to the present day, The Museum offers inspiration in the resilience and longevity of America's most prized cultural institutions.

...great guide for anyone interested in the details of art galleries. -Kathrine Erickson, Owner, Evoke Contemporary Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

...her 54 chapters cover every aspect of a gallery that you can think of... Highly recommended! -Neil Kalmanson, Professor of Art, Emeritus, East Georgia State College, Swainsboro, GA, Director, The Kalmanson Gallery, Emanuel Arts Council, Swainsboro, GA

Wonderfully comprehensive guide to the art and business of running an art gallery. -Lawrence Matthews, Owner, Matthews Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, Dallas, TX

...both new gallery owners and those who have been in business for years can learn from Michelle's experience and advice. -Lisa Burgess, Owner, New River Fine Arts, Ft. Lauderdale, FL

Nina Möntmann's timely book extends the decolonisation debate to the institutions of contemporary art. In a thoughtfully articulated text, illustrated with pertinent examples of best practice, she argues that to play a crucial role within increasingly diverse societies museums and galleries of contemporary art have a responsibility to 'decentre' their institutions, removing from their collections, exhibition policies and infrastructures a deeply embedded Euro-centric cultural focus with roots in the history of colonialism. In this, she argues, they can learn from the example both of anthropological museums (such as the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne), which are engaged in debates about the colonial histories of their collections, about trauma and repair, and of small-scale art spaces (such as La Colonie, Paris, ANO, Institute of Arts and Knowledge, Accra or Savvy Contemporary, Berlin), which have the flexibility, based on informal infrastructures, to initiate different kinds of conversation and collective knowledge production in collaboration with indigenous or local diasporic communities from the Global South.

For the first time, this book identifies the influence that anthropological museums and small art spaces can exert on museums of contemporary art to initiate a process of decentring.

A new edition of the bible of U.S. collections management--now updated for the 21st-century museum professional or Museum Studies student!

This is the only comprehensive discussion of the legal questions faced by museums as they acquire, use, and refine their collections.

This fully revised and expanded fourth edition addresses a thorough range of legal developments museums face, including new developments in the digital age and under new repatriation regulations. This approachable, easy-to-follow guide provides:

• Major updates on deaccessioning and copyright and fair use
• New chapters on ethical returns and shared stewardship

• Real-life and hypothetical lawsuit case studies
• Samples from museum collection policies
• Templates to help with document writing
• Suggestions for preventing legal problems
• Footnotes with more indepth discussion of relevant cases

The book covers a wide range of issues, including nonprofit status, fraud, copyright, loans, documentation, accessioning and deaccessioning, international exhibitions, and cultural heritage concerns. The authorative A Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections offers detailed explanations of the law that make it a go-to book for any museum professional.

Heritage, Tourism, and Race views heritage and leisure tourism in the Americas through the lens of race, and is especially concerned with redressing gaps in recognizing and critically accounting for African Americans as an underrepresented community in leisure.

Fostering critical public discussions about heritage, travel, tourism, leisure, and race, Jackson addresses the underrepresentation of African American leisure experiences and links Black experiences in this area to discussions of race, place, spatial imaginaries, and issues of segregation and social control explored in the fields of geography, architecture, and the law. Most importantly, the book emphasizes the importance of shifting public dialogue from a singular focus on those groups who are disadvantaged within a system of racial hierarchy, to those actors and institutions exerting power over racialized others through practices of exclusion.

Heritage, Tourism, and Race will be invaluable reading for academics and students engaged in the study of museums, as well as architecture, anthropology, public history, and a range of other disciplines. It will also be of interest to museum and heritage professionals and those studying the construction and control of space and how this affects and reveals the narratives of marginalized communities.

This book presents the first detailed study of the place of contemporary art galleries and gallerists, especially within the art markets of Europe and the United States. Based on the author's field research carried out for over a decade, and combining ethnographic material with quantitative data, the book reveals the major role galleries play in the creation of art value.

Despite being pillars of the art market, there has been very little in-depth research on galleries, especially when compared with the analysis of artists, critics, and dealers. Written by a sociologist who has spent a decade as an art critic, the book builds on work conducted by art historian and sociologist Raymonde Moulin from the 1960s to the 1990s. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with those working in the field today, it provides a thorough and up-to-date analysis of what contemporary art galleries really are: the spaces they occupy both physically and online; their position within gallery 'districts'; their relation to art fairs and biennials; and how friendship with clients is built and trends within the business, in turn illuminating the hierarchized structure of the sector. The book concludes by addressing a significant gap in data on the art market by providing a sociological ranking of international contemporary art galleries.

Offering a detailed analysis to a topic that has never been fully studied, The Social World of Galleries is essential reading for scholars and students of art sociology, art history and art business, as well as gallerists, collectors or art lovers, and artists themselves.

Library Lives plots the lifelong love affair between one particular bookworm and the John Rylands Library in Manchester, its collections drawn from every corner and period of the textual and meta-textual world. How do we read - and what can we read from - a potsherd, a locket, a fragment of papyrus, a gorgeously illuminated medieval manuscript, an envelope, a seemingly ordinary book? Stella Halkyard, one of the library's erstwhile archivists, tells the life stories of some of this great library's previously unsung treasures and provides radical new readings for a few of its acclaimed gems. In a sequence of idiosyncratic and often playful short essays she celebrates the resonance of these objects and their ability to tell stories that range across time and place, from the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, to John Donne's shroud, eighteenth-century Chinese papermaking, Elizabeth Bishop's letters, plastic surgery in sixteenth-century Italy, the lining of Walt Whitman's hat, and Delia Derbyshire's wartime gas mask. Selected from Halkyard's popular 'Pictures from a Library' and 'Archive Corner' features published in PN Review over the last two decades, these essays have been brought together for the first time and put into productive dialogue with each other.

A powerful reflection on the universal art museum, considering the values critical to its history and anticipating its evolving place in our cultural future

Art museums have played a vital role in our culture, drawing on Enlightenment ideals in shaping ideas, advancing learning, fostering community, and providing spaces of beauty and permanence. In this thoughtful and often personal volume, Daniel H. Weiss contemplates the idea of the universal art museum alongside broad considerations about the role of art in society and what defines a cultural experience. The future of art museums is far from secure, and Weiss reflects on many of the difficulties these institutions face, from their financial health to their collecting practices to the audiences they engage to ensuring freedom of expression on the part of artists and curators.

In grappling with these challenges, Weiss sees a solution in shared governance. His tone is one of optimism as he looks to a future where the museum will serve a greater public while continuing to be a steward of culture and a place of discovery, discourse, inspiration, and pleasure. This poignant questioning and affirmation of the museum explores our enduring values while embracing the need for change in a rapidly evolving world.