Should museums mount exhibitions with a moral agenda? Absolutely. If they do it well.

Last year, while working on a story about the various crises facing America's art museums, I spoke with two people, Carmen Morgan and Michael Robertson, who work at an organization called ArtEquity. ArtEquity works with the Art Institute of Chicago and other arts organizations to address issues around equity, inclusion and justice. In the course of our conversation I asked what sorts of exhibitions they thought museums should mount if they were serious about addressing injustice and inequality. After wondering aloud whether art museums were in fact serious about this, they gamely tossed out a few suggestions. What about a show that “documents the growing poverty gap?” Morgan asked. Another idea: She had recently seen a montage of all the faces of U.S. presidents (all male, all but one White): Why not have an exhibition showing what Congress looks like or the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, she mused. “Wouldn’t that be a powerful exhibit?” Picking up where Morgan left off, Robertson proposed an exhibition of “visual representations of wealth throughout the centuries and how that wealth has grown,” comparing “White folks versus Black folks and other people of color. I can imagine an exhibition that explores that with graphics.” Read more...

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