MUSEUMS AS SITES OF PROTEST: EFFICACY AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY AMERICAN ART MUSEUMS

Abstract

The colonial connotations and motivations of museums are well-established both in and outside of museum communities. However, despite these connotations, I argue that museums are spaces primed for the advocacy and advancement of social protest. The museum as a space is itself an actor in social protest that holds rhetorical, liminal, and symbolic power. This thesis focuses specifically on American art museums in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, examining four case studies of museums' interactions with protest—be they internal, external, or occupational—that work to construct an “un-model” of museum protest. This “un-model” consists of four “targets” that take the form of questions with the purpose of encouraging museums to re-examine the power they hold and consistently dismiss in the context of protest. Ultimately, this thesis argues that museums not only have a choice to correct and redeem their violent and colonial histories, but they have the unique opportunity to amplify this choice by fulfilling their pre-existing potential as integral utilities in liberation struggles and in social protest.