Staying Gold: Art Education Programming as Model for Queering the Museum Beyond Representation

Abstract

Queering the museum, as an active, critical orientation, requires a sustained engagement with anddeconstruction of binaries foundational to the logic of the Western canon and, by extension, to the modern museum. While most museums who have responded to the call to queer the museum have done so by staging temporary curatorial or artist-led interventions, these engagements have not led to structural change. This paper turns to the field of museum art education as an under-researched area containing rich potential for active engagement in the project of queering the museum. Specifically, I offer a case study of Stay Gold, a queer, intergenerational artmaking program hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art – Tucson, as a key example of museum art education programming that queers the museum through a critical engagement with three key concepts: artist, art-object, and community.