museums 
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SOURCE: Public Books
2/2/2021
Museums as Monuments to White Supremacy
by Ana Lucia Araujo
Recent protest and scholarship have highlighted the knowledge of major cultural institutions that artifacts in their collections were looted from Africa and other colonized places, and support calls to repatriate the artifacts.
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/26/2021
Cheech Marin’s Chicano Art Museum Is to Open This Fall
“My motto has always been that you can’t love or hate Chicano art unless you see it in person,” Marin said. “And now people will have a place to always see it.”
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SOURCE: Forward
12/15/2020
After an Online ‘Onslaught’ over Exhibit on Racial Justice, a Florida Holocaust Museum Vows Not to Back Down
A Florida Holocaust museum's decision to feature an exhibition of photographs taken during recent protests over police killings of Black Americans raised questions about the museum's mission and whether the Holocaust can be remembered and its victims honored by comparing the genocide of European Jews to other instances of systemic racism.
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SOURCE: New York Times
12/9/2020
Lockdown Gardening in Britain Leads to Archaeological Discoveries
Locked-down Britons have unearthed many potentially valuable objects both modern and ancient, prompting consideration of expanding a law that would enable museums to claim such objects after compensating the finder.
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SOURCE: Hyperallergic
12/9/2020
Illuminating the Legacy of Slavery at a New York Museum
Artist Reggie Black is projecting a message about the history of slavery in New York City on the façade of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum in Manhattan, where six people were enslaved.
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SOURCE: USA Today
12/10/2020
'Hyphenated Identity Groups': Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee Blocks Legislation For Latino And Women History Smithsonians
"Claiming 'the last thing we need is to further divide an already divided nation,' Lee blocked proposals to establish the National Museum of the American Latino and the American Women's History Museum."
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SOURCE: Worcester (MA) Telegram and Gazette
12/7/2020
Last Pearl Harbor Fighter Plane that Still Flies a Historical Highlight at American Heritage Museum in Hudson
A series of accidents allowed a P-40 fighter plane to survive the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; after crashing in service a month later, the plane lay on a Hawaiian mountainside until 1985, when it was restored to flight condition using parts from other planes. It is now an attraction at the American Heritage Museum in Hudson, Massachusetts.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
12/3/2020
Congress Takes Crucial Step toward Establishing Latino and Women’s History Museums
The proposed museums would follow the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016.
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SOURCE: New York Times
11/16/2020
Academy Museum Gives Debbie Reynolds Her Due as a Costume Conservator
For reasons likely including institiutionalized sexism, costumes have been a neglected part of the preservation of cinematic history. The new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures hopes to work with the late Debbie Reynolds's son to change that.
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SOURCE: New York Times
11/15/2020
Where Is the Smithsonian Museum for American Latinos?
by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Ken Salazar
A former Florida Congresswoman and the former Interior Secretary present bipartisan advocacy for an American Latino Museum.
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SOURCE: New York Times
11/13/2020
Thieves Grab Nazi Memorabilia in Museum Heists, Puzzling Police
Since March, four museums in the Netherlands and Denmark have been broken into, and memorabilia, including Nazi uniforms, has been stolen.
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SOURCE: Smithsonian
10/26/2020
Radical Protests Propelled the Suffrage Movement. Here’s How a New Museum Captures That History
A prison employee named Irma Clifton was instrumental in preserving the site's legacy as the place where suffrage picketers in Washington DC were incarcerated, beaten and tortured in 1917.
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SOURCE: Daily Gazette (Schenectady, NY)
10/24/2020
Schuyler Mansion Works to Bring Clarity to Alexander Hamilton’s Role as Enslaver
Jessie Serfilippi of the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site examines Alexander Hamilton's relationship to slavery and challenges his image as a proto-abolitionist.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
10/12/2020
Coronavirus Shutdowns and Charges of White Supremacy: American Art Museums are in Crisis
The year of the COVID pandemic is not an opportune time for museums to weather controversies over the content of exhibits, but many face criticism from across the spectrum about racial inclusivity and provocative works.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
9/30/2020
Smithsonian Taps N.Y. Cultural Director To Lead African American Museum
Since 2016, Kevin Young has been director of the Schomburg Center, a division of the New York Public Library and an important cultural organization in Harlem.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
9/28/2020
Philip Guston's KKK Images Force Us to Stare Evil in the Face – We Need Art Like This
"Art shouldn’t be polite. Guston’s work puts you into a headlock and forces you to stare into the face of evil, rearranging your sense of reality into a better one – and that’s what art needs to do more than ever."
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SOURCE: New York Times
8/27/2020
In His Own Words: Jacob Lawrence at the Met and MoMA
The artist Jacob Lawrence died in 2000; he spent a day in New York museums with Times art critic Michael Kimmelman four years before, discussing art and his creative process.
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SOURCE: New York Times
8/27/2020
The British Museum Reopens to a World That Has Changed
Finally reopening after a COVID-enforced hiatus, the British Museum is making concessions to an audience that is more skeptical of the museum's relationship to colonialism and the slave trade.
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SOURCE: Vanity Fair
8/24/2020
What Should A Museum Look Like In 2020?
"A call for divestment involves an acknowledgment of the ways that museums rely on local police departments to do the work of mental health providers and emergency medical technicians, as well as the implicit ways contracts with police departments protect property over people," said MoMA curator Thomas J. Lax.
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8/16/2020
Abridging History is Dangerous
by Greg Bailey
You cannot understand the pain and purpose that constitutes our heritage by hiding.
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