A Museum Committee panel at this 113th Annual College Art Association Conference
Cultural institutions in 2025 face many uncertainties regarding funding, support, censorship, and career stability. Additionally, there are multiple, often overlapping challenges we have sadly become familiar with–economic, social, organizational, ethical, and climate-related. It seems like the list keeps getting longer…
We aren’t alone in feeling these stresses acutely within our professional field, and we must not lose hope. We may be at a point where we need to pivot collectively in our priorities, working harder to reach each other instead of the bottom line to creatively conceive of system change experiments and organization-specific innovations alike. One of my favorite mantras is “Don’t Panic, Organize,” and it is opportunities like this that can bring us together.
This panel convened three practitioners in the field: Ceci Moss, Erika Perez Armenta, and Amanda Ripley. Each of them have been thinking about how museums should and can change for the future in diverse ways. For instance, how small academic institutions can support long-term structural change in the arts sector by nurturing the next generation of leaders equipped to build innovative, alternative, and socially conscious curatorial and institutional models. How collaborating with volunteer and social service programs in a museum results in educational spaces and community-building opportunities within the institution itself. And lastly, how the picket line can be considered the collision point of negotiations between internal labor struggles with external calls for decolonization and divestment and that, ultimately, the strike is a mechanism of collective evolution and codetermination necessary for lasting and ongoing structural change.
Full abstracts can be found here.
Martina Tanga 