Synopses & Reviews
Contributors to this volume examine and illustrate struggles and collaborations among museums, festivals, tourism, and historic preservation projects and the communities they represent and serve. Essays include the role of museums in civil society, the history of African-American collections, and experiments with museum-community dialogue about the design of a multicultural society.
About the Author
Ivan Karp is National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Liberal Arts at Emory University and director of the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship.
Christine Mullen Kreamer is an art historian working in Vietnam and an exhibit developer for the “African Voices” project at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.
Steven D. Lavine is the president of the California Institute of the Arts.
Table of Contents
Introduction : museums and communities : the politics of public culture ; On civil society and social identity / Ivan Karp -- Museums are good to think : heritage on view in India / Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge -- "Hey! that's mine" : thoughts on pluralism and American museums / Edmund Barry Gaither -- The other vanguard / Guillermo Gâomez-Peäna -- Festivals and the creation of public culture : whose voice(s)? / Robert H. Lavenda -- Art museums and living artists : contentious communities / Vera L. Zolberg -- Audience, ownership, and authority : designing relations between museums and communities / Steven D. Lavine -- Change and challenge : museums in the information society / George F. MacDonald.