Museum Affordances: Colonial Collections, Decolonial Possibilities
March 16 at 6 pm
Zoom / 38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

Paul Basu (University College London) speaks on the Museum Affordances / [Re:]Entanglements project, an extended experiment in museum methods, spanning the past four years. Basu explores the questions: What do museums and their collections make possible? How can we activate these latent possibilities? Can archives and collections assembled in the context of colonial scientific expeditions contribute to the project of decolonization?

Conversations on Access and Design
March 18, 10 am–12 pm and 1:30–3 pm
Zoom

In celebration of Bess Williamson’s (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design, which was awarded the 2019/20 Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize, leading disability history scholars, artists, and designers will discuss studies of access and design history. Speakers include Aimi Hamraie, Jonathan Sterne, Mara Mills, Riva Lehrer, Jennifer White-Johnson, and Joshua A. Halstead.

Next Week:

Colonial Dutch “She-Merchants” as Collectors
March 21 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

The women of New Netherland and their New York descendants who had the right to buy, sell, and trade any kind of goods of their own accord. Women who took advantage of this freedom were even referred to as “she-merchants.” Louisa Wood Ruby (BGC visiting fellow) presents on the collecting habits of Dutch seventeenth-century she-merchants using inventories along with extant documents and letters, illuminating the lives of these women.

The Current State of Archaeology in China
March 22 at 6 pm
Zoom / 38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

Lothar von Falkenhausen (University of California Los Angeles) presents important recent discoveries in China and reflects on how they have changed our understanding of how Chinese civilization was formed. He will also reflect on changes in the intellectual framework in which Chinese archaeological research is being conducted today.

This symposium features speakers from New York City museums who will discuss how their institution responded to the pandemic, how it shaped and redefined their work, and the new pathways and connections it created for the future of their institutions. Organized by BGC’s director of digital humanities and exhibitions Jesse Merandy, featuring Sofie Andersen (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Rachel Eve Ginsberg and Jessica Walthew (Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum), Leslie Hayes (New-York Historical Society), Jamie Lawyer (Rubin Museum of Art).