ABSTRACT
Vitrines, murals, installations, and artist-made objects – all features of traditional museums — become revolutionary and resistant when created, arranged, positioned, and curated by those with minority perspectives in mind. The familiarity of those formidable circumstances, however, offers unique insight – insight of a variety that has the potential to transform museum practice. The rules that might typically or traditionally apply work differently within those walls, and they are able to take on a form – and freedom – similar to the sensibility that characterizes the Gaasbeek. Sometimes making museums matter means leaving one institution behind – sometimes forever or at least for a very long time – and finding another. In the case of historic house museums, for example, some truths will never be told due to conservatism and the cash that controls who can speak and who cannot.
