ABSTRACT
Inspired by feminist and anti-racist interventions in art discourse, museum director Nancy Proctor asks whose interests are actually served by co-creation as museums start moving away from simply collecting, preserving, and presenting cultural objects to being proactive agents of cultural production. In this chapter, Proctor draws upon her experience of reopening The Peale, Baltimore’s community museum originally founded in 1814 as the first museum building in America, to discuss how community programming can produce cultural discourse that grows through network effects and is sustained by ensuring that the tools, technologies, and the products of co-creative processes belong to creators and benefit their communities. She points out that reconceiving the museum as a distributed network demands a reformulation of the museum’s core mission. Critically, museums need to examine the structures that run the risk of perpetuating systems of inequity, reproducing hegemonic structures, and entrenching selective narratives. It is not enough for museum work to have good intentions, but rather take steps to dismantle these age-old structures, and ensure that the tools for rebuilding the cultural sector in a new, more inclusive model are in the hands of the communities they purport to serve.
