Readings recommended by CIMAM members
For the week of May 6, 2024, we have some reading recommendations for you that have been suggested by CIMAM members. These articles and books are related to museums and collections of modern and contemporary art. Additionally, we suggest that you watch teresa cisneros's presentation from the CIMAM Annual Conference 2023, which was held in Buenos Aires.
Books:
A career-spanning catalogue featuring excerpts from Raven Chacon’s scores, musical prompts, and drawings interspersed with full-color documentation and descriptive texts of installations, sculptures, and performances.
Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among land, space, and people. In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined. In 2022, Raven Chacon became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2023.
Untrammelled neoliberalism and the inexorable force of production have produced a 21st century crisis of community: a narcissistic cult of authenticity and mass turning-inward are among the pathologies engendered by it. We are individuals afloat in an atomised society, where the loss of the symbolic structures inherent in ritual behaviour has led to overdependence on the contingent to steer identity.
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, published, October 6, 2020.
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis.
CIMAM TV
Day 2 CIMAM Annual Conference in Buenos Aires > The Role of Museums in Communities, Education, and Accessibility
In her presentation, teresa challenges us with a fundamental question: Is it possible to dismantle and reconstruct how a museum behaves and, by extension, what it produces? Through this enquiry, she highlights a crucial perspective: that the essence of a museum is shaped by its people. The institution is not just a collection of objects, but rather a collective of employed people who significantly influence what the public externalises and experiences.
Teresa's presentation considers how museum workers can actively sit, reflect, learn, unlearn, apply, integrate and embody different ways of being. This introspective process is essential to producing museums in a more socially just way, fostering collaboration that is mutually beneficial and inclusive.
Exclusive for CIMAM members
Exclusive for CIMAM members, enjoy a 25% discount on a selection of contemporary art and curatorial books through Lund Humphries online bookstore.
Access the Members Only section to get further reading recommendations by CIMAM members.