Event Description
Join Drexel's Arts Administration & Museum Leadership program for another installment of the Cultural Leadership Guest Speaker Series featuring co-producers of Museums Are Not Neutral, LaTanya Autry and Mike Murawski, on May 24 at 7:00 p.m. ET.
Museums Are Not Neutral is a global advocacy initiative produced to expose the myth of museum neutrality and demand equity-based transformation across institutions. The initiative began in August 2017 through an online t-shirt campaign and the social media hashtag #MuseumsAreNotNeutral. During its first 3 years, the initiative sold more than three thousand shirts to people around the entire world, raised more than $20,000 for social justice organizations and relief funds supporting museum workers, and engaged more than one million people across social media platforms. This movement continues to grow, bring people together, and demand change happen now.
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As a cultural organizer in the visual arts, LaTanya S. Autry centers collective care in her decolonial, abolitionist curatorial praxis. In addition to co-creating The Art of Black Dissent, an interactive program that both promotes public discussion about the Black liberation struggle and engenders fighting antiBlackness through the collective imagining of public art interventions, she co-produced #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, an initiative that exposes the fallacies of the neutrality claim and calls for an equity-based transformation of museums and the Social Justice and Museums Resource List, a crowd-sourced bibliography. LaTanya has curated exhibitions and organized programs at moCa Cleveland, Yale University Art Gallery, Artspace New Haven, and other institutions. Through her graduate studies at the University of Delaware, where she is completing her Ph.D. in art history, LaTanya has developed expertise in the art of the United States, photography, and museums. Her dissertation The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America, which analyzes how individuals and communities memorialize lynching violence in the built environment, concentrates on the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space.
A museum consultant, change leader, and educator, Mike Murawski is passionate about transforming museums, cultural institutions, and non-profits to become more equitable and community-centered. After more than 20 years of work in education and museums, he brings his personal core values of deep listening, collective care, and healing practice into the work that he leads within organizations and communities. Mike is currently the co-producer of Museums Are Not Neutral, a global advocacy campaign aimed at exposing the myth of museum neutrality and calling for equity-based transformation across museums. Since 2011, he has also served as Founding Editor of ArtMuseumTeaching, a collaborative online forum reflecting on critical issues in museums. Mike’s new book entitled Museums as Agents of Change: A Guide to Becoming a Changemaker is now available through Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. He previously served as the Director of Learning & Community Partnerships for the Portland Art Museum, Director of School Services at the Saint Louis Art Museum, and Coordinator of Education and Public Programs at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis. Mike has also served as a contributor to the Museums as Sites of Social Action (MASS Action) initiative supporting equity and inclusion in museums; and First Wave Project Advisor for the OF/BY/FOR ALL initiative helping civic and cultural organizations grow of, by, and for their communities. Mike earned his MA and PhD in Education from American University in Washington, DC, focusing his research on gender in curriculum development and interdisciplinary learning. |
