Spearheading or trailing behind the future? Museum responses to the socio-cultural tumult of the 21st century
Von: Maria Kouri, Assistant Professor in Cultural Administration and Development of Local Communities, University of the Peloponnese, Greece
Museums: institutions bound to their time and place
As human institutions, museums influence and are influenced by the ideals, values and objectives of the geographical, temporal, historical and socio-cultural context in which they function. Subsequently, museums transform alongside human societies, modifying their identities, missions and functions to support the mainstream political and socio-cultural environment, but also to rise up to the challenges of their time and place. Among others, how collections and objects are studied, understood, interpreted and showcased is continuously changing, as is the relationship between the museum and its audiences.
Indeed, back in the 18th and 19th centuries, the monumental national museums focussed on the aesthetic value of noteworthy objects, supporting the construction of nation states and of prideful national identities. Despite the fact that the western public museums were filled with the treasures of other peoples, non-western civilisations were depicted as uncivilised barbarians, sanctioning colonialism and the “civilising mission”. This Eurocentric and hegemonic representation of defeated and enslaved peoples as well as of social groups deprived of socio-political power (such as women or children), aimed to support the status quo and justify those groups’ subjugation. In effect, “traditional” museums condoned white male supremacy and colonisation, slavery and even genocide, while the curator’s voice dominated visitors, who were expected to become edified and accept unquestioningly the “objective” worldview that the museum promoted.
One century later, museums have shifted their interest from the artefacts to the human societies that created them, emphasising human stories and sociocultural contexts. Humble objects often become the epicentre of exhibitions and of museum narratives, which adopt a more ecumenical worldview observing cultural diversity and are open to multiple, subjective interpretations. Contemporary museums aspire to become welcoming spaces and engage audiences -even having different points of view- in dialogue on “hot” social issues. Moreover, they give voice to downtrodden groups attempting to address historical injustice and to foster reconciliation. To this end, museums welcome the visitors’ opinions, even when they contradict the curatorial views.
This aspect becomes particularly significant in the 21st century, which is already counting many worldwide crises, ranging from climate change and economic and humanitarian crises to terrorism, the rise of the far right and, generally, of intolerance and racism. In addition to that, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose a global threat to public health. In this article, I will examine by way of indicative examples some responses of western museums in relation to the refugee crisis, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests as well as the #MeToo movement, all three of which functioned as a catalyst for protests against white supremacy, racism and sexism.
Museums and the refugee crisis
According to the UN Refugee Agency, by the end of 2019 79.5 million people were forcefully displaced worldwide, revealing a staggering increase particularly since 2012. In the same year, 2.7 million immigrants from non-EU countries entered the EU, making up about 5.1% of the EU’s population (Eurostat 2021). One result of the ongoing economic and humanitarian, but also of the refugee crisis was the rise of far-right rhetoric and political parties. Former US president Donald Trump perpetuated a populistic, intolerance rhetoric and applied anti-immigration and anti-Islamic policies, promising to “make America great again”. In the EU the refugee waves coming mostly from Islamic countries fuelled conflict regarding the settlement of refugees and asylum seekers, which could cause significant transformation of the member states’ sociocultural composition.
Indeed, the continued influx of migrants generated new challenges for contemporary cities, potentially leading to polarisation and exclusion but, alternatively, to cultural enrichment and the creation of novel cultural resources and expressions. In 2016 the International Council of Museums (ICOM) with its International Committee for the Collections and Activities of Museums of Cities (CAMOC) and International Committee for Regional museums (ICR), began the 3-year project “Migration Cities” aiming to create a web platform and a network among museum professionals to share information and experiences on the realities of immigration. Through this project museums aimed to update their knowledge, tools and narratives regarding the preservation and representation of contemporary urban life, and to promote mentoring opportunities and social dialogue. The Network of European Museum Organisations (NEMO) also published relevant recommendations for museum work responding to migration and cultural diversity[i]. Accordingly, museums should re-examine their existing collections to avoid racist narratives and practices originating from the colonial past. Moreover, they should incorporate the refugee issue in the museum context, by collecting new objects, exhibiting refugee experiences and reaching out to diverse audience categories.

In effect, one of the first responses of museums to the refugee crisis was the organisation of relevant exhibitions. Even museums with a different thematic to immigration/migration caught up with this prominent issue and addressed it in various ways, opening discussions with the wider society. Indicatively, in Museum Europäischer Kulturen Berlin the exhibition “Insights in fleeting lives”, presented the memories and stories of refugee artists and asylum seekers, aiming to formulate the collective feelings of homeless peoples. The “I’m alive” exhibition at the National Museum of Science and Technology (Sweden)included interviews with refugees and their stories about how smartphones and the internet helped them during their dangerous journeys. With “Lives Afloat” the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago combined reports and data from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and photographs by Tasos Markou to present the difficulties refugees faced during their sea journeys towards Greece and while living in camps waiting for their reallocation.
In addition to exhibitions, notable museum projects aimed to attract refugee visitors, but also to expose “mainstream” communities to the historical and actual interaction of cultures and populations within their cities. “Multaka” is an exemplary, award-winning project, which trained Syrian and Iraqi refugees as guides to Berlin museums. In 2018 it spread to England, while one year later the Penn Museumin Philadelphia initiated a similar programme called “Global Guides”.
Museums and racial discrimination
The refugee crisis inflamed populistic rhetoric, which exacerbated systematic racism almost everywhere. In 2020 the murder of George Floyd fuelled the Black Lives Matter social movement in the US, which quickly spread across the globe, instigating supportive demonstrations of thousands who stood against racism, demanding justice and equity in all aspects of everyday life. One of BLM’s remarkable features was that it publicly and openly questioned established historical viewpoints. One result of this phenomenon was the toppling or defacing of several historical monuments, which were viewed as celebrating white supremacy and colonisation.
The size, expansion and intensity of the protest waves characterised BML as perhaps the largest movement in US history. To document these historic events, a number of museums, such as the Smithsonian institutions, sent their staff to demonstrations to collect material, testimonies and objects; interviewed demonstrators; and, invited community members to add their stories to museum archives and to donate relevant objects. Some museums participated in the “Open your Lobby” initiative, providing support and creature comforts to demonstrators.

BLM’s call for social reform underlined the need for inclusivity and equity. In response, museums mounted exhibitions not only on black genocide but also on the more encompassing thematic of racism. Additionally, some museums, such as the Baltimore Museum of Art or the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, boosted the re-examination of their collections and made it a point to enrich them by investing more in artworks and representations of diversity and equality. Along these lines, they purchased and showcased artworks by coloured artists, giving voice to diverse cultural expressions on a more equal basis than in the past.
Perhaps more significantly, museums are now engaging more systematically in re-evaluating their established interpretations as well as the western concepts dominating their exhibitions, such as, for example, the notion of Time, as explored by “Colored People Time” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (2019). Along the same lines, People’s History Museum in Manchester, in collaboration with a Community Programme Team, created the installation “Migration: a Human story” to challenge the museum’s migration narratives and interpretations and to motivate audiences to consider why the migrants’ contributions to the UK society are often undervalued.
Indeed, an increasing number of museums openly acknowledge the anachronistic Eurocentric mental frame through which they have been interpreting their collections, justifying stereotypes of racial superiority. Accordingly, they review the ways they describe and present artworks in their care coming from non-western civilisations, and face overlooked issues of race, gender, violence, and enslavement. A characteristic example offers the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Antiquities department, which is reviewing the terms, titles and descriptions used for the objects of the online collection depicting Black Africans. Hence, museums seek to address overlooked and painful issues of race and gender inequality, violence and enslavement through exhibitions; by gradually changing their established worldviews; or, by employing more controversial means, such as the live re-enactment of a slave auction in Colonial Williamsburg, which triggered heated discussions back in 1994.
In the same framework of addressing past injustices and supported by now mature national and international legal frameworks, museums are finally ready to accept repatriation calls for culturally sensitive objects, which were forcefully or illegally acquired during colonisation (e.g. treasures and cultural artefacts of many peoples across the world) or in collaboration with occupational forces (such as the seizing of the Parthenon sculptures by Lord Elgin during Ottoman rule). Human remains, special sacred artefacts and objects of great cultural importance are inventoried, communicated to the communities they belonged to and -in some cases at least- restituted. Glasgow was perhaps the first European city setting up the cross-party Repatriation of Artifacts Working Group to consider the ethical issues of restitution, leading to the repatriation of a sacred Lakota Sioux Ghost Dance shirt in 1999 and Maori Mokomokai in 2004. After its last meeting in 2007, Glasgow’s Working Group for Repatriation was reinstated in 2021 to work on the repatriation of Benin artefacts, highlighting quite vividly the increased importance given today to the restitution of cultural treasures. In other cases, adhering to the communities’ requests, culturally sensitive artefacts remain in museum collections, but are hidden from public view, as is the case of shamanic objects by the Alaskan Tlingit and Haida tribes, which were removed from the exhibition by the Field Museum in Chicago, applying the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
Museums and gender issues
Notorious cases of gender discrimination also rattled the 21st century. The Weinstein scandal, which uncovered the decades-long abusive behaviour of movie producer Harvey Weinstein, opened a can of worms, revealing extensive sexual abuse in various sectors. The #MeToo movement built up on Tarana’s Burke 2003 initiative, and particularly after 2017 spread across the world, encouraging sexual abuse victims to speak up and demand justice.
Museums were soon faced with the conundrum of how to react when an exhibited artist was accused of sexual misconduct or when an artwork was deemed sexually inappropriate. In very few cases exhibitions of contested artists were cancelled or curtailed, respecting creative freedom. For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York refused a petition by two visitors to remove Balthus’s “Thérèse Dreaming” from public view, seeing this as an opportunity for conversation, for reflecting on both the past and the present, and for respecting artistic expression. Attempting to balance between addressing legitimate concerns while avoiding artistic censorship, museums become creative. The Manchester Art Gallery took down the popular -but for some inappropriate- J. W. Waterhouse painting “Hylas and the Nymphs” for a period of time. It invited museum visitors to stick notes where the painting once hung with their ideas and impressions on gender, race, representation, as well as on the dismounting of the specific exhibit. The Royal Ontario Museum designed the “#MeToo & the Arts” display to encourage a larger conversation about how museums and the public engage with art within the context of the #MeToo movement. In a more general context, museums re-examine through exhibitions, publications and events the stories, the rights and the contributions in art and life of women as well as of LGBTQIA+, exploring gender issues and established inequalities. Having said that, a more extensive and publicly showcased representation of non-male designated artists and stories in museum spaces still leaves much to be desired.
Another important contribution of these socio-cultural conflicts are the changes instigated to the museums’ organisational structures, particularly regarding staffing. Still, despite efforts to promote gender equity dating back to the 1990s, research[ii] in US museums reveals small changes. Between 2015 and 2018 the percentage of women working in museums, and particularly in intellectual leadership positions, has somewhat risen from 59% to 61%. Nonetheless, museum board members and chairs are still largely male, representing 55% and 62%, respectively, in 2018. Regarding ethnicity, the numbers are more disheartening. Gradual but slow increases in hiring people of colour occurred between 2015 and 2018, reducing white museum staff from 76% to only 72%. In 2018 white people also make up 80% of the intellectual leadership positions, while in Boards, Chairs and Directors white representation ranges from 84.3% to 93%.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Access (DEIA) are now accepted as a necessity and a duty towards contemporary societies. Museums are increasingly creating diversity plans or hire specialists and consultants to lead them on that front. Responding to employee accusations regarding racism, white supremacy and discriminatory practices, the Guggenheim museum and Foundation published a two-year action plan (2020-2022) to drive anti-racism conversations and practices in staffing and leadership, organisational culture, interpretation and publication of collections and exhibitions, as well as in audience engagement. What’s more, during the last five years, hiring women, white or coloured, to museum leading positions is increasing, with characteristic examples such as Laurence des Cars, the first ever female director of the Louvre, or Naomi Beckwith, deputy director and chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, both taking office in 2021. This is telling of the positive results of the long-term discussions on exclusion in the museum sector but also of the recent public prominence of racism and sexism issues across the world.
Closing: Remark on an ongoing issue
One needs to bear in mind that all the changes in the museum world, presented above, did not occur suddenly, but are the fruit of decades of fermentation. Nonetheless, the current socio-political crises have boosted changes, which were occurring at a slower rate. Quite promising is the fact that even the national, grand museums of the 18th and 19th centuries now feel the social pressure to apply more quickly significant changes in their traditional mentalities, organisation and hiring, as well as in the ways they enrich and interpret their collections and approach diverse audience groups. It is understandable that changing the organisational cultures of such traditional, long-lived organisations is hard – after all, one ought to remember that these museums were largely established through colonisation and hegemonic practices. On the contrary, change in the newer, “hybrid” museums established in conditions of postmodernism, internationalism and democracy is easier to achieve.
Despite resistance to change, museums today must fully reckon with their own histories of inequity, to atone for them and move towards reconciliation. Naturally, self-reflection, criticism and, eventually, catharsis can be painful. Keeping silent in societies that boil in extensive social conflict is also a choice. However, if museums aspire to be open institutions in service of society and its development, this is a choice they should reject, lest they end up from the forefront to the rear end of History.
[i] NEMO, Museums, migration and cultural diversity. Recommendations for museum work, Berlin: NEMO – Network of European Museum Organisations, 2016.
[ii] ΒoardSource, Museum Board Leadership 2017: A National Report, Washington, D.C.: BoardSource, 2017; Westermann, M., Schonfeld, R., Sweeney, L., Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2019.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
iddredaktion (24. April 2022). Spearheading or trailing behind the future? Museum responses to the socio-cultural tumult of the 21st century. Abseits der Fußnote. Abgerufen am 11. Februar 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/ptiv

