Keynotes

Thursday, October 18 // 11:15 am – 12:15 pm Eastern

LaTanya Autry @artstuffmatters

Beyond Conversations: Transforming Museums through Social Justice Action

LaTanya S. Autry, co-creator of #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, will apply an action-oriented social justice lens to the museum sphere to envision and strategize for deep structural change. In discussing individual and institutional level practices for centering social justice, she’ll identify challenges and solutions. Autry will also highlight various equity-centered cultural work in and out of museums in the US and abroad.

LaTanya Autry at “Now: The Call and Look of Freedom,” Feb – May 2018 at Tougaloo College, Jackson, Mississippi Art: Fannie Lou Hamer by Kyle Goen

As a cultural organizer in the visual arts, LaTanya S. Autry centers social justice and public memory in her work. In addition to co-creating The Art of Black Dissent, an interactive program that promotes public dialogue about the African-American liberation struggle, she co-produced #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, an online campaign 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 Yale University Art Gallery, Artspace New Haven, Mississippi Museum of Art, Tougaloo College, and the Crane Art Center. Through her graduate studies at the University of Delaware, where she is completing her PhD in art history, she has developed expertise in art of the United States, photography, and museums. Her dissertation The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America concentrates on the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space.

Friday, October 19 // 11:15 am – 12:15 pm Eastern

Allison Tucker, International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, @SitesConscience

Memory to Action

Dina Bailey, Director, Methodology and Practice at the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, leading a community based memorialization workshop.

With global atrocities happening all around us, the need to remember often competes with the equally strong pressure to forget. Even with the best of intentions—such as to promote reconciliation after deeply divided events by “turning the page”—erasing the past can prevent new generations from learning critical lessons and destroy opportunities to build a peaceful future. Founded in 1999, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience is a global network of 255 members in 65 countries dedicated to using the past to address human rights abuses today. In our nearly twenty year history, we have developed a range of tools to help museums and other historic sites engage communities by connecting past to present. For instance, we recently developed Front Page Dialogues, which are rapid response tools that are intended to help historical sites immediately incorporate current events, or a recent atrocity, into their programming. We have written several specific Front Page Dialogues—on guns in the United States, women’s rights, the Paris agreement on climate change, and the refugee crisis, to name a few—which museums can use and adapt to their individual settings.

Braden Paynter, Program Manager, Methodology and Practice at the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, leading a community based memorialization workshop.

As the Communications Assistant, Allison (Ally) Tucker manages social media and assists in facilitating collaboration and awareness between Sites of Conscience members and the general public. She seeks out special projects to amplify the work that Coalition members do and promotes the work of the Global Initiative for Justice, Truth, and Reconciliation. Ally graduated from Carleton College as an American Studies major and is now based in New York.