The Terra Foundation for American Art supports projects that reframe and expand notions of American art within global contexts, exploring topics important to the field at large. The foundation is partnering with organizations committed to engaging multiple perspectives for convenings that address relevant issues in the field. Recent supported convenings that facilitated exchange and dialogue to support systemic changes in museum practice include Sharing Museums (Paris, France), Tools for Demodernizing (Rotterdam, Netherlands), and IMU UR2: Art, Aesthetics, and Asian America (Palo Alto, California).
Sharing Museums, a conference held at Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration Palais de la Porte Dorée, Paris, on October 20–22, 2022, brought together museum directors, artists, thought leaders, and journalists, to discuss diversity, migrations and diaspora, colonial history, and restitutions impacting museums and cultural organizations. This international convening invited participants to offer their insights into site-specific and shared experiences and to explore different methods and practices intended to inform the field, prompting cultural institutions to engage with critical approaches and rethink their place and role in society.
“With Sharing Museums, we have collected and combined the views and practices of museums worldwide as they consider their societal role, focusing on three issues that are key to coexistence and remembrance: social cohesion, diversity, and relations between Western countries and former colonies. This international format allowed actors from the field of culture, students, academia, and, more generally, members of the public interested in heritage issues to share and contrast viewpoints and to imbue the mutual enrichment of the institutions’ practices with new ideas,” said Constance Rivière, CEO, Palais de la Porte Dorée – Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration – Aquarium tropical, and Sébastien Gökalp, Director, Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration.
