Event Details
Date
April 16, 2019
Time
8:02pm
Location
ICOM Canada and NACDI have partnered on a session at the Canadian Museums Association (CMA) National 2019 Conference to explore the skill set and knowledge needed to be successful in a globally connected and aware museum practice.
This panel brings together leading museum professionals who, for a good part of their careers, have been heavily involved in international collaboration, sharing Canadian museology across the globe. Their extensive experiences served as a jumping off point to outline a skill set for working internationally, be it in international networks and alliances, working abroad, or in and with specific countries and regions.
Panel organizers and chairs: Sascha Priewe (Royal Ontario Museum) and Sarah E.K. Smith (Carleton University)
Panellists:
Anne Élisabeth Thibault, Director of Exhibitions & Technology Development, Pointe-à-Callière, Montréal Archeology and History Complex.
Anne will share examples of her and her museum’s extensive international work. In particular, she emphasized the notion of trust as a foundational requirement for successful collaboration.
Chen Shen, Vice President Art & Culture and Senior Curator, Chinese Art & Culture, at the Royal Ontario Museum
Chen will foreground the importance of cultural sensitivity when dealing with Chinese museum professionals. Reflecting on his more than twenty-years of work between China and Canada, he will also highlight the maturity of the Chinese museum sector, which now requires a high level of engagement.
Gerald McMaster, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Visual Culture and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University.
Gerald will draw on his extensive experience as a curator engaged in international work, pointing to advocacy of work enabling dialogue. Speaking about a new project to connect Indigenous communities from the Amazon to those in the Arctic, Gerald will underscore the potential and activist dimension of these types of connections.
Lynda Jessup, Associate Dean (Graduate Studies and Global Engagement), Faculty of Arts and Science at Queen's University and Director, NACDI.
Lynda will discuss “methodological nationalism” – our inclination to understand phenomena through associated nation-states, despite acknowledgment of globalization (and the mobility, flows and connections it has entailed). She will speak to the importance of acknowledging the local amongst the global. This call for a local/global practice framed the concluding discussions, which centred on the need for museum practitioners to move beyond perspectives located in the nationalist paradigm, in order to more fully engage the local as a means to speak to issues and imperatives of global relevance.
