Requirements and Curriculum

Program Requirements

The Certificate in Anti-Racist Curatorial Practice requires the successful completion of the following five core courses for a total of fifteen credits. Course substitutions can be made with the approval of the certificate faculty adviser.

Curriculum

FAH 0285: Museums Today: Mission & Function (3 credits)
Offered in the fall, Museums Today provides an introduction to museum operations and current issues. Museums in 21st-century America are changing inside and out. New demands and expectations from various audiences-visitors, community, schools, donors-are challenging the way museums organize staff, shape collections, and create exhibitions and programs. Course topics include governance, ethics, planning, collecting, exhibitions, programming, technology, collaboration, leadership, and finances. The course also examines some of the current issues challenging the field, such as the treatment of disputed cultural property, working with communities, and dealing with controversy.

FAH 0283: Art, Whiteness, and Empire: The Art Museum as an Imperialist Repository (3 credits)
Examining the ways in which whiteness functioned in service to European colonization, students in this course will explore how western art museums developed as cultural repositories of colonialism, and how this historical functionality directly informs the many problems facing museums today. Specifically, it will define whiteness, colonization, race and the specific role of each within the contexts of collections, exhibitions, interpretation, the art market, and museum policies regarding staff and visitors; it will define anti-racism, examine the history of anti-racist pedagogies developed within Indigenous and Black intellectual traditions, and teach students how to apply these traditions to curatorial practice; it will teach anti-racist object analyses and how to interpret historical objects through a non-white lens; and delineate best ways to navigate normative institutional structures and procedures that are rooted in imperialist histories.

FAH 0281: Curating as Community Organizing (3 credits)
In this course, students will gain exposure through professional speakers to curating and organizational practices in artist-run spaces, community-led projects, and grassroots arts organizations, with a particular focus on the relationship between institutions, artist organized projects, and community organizing across the United States. Conversations will cover history and practice of how artists and community activists have built their own cultural spaces and traditions; created experimental and responsive projects, public art, and publications; as well as imagined alternatives for funding, administration and curatorial approach. This series will be moderated by Professor of the Practice and Program Director Kelli Morgan and Abigail Satinsky, Curator and Head of Public Engagement, Tufts University Art Galleries.

FAH 0284: Curatorial Approaches to Collections Management (3 credits)
An introduction to the intersecting responsibilities of managing a museum collection while making it accessible to public audiences. The course addresses all aspects of collections management from acquisition to deaccessioning, registration documentation, creating collections and disaster plans, collections storage, special collections, art and cultural property crimes, provenance research, facility reports, loans, exhibits and displays, as well as the intellectual control and protection of collection. Students learn about collaborating with artists and community members, managing loans, insurance, and project administration, and explore access strategies such as open storage, online databases and social medial platforms utilized to highlight collections. Guest speakers and field trips connect classroom experience to current issues and practices in the field.

DLS 0248: Organizational Change, Leadership & Influence (3 credits)
This course will explore the tools and concepts required for successfully leading strategic organizational change and fostering inclusive climates. Ability/skills to assess the change needed, the political and complex process of introducing change, which includes motivating others, dealing with resistance and the emotional elements of change, and finally, extending change over time and sustaining it. Approaches and techniques needed to anticipate, measure, and evaluate the changes needed, facilitate the change, and sustain the change will be considered.