Museums As Systems 2025: Lessons For Survival
June 10–12, 2025 6:00–7:30 pm
Museums as Systems 2025 explores what it means to sustain, fortify, and reimagine cultural work in the face of systemic challenges. This year’s theme, “Lessons for Survival,” looks to the past to examine time-tested strategies of resilience, grounds us in survival tactics, and imagines alternative futures where dignity and joy are possible.
June 10Archive as Resilience: Preservation as Community Care
This session will examine the archive as a live(d) practice of resilience. It will challenge the idea that archiving is a passive form of preservation and position it as a tool for repair and a route toward empowerment and liberation. Together we will consider the role of archiving as an action—asking who archives, for whom, and with what intentions—and explore how people-powered archives can serve as tools for cultural preservation and celebration. How do we embrace archives not as merely static repositories but as tools for reclaiming narratives and building legacies outside of traditional constraints?
June 11Bodies, Land, and Cultural Labor
This session centers the body as a site of wisdom and resistance in cultural work, asking what it means to survive institutions that demand our silence, speed, and self-erasure. We’ll explore how exhaustion, grief, and joy live in our bodies—and what they reveal about staying human in the work. Rooted in both land and labor, the conversation draws on experiences from farms to schools to museums, tracing how connection to place cultivates resilience. Participants will leave with embodied strategies for rest, boundaries, and reclaiming dignity in the present moment.
June 12 Scalable Rejections and Praxis Ecosystems: Beyond the Museum as We Know It
This session, held in person, invites us to confront our commitments to and complicity with institutional models that shape our perspectives as cultural workers in museums and adjacent cultural, preservation, archival, and public spaces. How can we accelerate the process of abandoning (and not simply reforming) the harmful systems inherent to all museums as we have come to know them? Using multidisciplinary frameworks, we will examine the unfolding realities and speculative futures of museums, with an emphasis on praxis and sustainable worlding.
Museums As Systems 2025: Lessons For Survival
June 10–12, 2025 6:00–7:30 pm
Museums as Systems 2025 explores what it means to sustain, fortify, and reimagine cultural work in the face of systemic challenges. This year’s theme, “Lessons for Survival,” looks to the past to examine time-tested strategies of resilience, grounds us in survival tactics, and imagines alternative futures where dignity and joy are possible.
June 10Archive as Resilience: Preservation as Community Care
This session will examine the archive as a live(d) practice of resilience. It will challenge the idea that archiving is a passive form of preservation and position it as a tool for repair and a route toward empowerment and liberation. Together we will consider the role of archiving as an action—asking who archives, for whom, and with what intentions—and explore how people-powered archives can serve as tools for cultural preservation and celebration. How do we embrace archives not as merely static repositories but as tools for reclaiming narratives and building legacies outside of traditional constraints?
June 11Bodies, Land, and Cultural Labor
This session centers the body as a site of wisdom and resistance in cultural work, asking what it means to survive institutions that demand our silence, speed, and self-erasure. We’ll explore how exhaustion, grief, and joy live in our bodies—and what they reveal about staying human in the work. Rooted in both land and labor, the conversation draws on experiences from farms to schools to museums, tracing how connection to place cultivates resilience. Participants will leave with embodied strategies for rest, boundaries, and reclaiming dignity in the present moment.
June 12 Scalable Rejections and Praxis Ecosystems: Beyond the Museum as We Know It
This session, held in person, invites us to confront our commitments to and complicity with institutional models that shape our perspectives as cultural workers in museums and adjacent cultural, preservation, archival, and public spaces. How can we accelerate the process of abandoning (and not simply reforming) the harmful systems inherent to all museums as we have come to know them? Using multidisciplinary frameworks, we will examine the unfolding realities and speculative futures of museums, with an emphasis on praxis and sustainable worlding.