Museums as Systems

The multi-day, annual Museums as Systems symposium gathers together arts workers to discuss alternative approaches to museum structures.

2025 2024 2023 2022

How are museums systems of artistry, archives, education, labor, care, communication, and community?

Each year the panel discussions explore various theoretical and practical aspects of museum work, putting established arts and cultural workers in dialogue with the next generation of thinkers and workers.

The symposium creates a space of multivocal, multigenerational, circular learning about how museums currently function, what never was, and what could come next.

2025

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.

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?

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.

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.

2024

A series of insightful discussions centered around the theme "interdependence."

See Event Details

This panel focuses on artists and art spaces that facilitate connections between Black diasporic people and people Indigenous to Turtle Island (North America).

2023

Explore “resources” through four key themes: love and care, creative fundraising, reclamation, and radical hospitality.

See Event Details

The Dev 101 panel aims to spotlight how, through creative ingenuity, development departments play integral roles in ensuring the survival of institutions, art, and artists, at every level. The Access and Accessibility panel offers the perspectives and tactics of art workers and artists who are willing to go beyond tokenizing accessibility and who instead promote a rich, expansive form of equity.

2022

In its inaugural iteration, Museums as Systems asks: How are museums systems of artistry, archives, education, labor, care, communication, and communities?

See Event Details

The Safeguarding Our History session looks at the importance of safeguarding histories and the archive as a potential tool for envisioning the future. The How Museums Speak to people session looks at how design, media, and communication systems act as translators of institutional values, visions, and missions, as well as mechanisms for problem solving, accessibility, and world building.