"Locating Museum Engagement: The Oakland Museum of California"

In this talk, The Oakland Museum of California serves as a prism to explore the concept of engagement in museum theory and practice. Often invoked by museum marketers, engagement's deeper socio-cultural dimensions and the evolution of this term and concept are under-explored. The Oakland Museum, founded in 1969 as an interdisciplinary museum for its urban community, has spearheaded different forms and applications of engagement. Discussing this one important example sheds light onto broader questions: Can meaningful and critical forms of engagement help the embattled institution museum to regain the public trust that has been strained as museums struggle to define their identity in a neoliberal, market-driven society and as they face calls to decolonize?

This event will be simultaneously live-streamed. Click here to watch the live-stream via the Hallwalls website. The talk will begin at ~4:15pm.

About Miriam Paeslack, Associate Professor, Arts Management Program

Miriam investigates visual representations of the built environment and concepts of architectural and urban memory, heritage, and cultural identity. In more recent research, she explores the evolving concept of "engagement" as practiced and theorized in artistic, cultural, historical and arts management discourses. Her current book project explores this paradigm in US Art museums. She is the author of Constructing Imperial Berlin: Photography and the Metropolis (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and editor of Ineffably Urban: Imaging Buffalo (Ashgate, 2013) Her essays are published in Future Anterior, the Journal of Architecture, and Fotogeschichte.