Welcome to the Blog
A MESSAGE FROM Erica Lehrer, tttm's Principal Investigator, TO LAUNCH THE BLOGWelcome, fellow museum-thinkers!
We’re excited to add this dynamic space to our website where you can get a glimpse of what TTTM’s work looks like on the ground, in a range of voices from across the project. I’ll chime in a couple of times a year with a view from the helm.
For me, getting TTTM off the ground under COVID conditions has been exciting and challenging. It has meant more than fifty people getting to know each other mostly remotely, and required us to deconstruct the first of our annual TTTM meetings into a series of remote online sessions. Not ideal, of course, but it was also sweet to connect with old and new colleagues, students, project affiliates, and invited guests across far-flung space in that uniquely Zoom-y way that has become part of our new normal. To inaugurate our commitment to an ongoing exploration of project equity and ethics, the Critical Race Museology (CRM) cluster hosted the workshop Uprooting White Supremacy in the Institution with amazing facilitators Syrus Marcus Ware (Toronto / Mohawk: Tkaranto) and Amal Alhaag (Amsterdam), where we each presented “objects of whiteness” that we encounter in our institutions. This was followed by a collective ethical visioning session involving a critical read of the first draft of TTTM’s Ethics Vision Statement led by museum ethics expert Dr. Janet Marstine. The final piece of this Year 1 series was the workshop Approaches to Unsettling, Indigenizing, and Decolonizing from Within Institutions organized by the Unsettling and Indigenizing Museology (UIM) cluster and hosted by the Montreal-based partner organization the McCord Museum.
Picture taken by Erica Lehrer: Lunch outside Teatr Powszechny, Warsaw.
Given Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the resulting refugee crisis (on top of a winter COVID spike), it was daunting to plan our Year 2 (and first in-person) annual meeting in Warsaw at our partner POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, organized by the National Heritage and Traumatic Memory (NHTM) cluster. Despite the complexities of masking and daily antigen testing (and lost baggage and canceled flights), it was amazing for about two-thirds of our international team – including many students – to finally meet each other in person this past May/June. Travel stress was offset by camaraderie, and we pivoted to expand our planned program to engage the pressing issues on the ground in the region, bringing in Ukrainian artist Lia Dostlieva and heritage practitioner Sofia Dyak (among others), as well as a number of Polish groups that work doing social justice documentation on both Ukraine and the “other”, less-known, Polish-Belarussian border crisis where non-European refugees languish. NHTM’s first minority artist’s residency, held by Tobaron Waxman, co-hosted by POLIN, FestivALT, and Teatr Powszechny, cross-pollinated museum, festival, and theatre venues, and brought us into fascinating conversations with the experiences of embattled but self-empowered queer community in Warsaw. You can read some of the students’ impressions from the Warsaw workshop here.
Down in the “boiler room” of the TTTM ship, it was thrilling to watch the ground-up establishment of Emerging Scholars and Practitioners Committee (ESPC), a kind of project “union” (with elected representatives sitting on our Coordinating Committee) that ensures up-and-coming professionals’ needs and interests are being met. Watching them organize, build relationships, and develop their voices has been one of TTTM’s most exciting aspects. ESPC members have already been contributing in significant ways to TTTM faculty research, teaching, and knowledge mobilization, even as they forge ahead with their own intellectual and creative work.
Picture taken by Erica Lehrer: Visiting the memorial at the German Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, in Poland.
Finally, I have also been learning how much of TTTM’s decolonial mandate must begin not in curating (nor even necessarily in museums) but in dialogue with the academy’s research and financial offices, pushing for new systems that meet the needs of individuals and communities who do not fit into our institutions’ structural assumptions about financial cushioning.
Looking ahead, you can watch out for news about edited volumes from the Museum Queeries (MQ) and the Children’s Museology (CM) clusters, a ground-breaking workshop bringing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, and our Year 3 annual meeting in October 2023 in partnership with the Native American Art Studies Association meeting and the Nocturne festival in Halifax, NS.
These are just highlights. It has been incredible to experience the dedicated contributions from so many people that have gone into these activities, as well as all the action, inspiration, hard work, and pleasure not visible here but no less essential to the TTTM we are together inventing. Please check back here, like our Facebook page, and sign up for our newsletter! New Communications Coordinator Shanna Ossé (taking over from trailblazer Simone Cambridge) will make sure you hear about more of them as we go.