Declonizing or Changemaking

My master’s thesis project, Decolonizing or Changemaking: Professional Perspectives on Decolonzing Museum Practices in Small- and Medium-Sized Public Art Institutions, brings together interviews with gallery professionals from across Ontario to create a landscape study of current decolonizing efforts in the public art gallery sector to illustrate how small- and medium-sized institutions have been responding to calls for decolonization.

The thesis unpacks how professionals understand decolonizing; how they have been enacting decolonizing in practice; and what challenges they have encountered that have limited decolonial change. Answering these questions revealed that in lieu of the language of decolonization, professionals have opted to describe their practice using more general terms that better align with their broad changemaking efforts. The use of alternative language, most commonly diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, obscures attention to land and instead privileges a focus on representation and including a diversity of people in gallery spaces and operations. Interviews also revealed that despite the process-based nature of decolonizing, and changemaking work more generally, critical reflection has not been considered an essential component of practice. In its absence, a path forward rooted in “slow” practices is proposed. Overall, the current picture of the field developed throughout this project aims to provide a starting point for conversations between professional and academic spheres as we continue to explore what decolonizing means and what it might look like in public art institutions.