Museums as Sites of Decolonial Practice

Our research will center these questions: Do museums in San Diego effectively center marginalized voices and decolonial ways of knowing/art-making? Considering the colonial nature of museums, does centering marginalized voices and their art inherently make museums decolonial and anti-racist? What can we learn from informal art when it comes to decolonizing art and knowledge?

Before our trip to San Diego, we carried out deeper research about the museums and informal art sites we plan on visiting. More specifically, we researched these sites on the basis of their past colonial histories, and their decolonial statements, mission, and practices in order to get a fuller picture of their decolonial potentialities. at present. During our stay in San Diego, we visited the Museum of Us and the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park, where we took close observations, comparing and contrasting, and documented through pictures.

The Museum of Us - All of Us rests at the very entrance of Balboa Park. Prior to even visiting the museum, our interest in this very cultural institution was informed by prior research. According to the mission & value, the museum claims to be a space for diverse stories, especially those that have been overlooked or silenced by dominant cultural narratives. Indeed, the Museum of Us has a special section for land acknowledgment. In their values section, the website states:

“Located on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Kumeyaay Peoples, in San Diego’s Balboa Park, the Museum’s complex history and colonial roots mean that we have a responsibility to elevate community voices. Our mission, exhibitions, and initiatives are driven by our core values of equity, inclusion, anti-racism, and decolonization.” (The Museum of Us - All of Us).

Given that the museum explicitly embodies anti-colonial and anti-racist policies, and is committed to approaching marginalized stories with humility, we sought to see for ourselves, how their anticolonial/anti-racist commitments played out in practice. Firstly, we paid a visit to the “Undocumented Migration Project: Hostile Terrain 94,” which seeks to document how colonial legacies haunt the US - Mexico Border.

According to the website of the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park, their mission is to inspire, educate, and cultivate curiosity through great works of art. During our stay, we managed to experience the following exhibitions: “Arts of South & Southeast Asia” and“Arts of Iran.“ During our fieldwork in this, we plan on examining to what extent these exhibitions are simply presented as artworks from a distant past and “exotic” elsewhere or as sources of knowledge to be revered and actually learn from. The first one was an art gallery that details religious artifacts in the region and other cultural exchanges within the region and outside of it. While the artifacts were beautiful, the exhibition description mentioned nothing about the ethics of how the artifacts were obtained, a practice that is colonial in nature. The “Arts of Iran” exhibition details the cultural artifacts and daily lives of the Iranian people. From ancient Persia to contemporary Iran. While this exhibition, did not detail the ethics of how the pieces of art were obtained, it still highlighted local artists. Conclusively, from the San Diego Museum of Art, we had the sense that this museum in particular was not very intentional in portraying art from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Iran in non-orientalist, eurocentric ways.