Tufts University Art Galleries begins the two-day program The Metabolic Museum: New Pathways for Collecting, with a keynote by Clémentine Deliss, Global Humanities Professor in History of Art at the University of Cambridge. As public calls for responsibility and transparency in museums have increased — specifically around historic collections — audiences are demanding greater acknowledgment of the colonial ideologies at the foundation of some institutions, questioning provenance and modes of acquisition, and urging for the return of cultural artifacts to their home nations. How have institutions, including Tufts University, responded? This event explores new pathways of understanding, displaying, researching, and returning historic collections as we consider the ethics and moral implications of housing and collecting works, especially cultural objects of deep ritual significance or those considered colonial plunder.

Presented as an extension of TUAG’s exhibition re:imagining collections, the event borrows its title from keynote speaker Deliss’s 2020 publication “The Metabolic Museum,” in which the former director of Weltkulturen Museum (Frankfurt, Germany) argues for the living and changing nature of collections and new, radical engagements and interventions by artists into ethnographic collections.

Register through the event web page.

Day 2 of the event will feature a panel discussion from 9 a.m. to noon on Friday, March 31.