Transformación Cultural: Community Representation of Past, Present, Future

ID: WMA2026_607

Track:

For three years, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Artes de México en Utah, and a community work group endeavored to change the so-called “Mesoamerican” gallery. Through reciprocal learning and shared purpose, museum staff and community members—artists, advocates, educators, historians, and others connected to Mexico, Central & South America—created a dramatic reinstallation called “Transformación Cultural: Nuestro Pasado es Presente.” This collaboration illuminates important possibilities for how an organization and community can work together.

Session Information

Format: Regular session/panel (roundtable, single speaker, etc.)

Uniqueness: This session illustrates the profound opportunities and learning that happen when an organization shifts how they work, and when a community group generously lights the way.

Objectives:

• Learn how museum-community collaborations can emerge, including the details of the structure and working group sessions
• Understand perspectives of both institution and community representatives 
• Consider the implications of and possibility in a reinstallation process 
• Envision your own opportunities for institutional change and community collaboration
• Imagine professional opportunities for collaborators (participants/artists) in the project to “take action” on programs rooted in the exhibition

Engagement: We, both community and museum leadership, will engage the audience by presenting our shared process using multimedia components like photos and video. We’ll then ask them to imagine possibilities for a community-led project or other shift in their organization’s traditional approaches to exhibition-making.

Relationship to Theme:

Audience

Audiences: Other 

Professional Level: All levels 

Scalability: Museums of all sizes have opportunities to think about how the “past is present” and how their exhibitions can either alienate the public or fortify personal, cultural connections that community members identify with and could share with a collection.

Participants