Updated Recommended Reading
Reading is still fundamental. Here’s a list of books I’d recommend on museum practice, history, trends:
Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen
A thorough exploration of neuroarts and how aesthetic experience affects our brains. It’s a lot of science but fascinating and accessible writing.
As a equity practitioner, this book re-framed DEI work into creating better systems and outcomes that are sustainable and not focused on individual behavior. Even though, I do imagine institutions as people and the sum of individual decisions. Lily’s a new book, Fixing Fairness: 4 Tenets to Transform Diversity Backlash into Progress for All is now available in hardcover. I’ll update this list once I read it!
Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat by Robert R. Janes.
Very doom and gloom in the beginning then offers many practical and some aspirational positions museums should take when the world’s resources fall short and communities are in need. Highly recommend!
The Art of Remembering: Essays on African American Art and History by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw.
I’ve read a few essays and love the fresh perspectives and care Shaw takes in peeling back the layers of Black art history in America.
Museums as Agents of Change: A Guide to Becoming a Changemaker by Mike Murawski
Published in 2021, this book is a guide to museum workers on how to transform the field into spaces of care, repair and healing. I got so much hope from this book and know you will too!
A compilation of insightful essays and case studies that I’ve recommended for coursework and for budding museum professionals over and over again. Contributors include Jordan Casteel, Michelle Millar Fisher and Sandra Jackson-Dumont.
Any books you’d recommend, shout them out in the comments!
