This fall, students from Professor Monica Salas Landa’s A&S 325 class, Museum Studies: History, Theory and Debates, collaborated with a team of Lafayette librarians on an exhibit featuring objects from Special Collections & College Archives. The resulting exhibit, “Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism – A Pop-Up Exhibit” is curated by students in A&S 325. The exhibit will run from November 10th to December 6th in the Special Collections Reading Room, and student presentations will take place on November 14th and 16th at 12:15pm in the Gendbien Room of Skillman Library.
This exhibit draws inspiration from Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s book of the same title and aims to confront the profound legacy of violence deeply ingrained within museum collections. During the 19th century, imperial endeavors led to the extraction of objects from diverse communities, significantly shaping the emergence of museums as defining institutions that determine and evaluate what qualifies as “art.”