Museums and Memorials in the City WNY 315

Instructor: Katarzyna Pieprzak

New York City certainly has its share of museums and memorials, and these spaces serve as intensely political sites of history and memory, beauty and pain for diverse communities within the city. Museum scholars Corinne Kratz and Ivan Karp tell us that “Whether they define their scope as national, regional, or community based, museum spaces can become global theaters of real consequence.” Through extensive reading, site visits and fieldwork, this class aims to explore how museums and memorials in New York City become “global theaters of real consequence” indeed.

From 5th Avenue institutions to downtown tenement museums, from steel-cross memorials to the attacks of September 11, 2001 to less visible memorials to the city’s history of slavery, from community centers in Brooklyn to the Hall of Great Americans in the Bronx, and with much museum theory in between, we will cross the city in search of ways to address the relevance of museums and memorials in the cultural politics of the city. How do museums and memorials represent and narrate histories of race, gender, and conflict? How do museums and memorials create their desired (and undesired) publics? How does the museum as an institution create spaces of participatory dialogue? How does it exclude and silence? How are memorials testimonies to and performances of community presence in the city? How are these sites theaters of real consequence?