Where We Belong: Anthropology in an Art Museum and New Directions for the Future

Abstract

S days I sit back and shake my head while thinking of the journey I took to secure my position as a curator at the Denver Art Museum. While I knew from my teen years that I wanted to work in a museum, how to achieve my goal was unclear. Specifically, I debated the educational path that would ultimately lead me in the right direction. Art history would have served me well as Native arts was, and is, my passion, but cultural anthropology was the path I chose as I wanted the opportunity to work within Native communities and saw value in the application of anthropological theory and methods to art. Of course various scholars before me studied and practiced the anthropology of art, but I often questioned my decision to study cultural anthropology while in graduate school. Some faculty tried to convince me that anthropologists have no future in museums and that their duty as professors was to train me as an academic for a job teaching and researching anthropology. Thankfully, my advisor did not share this opinion and helped me to both succeed in my studies and prepare me for work in the museum field. When I interviewed for my curator position, I was asked if an anthropologist was the right fit for an art museum. I responded by highlighting how the materialities of the objects in the museum involve many histories, past, present, and future, and their role as “art” is one aspect of these histories. Focusing on this single aspect of an object’s materiality was my intent, and it has served me well; that said, aesthetics alone tell only part of the story, and I have found many additional intersections of art and anthropology to explore through exhibitions, catalogs, lectures, and public programing. WHERE WE BELONG: ANTHROPOLOGY IN AN ART MUSEUM AND NEW DIRECTIONS FOR THE FUTURE