Join co-hosts Converge 45 and The Cooley for a lecture with Amanda Donnan titled Dreaming, doubting: artistic strategies within and against the museum, presented by the University of Oregon Center for Art Research’s Critical Conversation Program.

It is now widely recognized that museums are not neutral containers for art. As theorized by Brian O’Doherty and Aruna D’Souza, among others, museums are ideological constructs that legitimate art objects as commodities and reproduce dominant (and dominating) ways of seeing the world. In this talk, curator Amanda Donnan considers contemporary artistic approaches to working within and against the museum’s’ collecting, display, and programmatic conventions to propose alternative models. Reflecting on a selection of her recent projects and current research, she addresses the museum’s role as a site of colonialist extraction and Indigenous resistance through Omaskêko Cree artist Duane Linklater’s work; a space of self-care and communality in the participatory “clinic” Group Therapy (2018); and secular temple for the practice of attention in ESTAR(SER)’s collection intervention The Third, Meaning (2022).

Critical Conversations is part of The Ford Family Foundation’s Visual Arts Program. It providesa collective space for artistsand cultural producers rooted inexchange and inquiry. Led by the Center for Art Research at the University of Oregon Departmentof Art in collaboration with the Douglas F. Cooley MemorialArt Gallery at Reed College and Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University.