The UW Museology program hosted the Transforming Museums Conference this week which brought together museologists and museum studies students from around the country. It was an inspiring conference where the themes of social justice and transformation were continually addressed and placed at the center of the dialogue. I was able to sit in on a number of papers, my favorite of which was a talk given by an exhibition designer at the U of Vermont Museum who spoke on the history of museums collaborating with individual artists to interpret and curate their collections - he talked about Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum project at the Maryland Historical Society, Andy Warhol's work, and Yinka Shonibare's reinstallation of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. I am very much enchanted with the idea of the artist intervening and interpreting a given collection and am thinking now about the idea of proposing to the Riverside Historical Museum an AIR that would allow me to research the history of the city where I grew up and to interpret the collections in a way that would arrange the objects in such a fashion as to illuminate some of the discontinuities of my own experience.

Travis Nichols, Mary Jane Knecht and I put together and spoke on a panel on Poetry and the Museum. Travis talked about the Ulrich show and MJ talked about the Frye catalog that is scheduled to come out from UW Press in March 09 - a project based on commissions of Seattle-area writers to interpret objects from the Frye's collections. It was my first time meeting Travis, though I think I probably met and hung out at Charlie's with most of the U Mass bunch at one time or another of that era after the obligatory Wordsworth reading, that he definitely seemed very familiar.

I thought in some ways of the panel as a public coming out - after a long hard year, I've decided to leave the anthropology program at UW to pursue other interests. More on that as it develops.