DECOLONIAL MUSEUM MATH: A COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY OF THE DISPLAY STRATEGIES IN THE ISLAMIC ART GALLERIES AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO AND THE DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS

Abstract

Calls to “decolonize” the museum have reverberated through the fields of anthropology, art history, and museum studies in the past few years. But what might a “decolonized” museum exhibit look like in practice? This paper presents two case studies, the Islamic galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Detroit Institute of Arts, with the hope of shedding some light on this question. First, placing the museums in their historical and colonial pasts, a preliminary section illuminates the original ties between citizenship, colonialism and the public museum. Next, I outline a brief history of the collection of Islamic art in the West, along with the stories of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Detroit Institute of Arts, two institutions which were founded in the same intellectual environment but have diverged considerably in museum practice in the past two decades. Finally, I use data gathered in the summer of 2021 to analyze the exhibit environment, object display and placement, and informational texts of the museums’ Islamic art galleries, and I identify two disparate approaches to “decolonization”: one “additive” (removing one-dimensional representations of the “other” and replacing them with more complex and humanizing depictions) and the other “subtractive” (removing overt stereotypes while leaving the underlying structures of European Enlightenment/Colonial-era knowledge intact). While neither can definitively be hailed as “decolonized,” one approach is much more successful at dethroning Western forms of knowledge, indicating the agency of Middle Eastern peoples, and presenting a practical example for progressive museums to follow.