Our right to imagine is under siege, and museums are critical spaces of resistance. While the Trump administration unravels America’s safety nets, dissolves our most critical research and aid, and weaponizes the state against our most vulnerable, our collective imagination of a just future is becoming hazier. bell hooks identified the creative imagination as the last frontier of colonialism, only at risk if one surrenders to collective despair.¹ Art has never been more important. New exhibits at the Brooklyn Museum and National Public Housing Museum challenge us to resist and reimagine.

Facilitating interactions between creatives and the public, museums as critical spaces hold an essential role in protecting the public’s ability to imagine. Museums are critical spaces of cultural heritage and laboratories where institutional representations of history can be challenged, critiqued, and revised. The Trump administration continues to target museums and the arts through sweeping budget cuts and ideological limits on what can (and can’t) be exhibited in federal museums. A particular executive order, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, targeted an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that explored American sculpture and the construction of race.² The order directly quotes the show’s accompanying text, which interrogates the relationship between race and power, as an example of anti-American ideology, showing how museums are critical spaces for conversation in community. Promises follow to reinstate American values in the institution. If our museums are unable to challenge hegemony, our story will be written for us. If the artists best prepared to visualize the change we desperately seek are unable to do so and museums are not treated as critical spaces, our future will be determined by those in power.

To me, museum-going has always been as much an exercise in imagining the future as it is in considering the past. I was raised by a single mom with a degree in art history who brought me to art exhibitions while my friends flocked to the beach during elementary school vacation week. I was an odd kid with a bowl cut that covered my eyes and an avid interest in birding; I was most excited to see the taxidermies at the Museum of Natural History during an early trip to D.C.. Yet, the only part of the trip I can vividly recall was a stop at the Phillips Collection, which houses half of Jacob Lawrence’s famed Migration series, showing museums as critical spaces for considering the past as well as imagining the future.

Read the full article about museums as spaces of imagination by Dylan Cleverly at Othering & Belonging Institute.