Wednesday, November 16, 2022 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Presenter: Dr. Janet Marstine
202 Frick Fine Arts Building
In this presentation, Dr. Janet Marstine will explore what it means to curate through the lens of relational ethics. She will assert that ethics codes alone are insufficient to address the complex ethical issues that curators face today and need to be bolstered by values-driven approaches, such as relational ethics. Dr. Marstine will argue that, by signifying the relationships or ‘connectness’ between objects and people, between institutions and people and among people, as facilitated by curators, relational ethics has the capacity to address both art world exclusions and inequalities and wider social and political concerns.
Janet Marstine is Honorary Associate Professor of Museum Studies (retired) at the University of Leicester, UK, and is currently an independent scholar and consultant based in Yarmouth, Maine. She writes on diverse aspects of museum ethics from curatorial ethics to negotiating the pressures of self-censorship to artists’ interventions as drivers for ethical change. Marstine is the author of six books including Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics (Routledge 2011); Critical Practice: Artists, Museums, Ethics (Routledge 2017); with S. Mintcheva, Curating Under Pressure: International Perspectives on Negotiating Conflict and Upholding Integrity (Routledge 2020); and with O. Ho Curating Art (Routledge 2022). To support her research, conducted internationally, in the US, UK, Europe, mainland China and Hong Kong, she has received grants from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (US), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and the British Academy. In 2018 she was a Senior Research Fellow at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Dr. Marstine has a particular interest in recognizing and supporting the agency of practitioners to make informed ethical decisions. She has done ethics consulting with institutions from the National September 11 Memorial Museum—on collections policy—to the Royal Air Force Museum—on sponsorship. She has served on advisory boards for the UK’s National Holocaust Centre and Museum and the EU-funded research project Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritage with the Arts. She sat on the Ethics Committee of the UK’s Museums Association from 2014-2019, helping to move their approach from one of policing to empowerment.
Dr. Marstine received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Pittsburgh in 1993.