Looking beyond the glass
Prof. Mónica Salas Landa challenges students to view museum exhibits from a different angle.
Photographs By Adam Atkinson
Illustration By Antonio Pinna
In a 1994 New York Times article, German artist Hans Haacke dubbed museums “managers of consciousness.” As they present their own interpretation of history, he said, museums can be great educational institutions—or they can be “propaganda machines.” It’s through this same lens that Mónica Salas Landa, associate professor of anthropology, designed her newest course, Museum Studies: History, Theory, and Debates.
A sociocultural and historical anthropologist, Salas Landa has long been fascinated by the history and politics of how particular artifacts end up in a museum’s vitrine. (Many relics on display worldwide, she explains, were unrightfully taken from cultures.) In her A&S 325 course, which she first taught last fall, she tackled complicated issues like how colonialism, looting, and exploitation have shaped modern museums and their collections.
By examining specific collections in natural history, anthropology, and art, and engaging in conversations about cultural restitution and repatriation, Salas Landa called on students to rethink museums’ roots and envision how they can become greater community spaces. Olivia Naum ’26, who took the course last year, adds that “by allowing these articles to remain in the exhibits without any indication of their violent pasts, museums continue to engage with imperial ideologies.”
Over the course of the semester, students studied the thought-provoking writings and curatorial work of industry professionals such as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. They engaged with experts who guest-lectured about the digitalization, design, and curation of exhibits. And, with funding from Salas Landa’s Lafayette Arts and Technology grant, they ventured to museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they took a critical eye to other collections.
Along with learning about the ethics of museum curation, students had a chance to build an exhibit of their own. At the outset of the course, Elaine Stomber ’89, P’17, ’21, co-director of Special Collections and College Archives and College archivist, as well as Pamela Murray, distinctive collections librarian, introduced 20 artifacts from the College’s assorted collections. Each student chose one piece to research. “We kept in mind the desire for students to explore the provenance of each one and investigate the diverse communities from which they originated,” Stomber says.
Included were donations of Egyptian and Sumerian objects, imperial postcards, and relics from the Philippine-American War that had limited documentation on their acquisition. “I worked with a pair of Native American moccasins,” says Naum, who is a history and Russian and East European studies major, “which is an example of something that is commonly found in museums but often exists there through the exploitation of native people.”
Salas Landa and Lijuan Xu, Lafayette’s director of research and instructional services, led students in compelling research exercises to dig up information and illustrate the types of questions to consider: Who created the item and why? Why was it in the library? If it could speak, what would it tell us? With Salas Landa’s help, students used their findings to write display labels that highlighted the violence inherent in the extraction of many museum objects.
Skillman Library staff then provided students the tools and resources to create their exhibits from scratch. Sarah Beck, digitization and experimental technologies manager, helped students take high-resolution photographs of their artifacts for their digital presentations. Janna Avon, digital initiatives librarian, trained students to use the Omeka platform to display their items online. Meanwhile, Murray, Beth Sica, collections technician, and Ana Ramirez Luhrs, co-director of Special Collections and College Archives, assisted students with physically handling and installing the objects for display at the library’s Special Collections and College Archives.
The three-week exhibition, titled Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, neatly wrapped up the semester-long efforts. “There aren’t a lot of templates for substantive undergraduate engagement in the professional work of archives curation and exhibit development,” says Charlotte Nunes, dean of libraries. “This is exactly the sort of work we want to support more of in years to come.”
Naum, who is now working as an assistant in Special Collections and College Archives, was so inspired by her experience that she’s planning to explore career options allowing her to work toward a better museum industry. “This will forever be one of the most rewarding courses I’ve taken,” she says.
Salas Landa is looking forward to the course’s return in fall 2025 and attracting students from a wider array of majors, including STEM and environmental studies, and taking on a new debate and different set of objects. “Last year, we worked with ethnographic and art objects to offer a critique of the art and anthropology museum,” she says. “Next time, we might work with scientific instruments or specimens to think more carefully about natural history or the science museum.”
