Wayne Modest
Wayne Modest is Director of Content National Museum of World Cultures. He is also professor of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies (by special appointment) in the faculty of humanities at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (VU). Modest was previously, head of the curatorial department at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; Keeper of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum in London, and Director of the Museums of History and Ethnography in Kingston, Jamaica.
He has held visiting scholar positions at the Yale Centre for British Art, Yale University and the School for Museums Studies, New York University. Wayne Modest’s work is driven by a concern for more historically contingent ways of understanding the present, especially in relation to material culture/museum collections. His research interests include issues of belonging and displacement; material mobilities; histories of (ethnographic) collecting and exhibitionary practices; difficult/contested heritage (with a special focus on slavery, colonialism and post-colonialism); Caribbean Thought. More recently Modest has been researching and publishing on heritage and citizenship in Europe with special attention for urban life, and on ethnographic museums and questions of redress/repair.
Some of his publications include: Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections, Collaborations (Bloomsbury Academic Publishers, ed. with Viv Golding, 2013); Museums, Heritage and International Development (Routledge, ed. with Paul Basu, 2013); Victorian Jamaica (Duke University Press, ed. with Tim Barringer, 2018).
- Het Parool - Wayne Modest about colonialism and the repatriation of art
- Human - Decolonization is an ongoing process
- RCMC - Research Centre for Material Culture
Links
Agenda
Symposium: Shapeshifters
Day-long symposium addressing the ethical and cultural implications of collections built through colonial looting and exploitation
Book Talk: Inheritance – A Speculative Ethnography of Evidence
Book presentation in collaboration with The Research Center for Material Culture on the bodily inheritance of colonial frameworks and the tools to resist them.
Symposium: Now You See Me
Black Women’s Defying Worlds During the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Indentured Servitude
Roundtable Conversation: Tanah Merdeka
Roundtable conversation with researchers and curators from different art museums and institutions within the context of Taring Padi's exhibition, Tanah Merdeka.
Symposium: (un)Common Grounds - Reflecting on documenta fifteen
A two-day hybrid symposium co-organised by Framer Framed, Akademie van Kunsten & Van Abbemuseum
Atelier KITLV: Kucini, kallu, kakkus - Creolising India Across the Oceans
Kucini, kallu, kakkus: Creolising India Across the Oceans
Symposium: Declassified - How to Un/Engender the Ethnographic Object?
On the (historical) construction of gender and sexuality within the ethnographic collecting practices of museums.
Magazine
Colonial history / Institutional Critique / Contested Heritage /
Institutional Critique / Global Art History /
Symposium: Collecting Geographies - Global Programming and Museums of Modern Art
Institutional Critique /
Symposium: The Future of Ethnographic Museums
Caribbean / Diaspora / Migration /
Symposium: Sustainable Art Communities - Creativity and Policy in the Transnational Caribbean
Collection development / Book Launch /
Symposium: Popular Imagination - Fiction With a Message
Colonial history / Collection development / Institutional Critique /
Symposium: Colonial Nostalgia
Institutional Critique / Shared Heritage / The living archive / Colonial history /
Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums
Collection development / Institutional Critique / Queer /
Report: How to Un/Engender the Ethnographic Object?
Colonial history / Photography / Indonesia / Institutional Critique /