Organization Description
Situated within territories of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat, Agnes is a curatorially-driven and research-intensive professional art centre that proudly serves a dual mandate as a leading, internationally recognized public art gallery and as an active pedagogical resource at Queen鈥檚 University. By commissioning, researching, collecting and stewarding works of art and by exhibiting and interpreting visual culture through an intersectional lens, Agnes creates opportunities for participation and exchange across communities, cultures, histories and geographies.
Agnes Reimagined is a future-oriented facility that will:
- Centre the social impact and civic role of art;
- Work across multiple temporalities and diverse world views;
- Create deeper, more intimate and empowering relationships to art, artists and material culture;
- Enliven participation in and constitution of poly-vocal museology through research, exhibition, curatorial practice, and community engagement;
- Amplify our capacity to foster and relay intersectional connections across the disciplines and communities that converge when a public, university-affiliated art institution is both civically minded and pedagogically driven.
Project Details
Guided by Agnes Reimagined, participating students explore how a contemporary art institution works from the inside, delving into areas such as curatorial, collections and public programs through a digital lens. They become acquainted with different ways in which museums, galleries and art spaces have been adapting to and expanding their operations within the digital realm in more accessible and inclusive ways. In close dialogue with Agnes鈥檚 team, students form multidisciplinary groups to identify areas of development for the digital museum of the 21st-century. Students research online collections portals as co-creative spaces, reimagining how, what, why and for whom information about the collection is shared and displayed online.
Project Goals
Imagining Digital Futures for the Art Museum is a special course that get the students engaged with Agnes in a pivotal year of change as the new, future-oriented vision for the museum, Agnes Reimagined is mobilized to set a new paradigm for museological practices. The museum of the 21st century can no longer simply be a container of history as if history has no bearing on our changing contemporary world. Agnes Reimagined is a dynamic culture-making hub and an active civic and social force鈥攎obilizing the transformative power of art to create more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable worlds. It asks: what needs to be done now to ensure Canada鈥檚 future museums no longer look like those of Canada鈥檚 colonial past?
Estimated number of hours: 40
Frequency of project discussion meetings: Six workshops plus independent and group work.
Contact Details
Want to learn more about this project or organization? Contact the Experiential Learning & Programming Team asc.el@queensu.ca with your name and the title of the project of interest.