The curator will build community relationships and connections to the Museum’s 25,000+ global collection. In collaboration with community, cultural, and academic advisory groups, the curator will develop exhibitions of collection objects and non-collection exhibitions and will select traveling exhibitions. The curator will collaborate with artists, scholars, and Museum staff to publish on exhibitions and the collection. With input from advisors, the curator will recommend objects for acquisition, deaccession, and repatriation. The Fleming Museum is committed to becoming a transparent, responsive, and inclusive Museum as outlined in the Fleming Reimagined. The curator will share these ideals and implement them into every facet of their job duties; curating exhibitions, selecting acquisitions, publishing, collaborating with the community, and recommending objects for deaccession and repatriation.
• The Curator develops and organizes a diverse and thoughtful annual exhibition schedule, prioritizing exhibitions that are aligned with and promote the goals and evolution of the Museum’s institutional transformation work. The Museum’s priorities in developing these exhibitions are founded in collaboration with museum staff, artists, community groups, and UVM faculty and student advisory groups. The curator will write and collaborate with others on texts to accompany exhibitions and on exhibition catalogues. The curator will assist the Curator of Education and Public Programs on program planning in conjunction with exhibitions.
• Working with colleagues and advisory groups from campus and community, the Curator employs the Museum’s collection of 25,000+ objects to best realize the goals of the institution including recommendations on the acquisition, deaccession, and repatriation, of artworks in the collection.
• The Curator develops relationships with local community groups and cultural organizations, UVM community, and others to ensure that the Museum’s resources are used in the most meaningful and relevant ways.
• The Curator researches and collaborates with Museum staff, UVM faculty and outside scholars to publish on collection objects and create interpretive publications, and multi-media installations that appeal and are accessible to a broad and diverse range of audiences.
• The Curator assists the Museum Director and the Business Manager in the development of fiscal year budgets for acquisitions, special exhibitions, publications, collection installations and other related activities.
From https://www.uvm.edu/fleming/fleming-reimagined:
Since the summer of 2020, the staff at the Fleming Museum have been reckoning with how to become an anti-racist museum that’s more responsive, relevant, and inclusive. We commit to enacting changes within the Museum, to affirm in action that Black Lives Matter and that the lives of Indigenous people and people of color matter. We recognize the long overdue and hard work that we need to undertake—personally and organizationally as a predominantly white staff—to address the foundations of white supremacy in the Fleming Museum. Museums across the world are founded in colonialist and settler colonialist values of extracting objects from their cultures. Those objects are presented with minimal context in a paternalistic framework that imagines itself to be beneficent or neutral. The ongoing work of redress and restitution is challenging and necessary for the Fleming and other museums to reorient their missions and values. The following statement is a living document of values that the Fleming Museum staff have developed.
We are at the beginning of our endeavors to reimagine our place in the University and the wider community. The foundations of this work lie in amplifying the perspectives of Black, Indigenous, and people of color who have been excluded—implicitly and explicitly—from the Museum. The Fleming Museum aspires to become a space for listening to our audiences and building avenues of trust with other organizations that are already doing this work. In order to build that trust, we will follow through on feedback with honest, reflective answers about past failures and ways we are committing ourselves to listening to the audiences we serve. That is why we have made feedback so central to this statement and our larger efforts as we move forward.