Description

Founded in 1941, The Weatherspoon Art Museum (WAM) at UNC Greensboro (UNCG) was the first art facility within the UNC system. UNCG is a designated minority serving institution, with substantial numbers of nontraditional, working, African American, Latino, LGBTQ, veteran, first-generation, and adult students. Conceived as a resource for the campus, community, and region, WAM has from the outset prioritized presenting and acquiring modern and contemporary works of art. Its current collecting strategies aim to strengthen the museum’s capacity to foster generative civic dialogue.    
    
WAM has been invited to apply for a Museum Partnerships for Social Justice Project (MPSJP) grant. The project aims to engage museums in dialogues that develop and disseminate anti-racist project models and implementation frameworks. WAM will partner with its mentor, the Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA). MMA will conduct convenings across the staff of the two museums and with external partners, to share models for anti-racist content development, community outreach, exhibition strategies, and program planning. Its case study will be the forthcoming exhibition, The Great Migration.   
Phase two will launch WAM’s project, “Leading with Objects: Engaging the Community in Institutional Change,” (LWO), with MMA in an advisory role. LWO will engage community and campus entities reflective of WAM’s Greensboro history and populations to reinterpret and re-present its collection. Sharing power and knowledge generation with campus and community constituents through access and collaboration, WAM will welcome wide-ranging perspectives into the narrative of the museum’s collection and its most ambitious, holistic reinstallation. LWO will be conducted as WAM launches its first racial equity plan and is designed to realize the plan’s goals: presenting exhibitions that question dominant cultural narratives; embedding community engagement in its institutional practice; and developing mutually supportive relationships with HBCUs. WAM will engage key loans from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T)—the country’s largest HBCU and a new partner for WAM—expanding its capacity to foreground diverse narratives.   
WAM aims for the knowledge produced over the course of the MPSJP and LWO to inform its ongoing relational, interpretive, collection, and exhibition practices. It will seek to sustain relationships with its new partners, including: UNCG’s School of Education, School of Health and Human Sciences, the Office of New Student Transitions; North Carolina A&T; the City of Greensboro; and International Civil Rights Center and Museum. Participants will contribute to a digital publication that will gather and disseminate the learning outcomes of the MPSJP and the Leading with Objects project.