“We take for granted that citizenship and democracy are connected, but that’s not true everywhere. Citizenship shouldn’t be the mark of inclusion.”

SEPTEMBER

Citizenship goes hand-in-hand with exclusion in America.

The MFA’s curatorial team brought together a group of community members to discuss opportunities for the Museum’s ancient Greek and Roman galleries (currently under renovation) to serve as spaces of civic engagement.

The participants discussed the relationship between art and democracy, and how challenging of a concept democracy is to represent in art with a limited visual vocabulary of clichés. They talked of how high cultural references are too often used to mark people “in” or “out.”

The roundtable participants remind us that citizenship goes hand-in-hand with exclusion in America.

^{The project: The Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s Table of Voices initiative is a new model to integrate diverse voices into the curatorial process to shape interpretive approaches, outreach, and programs. Agncy is documenting the Museum’s roll-out of this model.}