Practices of Care: Reimagining Museum Programming through Cross-community Solidarity

Abstract (English)

This presentation reflects on how museum programming can be a site for building cross-cultural and cross-diasporic solidarity, particularly among communities affected by colonization, displacement, and cultural erasure. Drawing on my curatorial and outreach work at the Textile Museum of Canada and beyond, I explore how intentional relationship-building, rooted in care, reciprocity, and co-resistance, can challenge extractive models of engagement and reimagine what ethical collaboration looks like in practice.
Through examples such as co-organizing artist-led workshops with Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Latinx communities, and supporting grassroots textile initiatives in partnership with women’s shelters and international collaborators, I examine how programming can extend beyond institutional walls to foster mutual learning, joy, and resistance. Whether through a tamales-making workshop as a form of cultural preservation or a community quilt as a vessel for memory and belonging, these projects are grounded in deep listening and cultural protocol.
This presentation considers: What does it mean to engage across geographies while being rooted in place and people? How can museum practitioners become accountable co-conspirators in processes of cultural revitalization and transnational solidarity? What might emerge when we shift our focus from representation to relationship?
Intended for museum professionals, educators, and community workers, this talk invites a rethinking of programming not as outreach, but as a sustained commitment to kinship, justice, and shared futures.