FWD MUSEUMS: Guide To {...} 2025, Edited by Molly Fulop & Therese Quinn
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You are here.
This phrase allows us to situate ourselves in the museum space, a map we often turn to in moments of uncertainty. When the way forward feels murky, or when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. A guide does not erase uncertainty, but offers orientation, familiarization.
This is a guide assembled from multiple voices: artists, scholars, critics, educators, workers, and visitors-each marking out a section of the museum from where they stand. Some entries move with institutional knowledge, others push against it. Some map what exists, others imagine what could be. Taken together, these contributions form a constellation-one that might help you find your place, or reconsider it altogether.
Guide To { ... } is for anyone engaging with museums today, whether at the very beginning of your career, years into it, or peering in from the margins. It is meant to be revisited. A guide does not expire when we memorize the route; it waits patiently, until the landscape shifts and we realize we need to peer into its blueprint.
Across its pages, this issue considers what it means to witness with care, to critique with precision, to sustain with integrity, and to disrupt with purpose. You will encounter questions that expose the museum as a site of power, and others that imagine it as a space of care, repair, or abolition. Along the way, the familiar rooms of the museum may shift.
You will move through Visitor Experience, Exhibitions, Directors and Development, Collections and Archives - not as separate areas, but as overlapping terrains.
In moments of change or crisis, when the museum reveals its futures and fractures, a guide can offer perspective. A guide is a reminder that you are not lost, even if you find yourself in unfamiliar territory.
You are here.
Which direction will you be guided to next?
{Introduction} by Ivanka Suska
Produced and edited by the University of Illinois at Chicago Museum and Exhibition Studies graduate students and published by Chicago-based, Bridge Books, Fwd: Museums strives to create a space for challenging, critiquing, and providing alternative modes of thinking and production within and outside of museums.
