The Living Museum

Museums have spent too long asking people to come prepared: to arrive already knowing; to stand at a respectful distance from the work and feel grateful for the access. That era is over—or at least, it should be. The best museums right now are doing something different: flinging the door open, pulling up a chair, saying, “This space belongs to you.” They are becoming less about preservation and more about permission—permission to question, to feel lost, to find yourself somewhere unexpected on the walls. A museum is not a tomb. It never should have been.

I’ve been fighting for a way to say this for a long time, but over the last two years, I’ve noticed that museums are both responding to and redefining what they mean to people—internationally and locally, internally and externally. On the occasion of the SCAD Museum of Art’s 15th anniversary, I wanted to speak with chief curator Daniel S. Palmer, because of my personal experience visiting the museum as both an audience member and a reporter. The SCAD MOA occupies a genuinely difficult position: it is the university’s most visible face to the rest of the world and simultaneously a museum in service of students who are still finding their own creative path. It balances retrospectives against debut solo exhibitions, the experimental against the warm, cross-pollination against individual discovery. In an era of colossal upheaval in America and the redrawing of the maps of our history, art has been attacked and, at times, has quietly retreated in response. I wanted Palmer to explain how a museum can meet this moment.