Art & Morality with Michelle Hartney & The Delaware Art Museum

State Of The Art

Guest host, Michelle Hartney discusses the decolonization of museums with Heather Campbell Coyle, Chief Curator and Curator of American Art at the Delaware Art Museum, and Amelia Wiggins, Assistant Director of Learning & Engagement at the Delaware Art Museum. Together, they break down what decolonizing museums means and entails. Heather and Amelia share and explain the Delaware Art Museum's reinstallation efforts as an empathetic museum and how this new approach reshape the acquisition process, language-use and presentation in the production of new exhibitions.

-About Heather Campbell Coyle-

Heather Campbell Coyle is Chief Curator and Curator of American Art at the Delaware Art Museum. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware. She lectures, publishes, and researches primarily on American painting, photography, and popular illustration from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is a specialist in the art of John Sloan and the Ashcan School, a strength of the Delaware Art Museum’s collection.

-About Amelia Wiggins-

Amelia Wiggins is Assistant Director of Learning & Engagement at the Delaware Art Museum, where she manages the guide corps, oversees gallery programs, and develops interpretation integrating community voices. She previously worked in family programs and museum education positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Franklin Institute, and The Stark Museum of Art. Ms. Wiggins has been honored with awards in excellence in label writing from the American Alliance of Museum and an award for excellence in programming from the Mountain-Plains Museum Association. She holds an MSEd in Leadership in Museum Education from Bank Street College and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Special thanks from the Delaware Art Museum to the following collaborators who have spearheaded the Museum's reinstallation project and its diversity and inclusion initiatives:

Stacey Mann and Janeen Bryant of Empathetic Museum, Stace Treat of Crystal Bridges Museum, Dan Rahimi of Penn Museum, Scott Wilcox of Yale Center for British Art, Judy Koke of Institute for Learning Innovation, Kathleen McLean of Independent Exhibitions, Museums as Sites for Social Action (MASS Action), Keonna Hendrick

And the following organizations whose leadership on these issues informed the Museum's work and thinking: Museums and Race, The Incluseum, Museums Are Not Neutral , Visitors of Color, Participatory Museum, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.