MISSION

Recognizing their need for transformation, Fwd: Museums creates a space for challenging, critiquing, and reimagining museums.

This peer-reviewed journal is produced by graduate students through the Museum and Exhibition Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago and published yearly by Stepsister Press. 

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The arts, it has been said, cannot change the world, but they may change human beings who might change the world.

Recognizing the need to critically transform museums, Fwd: Museums strives to create a space for challenging, critiquing, and imagining alternative modes of thinking and production within and outside of museums. Fwd: Museums invites you to submit artwork, essays, creative writing, interviews, poetry, love letters, and other experimental forms to analyze, critique, and make space for new thinking about museums and exhibitions.

“Death to Museums” is a call for disruption. It is a call 
to action and proclaims the need for change. This issue 
of Fwd: Museums asks: Do museums need to change 
to avoid their death? Do museums need to die in order 
to change? Are museums under attack? By whom and 
to what end? 
​
“Death to Museums” is an alert that cultural institutions 
held in public trust are at risk and need protection. It is an acknowledgment that museums are active battlegrounds in our deepening cultural conflicts. It is a threat that things will be different from now on. ​

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​Submission topics may include, but are not limited to:

​- Can museums engage conflict?
- Death as a part of rebirth, like a phoenix rising from the ashes
- Funding cuts to art and education as a perpetual threat of death
- How do museums deal with disaster and trauma?
- The ethics of caring for living specimens, dead things, and human remains
- Keeping museums alive in a changing culture

Deadline: January 5, 2019 by 11:59 (CT)

Submission form & more info: 
https://tinyurl.com/Fwd2019
Email us: fwd.museums@gmail.com


Fwd: Museums invites academic articles, artwork, essays, exhibition/book reviews, creative writing, interviews, poetry, love letters, and other experimental forms to analyze, critique, and make space for new thinking about museums and exhibitions.
All submissions should follow the guidelines and relate to the journal’s mission statement (see above). We strongly encourage book and exhibition reviews on multiple topics, but require all other submissions to connect to the fourth issue’s theme, “Death to Museums.”

Guidelines
​Written submissions should be between 1,000 and 2,500 words and in one of the following formats: DOCX, Rich Text, or ASCII, using Chicago Manual of Style formatting and citations.
All images should be sent as separate files (not embedded in text) at 300+ dpi in tiff format. Note in text where images should be inserted and include credit, caption, date of execution, materials used, and dimensions, as appropriate.

A Note on Reviews
Reviews need not directly engage the issue’s theme but should relate to the journal’s mission statement (see below). We welcome long-form museum, exhibition, film, and book reviews with a point of view and connections to social, historical, political and other contexts.

Who Should Submit?
Students, faculty, scholars, professionals, artists, amateurs, adjuncts, volunteers, part-timers, philanthropists, activists, and other people with something to say about museums, exhibits, and cultural work are welcome to submit.

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