Museums and Wealth: Who Benefits from Public Collections?

Join Hamiltonian mentor Terence Washington in conversation with guest speaker Dr. Nizan Shaked over issues Dr. Shaked takes up in her 2022 book Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections. How exactly are art museums and ultra-wealthy people invested one another? How does being placed in a public collection affect an artwork’s value? Art museums and extreme wealth are good friends—this is increasingly clear. Through readings of history and theory, Shaked explains how that relationship works and how it might be restructured more equitably. This topic will be of great interest to museum workers, social justice advocates in and out of the art world, and especially artists, on whose work we all depend.

About the speakers

Terence Washington is an independent curator, educator, and writer. He currently works as a guest curator on the curatorial team for the Philip Guston Now exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He was previously the program director at NXTHVN, a residency and gallery space in New Haven, Connecticut, and an organizer of public programs at the National Gallery of Art. Washington’s publications include forthcoming essays on the work of Kevin Beasley and Holly Lynton as well as contributions to photobooks by Zora J. Murff.

Nizan Shaked is author of Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (Bloomsbury Academic 2022). For her book The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2017) Shaked was awarded the 2019 Smithsonian American Art Museum Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art, and a Wyeth Foundation for American Art/College Art Association Publication Award in 2015. Shaked teaches contemporary art history, museum and curatorial studies, at California State University Long Beach.