“I invite you dear foreigner in my performance country to dream with me and send me your own letters imagining a better art world or rather a myriad of art worlds, coexisting in synergy with nature, radical imagination, and community—you're surrounding multiple communities. Do you have ideas to propose for a museum of the future?”
—Guillermo Gómez-Peña, An Open Letter to the Museums of the Future
At the start of 2021, rebel artists and MacArthur Fellow Guillermo Gómez-Peña presented a performance keynote and call to action: An Open Letter to the Museums of the Future. Now he is inviting the public to share their own open letters. As an insider/outsider artist, Gómez-Peña has had an obsession with rewriting and re-staging so-called “Western Art History” while highlighting colonial legacies of systematic exclusion, demonization and fetishization of Brown, Black and indigenous people. This performance keynote challenges contemporary art museum practices and calls for an open discussion regarding radical restructuring from within. Watch Gómez-Peña’s open letter below and add your voice by submitted this online form, emailing tomuseumsofthefuture@gmail.com, or leaving a message at 773 823 9700.
Submitted letters and voicemails may be read by Gómez-Peña on his bi-monthly experimental audio series on Lumpen Radio or be included in Jane Addams Hull-House Museum’s upcoming exhibition, public programs and in print. Letters should include preferred names that may be used on the radio. Audiences can tune in to Gómez-Peña’s broadcasts on 105.5 FM WLPN-LP or stream on twitch.tv/lumpenradio and listen to what you missed on JAHHM’s website.
Click to learn more about the first-ever partnership between Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and Public Media Institute, listen to Gómez-Peña’s experimental audio program, and learn more about the interactive exhibition Hull-House will launch September 2021 with Gómez-Peña in dialogue with performance troop La Pocha Nostra (US/Mexico 2021).
An Open Letter to the Museums of the Future and Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files: Audio Art & Strange Poetry from the US/Mexico Border are part of an on going collaboration between Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and Public Media Institute for Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40, a multi-venue exhibition and program series featuring twenty-eight MacArthur Fellows happening throughout 2021 that is organized by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. Toward Common Cause is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
(Banner Image by Zen Cohen, courtesy of Guillermo Gómez-Peña)
