Writer and Curator Laura Raicovich on “Not Normal” Museum Practices

As COVID-19 becomes endemic and as calls for racial, social, and environmental justice continue, the cultural sector is not returning to a “New Normal” but rather finding itself situated in a shifting, sometimes bewildering “Not Normal.”

Writer, activist, and curator Laura Raicovich shared her insights and observations about how museums and cultural practitioners are beginning to come to terms with this new stage of practice in a recent conversation with the Center’s director of exhibitions and public interpretation, Kelly Shindler.

Raicovich takes an intensive look at this phenomenon in her book "Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest," which examines several key museum flashpoints, provides historical context for contemporary controversies, and suggests ways museums can be reinvented to serve better, more public ends.

Filmed on June 8, 2022.

Laura Raicovich was president and executive director of the @queensmuseum, and most recently served as interim director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Before that, she worked at Creative Time and Dia Art Foundation. She is a recipient of both the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship and the inaugural Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators at Hyperallergic. She coedited Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production and is the author of Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, At the Lightning Field, and A Diary of Mysterious Difficulties. In June 2022, the Center hosted an online talk with Raicovich on emergent changes in museum and institutional practices.

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The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (the Center) is a multidisciplinary grantmaker and hub for knowledge-sharing, dedicated to fostering a vibrant cultural community in Greater Philadelphia. The Center invests in ambitious, imaginative, and catalytic work that showcases the region’s cultural vitality and enhances public life, and we engage in an ongoing exchange of ideas concerning artistic and interpretive practice with a broad network of cultural practitioners and leaders.