How Museums Colonize the World\u27s Art

This paper examines the presence of colonial ideology within art history that I argue erases and oppresses art and artists from outside of the Euro-American art world. I define colonial values specifically within the terms laid out by Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism which I will first outline and then apply to three aspects of the museum: the internal and external architecture, the rhetoric of accompanying text and labels to the art, and the curatorial work that arranges the pieces themselves. I use this structure to organize my qualitative on site museum research