ARLIS/NA 48th Annual Conference

This tour requires pre-registration.

Laumeier Sculpture Park is one of the first and largest dedicated sculpture parks in the country. Founded in 1977 as a nonprofit arts organization, it presents more than 60 works of large-scale outdoor sculpture in a 105-acre park. Artists include Vito Acconci, Donald Judd, Jenny Holzer, Niki de Saint Phalle, Ernest Trova and Jackie Ferrara, who designed the first site-specific sculpture for the Laumeier Sculpture Park.

Plan for an interactive, hour-long hike led by a docent that will engage you in the relationship between art and nature and a visit to the Adam Aronson Fine Arts Center. All participants are advised to dress appropriately for the season and weather, and to wear comfortable shoes for walking on uneven pathways.

Maximum participants: 22

Fee: $45

Accessibility: Walking, standing.

Transportation: Coach bus leaves from the conference hotel at 8:15 am. Meet the tour volunteer by the front desk 15 minutes prior to start. Tour starts on site at 9:00 am.

Wassan Al-Khudhairi is the Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, where she has organized Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Earwitness Theatre, Guan Xiao: Fiction Archive Project, Hayv Kahraman: Acts of Reparation, Trenton Doyle Hancock: The Re-Evolving Door to the Moundverse and SUPERFLEX: European Union Mayotte. Prior to her position at CAM, Al-Khudhairi was the Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art.  During her time in Birmingham, she organized the first large-scale exhibition of the museum’s contemporary collection,Third Space / shifting conversations about contemporary art. In 2019, Al-Khudhairi received the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) and the AAMC Foundation Award for Excellence for the Third Space catalogue.  She was invited to be a Curator for the 6th Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan in 2017 and Co-Artistic Director for 9th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea in 2012.  Serving as the Founding Director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, Al-Khudhairi oversaw the opening of the Museum in 2010 and co-curated Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art and curated Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab.

This panel will focus on current trends and challenges of five of the larger encyclopedic art museum libraries in the United States. Their directors will represent the libraries. The participants will address major issues, challenges and initiatives in their libraries, including leadership and management, organizational development and change, outreach and programming, collection development and management. The panel’s goal is to give an overview of the current challenges and initiatives that are shared in all libraries, especially large art museum libraries, but topics will be coordinated in advance so that speakers can bring out the priorities, initiatives and features that are characteristic of the individual library.

This tour requires pre-registration.

Since its founding in 1866, the Missouri Historical Society (MHS) has been collecting archival materials, books, artifacts, art and photographs documenting the history of the region and state. In the 1990s MHS added architectural archives, sound and moving images to its collecting areas, and launched an active digitization program.

The MHS Library and Research Center is an adaptive reuse of a historic 1920s era Byzantine-style synagogue designed by St. Louis architecture firm Maritz & Young and consulting architect Gabriel Ferrand. The former sanctuary with its ornate plaster work ceiling is now the library’s Reading Room. The tour will highlight visual resources and architectural archives, and include processing, storage and digitization areas.

Maximum participants: 25

Fee: $45

Accessibility: Walking, standing.

Transportation: Coach bus from conference hotel. Meet the tour volunteer by the front desk 15 minutes prior to start.

Continuing the conversation started at ARLIS/NA 2019, the LGBTQ Special Interest Group proposes a workshop focused on finding stability and confidence amongst the uncertainty and new challenges that one experiences as an art information professional. The workshop will address how identity, experience, and professional transitions impact the workplace. Five panelists, representing a major art museum library; an academic library at a small public university; land-grant and public university research libraries; and nonprofit collections will discuss how experience, identity, circumstance, and position influences and interacts with professional identities. 
 
Presentations and breakout sessions will include ways in which speakers have handled: successes through workplace, personal, and health challenges; new leadership expectations; changeover of duties; promotion to management; anxiety to new positions and responsibilities; overcoming library/institution/city/geographic  community boundaries, and solutions to address institution siloing. 
 
Proposed schedule for the 2 hour workshop: 
Introductions and overview (5 minutes)
Speakers Presentations (10-15 minutes each, 60 minutes) 
Group breakouts, led by panelists (40mins)
Critical Engagement (10 mins)
Workshop Wrap-Up (5-10 minutes)

This is a free workshop.