How does cultural heritage provide us with the tools to shape what collective freedom looks, sounds, and feels like? This question and its political stakes has guided the life’s work of my guest today, Porchia Moore.
In episode 111 of Imagine Otherwise, I interview museum visionary and activist-scholar Porchia Moore about the radical librarians and museum workers who are making information and art institutions newly accessible in our new social distancing world, how race and class structure who feels at home in cultural institutions, and how reclaiming African Americans’ relationship to nature and green spaces is how Porchia imagines otherwise.
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You can also read the transcript and show notes on the Ideas on Fire website, which have links to Porchia’s work and all the concepts, people, and events we discuss on the show (great for teaching!).
Guest: Porchia Moore
Porchia Moore is a museum visionary and activist-scholar who employs critical race theory to interrogate museums and other cultural heritage spaces.
Porchia is an assistant professor of museum studies in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida. In addition, she is part of the teaching faculty at Johns Hopkins University in the Museum Studies Program.
A contributing writer and project advisor for the Incluseum, Porchia’s writing and research is used as training and learning materials at museums across the United States. She is the co-creator of the Visitors of Color project, a national counternarrative project recognized by the American Alliance of Museums as a resource on DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access) that highlights lived experiences, insights, and reflections on modern museums from marginalized people.
She has served as advisor to Museums as Site for Social Action, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Museums and Race. She has also been a consulting curator for the Columbia Museum of Art and a curator of the rotating African American art gallery Spoken.
Porchia is an avid outdoor enthusiast and cultivates healing hikes and other outdoor activities to connect African Americans with nature and green spaces. She brings her ethics of critical race theory and inclusion to the outdoors in a variety of projects and partnerships with outdoor and cultural heritage spaces.
