Uploaded June 2025 | Updated September 2026, 10 hours ago
What does it mean to display art through the lens of national identity and history? To mark its reopening, the Yale Center for British Art convenes “Art, Museum, Nation,” a symposium to critically interrogate the concept of nationhood in contemporary practices of art exhibition, interpretation, and acquisition.
In roundtable discussions, leading art historians, curators, and directors from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and National Gallery, London, among others, will explore how art museums can revise, think beyond, and reinvigorate national frameworks. Among many questions, the symposium will ask: How have expressions of national identity influenced the civic and public role of art museums in both explicit and implicit ways? How might art museums contend with the fluidity of borders and foreground ideas of migration and diaspora? What can art museums do to better acknowledge the traces of colonialism and empire embedded in national collections?
Learn more: https://britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions-programs/art-museum-nation
What does it mean to display art through the lens of national identity and history? To mark its reopening, the Yale Center for British Art convenes “Art, Museum, Nation,” a symposium to critically interrogate the concept of nationhood in contemporary practices of art exhibition, interpretation, and acquisition.
In roundtable discussions, leading art historians, curators, and directors from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and National Gallery, London, among others, will explore how art museums can revise, think beyond, and reinvigorate national frameworks. Among many questions, the symposium will ask: How have expressions of national identity influenced the civic and public role of art museums in both explicit and implicit ways? How might art museums contend with the fluidity of borders and foreground ideas of migration and diaspora? What can art museums do to better acknowledge the traces of colonialism and empire embedded in national collections?
Learn more: https://britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions-programs/art-museum-nation
