Curating Pacific Art in the United States: A Roundtable Discussion

On February 16, 2024, the North American chapter of the Pacific Arts Association hosted a panel at the 112th College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference in Chicago. Chaired by Sylvia Cockburn (Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow) and Maggie Wander (senior research associate) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this roundtable invited Halena Kapuni-Reynolds, associate curator of Native Hawaiian history and culture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), and Ingrid Ahlgren, curator for Oceanic collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, to share updates on their current projects and discuss critical issues in Oceanic art curation. The discussion centered on community engagement and critical methodologies grounded in Pacific epistemologies, the ethical and sociopolitical issues around museum collection and display, how to engage with different audiences (especially in the settler colonial context of North America), and how to collaborate across institutions.