Collecting Geographies: Global Programming and Museums of Modern Art – Editorial

In March 2014, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam hosted the international academic conference “Collecting Geographies: Global Programming and Museums of Modern Art.” The conference was organized in collaboration with the international partners ASCA/ACGS at the University of Amsterdam, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Folkwang Museum Essen, and the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. Its aim was to take a closer look at new inquiries into the relationships between art institutions, globalization, and postcolonial discourse, including a critical assessment of the deployed terminology and those strategies that focus on local affinities within a larger art historical and global framework. An overwhelming number of more than 140 scholars, museum professionals, curators, and artists responded to the open call for papers, which urged a critical rethinking of many assumptions in the practice of collecting and exhibiting of so-called non-Western art, as well as the very categories of art and its institutionalizations. Eighty-one papers were selected for the conference. Eight papers are highlighted in this first issue of Stedelijk Studies.