The National Museum

Pittsburgh, PA 2023-

💥 Project Website 💥

The National Museum repeatedly asks which stories, histories and futures are deemed worth saving and which are ignored or forgotten. Each month, a different artist is invited to change the name of the museum and a national writer is invited to use that museum title as the jumping off point for an essay. In its first year, the project currently consists of storefront signage, street posters, printed broadsheets, a website and monthly accompanying essays.

When a name starts with “The National Museum” it triggers contentious and political associations with borders, nationhood, even citizenship and belonging. Who gets to determine the belonging of an entire group of people bound only by the fact of their geographical location. There’s something absurd about that, if you think about it. Instead of claiming ownership over a diverse populous or even a disparate set of objects, can the notion of the “national” be rethought as something that is less tangible, less object-oriented?

There is a fundamental hubris and absurdity in calling something, anything, a museum, let alone The National Museum. But, in many ways, it’s really no different than any other museum that someone, usually with far more money, privilege, and power than any of my artist peers or myself, has simply made up. So, in a way, the project functions as a kind of loophole or work-around, a participatory fiction that allows a variety of artists to put forth an ongoing series of grand propositions, a theoretical institution that repeatedly brings into question the certainty and reality of our pre-existing institutions. 

The National Museum elucidates how museums, especially national ones, are perhaps no different than the nation-states in which they reside. Each is an imagined political construct, a collective fiction used to collect, categorize, narrativize, and control. Throughout modern history museums have used the collections they steward and the stories they tell to validate extractive legacies of colonialism. And, although our current museums, both national and private, are staffed by people with experience in the arts and humanities, the ultimate decision-makers in many of these institutions are wealthy donors and trustees who derive financial benefits from, and exert ideological control over, the fundamental mission of museums. So, while the general public think museums are nominally for “everyone,” the truth is that they are delimited by economic, geographic, racial, and cultural boundaries that restrict their function, design, and access to select publics.

(Images above) September 2023 / Text by Pablo Helguera / The National Museum of Nostalgia For the Very Moment You Are Living

Upcoming artists and writers include: Walid Raad / Jalal Toufic; Edgar Heap of Birds / Suzan Shown Harjo; Alisha Wormsley / Renee Gladman; Sky Hopinka; Karyn Olivier; Tania Bruguera; Joseph Grigely

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The first iteration of the National Museum was developed in collaboration with Joseph del Pesco for the 2019 Triennial of Counterpublic in Saint Louis. Titled "Monuments, Ruins and Forgetting” the project manifest as a prospective national museum that, over the course of three months, rotated through the title words as a micro-narrative about historical progression. 

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The National Museum is founded and curated by: Jon Rubin

The National Museum Editor-in-Chief: Sharmistha Ray

Advisory Board: Sean Beauford, Anastasia James, Joseph Del Pesco, Paola Santoscoy

Commissioning Agency: The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust

Graphic Design: Brett Yasko

Sign Painter: Run Rabbit Gilding