Curator Q&A with Sophie Ong, "Ethiopia at the Crossroads," Toledo Museum of Art (Rummage: Museums, Exhibitions, and Representation RIW)

Rummage is a Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop focused on the nexus of exhibition, collection, curation, display, and representation within museums and museum-adjacent spaces. The group’s name, rummage, evokes both a materiality and an intellectual practice characteristic of museum studies more broadly. On the one hand, rummaging has a tactile quality. It gestures to the human role in how objects are placed and misplaced, organized and disorganized, thrown into juxtaposition, and often randomly re-discovered anew by individuals negotiating various value systems associated with objects. It evokes an image of coming to objects of the past with new eyes and curiosity. On the other hand, rummaging could also be used to describe an intellectual approach. In posing questions about the how and why certain narratives come to be exhibited and interpreted, we root around historical understandings of heritage and the power dynamics that lead certain narratives to become dominant. This process is guided by curiosity, a drive to understand, and a skepticism of ordering systems.