The Museum Worker: Leaving the Museum

In episode two of this two-part conversation, Diedra Harris-Kelly, Camara Holloway, and Samantha Rowe continue their discussion of the The Romare Bearden Catalogue Raisonné Project. Catalogue raisonné research constitutes relatively new ground for the study of African American art. They address the unique challenges they faced bringing this project to fruition and reflect on the insights gained. This conversation sheds light on how digital catalogues raisonné can contribute to legacy-building for African American artists like Romare Bearden.

In the first episode of this two-part conversation, Camara Holloway and Samantha Rowe discuss the development of The Romare Bearden Catalogue Raisonné Project which was launched online in June 2025. The conversation is moderated by Diedra Harris-Kelley, co-director of the Romare Bearden Foundation. In 2020, the artist-endowed foundation formed a partnership the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, which is devoted to facilitating access to archival materials and publishing digital catalogues raisonnés. The project leveraged art historical, technological, and archival resources, including the Romare Bearden Papers. Working without the benefit of an artist inventory, Harris-Kelley, Holloway, and Rowe pooled their diverse backgrounds and expertise to recover vital information about the artist.

In this episode of The Museum Worker, hosts and CAA Museum Committee members Miriam Paeslack and Samatha Sigmon delve into the literal ins and outs of museum architecture today with experts in the field. This discussion features various stakeholders in the field: Erin Coe, a museum professional who has spearheaded major building projects; Lauren McQuistion, an educator and theorist specializing in museum architecture; and architects Paul Schulhof and Azadeh Rashidi, who design cultural spaces in both urban and rural environments. Working from the outside into the physical museum space, each speaker draws on their own experiences and case studies to underscore the imperative of incorporating the input of diverse voices along the design process. Museums today, all participants agree, must navigate between being beacons of unique design and crafting a meaningful environment that facilitates the institution’s role as a community anchor.

In this episode of the CAA Conversations podcast subseries, “The Museum Worker,” Andrew Gardner, Laura Raicovich, and Ella Wesly discuss with host Samantha Hull their multifaceted careers in and out of museums, how museums have shaped their career trajectory, and the skills and lessons they have learned from the field that have benefited their work today.

In this episode of CAA Conversations, Feixue Mei, Yanbin Li, and Eric Millikin explore how educators break down disciplinary barriers through collaborative teaching, community-engaged practice, and inclusive learning environments. Through discussion of interdisciplinary teaching framework, examples of cross-disciplinary classroom collaborations, and projects such as culturally grounded Tarot-card design and the Boundless Bound Symposium and Art Book Fair, the conversation highlights how students learn to translate concepts across fields, reflect on cultural and social contexts, and develop critical, creative, and adaptive problem-solving skills. The guests emphasize how shared learning spaces, low-barrier activities, and thoughtfully integrated technologies support meaningful participation, foster curiosity and dialogue, and empower students to connect theory with practice across diverse disciplines and communities.

This episode of CAA Conversations, Research and Scholarship edition, focuses on Hannah Entwisle Chapuisa's background in law and the visual arts. In it she discusses curating exhibitions in diplomatic venues, specifically around the topics of climate change and human migration, as well as the role of artistic practice in societal norm development and the factors that led her to choose diplomatic venues as the sites of her curatorial work

In the second episode of this two-part conversation for CAA Conversations, multidisciplinary artists Lineadeluz (Darleen Martinez) and Edgar Fabián Frías shift from institutional critique to speculative possibility, examining how digital practices can reimagine pedagogy, knowledge production, and cultural stewardship. Drawing from examples in augmented reality, AI art, queer archives, and self-instituted platforms such as Lineadeluz's Selfie Institute for Selfie Studies (SISS) and Frías’s MOMMM (Museum of Multidimensional Mutant Maps), they consider how institutions can be performed, hacked, and collectively reauthored through care-based and community-driven frameworks.  The discussion explores digital pedagogy as a slippery and relational technology that resists fixed hierarchies of legitimacy and authority, particularly within systems that continue to marginalize experimental, interdisciplinary, and Indigenous knowledge practices. Martinez and Frías reflect on speculative infrastructures as tools for redistribution, proposing models of institutional governance rooted in futurity, embodiment, and collective imagination. Together they position the institution not as a static structure, but as an evolving performance, one shaped by queer worldmaking, technological magic, and the ongoing labor of reenvisioning how knowledge is created, shared, and sustained.

In the first of this two-part conversation for CAA Conversations, multidisciplinary artists Lindeadeluz, aka Darleen Martinez, and Edgar Fabián Frías examine the intersections of pedagogy, performance, and institutional power. Drawing from their experiences as educators, artists, and cultural workers, they reflect on how institutions shape bodies, knowledge production, and lived experience; often through mechanisms of trauma, exclusion, and legitimacy. The discussion considers the performative dimensions of teaching and scholarship, particularly within digital and interdisciplinary practices that remain marginalized in traditional academic and museum contexts. Martinez and Frías explore questions of accessibility, representation, and cultural stewardship, emphasizing that inclusion alone is insufficient without structural transformation. Through examples of performative and speculative art practices, they highlight strategies for reclaiming space, redistributing authority, and imagining institutions as evolving sites of possibility. Together, they propose speculative frameworks that challenge inherited hierarchies while opening pathways for more accountable, embodied, and future-oriented forms of learning and engagement.

This episode of CAA Conversations, featuring Lilia Cabrera, Gina Gwen, and Christen S. García, considers borderlands-informed art pedagogies as acts of classroom, community, and artist practice, in both formal and informal spaces of art education. These guests make productive liminal spaces of art education by harnessing cultural, navigational, familial, creative, and linguistic capital. Lilia Cabrera explores multiple environments with her art education students, offering experiences to work alongside hospital patients, asylum seekers in shelters, and resident doctors in Rio Grande Valley, Texas, hospitals. Her students work with communities with a range of age groups, motor skills, and cognitive abilities. She has taught art at various levels ranging from early childhood to university. She creates opportunities that align with the education of regional communities lacking in art experiences and has led art education students to create art workshops to delicate, low-economic, and multicultural youth in a border town. Cabrera is a lecturer for the art education program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and an Associate Dean for Student Succes for the College of Fine Arts. Gina Gwen Palacios creates work highlighting the underrepresented geographic and cultural narrative of the people and land of South Texas. Rooted in the theory of conocimiento, Palacios invites viewers to embrace a multiplicity of perspectives and honor the rich, marginalized knowledge and history embedded in the US/South Texas borderlands. She is an associate professor and the Director for the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley. Christen S. García theorizes through lived experiences, sharing autohistoria-teorías as creative capital in nepantla espacios. García is co-founder of the Nationwide Museum Mascot Project and is an associate professor in the Department of Art Education at Florida State University. García is co-author of Art Borderlands in Theory, Practice, and Teaching, with Leslie C. Sotomayor II (Routledge, 2025) and is co-editor of the book BIPOC Alliances: Building Community and Curricula (Information Age Publishing, 2023).

In this episode of CAA Conversations, Dr. Yipaer Aierken hosts a conversation with Dr. Rachel Miller an Dr. Mya Dosch exploring the rise of generative AI and how it is reshaping the practice of teaching art and art history—particularly in general education art history courses. As AI tools become more integrated into students’ academic and daily lives, educators are being challenged to rethink not only how we teach but also how we define learning, teaching, and pedagogy in higher education. This week’s conversation between three California State University professors covers their teaching experiences, pedagogy development processes, and the course assignments designed to reflect on the key question: Why is it important to rethink how we teach in the Age of AI? Yipaer Aierken is an assistant professor of Asian art at California State University, Sacramento, where she teaches courses on the art of Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia. Professor Aierken is a scholar with an interdisciplinary focus on both art history and religious studies. She employs methods from art history, religious studies, and ethnography in her study of polyethnic artists and scholar-officials of the Yuan and Qing dynasties, including those of Uyghur, Tibetan, Manchu, and Mongol origins. She has published pedagogy lesson plans on Art History Teaching Resources and previously taught at the University of California, Davis, and Arizona State University. In February 2026, Professor Aierken will present papers and chair panels on Asian and Asian diaspora women artists at the CAA Annual Conference. Rachel Miller is an associate professor of art history and chair of the art department at California State University, Sacramento, where she teaches courses on ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art, using teaching methods that place European art in a broader global context and decolonize European art’s traditional normative position in the canon of art history. Professor Miller has presented papers and workshops on art history pedagogy and organized pedagogy panels at the College Art Association, the Sixteenth Century Society, and the Renaissance Society of America annual conferences. She has written on pedagogy for the Sixteenth Century Journal and Art History Teaching Resources and has a forthcoming essay, co-written with Dr. Mya Dosch, in the edited volume Equity-Enhancing Strategies for the Art History Classroom. Dr. Miller also serves as an editor of Art History Teaching Resources and is on the editorial board of the journal Art History Pedagogy & Practice. Mya Dosch is associate professor of art of the Americas at California State University, Sacramento. Their current research considers commemorations of the 1968 student movement in Mexico City, from monumental sculptures to ephemeral protest interventions. Dosch’s work on Mexican prisons, public art, and protest appears in the journal Future Anterior and the anthologies Teachable Monuments and Imágenes en Colectivo. They have also facilitated student-written audio guides for the Crocker Art Museum and are working on a student-developed public art catalog for Sacramento State.