For the past several months, we’ve all had the pleasure of reading a number of posts by Alicia Akins, Createquity’s spring 2014 Fellow. She’s officially wrapped up her tenure as of last week, and as is our tradition, here we take a look back at the articles she contributed to the site:
- In Models and Trends in International Arts Exchange, Alicia tackled the complicated history and motives underlying international arts exchange and catalogued a number of ways in which it takes place. I particularly appreciate that she tracked down the history of US State Department funding for this purpose since 2001!
- Dispatches from the East: Museumscapes of Asia recounts Alicia’s personal experiences having traveled the globe’s largest continent for much of the past decade, and the surprising insights about museums that resulted.
- Nationalism and government support of the arts is an ambitious look at the way that four countries, China, South Korea, Brazil, and Cambodia, conceptualize national and cultural identity in relationship to the United States and the rest of the developed world.
- Alicia’s Arts Policy Library analysis of Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum expresses admiration for the book’s applicability even to Alicia’s remote museum in Laos, and explores some of the thornier questions around what “fully participatory” means both for an individual museum and the entire field. The abridged version is here.
Alicia’s back in the United States now and planning out her next steps, so get in touch with her if you like what you see! In the meantime, please join me in thanking Alicia for these great additions to our collection.