AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

This abstract offers a glimpse into the Museums of the 21st Century program, which combined practical, hands-on training with online workshops to support museum professionals in Indonesia's cultural sector through exchange, capacity-building, and knowledge-sharing.

Indonesia has a rich cultural heritage of tangible and intangible artistic and ceremonial practices, including indigenous preservation techniques that have been successfully practiced in villages and communities for hundreds of years.

Due to a complex array of factors such as the aftereffects of colonization, shifts in belief systems, and modernization many objects have left their original environments and are now in regional museums throughout the Indonesian archipelago. These objects are cared for by museum staff with various backgrounds and levels of expertise, who are shifted to new positions every two - three years by the Indonesian Ministry. This methodology is intended as a response to colonization with the goal of imparting intra-museum knowledge throughout the archipelago. Consequently, an individual may serve as in the roll of curator and/or conservator of maritime artifacts at one museum and textiles at another, by means of example.

This solution to a colonial problem creates challenges of its own, since individuals must adapt with creativity and resilience as they care for a variety of objects in various highly humid, equatorial environments.

The desire for conservation, and museology courses in Indonesia ignited extensive communications with museums in Kalimantan and Jakarta and inspired the creation of a supportive program, Museums of the 21st Century. This program involved collaborations between Tracing Patterns Foundation (Berkeley, CA), The Smithsonian Institute (Washington, D.C.), the American Institute for Indonesian Studies (Berkeley, CA), Institut Konservasi (Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia), and Museum Ceria (Jakarta, Java, Indonesia) to create a three-part, workshop focusing on conservation, curation, and education in museums.

This program was conducted in three succinct chapters. The first segment involved on-site training workshops at the Museum Tekstil Jakarta, the Museum Kalimantan Barat in Pontianak, and the Museum Balanga in Palangkaraya with additional participation from museums and cultural sectors in the neighboring vicinities.

At each location, there were three days of training, focused on one of the critical museum activities of conservation, curation and museum education, which included on-site visits, demonstrations, talks, and hands-on training. Participants were encouraged to discuss challenges and solutions in their institutions, including the local and indigenous preservation techniques they actively utilized.

The second part of the program involved seminars for workshop participants. Collaborating in groups, they focused on a museum object, researched its history, created a condition report and exhibition caption, and designed a museum activity.

During the third and final section of the program, Tracing Patterns Foundation and the American Institute for Indonesian Studies hosted three webinars. These were moderated by the Museums of the 21st Century team members with guest lectures by American curators, educators, and conservators, who shared their work.

As a result of this program, a number of course participants were inspired to share their knowledge via local programing and have remained in contact with the Museums of the 21st Century team.