Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture, and Design

From 2017-2018 I was the inaugural Associate Curator of Education at Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture, and Design in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Shangri La was built in 1937 as the Honolulu home of philanthropist Doris Duke and opened as a public museum in 2002. Built with objects and architectural motifs from North Africa, Middle East, and South Asia, the museum reflects Duke’s travels, wealth, and taste. Unpacking the larger social and structural conditions that made a project like Shangri La (even its very name) possible presented a pedagogical and political challenge (echoing the hashtag #museumsarenotneutral created by Mike Muraski and LaTanya Autry).
My role as an educator was to reframe the function of the site from a private residence to a public classroom. Working with a great curatorial team, we sought to open up questions around culture, power, and meaning-making in the local and global context through educational and public programming. We aspired to rewrite the story of the historic house that was framed as a vestige of luxury and philanthropy by asking what untold stories it could tell in the present moment. Given its location in occupied Hawai‘i, Shangri La was a narrative tool to help us see how practices of collecting and ownership (and the notion of “private property”) could function through the entanglements of whiteness, Orientalism, and settler colonialism. Particularly with intensified anti-Muslim racism and widespread xenophobia under #45, there was an urgency to invent programmatic models that could forge solidarity across cultures, geographies, and histories. However, this work was not easy. We found the call for experimental responsive change and public engagement incompatible with the very structural design of the site and the priorities of its leadership. As museum workers, we are often seen as working for the institution, but not of it even as we are hired to represent it and transform it. I didn’t stay at Shangri La long enough to see through any significant shifts, but I learned tremendously about the labor of museum pedagogy and activism and the work of decentering and resisting institutional legacies.