Museums should honor the everyday, not just the extraordinary | Ariana Curtis

TED Talks Daily

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2020

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Who deserves to be in a museum? For too long, the answer has been "the extraordinary" -- those aspirational historymakers who inspire us with their successes. But those stories are limiting, says museum curator Ariana Curtis. In a visionary talk, she imagines how museums can more accurately represent history by honoring the lives of people both extraordinary and everyday, prominent and hidden -- and amplify diverse perspectives that should have always been included.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks daily. This TED Talk features Afro-Latina researcher and curator Ariana Curtis, recorded live at TED Women 2018.
0:16.0	Representation matters. Authentic representations of women matter.
0:23.8	I think that too often our public representations of women
0:27.9	are enveloped in the language of the extraordinary.
0:31.8	The first American woman to become a self-made millionaire,
0:35.2	Madam C.J. Walker.
0:37.2	The dresses of the first ladies of the United States.
0:41.8	Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to seek the U.S. Democratic Party's presidential nomination.
0:50.3	As a museum curator, I understand why these stories are so seductive.
0:55.1	Exceptional women are inspiring and aspirational.
0:59.5	But those stories are limiting.
1:02.1	By definition, being extraordinary is non-representative.
1:05.9	It's atypical.
1:07.7	Those stories do not create a broad base for incorporating women's history,
1:11.6	and they don't reflect our daily realities.
1:14.7	If we can collectively apply that radical notion that women are people,
1:20.3	it becomes easier to show women as people are.
1:23.8	Familiar, diverse, present in everyone's everyday throughout history. Women exist positively,
1:34.6	not as a matter of interpretation, but as a matter of fact. And beyond a more accurate representation
1:40.7	of human life, including women, considers the quotidian experiences of the
1:45.7	almost 3.8 billion people identified as female on this planet.
1:51.2	In this now notorious museum scene from the Black Panther movie, a white curator erroneously
	...

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