Ruth Phillips argues that these practices are "indigenous" not only because they originate in Aboriginal activism but because they draw on a distinctively Canadian preference for compromise and tolerance for ambiguity. Phillips dissects seminal exhibitions of Indigenous art to show how changes in display, curatorial voice, and authority stem from broad social, economic, and political forces outside the museum and moves beyond Canadian institutions and practices to discuss historically interrelated developments and exhibitions in the United States, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere. Drawing on forty years of experience as an art historian, curator, exhibition critic, and museum director, she emphasizes the complex and situated nature of the problems that face museums, introducing new perspectives on controversial exhibitions and moments of contestation. A manifesto that calls on us to re-imagine the museum as a place to embrace global interconnectedness, Museum Pieces emphasizes the transformative power of museum controversy and analyses shifting ideas about art, authenticity, and power in the modern museum.

Ruth Phillips is professor of art history at Carleton University. She is author or editor of many books, including Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (UWP, 1998), Native North American Art, coauthored with Janet Berlo (Oxford, rev. 2014), and Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (McGill-Queens, 2011).

Ruth B. Phillips' profile page

"Ruth Phillips is one of the most well-respected and senior figures working in the domain of contemporary museum anthropology and critical museum studies. The great strengths of this volume are the author's careful research, her unique position within the

"Ruth Phillips has been a key maker and shaper of new curatorial and institutional cultures but is also certainly the finest commentator on the progress, in fits and starts, of the museum world over the last thirty years. While the debates have suffered a

"Museum Pieces is eminently readable - written simply and elegantly. There is no other book that covers forty years of Canadian museology with such historical depth and theoretical thoughtfulness." Jennifer Kramer, anthropology, University of British Columbia