The colonial and fascist legacies in our museums

A meditation on the fascist, colonial, Western agenda masquerading as historical artifacts

Fringe ArtsopinionVarda Nisar — Published March 18, 2025 4 minutes

“Visualizing White Supremacy in Institutions” is a project that uses the responses to these prompts to argue that white supremacy continues to operate in our institutions—and, more often than not, makes a more subtle appearance.

The diverse range of objects that members submitted made the case for this line of argument. The objects ranged from the James McGill statue at McGill University’s downtown campus to the Concordia University campus map. It even included Concordia’s academic calendar, emphasizing the university's white Christian values. 

An anonymous entry titled “Art Gallery Promotional Photograph” made this case most aptly. The entry argues how, in art galleries—and even in museums—whiteness is the “standard against which all else is measured.” 

Montreal art galleries and museums celebrate whiteness—white administrators, artists, white sculptors, white bodies—further cementing its equation with beauty and purity. A 2020 article in Canadian Art, which examined the largest four museums in Canada, concluded that all directors, board presidents, 96 per cent of senior executives and 75 percent of board trustees were all white.

While the inclusion of BIPOC bodies and the works produced by them may point towards some internal shifts, these changes hardly impact the power structures within these institutions. The firing of Wanda Nanibush, the prolific Indigenous curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, over her pro-Palestine stance points to the uneven distribution of power in our museums. 

The lack of neutrality in museums is now a well-established fact, and their upholding of white supremacist, fascist and colonial ideals has been widely challenged and criticized. The 9 Weeks of Art + Action that was launched by Decolonize this Place (DTP) in solidarity with the staff of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2019 have called out the complicity of museums in upholding colonial frameworks and institutional barriers that work to exclude marginalized communities. 

In her book A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum, Françoise Vergès argues at great length about how museums reflect the world in which we live. The museum, Vergès argues, “exists thanks to, and within this context,” which is rife with multiple crises including fascism, colonialism, racism, capitalism, climate disaster, wars, famine, genocide, pandemics, austerity policies and increased surveillance. 

The museums of today cannot be separated from a history of exploitation and violence, which continues today as a war against marginalized communities. So how do we go about recognizing whiteness at play, given the subtlety of these narratives and their embeddedness in our cultural spaces?

“Fascist legacies need not—and often are not—overt,” Jarrett said in an email to The Link. “This is especially true in Canadian institutions, as the stereotype that Canadians are ’nice’ manifests itself within our national narrative.” 

The Canadian myth of niceness is further blurred today by institutional attempts at decolonization, where institutions might appear to be doing the work, but in fact, nothing changes structurally. 

Curator Eunice Bélidor's experience at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is yet another case in point. Bélidor, who made history as the first Black curator in any major Canadian museum, and who describes her hiring as a Black Lives Matter hiring, has shared in detail the limitations of the decolonial agenda within museums, where the lack of structural shifts refuse to shift the status quo. 

Last November, Pip Day, director of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia, was dismissed. 

Shelley Ruth Butler, independent scholar and member of the TTTM, describes how Day’s dismissal betrays the continued operation of institutional violence in these spaces.

“If this was due to Day's political support of Palestine, and if Day received pressure from university donors as past gallery board members suggest, a picture forms of institutional power being used to protect the status quo, rather than to hold space for difficult conversations across implicated communities,” Butler said an email to The Link.

Yet museums are not just about people—they are also about objects. Many of the objects currently on display in our museums were never meant for public display or consumption.

Karina Roman Justo, an emerging independent curator, brought attention to how cultural objects reflect a community’s worldview. Justo explained that, not only are objects disrupted when they are taken away from these communities, but their display in museums points to a lack of consideration of this worldview. 

“There are many cultural items that don't belong in the museum, and that, behind glass or in the storage room, are stripped of their personhood,” Justo said in an email to The Link. 

It is this understanding and sensitivity that should make us consider whether all objects even belong in museums for public consumption.

Is this fascism in the way in which it has come to be understood historically? Maybe not, but we are getting close to it. The criminalization of DEI in the United States, and the anti-Palestine sentiments that we see in our institutions should make us concerned. 

As museums insist more and more on their need to be neutral, we should question them: Who does this neutrality serve?

If neutrality means the maintenance of the status quo, then that status quo has never been neutral and has always advantaged a certain group of people, at the cost of all others.

This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 11, published March 18, 2025.