“In All Their Diversity": Examining Participation, Funds of Knowledge, and Identity Representation in Art-Based Social Media Posts

Abstract

Many art museums are currently facing issues of inequity at every level, including in collections, staffing, audiences, and engagement practices. In this dissertation, I hypothesize that one way to address these issues is by altering engagement and learning practices, which are traditionally grounded in didactic, expert-led approaches. In this multiple-method, three-paper dissertation, I use The Museum Challenge (TMC) – a social media challenge to re-create works of art with household materials – as a case study of participatory art engagement. This large-scale, global challenge, which was initiated by the public during the COVID-19 pandemic, relied on participatory engagement practices with digitized museum collection objects. To better understand the implications of TMC for participatory art engagement, I combine quantitative data on 81,086 Instagram posts from the first four months of the challenge and qualitative data from post samples and interviews with participants in TMC.

As others who have researched social media use in art museums have found, these platforms can afford visitors and remote users alike the ability to choose what is important to them and to engage with art museum collections in a self-led, playful manner that is not always encouraged by the museum environment, especially for adults (Budge, 2017, 2018b, 2018a; Budge & Burness, 2018; Villaespesa & Wowkowych, 2020). My findings predominantly speak to three things: 1) Participants drew on slow-looking and embodied learning as they re-created art, often in an instinctive way connected to their funds of knowledge; 2) Participants offered their interpretations of artworks, adapting art for our times and in some cases challenging norms to represent their individual and group identities; and 3) Participants found joy in the process, learning and building a positive and supportive community that has had a lasting impact. My research presents an example of audiences showing museums what they want and challenging expert-led interpretations to adapt art for our times and, in the process, representing themselves “in all their diversity” (Wong, 2012, p. 284; Ebben & Bull, 2022).