The CoLab Studio team recently presented “Exhibition as Creative Process: Innovation for Complex Times” at the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries annual conference on the campus of the University of Iowa in Iowa City. When a tornado warning interrupted our session, we paused, regrouped, and kept going. My colleagues Mark Valentine Sullivan, Caroline White, and Abbie Stevens handled the moment with composure and flexibility, and I could not be more proud of them. Moments like that speak to the kind of adaptability that is at the heart of what we do at the Michigan State University Museum.
The session drew on the MSU Museum’s CoLab Studio model, using our Blurred Realities exhibition as a case study for open call curation, collaborative exhibition development, student facilitation, and public programming designed to spark meaningful dialogue around complex and timely issues. CoLab reframes exhibitions as evolving processes rather than fixed products, centering interdisciplinary co-creation and student leadership through our CoLaborators program. The result is a museum that stays genuinely responsive to the moment, and a team that clearly does too.
While the conference app is experiencing some upload issues, I’m sharing our slides here so attendees can access the presentation directly.
