I’m pleased to share that my article, Exhibition as Process: CoLab Studio’s Adaptive Model for Rapid, Collaborative Curation, appears in the Spring 2026 issue of Exhibition, the peer-reviewed journal of exhibition theory and practice published by the American Alliance of Museums.
The issue, titled “Present Tense,” gathers practitioners from across the museum field who are grappling with how institutions can respond to pressing contemporary issues and bring communities together around shared experience.
The article traces the origins of CoLab Studio, launched by the MSU Museum in 2022, and the model of exhibition-making we have developed over the past several years. At the heart of CoLab’s work is a conviction that exhibitions need not be fixed products delivered to passive audiences. Instead, they can be living processes, shaped through dialogue, co-creation, and ongoing community engagement.
CoLab grounds each annual exhibition cycle in a broad, socially urgent theme, drawn from ongoing campus dialogue, national research on youth culture, and audience surveys. Past and upcoming exhibitions have taken up climate change, food justice, surveillance, the nature of truth in the digital age, and artificial intelligence. The article walks through the open-call framework, the role of student CoLaborators, and the iterative design process that allows subthemes, narratives, and exhibit concepts to emerge organically from conversations with contributing artists and researchers.
As a case study, the article examines Blurred Realities, our current exhibition running through August 1, 2026, which addresses disinformation, misinformation, AI-generated content, and the evolving nature of truth. Drawing on 241 proposals from 34 countries and 16 months of collaborative development, Blurred Realities is a practical demonstration of what this model can achieve: a timely, immersive, and genuinely participatory exhibition that connects audiences to urgent questions in civic life.
The article also reflects honestly on the challenges of this approach, including the difficulty of maintaining thematic cohesion across a wide range of disciplines, the investment required to support first-time exhibitors, and the importance of strong subthemes as connective tissue across diverse works.
I will be presenting on this work at the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) Annual Conference, Creativity: Celebrating Innovation in Campus Museums & Galleries, on Thursday, June 11 in Iowa City. I’ll share the slide deck in an upcoming post.
This article first appeared in the journal Exhibition (Spring 2026) vol. 45, no. 1, and is reproduced with permission. www.aam-us.org/programs/exhibition-journal/