Call for Applicants: “Representing Religion in Museums” 20-27 June, New York City
The 2026 APRIL Summer Colloquium will bring together curators, community organizers, academics, and artists to explore the ways religion is represented, reified, and recreated in museums. This includes questions about representation and repatriation, conservation and conversion, display and delight.
Museums are booming throughout the world. In China, there were 1.49 billion visits to museums in 2024. In the UK and US, far more people visit museums than attend professional sports events. The institutions themselves have increasingly become key players in global cultural affairs, as national treasures travel on loan for international exhibitions and unethically-acquired works are returned to their source countries in overt displays of heritage diplomacy. Archaeological, anthropological, historical, and regional art museums are filled with ritual objects and sacred artifacts that have been vital to indigenous and global traditions throughout the centuries.
Today, people in the secularizing developed world may have limited exposure to religious traditions and practices, but museums remain one of the few places where visitors may readily encounter the sacred artifacts, traditional symbols, cosmological beliefs, and religious rituals of others. Even as museums reckon with the lingering legacies of colonialism, cultural imperialism, the underground antiquities market, tainted donor dollars, gender dynamics, and other fraught power relations, they still offer rare places of inter-cultural and inter-religious re-connection and re-enchantment, where people of different religious backgrounds may encounter the practices and beliefs of others, their sacred artifacts, and traditions.
The colloquium will provide a forum of like-minded cultural workers to discuss just how museums address religion and treat religious objects. We will take stock of developments in the field and chart a course for future research and interpretation. Curators, academics, and artists alike will collectively explore the work of museums as they care for and present religious artifacts and interpret religion as a crucial component of human cultures.
With a generous grant from the Coolidge Foundation in 1995, and supplemented by a more recent grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, the APRIL summer colloquia have been operating for over thirty years. Previous themes have included “Mission and Media,” “Oppressions and Repair,” “Memory” and “Varieties of Cinematic Experience.”
For those selected to the 2026 colloquium, APRIL will pay for transportation, food, and lodging, from 20-27 June in NYC. This is a competitive program, and we average a <25% acceptance rate.