We are witnessing the slow, tectonic grinding of the 20th-century museum model. Across the global art world, the pattern is becoming distressingly familiar: institutions are buckling under the weight of governance structures never designed to withstand the seismic shifts of our current moment. The burden of the “director” has become a setup for disappointment—an impossible demand to be at once a corporate chief executive officer, a chief fundraiser and a radical visionary. We demand they secure the leaking roof and the endowment while simultaneously reimagining the canon.
If we look closely at the fissures appearing in our institutions, we must ask a simple but uncomfortable question: What if leadership no longer lives at the centre?
Leadership, within this archaic framework, remains stubbornly framed as a top-down, heroic and deeply individualised pursuit. It relies on the myth of the singular figurehead who directs the flow of culture from the “centre” to the “periphery”. Yet, if we look closely at the fissures appearing in our institutions, we must ask a simple but uncomfortable question: What if leadership no longer lives at the centre?
As a young practitioner currently working to build a new cultural infrastructure in West Africa, while exploring what it means to expand narratives in the so-called West I grew up in and embody as part of my hybridity, I have found myself wrestling not just with the logistics of building, but with the ethics of authority itself. Building new cultural infrastructure is rarely a linear process. The genesis of such projects is often marked by periods of recalibration; shifts in scope and timeline that are evidence of an institution deep in the process of listening and adapting to its environment.
We must acknowledge that artists are not merely content providers, but the architects of our institutional soul. We are currently witnessing a proliferation of artist-led spaces and residencies across the African continent, where the real work of shaping epistemic and material futures is taking place. If “the institution” is to survive, it must internalise this energy. It is in what the critical theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney would call the “undercommons”—the fugitive spaces where study happens without credit, where preservation happens without permission. The challenge for us is not to capture these spaces, but to practice a form of radical hospitality that allows the fugitive to enter the institution without being arrested by it.
The visionary path forward is a museum that operates not as a monarchy of the overwhelmed, sealing itself off to survive, but as a federation of the focused: open, responsive and radically accessible. In this model, the artist is not a supplier, but a co-conspirator; and the public is not a ticket-buyer, but an active interlocutor whose ideas can penetrate the governance structure. We must replace the bottleneck of individual authority with a membrane of listening, creating real, meaningful forums within the museum; places of friction and debate where the community is invited to argue with history in real time.
‘Slow time’ and ‘fast time’
We must be brave enough to step outside traditional spaces. A museum today must be as comfortable in a marketplace, a digital archive, or a community garden as it is in a white cube. We must decouple the “slow time” of deep curatorial listening from the “fast time” of capital accumulation, ensuring that the demands of the ledger never again cannibalise the mission of the legacy.
This shift is a necessary evolution of professional rigour. As a fellow of the AAMC Propel Program, I am acutely aware that the next generation of leadership is being tasked not simply with inheriting the director’s chair, but with redesigning the room itself. We are seeing the monolith crack in real time, with institutions moving toward joint visions or dual leaderships; a potent signal that the complexities of our time demand a convergence of strengths, not a singular authority.
For too long, we have laboured under the colonial fiction of the “universal museum”, that encyclopaedic fantasy where the world’s treasures are ordered by a single Western eye. That project is dead. The vertigo we experience in building anew is the vertigo of stepping off that pedestal.
Let us be bold enough to say that the era of the Big Man could be over. We are entering the age of the Circle. We need institutions that are less like monuments and more like movements: fluid, responsive and fiercely collective. We need a leadership that dares to dream in multiple tongues, that understands that “rocky ground” is the only ground worth building on because it is the only ground that is truly ours. This is a call to break the mirrors in the palace and use the shards to build a mosaic. We are not just artists, curators, art-lovers; we are dream-weavers, tasked with re-stitching the frayed edges of our world. Let us build an institution that does not merely stand as a witness to our time but acts as the engine of its transformation.
• Aindrea Emelife is the curator of Modern and contemporary at the Museum of West African Art, Benin City