Since the first meeting in many ways reflects the intensity of the conversations that were to unfold, it is useful to quickly summarize the topics that arose. Paulo, now a museum director in Brazil, started his presentation with a poetic mapping of the socioeconomic conditions of that country, outlining its rates of literacy and charting its ethnic populations. He stated there was no neutral decision in collecting art; he cautioned us to avoid the history of “oblivion and exclusion” practiced by many institutions and critics while establishing a “brave relationship with the present.” Hanru, a Chinese curator living in Paris, wondered if the “anti-object-centric” orientation of many young artists mirrored the fluidity and electronic impulses of the global economy; he urged us to “learn to possess the immaterial” and to elevate its status. Walter, a theater director, mentioned that the word “curator” is not used in South Africa to describe the person who “designs” artistic programs, which “never could be divorced from the social, political, and economic realities of South Africa.” The effects of a history of strife, conflict, and struggle could be seen in the intellectual systems (of exclusion and inclusion) that shaped his country, including the censorship that made it impossible to either present or publish scripts in the 1970s. He thought South Africa “could now afford the luxury of aesthetics” and reminded us that collecting was a form of adjusting and saving memory. All agreed it was an imperative to give people critical tools but not to pretend it was possible to tell them what a work means.

Our experiences of the past four years of this initiative culminated in a season of multidisciplinary global programming, anchored by the major exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age (which, after premiering at the Walker, is traveling to Italy, Mexico, Canada, and Texas) that demonstrate how we are learning to become better global citizens and curators. Throughout the grant period, Walker curators in each of our programming areas—Visual Arts, Performing Arts, Film/Video, Education and Community Programs, and New Media Initiatives—also traveled to the home countries of committee members to expand our network of colleagues—artists, scholars, and presenters—across the globe. Senior Curator Philippe Vergne, who assumed primary responsibility for organizing the show, observed: “In the making of the exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms, we learned that our Global Initiative was only a first step in a very long and slow process. Long and slow because the ambition is to change the methodology and balance of art history and history in general, in order to identify an alternative to a Eurocentric understanding of modernity. In terms of multidisciplinary programming and cross-departmental collaboration, How Latitudes Become Forms was an amazing learning experience. Every programming department was at the table and ended up being represented in the exhibition catalogue. It was the first time since I have been here that the walls of the disciplines gave way to an incredible series of cutting- edge programs, where the disciplines intersected and programs were jointly planned by all of the departments. Through the artist residencies, we learned (again) how much the interaction between artists and our local communities is a seminal element in the Walker’s philosophy, and a key strategy in order to reinvent our institutional practice toward becoming ‘more than a museum,’ informed by the notions of civic engagement and responsibility.”