SARAH

E.K.

SMITH

From Remote Stars: Buckminster Fuller, London, and Speculative Futures

Museum diplomacy has come to new prominence in the contemporary moment. Museums have increasingly global agendas, advancing diverse international partnerships across the world. Moreover, they hold the potential to advance cross-cultural education and foster mutual understanding at a moment when we are beset by global challenges.

The edited collection Museum Diplomacy: How Cultural Institutions Shape Global Engagement recognizes the pivotal contributions of museums’ global work, while also grappling with the significant issues, questions and possibilities that these activities raise. The collection features examinations of museum diplomacy by fifteen leading scholars and museum practitioners. These texts address global case studies that speak to museum practices related to objects, collections, and people, and charting foundational concepts and ideas. 

Through these wide-ranging contributions, Museum Diplomacy calls on the sector to rethink their perceptions of cultural diplomacy and embrace an expansive understanding of the diplomatic practitioner.

Contributors: Lee Davidson & Leticia Pérez Castellanos, Anthony Alan Shelton, Henry McGhie, Patricia M. Goff, Da Kong, Simona Bodo & Anna Chiara Cimoli, Linda Grussani, Karen Exell, Melissa Chiu, Liz Tunick Cedar, Chen Shen, Anaïs Aguerre, and Simge Erdogan-O’Connor.

Published in 2023 by the American Alliance of Museums and Rowman & Littlefield.

From Remote Stars: Buckminster Fuller, London, and Speculative Futures

Museum London, March 5 to May 15, 2022
Co-curated with Kirsty Robertson

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In 1968, futurist, systems theorist, and architect R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) visited London, Ontario. Then at the height of his global fame, Fuller was best known for patenting the design for geodesic domes, as well as for his proto-environmentalist description of the planet as “Spaceship Earth.” For six days, he gave talks and met with artists, planners, industrialists, architects, and students at Western University. Throughout, Fuller mixed his thoughts on London with his own utopian vision for the future, which focused heavily on the interconnectedness of different processes on the planet.

More than fifty years later, we revisit Fuller’s visit to London in a very different time. From Remote Stars: Buckminster Fuller, London, and Speculative Futures is framed by a recording made by artist Greg Curnoe (1936–92) of a talk given in London by Fuller, and brings together the work of 22 artists, from the 1960s to the present. These works range from video to photography, painting, installation, and sculpture. The exhibition explores Fuller’s futuristic theories, while addressing the gaps in his techno-utopian vision for progress by highlighting many pathways to different futures. Today’s reality—climate change, the advent of big data and artificial intelligence, and increasing global interdependence—reveals Fuller’s inventiveness, as well as his limitations.

Artists: Shuvinai Ashoona, Christina Battle, Katherine Boyer, Heather Campbell, Greg Curnoe, Jade Doskow, Gillian Dykeman, Erin Elder, David Hartt, Farhiya Jama, Jessica Karuhanga, Mary Kavanagh, Rita Letendre, Colin Lyons, Jason McLean, Doug Mitchell, Kitaay bizhikikwe/Amanda Myers, Julie Nagam, Dan Patterson, Skawennati, Amanda White, and Kelly Wood.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated multi-authored publication with critical essays by art historian Eva Díaz, Kirsty Robertson and Sarah E.K. Smith, as well as an interview with author Kerri Sakamoto. The catalogue is available online or in person via Museum London’s gift shop.

Image credit: Buckminster Fuller at Althouse College, November 9, 1968, Bill Ironside, London Free Press negative archives, Archives and Special Collections, Western Libraries.

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