Protecting these Places: Curating in Collaboration

Protect These Places is a digital storytelling project built off of the responses to the question “What’s a place you want to protect?” from visitors to the Haffenreffer Museum. Visitors were asked to write their special place on a piece of tape and put it on the map. These responses ranged from places like the Amazon, Mt. Hope, Mauna Kea, but also included calls to action like “protect women’s rights” and “stop gentrification.” In this talk, Isabella Robbins (MA ‘19), will discuss the process and importance of curating this project “in collaboration” with Haffenreffer visitors, and the importance of protecting sacred places all around us.

Isabella Robbins is a Diné scholar, rez girl and current PhD student in the History of Art at Yale University. She graduated from Brown University in 2019 with an M.A. in Public Humanities. While at Brown, she was a Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative Fellow and worked at the Haffenreffer Museum and curated the exhibition ‘Sacred is Sacred’: the Art of Protecting Bears Ears. She is currently studying global contemporary Indigenous art, specifically of Native North America and Aboriginal Australia. She hopes that through her education and curatorial work, she can create more space for Indigenous artists, art historians and audiences.

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