Stephen Vider Gives Talk at Norway Conference on “Queering Museums: Making Diversity Visible”
A video shared by Skeivt Arkiv features Vider discussing the talk, along with the archive’s founder, Tone Hellesund, and archive director Hannah Gillow-Kloster, discussing the significance of the conference for the archive.
The conference was hosted by the University of Bergen and Skeivt Arkiv, the Norwegian queer archive, and was attended by Bergen students and faculty as well as scholars, curators, and archivists from throughout Scandinavia.
Skeivt Arkiv was conceived in 2012 by Hellesund and has been a pioneering force to collect and preserve Norway’s rich LGBTQ+ history. The word “skeivt” translates roughly as “crooked,” but has come to mean gay or queer in Norway. In 2016, the archive received permanent funding from the Norwegian Parliament, in recognition of the importance of LGBTQ+ public history.
“It is such an incredible honor to share my curatorial and scholarly work at University of Bergen and Skeivt Arkiv,” says Vider. “I have admired the archive’s work for several years—they are really doing unprecedented and essential preservation, with an eye not just to big cities and to activists, but to the full scope of the country’s history and everyday life.”
Vider’s talk focused on the exhibition he curated in 2017 at the Museum of the City of New York, AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism. Vider discussed specifically how the exhibition sought to link and animate art and archival materials, as a model for museums and archives working to preserve and present the history of marginalized communities. It is also a way of thinking about historical scholarship that engages actively with local communities.
Vider is also working on an article-length version of the talk for the academic journal The Public Historian. This spring, he will be teaching a course on public history for History and Museum Studies at Bryn Mawr College and a course on history of mental health and mental illness at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research.