MA in Museum & Exhibition Studies (MUSE)
Welcome to MUSE at UIC!
At their best and very most wonderful, museums and exhibitions open up, challenge, spark and ignite. They leave their visitors agitated and unsettled, as well as awed and inspired.
But museums and exhibits can also be chilly and un-fun. Someone—hopefully not you!—left a museum and felt like s/he didn’t get it, felt bored, felt left out, felt followed and then felt angry. Someone—hopefully you!—may have also talked back, raised a ruckus, made some change.
In the Museum and Exhibition Studies Program (MUSE) we are interested in how museums and exhibits invite and exclude, delight and frustrate, reinforce and transform, and wonder how to reimagine museums, where they fail, and what framing ideas should guide us as we remake them.
We ask: What is a radical museum? How can our cultural work foster a flourishing democracy and human liberation? Can museums name the margins and shift the centers?
We insist: Museums are a language and a practice; they reflect us, and also create new possibilities for who we can be. They may be restrictive, but they are also sly and subversive.
In MUSE, we aim to name, debate, and figure out how to do it, together.
Join us.
Therese Quinn
Director, Museum and Exhibition Studies
Scroll down to learn more.
MA in Museum & Exhibition Studies (MUSE)
MUSE Program Overview
The University of Illinois at Chicago offers a two-year Master of Arts (MA) in Museum and Exhibition Studies (MUSE).
Using Chicago’s many museums and cultural spaces as classrooms, including the on-campus Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and Gallery 400, MUSE at UIC puts social justice at the heart of our work and scholarship.
Full-time resident students take five core courses that focus on exhibition-making, collections, writing for exhibitions, strategies for public engagement, and museum genres and histories; two capstone research courses; five elective courses; and complete a Capstone thesis or project. Students may also elect to register for a supervised internship as an elective option. This program is conducted in person; MUSE is not able to offer fully virtual study.
Want to figure out if the MUSE program is right for you? Learn more about how to apply here or join us for a virtual info session on:
- Tuesday, September 29, 2026, 3:00-4:00pm Central (Chicago) Time
- Wednesday, October 28, 2026, 11:00am-12:00pm Central (Chicago) Time
- Thursday, November 19, 2026, 6:00-7:00pm Central (Chicago) Time
Register for the info session of your choice here. Zoom links will be sent out one day prior to each session to registered participants.
MUSE Degree Requirements
In addition to the Graduate College minimum requirements, students must meet the following program requirements:
Program Requirements
- Minimum MA credit hours required to graduate: 48
- 20 total credit hours of required coursework
- Completed across the 5 MUSE Core Courses: MUSE 532, 542, 543, 544, 545
- 8 total credit hours of Capstone Course credits
- Typically completed across two semesters of MUSE 597 (for those completing a Capstone Project) or MUSE 598 f(or those completing a Capstone Thesis)
- 20 total credit hours of Elective Course credit
- Typically completed across 5 courses at the 400- or 500-level in any department, chosen in consultation with a faculty adviser
- Successful completion of a Capstone Thesis or Project involving in-depth research in consultation with a Faculty Advisor and Capstone Committee, culminating in an oral defense
- No Comprehensive Examination required
- MUSE 532: Collections
4 hours. Practical, theoretical and institutional goals and practices related to collections. Students meet in seminar, read and discuss core texts and ideas; travel to representative exhibition and cultural heritage sites. Extensive computer use required. Prerequisite(s): Approval of the department. - MUSE 542: Exhibition Practices
4 hours. Core course in material and display practices. Exposure to the mechanics of preparing exhibitions in physical and virtual environment; exhibition planning, design, management and marketing. Prerequisite(s): Approval of the department. - MUSE 543: Writing for Exhibitions
4 hours. Practicum in producing texts for sites across physical and virtual museum and exhibition environments, from labels to exhibition catalogs. Includes digital and virtual exhibition venues. Extensive computer use required. Prerequisite(s): Approval of the department. - MUSE 544: Public Engagement in Museums and Exhibitions
4 hours. Development of methods of audience and public interaction with exhibiting institutions and forms. Includes practicum in publicity, promotion, audience-development assessment. Prerequisite(s): Approval of the department. - MUSE 545: Museum Genres, Practices and Institutions
4 hours. History of museums, cultural heritage sites, other sites of preservation and exhibition; includes discussion of contemporary sites of virtual display. Field trips to multiple cultural sites in Chicago area. Extensive computer use required. Field work required. Prerequisite(s): Approval of the department.
Capstone Courses
Students must complete 8 credit hours of one of the following Capstone Courses, typically completed across two semesters:
- MUSE 597: Project Research and Implementation
0 to 8 Hours. Capstone project appropriate to area of study, developed in consultation with graduate advisor. Projects may cover areas of visual exhibition, or professional practice that fall outside traditional boundaries of scholarly research: website design; organizational management projects; festivals; collaborations arranged among different institutions, and the like. May be repeated to a maximum of 8 hours. Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grading only. Prerequisite(s): Approval of the department. - MUSE 598: Master’s Thesis Research
0 TO 8 hours. Individual research under faculty direction. Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grading only. May be repeated to a maximum of 8 hours. Prerequisite(s): Consent of the instructor.
Capstone and Internships
Specific Capstone Projects or Theses will draw from the student’s course of training, interest, and experience. Possibilities include:
- develop and mount an exhibition at the site of internship or other appropriate venue
- write a scholarly thesis focused on in-depth research on a particular museum practice (e.g., accessibility measures for people with disabilities), institution, or exhibition
- write a creative or hybrid thesis involving deep research on a particular museological topic combined with practical or artistic work
- assemble and edit a published (or web-site located) catalog to an exhibition or collection
- produce a portfolio of professional critical writing appropriate to an art journal or other art criticism venue
- develop a website for an existing “bricks-and-mortar” institution
- adapt an existing database software engine to track all aspects of an exhibition’s progress- location of artworks, insurance value, shipping methods, agreements with lenders, specifications for exhibition, previous exhibition histories for exhibition objects, and more.
- craft a business model for serving as an artist’s agent using new media and presentation forms.
The goal of Capstone activities is threefold: to synthesize the student’s program of learning; to move from novice to professional status; and to provide a sample of work immediately useful in the search for post-graduate employment.
Internships are not required of MUSE MA students, but are strongly encouraged. Students may received elective course credit for internship work via MUSE 582.
Internships may be completed during the academic year or summer, and will be coordinated with faculty and advisors. In Chicago, students have interned at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Graham Foundation, and other institutions. Internships may also be coordinated in other cities and countries.
Important Forms and Documents
MUSE Travel and Research Award Application Instructions
Capstone Advisor Definitions for Projects and Theses
Committee Recommendation Form (required for the thesis option)
Certificate of Approval for Master’s Projects (must be signed at capstone project defense)
Example Capstones
We are delighted to share the capstone projects and theses of past MUSE students. See below for a selection of past capstones.
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June Ahn
Greenspace: A yearlong series of public engagement at the UIC Plant Research Laboratory. Greenspace was a yearlong series of 23 public programs at the Plant Research Laboratory (PRL) funded by the UIC Sustainability Fund. The PRL is an underutilized space on campus that is on the brink of demolition. The crux of my project was a case study on how to DIY a plant centered community in a building that is both thematically perfect and deeply difficult to work with. These public programs were interdisciplinary collaborations with local artists, scientists, chefs, and organizations like the Latino Cultural Center. Programs included a hands-on fire cider workshop, lunchtime talk about fungi, a tour at the Art Institute of Chicago, and a dinner party about migration. Through this platform, I wanted to give ownership and agency for community members, especially students, to share their own experiences and knowledge about plants. The goals included fostering a community centered around plants, unleashing a radical creativity of what is possible in a greenhouse space, and exploring what it means to create a contemporary botanic garden removed from imperialistic frameworks. You can learn more about this project at juneahn.me/greenspace.
Abby Atwood
My capstone project was creating a digital archive in conjunction with the Oak Park River Forest Museum, that documented volunteers’ stories and thoughts from the Economy Shop; a charity thrift store in Oak Park that has been running for 101 years. I have often found volunteer worker stories missing from archives and museums and I wanted to highlight them. I also wanted to highlight the Economy Shop as it is a model of how to treat volunteer workers. I wanted to create a digital space for these stories so they will be easier to access and will last longer than a one-time exhibit in the museum.
The results of the surveys showed that there is a strong sense of camaraderie and friendship among the volunteers. Many of their favorite parts of working at the shop were the people in their department. Many volunteers talked about how they felt they received much more from the shop than they gave. In receiving these surveys, I was able to get a more in depth look at how volunteers at the Economy Shop feel about working there. By creating this digital archive, I have been able to let the public get a glimpse into the Economy Shop and its volunteers.
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Carlos Bossard
This project addresses museum executive directors and board of directors, to analyze their roles in promoting diverse and inclusive museum practices. The guide, Creating Sustainable Museum Practices, was created to easily share the research to museums big and small. It includes a case study of the Haitian American Museum of Chicago, a culturally specific museum in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, whose Founder, Elsie Hector Hernandez, has created a multigenerational, collaborative organization. After, four actions steps that can be taken immediately by executive museum leaders are explained. The researcher, Carlos Bossard, includes a positionality statement and his Capstone Committee’s suggestions to provide his readers with transparency. His guide is the first of two, the second created by his colleague, friend, and research partner, Sheila Navas.
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Cassandra Boulanger
Inching Towards Genocide: Trump’s Persecution of Hispanic Immigration is a cost-free online course on OpenLearn Create which examines the history of the Trump Administration’s policies and practices targeting Hispanic immigration through the United Nations’ Genocide Watch President Gregory Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide. In an effort to diversify and contextualize students’ understanding of genocide, the course utilizes examples of the genocides of Rwanda, Cambodia, and Darfur. In each module, students are introduced to a stage of genocide and presented evidence as to whether the Trump Administration has satisfied, or is engaging with, a particular stage. Following each module, students are requested to participate in an ungraded self-reflection activity, which consists of a series of open-ended questions aimed at expanding students’ personal understanding of, and connection with, Hispanic immigration. The objectives of the course are to elevate students’ understanding of the mechanisms for genocide, the interconnectedness of the Ten Stages of Genocide, as well as immigration advocacy groups operating in the United States. Only through knowledge, shared understanding, and activism can we prevent genocide from occurring in the United States of America.
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Rose Cannon
Examining the ways in which power acts on museum partnerships as a force that either fosters or thwarts genuine solidarity and alliance-building, this capstone exhibition, titled Transition, evenly distributed authority between a graduate student researcher (myself), two activists with lived experience of homelessness, and a non-profit that directly serves youth experiencing homelessness. Together, we explored a mode of display grounded in mutual care, openness, and non-hierarchical relationships.
Transition displayed artwork created by students and advocates of One Heart One Soul, a traveling organization that visits drop-in centers, transitional homes, and shelters to connect with youth living unhoused. Curators Kasey White and Zamari Vivens, former students of the program, selected artwork from One Heart One Soul’s archive and paired the visual compositions with audio interviews narrating the artists’ journeys. Our collaboration reimagined exhibition development through the lens of “radical vulnerability,” a practice developed by feminist scholar Richa Nagar that subverts institutional value claims and omniscient objectivity in favor of storytelling, memory, and power redistribution. As such, this capstone offers an example of what can flourish when art spaces share curatorial authority with those participating in activist work. As I conclude, it is in this space of destabilization that innovation and trust occur.
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Mason Culkin
Queer Invisibility In Museums highlights three research-based projects I completed as graduate student in Museum & Exhibition Studies at UIC, all focusing on the disparities in queer representation and inclusion in the museum field, and testing ways to start filling those gaps. Museums and other cultural institutions hold a great deal of power in public perception, whether we recognize it or not. It’s important to ask: What are we showing (and hiding from) museum goers about queer history? What are we saying to them? And most importantly, what is this doing to their perceptions of the LGBTQ+ community and its rich history?
I invite museum professionals (and museum lovers) to use Queer Invisibility In Museums as a resource to advocate for more queer visibility in museum exhibitions, collections, and programming. The three projects highlighted in the booklet, grounded in queer theory and accessibility, utilize free online platforms and propose creative sources of inspiration to highlight queerness in museums. The booklet includes three projects of mine: my rogue virtual tour developed for Public Engagement (Spring 2019, Jen Delos Reyes) Searching for Queerness in Hull-House, my work with Liliana Macias for the Goethe-Institut’s QUEER AS GERMAN FOLK exhibition developing Mapping Queer Chicago: Past & Present and curating an international playlist for the show, and my presentation, Sexuality Without the Sex: Exhibiting Queer History for Children, on the Youth Exhibitions & Sex Education panel at the 2019 ALMS Queering Memory conference in Berlin. It begins with my working definitions for three key terms–Queer, Accessibility, and Temporality–and concludes with Dreaming of a Sapphic Renaissance–detailing my visions and hopes for the future of queering museums.
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Lauren Janik
Museums have been collecting pop culture materials for decades but using popular media to stage exhibits creates novel challenges in the museum space. Pop culture topics are often well known, and even emotionally and socially significant to members of the public. Pop culture topics – from Star Trek to Major League Baseball – are understood, dissected, and beloved by dedicated fan communities. Fans also build knowledge through community, both online and in person. Museums will have to adapt new strategies for topics that are understood more intimately by potential audiences than exhibits on—say—geology or deep space or Renaissance art. With that in mind, I created a newsletter for distribution at Chicago’s C2E2 that outlined how Chicago cultural institutions were integrating popular culture into their exhibits.
I chose to distribute this at a pop culture convention because I wanted to contrast the ways that fan communities build knowledge—through community-driven events like these conventions—with the top-down approach typically employed by museums. I followed the distribution of the newsletter with an analysis of the feedback I received in order to evaluate the effectiveness of current strategies and imagine what an ideal pop culture exhibit might look like in the future—one that finds a way to combine the intellectual rigor of the traditional museum space with the community-driven and grassroots knowledge-building employed by fandoms.
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Mallery Lutey
How can museums optimize new or existing technologies to make their collections accessible for broader publics in more ethical and meaningful ways?
Less than 1% of over 40 million objects and specimens at the Field Museum of Natural History ever reach the surface for community engagement. Digitization efforts of cultural material open the basement doors a little wider for open accessibility, address a growing community who are engaging with museums online, and simultaneously help protect and preserve objects for future generations. This capstone project involved digitizing over 200 textiles and jewelry handmade by minority groups in Southwest China to be published on the Field Museum Anthropology Collections web page for open access and digital engagement. In a moment where new accessions are given the most attention, there exists an opportunity to digitize and make them available for broader publics before they disappear into storage. Beyond digitizing a collection, this project lends itself to more comprehensive discourse around how museums are thinking about their own digitization tools and processes, who they are digitizing cultural material for, and why or how they are disseminating stories and information. Are we making space for the right voices to lead these processes?
Araceli Medina-Castillo
Museum practices of the past have negatively impacted representation of Native people. Past collection practices centered upon the salvaging of “dying races” and the study of Native people to further social evolutionary models. Objects were used to justify colonial endeavors and establish dominance over colonized people, through the claiming of their material culture. Past practices have become grievously embedded within the museum and must be decolonized. In the past, objects were used to further colonial interests and silence non-Western voices in the intent of sustaining a Western, hegemonic order. Today, they should be used to address colonial destruction and to accurately present narratives of various cultural groups.
Art and natural history museums are critically analyzed to discuss the ways in which different institutions contribute to varying modes of misrepresentation. Cultural objects have either been aestheticized by art museums or viewed as specimens of study by natural history museums. Essentially, this investigation seeks to provide suggestions and solutions for better representation, through encouraging Native voice and community inclusion in all museums that contain cultural objects in their collections. Four case studies are analyzed and demonstrate the importance of recontextualizing objects in a manner that refocuses the narrative with a Native lens, rather than an oppressive, Western one.
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Sheila Navas
In this guide there are three parts: The first part looks at the research question: How can museums mend relationships between the institution, curators, and artists in order to create more ethical exhibitions? It examines the ethical practices and ideologies behind exhibition practices. We explore the history of curators, ethics within museums, institutional blockades, binaries between the curators and audience, and lastly the audience itself. Here we stress the ideological changes that need to occur in order for the continued success of museums. The second part of the guide follows two interviews; one with Erik Ruin a visual artist from Philadelphia and two from Sam Kirk a muralist from Chicago. These interviews further explore the issues discussed in the previous section through first-hand accounts. The third and final part of this guide suggests a resolution to the research question posed in this guide. We evaluate the ideologies examined in part one; the interviews and their analyses in part two and tries to find the best way to mend relations between curators, artists, and institutions. Also, there are two new suggestions to museums curators on how they can start adopting new practices in order to create more ethical exhibitions.
Elise O’Neil
For my capstone project, I built a digital archive that serves to document the histories and memories of those who have either attended or worked at Howard Kennedy Elementary School in the Highlander Neighborhood in North Omaha. My hope is that this archive will help to illuminate the oft-disregarded history of a community of people of color within the city of Omaha. It brings previously difficult to access materials together and makes them available to both students at the school and the wider community. The website that serves as a home for the archive has been constructed with an eye to keeping children engaged and to allow them maximum comprehension. As time goes on, I hope to continue to add more material, as well as creating a page with potential lesson plans involving the archive and suggestions for how to use it in the classroom. To see the website and the over 450 objects it houses, visit howardkennedyhistory.com.
Emma Turner-Trujillo
The Ancient American Provenance Database is a bilingual collections database that attempts to reunite collections of ancient American art housed in geographically distant museums. https://sites.google.com/uic.edu/ancientamericanprovenance
Nina Versenyi
Sites of Historical Memory: Using Re-memory to Expose Silence. We are largely unaware of the invisible forces at work that shape both the space we inhabit and our experience of that space. From the entry point of the Confederate monument, Silent Sam, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this thesis poses the question: what is the purpose of a site of memory? Using Michel-Rolf Trouillot’s formula of where silences enter in the production of history this thesis interrogates the silences inherent in sites of memory, how they came to be, and the memory strategies that attempt to reckon with them.
This thesis traces the coloniality of power that structures contemporary experiences of space and time, beginning with the attempted placemaking of the Relaciones Geográficas, maps commissioned in 1577 by King Phillip II of Spain, and examining how this placemaking manifests in the racialized space of Silent Sam. This examination continues with an analysis of how attempts to recover memory, illustrated by Unsung Founders, Bond and Freeby Do-Ho Suh and Rumors of War by Kehinde Wiley, often distort and commodify memory. The final chapter argues how the recurrent production of knowledge around the Relaciones Geográficasand protest around Silent Sam demonstrate the recuperative potential of “re-memory.”
Alimot Yusuff
This thesis seeks to discuss Blackness and its social complexities in the art museums in the United States. It looks closely at the changing dynamics following the demands for equity and inclusion in the museum. It opens a dialogue on Blackness in the social imaginary, towards exposing and contextualizing current ideologies about Blackness in the history of the United States and the museum. Consequently, making a case to destabilize ideologies about Blackness, to then re-theorize and create new meanings for Blackness in the social imaginary and consequentially in the museum. It makes central the desire to shift museums from their representational practice into the exploration of Blackness through radical visibility.
This paper also seeks to hold art museums accountable to their roles as purveyors of cultural production and educators. It is urging them to be proactive in shifting the socialized perception of Blackness through the art in their exhibition spaces. It argues that visibility is not enough to reclaim and reimagine Blackness in the museum. Instead, it proposes the uses of counter storytelling to create new meaning and dialogue surrounding Blackness— to reimagining and reshape institutional practice to see Blackness and its complexities in visual media radically.
Policies
Administration of the MA Program
- The graduate program in MUSE is the responsibility of the Graduate Program Committee (GPC) and is administered by the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS). All questions or problems should first be directed to the DGS. If there are unresolved problems, these may be taken to the chairperson of the department.
Advising
- Graduate students taking courses are strongly advised to meet with their advisor to discuss course offerings and progress toward the degree before registering each semester.
Registration
- Students normally register continuously until all course requirements for the degree have been completed. Students on full-time status must register for 9 semester hours or more each semester. Students holding assistantships must register for at least 8 semester hours each semester. International students holding a teaching or research assistantship must enroll for (1) at least 8 semester hours if they hold a one-half time (50%) appointment or (2) at least 10 semester hours if they hold a one-third time (30%) appointment.
Minimum Grade Point Average
- Required GPA: 3.00/4.00 or higher. Students whose GPA drops below this average must meet this requirement in the following semester of enrollment or be placed on academic probation. While on probation, students will not receive financial aid or fellowships. After two semesters on probation, the student will be dismissed from the program.
Time Limitation
- Master’s degree: within 5 consecutive years of initial registration. Students may petition the Graduate College for an extension of the time limit; petitions require the recommendations of the student’s advisor and the DGS. Extensions are not automatic.
Leave of Absence
- Master’s degree: within 5 consecutive years of initial registration. Students may petition the Graduate College for an extension of the time limit; petitions require the recommendations of the student’s advisor and the DGS. Extensions are not automatic.
Student Support
Who qualifies for in-state tuition?
- Residents of the state of Illinois are assessed in-state tuition, and all other students are assessed out-of-state tuition. U.S. citizens, permanent residents and holders of certain types of visas may establish Illinois residency and qualify for in-state tuition provided certain conditions are met. There is also an Illinois law that allows for some students, including non-citizens, to qualify for in-state tuition provided specific criteria are met. For more information, click here.
Does UIC offer graduate housing?
- UIC offers single student resident housing for graduate students on the west side of campus, which is accessible by UIC shuttles and CTA buses. For more information, click here.