Leadership in art museums is a changing construct: historically, these institutions were established as hierarchical, top-down structures that prioritized sole expertise to dictate success. Today, museums are searching for ways to become more responsive, collaborative, and multivocal institutions that value community voices and expertise. A growing variety of museum professionals ask how to better reflect and integrate local communities within their museums. We share reflections, insights, and lessons learned from a multi-year case study at the Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block (TMA), which focuses on redefining curatorial leadership as community-based and collaborative to expand approaches to exhibition development and interpretation. The authors of this article highlight how network governance/collaborative leadership can be applied to curatorial practice to develop exhibitions rooted in collaborative stewardship, multivocality, and community-based approaches. Here, leadership is defined as a way in which a museum influences its communities and vice versa. In addition, we discuss strategies for building multi-directional and collaborative initiatives to shape a more equitable and inclusive museum.

This chapter explores multivocality, when working with refugees, as an approach to challenge and destabilize homogenizing narratives. Museum as Sanctuary is a long-term program at the Tucson Museum of Art that leverages community partnerships to engage refugee audiences through art-making and in-gallery activities. The author will explore how museums can foster multivocal, community-based programs by creating opportunities for participants to share their opinions, observations, and experiences in response to works of art on view and through their own artistic products. The theories of Trinh T. Minh-ha provide a lens for contextualizing the multivocality that emerges from collaborations and that honors difference, builds comfort, supports individual strengths, and welcomes change. Through a methodological blending of critical narrative inquiry and decolonizing theories, the author examines pedagogical strategies that include performance and process in order to unsettle monolithic ideas to make space for multiplicities.

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