Museu da Umbanda is an independent, artist-run museum of religious art organized by Brazilian artist Zé Kielwagen, currently located in his studio at Oberlin College. Dedicated to the artistic traditions of Umbanda, the museum hosts a growing collection of religious art. It hosts seasonal events and is open to visitation by appointment.

INDIE MUSEOLOGY

The museum is a medium. Institutional forms and spaces can also be appropriated.

a site of authorship, performance, and ideological construction. It mobilizes curatorial and pedagogical strategies, as well as exhibition design, as tools for artistic production; it privileges provisional structures, speculative histories, marginalized narratives and idiosyncratic taxonomies over standardized collections or institutional authority; it blurs the boundaries between artworks, exhibitions and research, challenging dominant regimes of classification, conservation, and value. 

Indie museology projects thus may take the form of installations, para-archives, fictive institutions, bureaucratic parodies, ritualized displays, long-term social practice, lectures and workshops, publications, and others. 

PRECEDENTS

Thomas Hirschhorn’s practice offers a crucial model for MUSEU DA UMBANDA through his series of monuments conceived as temporary, precarious structures that prioritize production over preservation. Built from everyday materials and situated in public space, these monuments function less as sites of reverent commemoration than as active generators of memory, encounter, and discourse. Hirschhorn reframes the monument as a processual event—something that exists through collective use, conversation, and labor rather than through durability or institutional sanction. For an indie museum, this approach foregrounds temporality, excess, and participation, proposing the museum not as a stable repository of objects but as an ongoing instance of cultural production in which meaning is continuously made and unmade.

Jorge Lucero’s work informs MUSEU DA UMBANDA through its tactical appropriation of institutional space and infrastructure. By repurposing his college office as a library, Lucero collapses the distinction between private workspace, pedagogical site, and public cultural institution. This gesture exposes the latent museological potential embedded within everyday academic environments, while simultaneously critiquing the scarcity, gatekeeping, and bureaucratic inertia of official institutions. Lucero’s practice suggests that an indie museum can emerge through acts of recontextualization rather than construction, operating parasitically within existing systems and reprogramming them from within. The museum, in this sense, becomes an attitude or mode of use rather than a purpose-built architecture.

Henrike Naumann and Bastian Hagedorn's "Museum of Trance: project is another example of how contemporary artistic practice intersects with both indie museology and the theoretical concerns of the new museology. Originally developed in 2015 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Museum of Trance takes the form of a fictional ethnographic museum dedicated to German trance music and rave culture. By presenting German youth subculture as an object of anthropological display, the project reverses the historical direction of ethnographic museology, which traditionally framed non-Western cultures as exotic subjects for Western interpretation. This inversion exposes how museum display practices construct cultural hierarchies and narratives rather than neutrally preserving heritage. In doing so, the project transforms the museum itself into a critical medium. The project constructs a temporary, flexible institutional structure that can be reconfigured across different sites and contexts. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, the installation invites audiences to reflect on how museum authority is produced and how cultural identities are framed within institutional settings. By encouraging local collaborators to reshape the exhibition and reinterpret its materials, the work shifts the museum from a space of top-down knowledge transmission to a platform for shared cultural production. 

Dinh Nhung’s creation of a “queer museum” in Vietnam offers a radically intimate and politically charged framework for indie museology. By transforming her own home into a museum space, Nhung situates museological practice within the domestic sphere, foregrounding vulnerability, care, and lived experience as curatorial principles. This strategy challenges both the heteronormative assumptions of public cultural institutions and the colonial legacies embedded in museological display. The house-museum operates as a site of protection and visibility, where queer histories can be assembled, narrated, and safeguarded on one’s own terms. In the context of indie museology, Nhung’s work underscores the museum as an act of self-determination, where space, authorship, and community are inseparable.

PROJECTS & ACTIVITIES

Visits - Visitors can browse the museum's collection and archives. Contact me to inquire about available dates.

Open Classes - At least once per semester the museum becomes a classroom where an invited artist or scholar, or myself, offer a lecture or workshop to the local community. Contact me if you are interested in offering an open class at the museum.

Performances & screenings - The museum can host performances and screenings. Contact me if you are interested in organizing such an event at the museum.

Museology projects - The museum collection grows continuously. Each new artifact needs to be documented and cataloged. Art History students looking for hands-on museology experience are welcome to participate as volunteers, student workers or researchers. Contact me if you are interested in working with the museum.

Museu da Umbanda in Brazil - While the museum is currently based in the USA, it belongs in Brazil. A long-term goal is to create the Umbanda Museum in Brazil, as a formal institutional with its own space, board and staff. This will require fundraising for the construction of a new building, somewhere in Brazil. We have plans for what this building would look like. Contact me if you want to contribute.