What Would You Do?

In this post I'm joined by Aleia Brown, reflecting on our joint NEMA session building on #museumsrespondtoFerguson. The session, including all the conversations leading up to and following, were an amazing opportunity to work with a thoughtful, reflective and passionate colleague whose work I had followed. Thank you Aleia!  And of course, please continue to check out the #museumsrespondtoFerguson monthly twitter chats.  Here's the latest Storify.

• A volunteer at your museum says, “Those kids in this neighborhood, they come in and I know they’re going to steal something, so I keep a really close eye on them.” You’re the volunteer coordinator. What do you do?

• You are in charge of an annual event and one of your regular vendors shows up selling the Confederate flag. What do you do when you’re a junior staff member?

• You have photographs of your historic house museum in 1930, including an Aunt Jemima cookie jar in the kitchen. Do you recreate it exactly?

At the New England Museum Association conference, we co-facilitated the session, #MuseumsrespondtoFerguson: Bringing Race Into the Foreground. Our goal for the session was to open up in-person conversations that provide all of us with tools for moving beyond conversation to real change.

How did the session work?
Behind our conversations, we ran a rotating Powerpoint of historic and contemporary images about race and racism in New England. From the Amistad to Henry Louis Gates’ arrest on his front porch, there was much to show. We really wanted conversation and so we began by each sharing, from our own perspectives, experiences with race in a museum. And then we asked participants to share a situation, any situation, where you felt powerful, a time when you felt uncomfortable or out of place. and then a time in a museum, or anywhere else, that you found yourself in a racially charged situation--or an uncomfortable situation.

The questions above are just a sample of the ones we distributed to small groups for conversation, and then circled back to large group discussion. And we got discussion! So much so that almost half an hour after the session ended, folks were still sitting around talking and the hotel staff asked us to leave so they could set up for lunch (see above).

We’ve now had the chance of a month or so of reflection, and wanted to share some of our own learning.

The conversation needs to start now. One participant noted that she felt uncomfortable with having this conversation in a room of mostly white people. We agree that a more diverse group of participants would be great, but we also strongly believe that if we wait for the museum field to be more inclusive to have the conversation, it’s simply too late. Begin now. You can find all our conversation starters here, to begin.

Niceness is overrated.  Many of the thoughts shared by participants showed more of a concern for niceness, and a lack of willingness to rock the boat in any given situation. Nice is overrated. We also encouraged participants to think about who benefited from niceness. Rather than challenging racist remarks, niceness effectively ends the conversation. Niceness is often another form of complicity.

Internal conversations are the hardest.  When we did a debrief together, a week or so after, we both noticed that groups did not volunteer to share certain conversation starters. Some of those conversation starters were the ones that addressed staff dynamics. Ones like:

• A person of color raises a concern about race in a staff meeting. What do you do if you’re the director? If you’re a peer? If you’re a subordinate?
• Your museum’s education and outreach department consistently prioritizes white museum studies graduates over African Americans with deep community roots and experiences. What do you do?
• Your museum’s security staff is African American and the rest of the staff is white. Each group eats lunch in a separate space. What do you do?

We wished we had recognized this in the moment, and encouraged sharing of perspectives. These are tough issues, not involving visitors in the abstract (if there is such a thing) but the people we work with and see every day. 

Get Out There A participant commented that it was difficult to get new groups of people into the museum. Linda was pretty vehement in her response--get out there! The days, if there ever were any, of expecting people to come just because you invite them are over. You--you personally, your museum--you--need to go to community places and meet community leaders in their own places, not in your own, safe to you, place.

Linda: At the end of the session, after some conversation about the risks of speaking out, Aleia spoke passionately from her own perspective about the risks that she takes: that speaking in front of a group of white museum professionals about racism is a risk; that co-leading the #museumsrespondtoFerguson tweet chats is a risk; that writing about the Confederate flag is a risk. She encouraged us all to think about the risks that people take every day to make the world different and to get out of our own, risk-averse heads and step forward.  I'll long remember this.

Aleia: I left the session with so many thoughts swirling through my head, but I will just share a few. First, I want to continue to encourage museum professionals to use specific language. In the session, and in other spaces, I often heard phrases like, “we don’t talk about it.” What is it? Racism, anti-blackness, prejudice, white supremacy…? I don’t think we can expect to solve our race-related issues in the field, if we can’t identify and verbalize them.

Second, I hope museum professionals understand that these sessions are not just mental exercises. Racism, in and outside of the field, is a real thing that has real effects on real people. I always wonder if I effectively communicate the urgency to understand racism as something concrete that negatively impacts every aspect of our society rather than abstract. Thinking about social justice is not enough. We have to act in ways that are timely, and beneficial to people of color- who the field has marginalized for so long.

Finally, our session was one part of our journey toward a field that values race equity and social justice. As Linda mentioned earlier, I always look to other risk takers for encouragement and motivation. Shortly after our session Mizzou students gained attention by risking their bodies, their scholarships and much more for race equity. Their actions should embolden us to not only discuss race, but to also take actions to make our field an inclusive and equitable space.

Be the Change
We asked participants to write postcards to themselves, with 30 day resolutions about addressing racism in museums. Some were personal, some were institutional, some were specific and some were general. But all of them were worth attending to. We’ve mailed them out, but we've shared a few in this post. What change will you be making?  

Considering Rewind at the Baltimore Museum of Art: Emotion and Learning

Shakia Gullette, Curator of Exhibitions at the Banneker-Douglass Museum,  is one of my 2015 mentees. We've had wide-ranging conversations, from career plans to meaningful exhibits to issues of inclusion within the museum field itself.  In this guest post she expands some of our conversations to share her reflections and analysis of Paul Rucker's exhibition, Rewind, at the Baltimore Museum of Art.  Please be aware that there are challenging and disturbing images included in this post.

 “Baltimore is America amplified—the good and the bad. It’s where the North meets the South, and has so much historical information. I couldn’t think of a better place to do this project”

Paul Rucker

In September, Linda shared her experience at the New Founde Lande pageant and she briefly mentioned Rebecca Herz’s blog post titled, Should Exhibits Tell Stories? Herz addresses three issues/advantages that may arise during storytelling, which include storytelling as kitsch, stories evoking emotion, and the anti-storytelling moment. Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting Paul Rucker’s highly anticipated exhibition Rewindat the Baltimore Museum of Art and immediately, I thought about Herz’s post. I knew this exhibit was designed to stir emotions and I wanted to truly examine how being led by emotions affected my experience.

As I was entering the exhibit, I wondered, how emotional is too emotional when you are already invested in the subject matter? How can you get past what you already think you know to learn something new? Rewind allowed me to explore both questions while confronting challenges we face each day as Americans.  

As I approached the entry of the Rewind exhibition, I was greeted by two people who appeared to be quite rattled. I asked them what they thought of the exhibit, the gentleman responded, “I didn’t like it and you should turn back around.” Initially, his response puzzled me, but then I knew this exhibition would challenge me to think differently. Yet, I wondered how this couple felt. Had their brief encounter with this exhibition scarred them? Where they so shocked by the content that they hadn’t learned anything? Even after I ran through these questions in my mind, I continued to pursue the exhibit.

                                                                                         

Rewind focuses on race in America and how history repeats itself in different ways. Rucker uses a transmedia narrative, which created an immersive experience for the exhibition guest. He explains in his meticulously researched exhibition guide that his life’s work is meant to shock the attendee into thinking. Rucker began researching his exhibit content in 1992 after the LA Riots which were incited by police violence. He followed many of the outcomes and began to draw parallels with lynching. In the section titled Stories from the Trees we were able to see images from lynching’s magnified from their original postcard format and transferred onto throw blankets.  To honor the legacy of the story behind each slain individual, Rucker carefully placed the remaining throw blankets atop a safe which housed the artist’s Glock 22 semi-automatic gun which he used in another section of the exhibition. Stories from the Trees left me thinking about Baltimore native Billy Holiday’s song Strange Fruit and how 76 years after the songs release, the lyrics are still relevant. 

At this point in my visit it became apparent to me; there can be a balance of emotional investment and learning in exhibition storytelling. Sometimes, museum professionals take for granted the power we harness when we are able to bring a different layer to a past event in our history. Rucker was able to remove the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) from the confines of a text book and bring them to life with a very modern twist. Initially, the sight of 21 life sized mannequins dressed in KKK robes made my heart race. Rucker refers to this section as Birth of the Nation. Here, the artists recalls his experience as an onlooker at a Klan rally but through his creative lens, recast the KKK robes using camouflage, satin, and Kente.  After exploring each garment, I felt less threatened. I confronted my own definition of fear and white supremacy, and thought about how seeing these images in books as a child affected me. I then witnessed a father explaining to his three daughters that the KKK are “very bad people” and they are like terrorists. After overhearing his explanation, I tuned in as I had great expectation for the rest of their conversation. As the father began walking his girls through the exhibit, the mother came rushing in and demanded the children be taken out of the exhibit. Although the lesson had been cut short, I applauded the father for initiating the conversation and potentially changing the way the next generation will approach race relations.

The initial shock of the exhibition forced me outside of my own thoughts. In my mind, I thought I had a good handle on my knowledge base but I found myself deeply engaged in the exhibition guide—much like the artist intended. As I was engaged in the exhibition, I felt my perspective being challenged. I was no longer led by emotion because the artist armed me with a great deal of facts about lynching, unnecessary violence statistics, and how the number of prisons has increased since the 1940s.  I looked around to see if others were having the same revelation that I was experiencing. Sadly, I witnessed numerous people walk past the exhibition as if the art were non-existent. I considered that the content may have been too heavy and then it hit me. Rucker’s point was proven—we do not directly address the issues that plague the United States and this intentional silence means we constantly make the same mistakes again and again—hints the title Rewind.