I often say that I entered the art museum, and the curatorial profession in general, through the back door when no one was looking. It was as if I walked through the service entrance and became intimately familiar with the foundations and colonial mechanics of the terrain long before I knew what the galleries looked like. Thus, I strive to employ curatorial approaches that will force institutions to develop new infrastructures. This grew out of my upbringing in black feminist and black working class ways of knowing that taught me to use my be as a disturbance and how to use my personal and cultural biographies as a form of knowledge.
Over time, I learned that traditional art museums were never going to substantially support this type of work. However, I knew the BIPOC conservatives, scholars, activistsAnd artists who performed it; I knew that many others before us had developed detailed instructions, and I knew that the vast majority of museum professionals wanted to learn. So last year I developed a graduate program which teaches museum professionals how to apply anti-racism frameworks to their core professional functions. I call him the breath work and I frequently analyze museums across the United States for projects that can explode traditional museum practices and approaches typical of permanent collections.
Consider the American portrait. Most major encyclopedic institutions in the United States hold significant works by artists like Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley, John Singer Sargent, Charles Willson Peale, and the list goes on. But the history of American portraiture becomes much more interesting and accessible when you consider that from 100 to 800 CE, the Moche fashioned beautiful vessels in their own image. They were one of the first cultures in the Americas to perfect realistic portraiture and produce it in large quantities. Nearly a thousand years later, Phillis Wheatley’s portrait appeared on the frontispiece of her 1773 book – the first published book of poetry ever written by a black woman. In the early 19th century, Joshua Johnson was a popular American portrait painter in the Baltimore area. And from the 1850s through the Depression era, black men and women across the United States prioritized self-written visual presentation, especially through photography.
So, what if a black literary theme replaced the typical chronological presentation of early American portraiture? What if museum visitors were introduced to American portraiture through a permanent collection gallery based on Toni Morrison’s phrase, “I don’t want to do someone else.” I want to make myself”? Excerpt from his 1973 novel Sula, the quote relates to the protagonist’s journey to self-awareness and self-reliance. How relevant and central are these ideas to American portraiture? How important was self-image in our individual knowledge production processes? More so, what different forms of knowledge are produced when Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latino histories are prioritized in a visual presentation of the American portrait, especially given that White American forms of self-representation have often required , then later facilitated , sexist, racist and often violent redo of all the others? Finally, how can we exhibit American portraiture to explore how definitions of self-reliance, self-formation, and self-awareness have changed over time?
A relocation like this could revolutionize the presentation of the American portrait, creating many opportunities for institutions to explore questions such as:
1.) Power: Using colonial and antebellum portraits of white sitters, most art museums could explain how traditional American portraiture was a visual representation of the political and socioeconomic dominance of settlers, plantation owners, and settlers. Whites who derived their wealth from the country’s slave economy.
Presenting this narrative through objects in the permanent collection provides an entry point for staff and management to experience the history of an institution as a colonial entity. Using Diana Greenwald and Nika Elder’s study on Models of John Singleton Copley as a model, organizational excavation could probe institutional budgets and discern how grants, donations, and endowments reinforce discriminatory policies. This is how museums can use employee feedback data, their permanent collections, and groundbreaking art history research to identify the specific ways in which BIPOC’s low-wage workforce, BIPOC commissions and BIPOC acquisitions are frequently converted into financial capital for white museum leaders and cultural capital. for a predominantly white audience. It’s time to move away from hiring DEI companies that facilitate generic corporate approaches to equity and inclusion. We need to start using our collections and the analytical models researchers have specifically designed to build anti-racist cultures within the visual arts and the organizations that house them.
2.) Shared traditions: Using daguerreotypes of African Americans and ships of Moche portraits, a gallery could demonstrate that almost 2,000 years apart, black people used elements of self-representation in the same way as the Moche. .
Using objects to explore similarities between African American and lousy ways of sharing could be a way for museums to break down departmental silos. By unpacking internal procedures to find points of intersection, similarities, and opportunities for new avenues of cross-departmental collaboration, museums may discover, for example, that developing departmental practices are much more aligned with registration and curricula. public than on conservation. This could raise questions such as: How can a registrar’s expertise help development refine fundraising practices? Or, how can departmental community development strategies in public programs help broaden donor demographics beyond those with high financial capacity? During my stay at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Newfields, we implemented this type of cross-departmental collaboration through a basic team modelwhere major projects were conceptualized and reviewed by a core team composed of staff from all departments of the museum. Working this way democratized our proposal process, but more importantly ensured that our projects represented and included the communities we value despite institutional barriers.
This type of internal relationship building should also compel institutions holding indigenous, indigenous and pre-Columbian collections to commit to responsible repatriation and restitution of each object that needs to be rendered. The first step to truly respecting Indigenous communities is to return their stolen cultural property, not to deliver performative territorial recognition. Imagine what the estate would look like today if the total number of art museums that developed land acknowledgments between 2018 and 202o actually returned just one object instead? Such an act would have forced arts institutions to care more about what actual Indigenous people have been saying for decades, rather than the verbiage of their institution’s public narrative.
3.) Contemporary events: To demonstrate how common the practice of self-representation has been throughout history, a gallery could install portraits of different cultures to show that humans (not just BIPOC) have always enjoyed seeing each other. An installation of portraits representing a myriad of cultures would provide an opportunity to blur the divisions between collection areas. It could also allow for an exploration of contemporary forms of self-representation in ways that encourage visitors to physically engage with the theme of the gallery by taking selfies. And, this could include works by Jonathan Christensen Caballero, Kukuli Velarde, and many more to demonstrate how lousy portraiture techniques and other ancient indigenous art practices are alive and well in contemporary Latinx art. It is an accessible way to engage innovative technologies in museum display and explore virtual options for interactive galleries. It’s also a more responsible way to show contemporary art in a historic American gallery without putting it on patch duty. Museums must stop flaunting contemporary art, artists and curators from BIPOC as detours around investing in professional development that shapes all museum staff on how to engage and interpret American and European historical work through more critical and relevant frameworks.
As Kajette Solomon, Museum SEI program specialist at RISD, often says, “People understand institutions. This means that the art museum, its colonial foundations and its discriminatory culture are not random by-products of history; rather, it is our conscious decisions that create this reality. Now we must learn and respect the ways of knowing this center of BIPOC culture, humanity and experience. We must also know how to analyze the functionality of our institutions for the spaces of rupture and make the conscious decision to change the way we work. We must recognize that history is made up of countless experiences that unfold simultaneously, and that we know enough now to better assume the role of our institutions in it.
Editor’s Note: This is part of the 2022/23 campaign Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Conservativesand the second of the three messages by the author, the third will be an online exhibit sent to all Hyperallergic subscribers. Register here for Dr. Morgan’s virtual event hosted by Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian on Wednesday, March 15 at 6 p.m. (EDT).
