I am a black woman who has been cultivating experiences for museum leadership and public history scholarship. The work of early black museologists, bibliophiles, truth tellers, and culture producers informs my work to sustain discourse that centers under-examined topics on museums and race, and how gender and class intersect with race. Without discourse on race, museums cannot begin to engage changing demographics.
Through three different spaces, I have the opportunity to practice my philosophy on museums and civic discourse. At the Michigan State University Museum, I am curator and co-project manager for a collaborative quilt exhibition with the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation. While the narrative quilts in the exhibit primarily serve as tributes to Desmond and Leah Tutu’s dedication to human rights, I am also interested in emphasizing two important auxiliary points: 1.) The Black Freedom Struggle was – and still is – an international effort. Pan-Africanists realized the Jim Crow South and South African apartheid inflicted nearly identical oppressive tactics. Similarly, the quilt exhibition is a contemporary celebration, and an acknowledgement in solidarity of the shared experience in South Africa and the United States of overcoming oppression. 2.) In times of oppression, discord and anti-blackness, black people have still found peace in forming relationships, as is the case with the Tutu’s who married during the apartheid. Second, I am writing a dissertation on black women’s quilting realized as a materialization of intellectual history. Since I started this research project, one of my goals has been to expand the scholarship on black women’s quilting beyond utilitarian quilts. Finally, I co-founded the Twitter chat #museumsrespondtoferguson with Adrianne Russell, which maintains the dialogue of how museums can interact with the Movement for Black Lives.[1] In all of these spaces, my objective is to stretch the discourse about black life beyond what is typically discussed in museums.
Through my work and collaborations with others in the field, I have been actively exploring the issue of the field’s discomfort with internal discourse on race. While many conferences within the past few years have selected themes that drew paralleled race, the field has yet to embrace ongoing conversations on race that lead to depth, understanding and engagement.
The second issue I am interested in addressing is the field’s refusal to place contemporary race issues within a historical context. Many museum leaders have reiterated the sentiments from the Center for the Future of Museums post “On Morning Coffee & Museum Activism,” that indirectly described Ferguson as a “headline issue of the day.”[2] In reality, police deployment of deadly force on unarmed black people, state sanctioned extra judicious solutions against peaceful protestors, and mass incarceration have all been part of the black experience since what Rayford Logan termed the Nadir of Race Relations. Furthermore, since Ferguson, Baltimore, Cleveland, Charleston, Cincinnati, and a litany of other cities have been sites of black life taken. To further the discourse inside and outside of the field, museums have to reframe their understanding of these cities as sites of race inequities rather than unfortunate headlines.
The final issue I am interested in is the discrepancy between museums’ understanding of black history and their attempt to establish connections with the black community. Mainstream museums still present uncritical histories of black people that tend to lean toward the celebratory, contributionist and stereotypical. In both popular culture and scholarship, the examination of black life in America involves critiquing white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism; celebrating diversity in the black experience, and centering the black experience rather than presenting as an add-on to the overall American experience. Even with the best of intentions, museums cannot hope to engage black communities more if they don’t prioritize learning about the history and culture from sources that don’t marginalize blackness.
My first solution to all of these issues is producing and illuminating museum work that decolonizes museums and centers black histories using methods that are most productive and germane to the black experience. Although critically delving into race seems unfamiliar to the field, black museums have been doing this work for some time. The New York Magazine article, “Because This Place Has Been Showing How Black Lives Matter for 90 Years,” reminds us that black institutions such as the Schomburg Center, have critically and creatively addressed race, offering points of reference for other institutions.[3]
My ultimate goal is to find more solutions and methods in leading museums to have productive internal and external discourse about race.
~ Aleia Brown, Middle Tennessee State University
[1] The #museumsrespondtoferguson Twitter chat was born out of the “Joint Statement from Museum Bloggers and Colleagues on Ferguson and Related Events,” led by Gretchen Jennings. Please refer to the open letter here.
[2] See Elizabeth Merritt’s full post “On Morning Coffee & Museum Activism.”
[3] http://nymag.com/news/articles/reasonstoloveny/2015/harlem-schomburg-center/
Aleia, I loved reading how your practice at the museum draws a through line from past to present. I think that’s a crucial tactic for building relevance. Building on that, I think your concern about bringing contemporary concerns about race into historical context within the museum is right on. Just as Holocaust museums should not isolate the Holocaust in an a-historical bubble, so should museums not allow amnesia around the continuity of racist violence in this country. Museums have something special to offer in situations of transitional justice precisely because they are able to build context, take and share the long view, and not isolate historical episodes. This needs to carry over into the unfortunately commonplace area of racial violence. To your point about centering and decentering narratives, I am very heartened that Lonnie Bunch views his mission with the new museum of African American History and Culture to be framing it as an American story that all Americans should know and be interested in as part of their nation’s history and culture. I think that kind of message is where we need to be going with stories about a variety of culturally specific groups and stories. Thanks for the excellent food for thought!
This is really resonating with me: “Even with the best of intentions, museums cannot hope to engage black communities more if they don’t prioritize learning about the history and culture from sources that don’t marginalize blackness.” La Tanya in her case statement references a Critical Race Theory toolkit for museum educators, and I feel like a resource such as that would help to address the issue that you raise here. I absolutely agree, that as museum professionals, we need to think about inclusivity at all levels at our work, starting with understanding our own biases, and their roots.
Aleia — I have followed your posts and your efforts to push museums toward a practice that clearly centers race and its intersections with class and gender, so I look forward to having this conversation as a group next month. I am particularly interested in discussing your work on quilting because in addition to the civic engagement hat I try to wear, I am also very interested in the relationships museums can (and rarely) draw between objects and ideas. Hearing about your dissertation realizing black women’s quilting “as a materialization of intellectual history” makes we want to do a whole session at some point on the question of what museums in particular bring to the table in discussions about race. “We” usually talk about historical context (clearly important), but I think it’s more. And I have been thinking a lot as I teach a course on Museums and Civic Engagement about the range of approaches from the more cerebral to the more experiential or emotive, and the place of objects in that spectrum. Not sure if any of this makes sense, but I look forward to a discussion that brings together your #museumsrespondtoferguson work with the quilt project.
Some themes or key areas of focus that crystallized as I read your case statement:
•Decolonization as an unfinished museum project and how that curbs needed internal and external discourse on race
•Intersectional theory and approaches as essential to re-centering museum studies and museum work (Here your research with quilts as intellectual history highlights how old/existing centers have devalued, dismissed, ignored, etc., non-print forms and ways of knowledge creation and sharing)
•Need for a “deep present” to inform museum approaches to contemporary race issues
Like Laura, I am also interested in the role of artifacts in affective experiences in the museum–both in the present as well as in the past.
I love this comment, Clarissa. Decolonizing the museum is a huge prerequisite, I think, for any meaningful civic engagement work at museums. Looking forward to our conversations tomorrow!
(I attempted to post this point already but it doesn’t seem to have gone through–apologies if this is a repeat). Great statement, Aleia. I’m concerned, though, that real change is not going to happen until museums have more diverse staffs. And if they need to let go of white staff members in order to open up the positions to hire people of color, that may simply be one of the steps that is necessary to ensure that we are not waiting a generation (or two) for the chance to have more people of color working in museums.
Lyra, that is an interesting assertion–this idea of radical space-making. I enjoyed your statement Aleia. I especially connect with your argument that freedom struggles are diasporic and cinnected–so true! I also wanted to share that myself and the Incluseum wrote a response to the CFM post on museums and race here: http://incluseum.com/2015/05/12/michelle-obama-activism-and-museum-employment-part-i/
Aleia, your post resonates with me quite a bit. After working with a museum in Brooklyn for ten years that represented an erased history of people of African descent, it is clearer than ever that the gaps in American education around black history are pervasive, and that these carry over into to the museum world. I completely agree with you that museums are incredibly uncomfortable and inexperienced with supporting and catalyzing discussions on race. Until we center race and gender, we are not acknowledging the existence and the devastating impact of racism and patriarchy in this country. I also agree wholeheartedly that addressing race outside of history is futile. I’ve seen firsthand how providing a more complex history interpretation can be transformative and help to flourish connections with community members.