Legacies of the 1960s and the Legacy Collection
Over the past century there have been a lot of questions and varying desired roles for museums. Are museums legacy institutions that edify only a certain public and lead by distant example? Does a museum need to be representative of, or mirror to, its surrounding community or the broader American public? Should a museum open its doors as a safe space to hold tough conversations? And can exhibitions and programming originating from an existing collection be as relevant as those curated from current events? In the 1960s and 70s, questions about the roles and responsibilities of museums coalesced around issues of participation and dramatically changed the public and professional expectations of museums.
In this very brief statement I want to provide some historical context and examples of art and culture museums being pushed specifically to expand the demographics of their representation and audience. In that particular moment, members of the public not traditionally served by museums made it known that that they, too, recognized and valued the role that museums play in society. I hope these comments will help us think about the legacies of the 1960s that affect museums trying to be meaningful sites of civic discourse. I also want to raise the question of roles for legacy collections as our group moves from discussion to action.
The late 1960s was a watershed moment when museums themselves were a subject of civic discourse. Minority groups–including but not limited to African Americans, women, and the underprivileged residents who lived near city art museums–began to demand that museums recognize and value them as creators, as audience members, and as the rightful owners to culturally sensitive materials. Some of these activists wanted to be included in collections and on gallery walls in order to feel fairly represented and welcomed to visit. Others wanted the ability to reclaim and interpret their own objects. Self-representation in museums was so important that some communities even founded their own institutions to insure the collection, display, ownership, and accessibility of their own artistic expression and experience.
In New York City alone, that wave of interest and activity resulted in frequent protests against the lack of non-white, non-male artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney, and Museum of Modern Art, among others. At the same time, community activists founded a number of important institutions including the Studio Museum (1969), El Museo del Barrio (1969), Basement Workshop (the future Museum of Chinese in America) (1970), Bronx Museum of the Arts (1971), the Ukranian Museum (1976), and many smaller organizations expressly to expand opportunities for their own ethnic and neighborhood communities to be represented, to exhibit, and to gather. Meanwhile, established institutions such as the Brooklyn Children’s Museum initiated MUSE to expand their reach into city neighborhoods, the Brooklyn Museum of Art opened a “Community Gallery” with rotating exhibitions by Brooklyn-based artists, and the City Museum of New York created exhibitions such as “Drug Scene,” aimed at attracting city residents. Additional partnerships and school programs expanded the reach of all of these museums beyond their walls.
In these examples, the element of civic discourse that was most desired was representation and the ability to participate–actually getting in to the museum as a creator or audience member. The responsibilities of museums to their urban surroundings during a time of great economic and social distress led to the 1972 collaborative report from the American Association of Museums (now known as American Alliance of Museums) and Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide some interpretation on these events: “Museums: Their New Audience.” For AAM and its membership, this report claimed that inclusive representation in museum collections, exhibitions, staff, and audiences was a major professional concern. The impulse to increase inclusion and expand involvement was partly due to demands of the public to be allowed in, but also partly due to internal expectations that the museum should lead by example.
I bring up this relatively distant history it reminds us that people think museums are worth fighting over in order to get what they want, but perhaps more importantly to get what they need. In the 1960s and 70s a previously unreached audience was protesting and negotiating to be invited to convene in a museum, while others built their own institutions to do the convening. One legacy of this period is the general public and professional expectation that American art and culture museums should have inclusive collections that are simultaneously sensitive to provenance and type of object. Another legacy is the expectation that museums should have programs to expand their reach and stake a claim as a public educational space for their neighbors.
For our conversation, I think it’s a useful reminder that if you want the public to think of museums as a place for civic discourse, then the civic body needs to feel welcome in the place and trust the impulse for hosting the conversation. Civic, and hopefully civil, discourse can be a next step after inclusive participation, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the prerequisites.
Given this historical context, I’m interested to discuss the challenges facing collections-based institutions to be demographically representative and appealing to the contemporary American public even though their founding mission was to display a particular genre of object or serve a particular audience. How can legacy art institutions, for example, participate in contemporary civic discourse? One way might be identifying the historical challenges, desires, or debates behind the objects in a collection that feel contemporary. Provocatively or deliberately contrasting objects might be another. I look forward to speaking with the group about the prerequisites to civic discourse they consider important, identifying precursors to this contemporary debate, and thinking of ways we might use legacy collections to prompt civil discourse about our contemporary world.
~ Joan Fragaszy Troyano, Smithsonian Institution
Joan, thank you for this history and these valuable questions. Some interesting recent projects, such as Sandell et al’s _Re-presenting Disability_, have asked that question on a smaller scale. How can we incorporate, in that case, the discussion of disability into the museum without changing the collection itself? The Chicago History Museum asked a related question in the wake of the museum’s exhibition _Out in Chicago_, about the ways in which Chicago and the city’s queer population have influenced each other. The museum was interested in ensuring an ongoing source of material to discuss and engage queer Chicago. It did end up undertaking some collecting efforts, but the first step was to mine its own collections with an eye toward that topic. In short, I think that there are many topics and concerns, areas of potential civic discourse, that legacy collections are actually equipped to tackle when we turn our eye toward analyzing them with those topics in mind. We discover, with close readings and attention to presences and absences, many opportunities we were previously unaware of. I think this will be a very fruitful and practical area of conversation for us.
Thanks for this background, Joan. I think that it’s interesting how much things have changed–I don’t see marginalized groups clamoring for inclusion in museums in the same way, so I’m not sure we can draw a direct conclusion from these historical examples that people necessarily want to be included in museums. Do today’s marginalized populations care about museums? I’m not so sure…
As for the question of how legacy collections can become relevant and inclusive, I think museums in the UK have done some really great work with that, particularly around the bicentennial of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 2007. I’m thinking especially of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Manchester Museum, both of which created provocative “gallery trails” through their existing collections, that highlighted the role of the objects and their collectors in colonialism and, in some cases, slavery. Due to the historic role of museums and their patrons in structures of oppression in the United States, such projects could be undertaken with most collections–though museum boards and membership may not appreciate being reminded of these connections.
Just thought of another powerful example, also slavery related: A portion of the second Slavery in New York exhibit at the New-York Historical Society featured decorative arts items from the museum’s collection, but the labels explained how they were part of the daily labor of the enslaved. And, of course, right here in Baltimore was Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum exhibit.
Joan, I was thrilled to read your statement that historicizes the moment in the 1960s-70s when communities were demanding self-representation and inclusion, not only as audience, but also as stewards and knowledge creators. I would like to add two museums to your brief list of places that were created out of activist efforts during that time – Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn (begun in 1968, chartered in 1971) and Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago (begun circa 1963, landmarked 1965/1966/1974.) Besides the fact that I worked and work with these special places, I think they are not only part of the important movement that you describe, but also produce significant contemporary interpretations based upon those histories and that moment of demanding a different level of civic discourse and engagement from museums. I also just want to point out that the Brooklyn Children’s Museum MUSE project has direct connections with the development of Weeksville. Some of the same people (activists) were involved, and this was not accidental. Different movements connected and overlapped and shared momentum. I would love to see this project expand what you have set out here to document the development of these spaces along with their interconnections. Thank you for this wonderful grounding.