Hope & Dread, Episode 4: Burning Down The House?
Museums have become cultural battlegrounds—monuments to meaning that are struggling to contain democracy. Museums have mushroomed: from audience numbers to board members, from the value of art to the real estate that houses it, and from international interest to the size of local protests.
Hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman will guide you through the troubled museum system over the next four episodes, beginning on the streets and working our way inside—from the galleries to the staff offices, up to the boardroom.
In today’s show they ask: if the current model isn’t working - should we just build new museums?
Guests: Lulani Arquette, Miki Garcia, Roxane Gay, Deana Haggag, Max Hollein, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Jill Kraus, Dr. Kelli Morgan and Farah Nayeri
New episodes available every Wednesday.
For more, follow @artand_media on Instagram / Twitter / LinkedIn / Facebook
By MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images
Transcript:
Max Hollein:
In the whole world, we've seen further polarizations and further inabilities to talk to each other. I've always felt that museums are one of the very few platforms where you can have a complex discourse, an informed discourse, a dialogue without immediately yelling at each other.
Charlotte Burns:
This is Hope and Dread. I'm Charlotte Burns.
Allan Schwartzman:
And I’m Allan Schwartzman. This is a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art.
Charlotte Burns:
We wanted to hear from people who are making change, and people who are resisting change. Today’s episode is the first of four that look at museums. These institutions might appear to be either handsome, historical stockrooms of important artifacts, or dynamic new social spaces fitted out for contemporary culture. For the past couple of years, their meaning has changed and they’ve become nothing so simple as that.
Museums have become the frontlines in the cultural battlegrounds of the day. These monuments to meaning are struggling to contain democracy.
Meanwhile, our cultural institutions have grown almost beyond recognition: from the audiences to the boardrooms, from the value of art to the real estate that houses it, from international interest to the size of local protests.
The massive spread of wealth inequality that shapes our societies is also — often quite literally — remodeling the hallowed halls of culture, within which, staff are unhappy. We’ve witnessed a series of high-profile oustings and drop-outs. Museum employees are writing open letters decrying their own institutions and calling for resignations from trustees and directors, whilst demanding that the better pay and benefits that we’re seeing at the top start to trickle down.
We’ll begin on the streets outside the museums and we’ll work our way inside, up to the boardroom. In the first of these four shows, we’ll ask who the institutions are really for. In the second, we’ll go behind the scenes to reveal the private power struggles playing out beyond the public galleries. In the third, we’ll ask who should run the nation’s museums — and who’d want to, anyway? And finally, we’ll follow the money to meet the trustees — those grandees who really run America’s museums. And we’ll ask who governs the governors?
First, though - the big question, which might seem sacrilegious to some, but it’s a discussion gaining traction in some serious-minded sections of the art world: “Is the old museum model broken and should we just build new museums?”
The next voice you’ll hear is that of the writer and editor Roxane Gay, author of books including Bad Feminist.
Roxane Gay:
I think it's a question of both. I believe in building new structures. I think it's important to dismantle a lot of the institutions that really need rethinking, but I also think that it is shortsighted to discard everything that those institutions have built as if there's nothing there of value, when that's not the case. And so, it's a question of how do we build new institutions and making good decisions about what we bring forward from those institutions, and what we leave behind.
Charlotte Burns:
What would you suggest is left behind? What would you suggest bringing forward?
Roxane Gay:
I would suggest that a lot of the gatekeeping be left behind, a lot of the snobbery, a lot of the very narrow judgments about what is and is not valuable should be left behind; a lot of the exclusionary tactics that demean certain kinds of art should be left behind.
An expansive understanding of what art can be and what art is, should be brought forward. I think inclusivity is something that needs to be practiced at every level, not only from patrons but the artist whose work is displayed, the curators who make the exhibitions, the people who work in development and try to earn money, the people who work in marketing and publicity and think about outreach. I think it all needs to be rethought.
Charlotte Burns:
How do you change the institution?
Kelli Morgan:
You can't. We can't. That's something I've just completely let go of. They can't be reformed. What I've decided is that there's ways that we can disrupt.
Charlotte Burns:
You’re hearing from Dr Kelli Morgan, Professor of the Practice and Director of Curatorial Studies at Tufts University. Having held curatorial and teaching positions across the US, Kelli is unconvinced that simply “hoping for the best” is any sort of option.
Kelli Morgan:
If I am going to come into the field and do the same thing, including the silence, that everybody else is doing or has done before me, what am I doing here? What is the point of doing the work? Because maintaining the status quo is very literally harming people. And I have no interest in maintaining that. I don't care who it offends.
Charlotte Burns:
So much of this series is about power. And what power often means is who gets to speak and who gets to be listened to and heard. These conversations are very intense. Change feels scary. Here’s Miki Garcia.
Miki Garcia:
I think the field is very scared. And when they hear "change,” many of them hear "dismantle." And “dismantle” is such a scary word. I don't think that anyone that I speak to is interested in dismantling the power of art. That's not going anywhere. I think what we're interested in is having more people at the table, and how can we do that.
Charlotte Burns:
Miki Garcia is director of the Arizona State University Art Museum, which is a museum within an entrepreneurial university structure whose President, Michael Crow, looked at the enormous drop out figures and said, the model isn’t working. Let’s invent a new American university, one he defines as resting on enterprise thinking.
In 2021, the university was ranked as the most innovative in the nation for the seventh year in a row, ahead of stalwarts like MIT and Stanford. Miki says that she’s taking from that playbook in her thinking about the museum.
Miki Garcia:
The coasts have had hundreds of years to come up with new models, to think about equity and they haven't done it, so I guess my conclusion is that there are people who don't want change and then there are people who are looking for change.
Charlotte Burns:
Calls for change are coming from many different directions and each institution handles it in their own way — some better than others. Jill Kraus is a collector, philanthropist and board member of New York’s MoMA and New Museum.
Jill Kraus:
What I found over the last year and a half during the pandemic is that institutions that I thought were creative institutions couldn't think creatively during this period. They were paralyzed. And institutions that I thought were sort of monuments, and not easily moved, were the creative ones. And so, I worry about who will survive and who won't survive in the end. It's a scary time for people to try to figure out what the future is.
Charlotte Burns:
Museums, don’t of course, exist in a bubble.
Farah Nayeri:
Museums and art institutions and even galleries are almost like representations; they're mirror images of society. And society has moved on and is moving on in a very, very kind of fast way. So, again, I really don't think we can go back to the way things were. I'm not saying we're in an ideal world, far from it. But we are...the march is on.
Charlotte Burns:
Farah Nayeri is a culture writer for the New York Times and author of the forthcoming book Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age. She talks about protests at the museum, this sense of a constant state of crisis management.
Some of the charges being leveled against museums is their lack of diversity, that they’re overwhelmingly white and male in their programming and collections. According to data compiled by Julia Halperin, the executive editor at artnet news, and me, in which we gathered data from American museums about the ten previous years’ exhibitions and acquisitions: just 11% of work in American museum collections was by female-identifying artists in that period of time, just under 3% by African-American artists.
Those numbers are not very good. For a sense of context, they are each around a fifth of what they ought to be if you looked at the population of America as your guide.
Staff diversity is just as bad. Just 4% of the positions outside service and security in US art museums are held by Black professionals, for instance.
Add to that arguments over so-called “toxic philanthropy” — where the origins of the wealth that supports institutions has been questioned: it seems arms-dealing and opioid-pushing aren’t such great looks in cultural circles today.
The power of philanthropists on boards has been questioned, as have their links to an art market that would happily take the reins of programing from curators. Meanwhile, many of those trustees aren’t happy about this criticism: without them, they say, there would be no museums in the US. These are the people footing the bill.
Should museums simply try to extract themselves from the wider social debates roaring on — or should they be the crucibles for them? Allan, what do you think?
Allan Schwartzman:
Oh, I don't think they have a choice. I think that the discussion is well within the institution. Museums grew at such a rate that they failed to recognize that in the process of enlarging and broadening their audiences, most did not fundamentally rethink their programs and the interests and needs — and the representation — of newer audiences that are of great cultural diversity. Once you start to look at the museum as having a much more dynamic range of audience and therefore dynamic potential to its programming, you begin to realize that the possibility for what we see as relevant, valuable, meaningful, instructive in art — particularly in contemporary art — can change dramatically. This is really a moment of potentially vast opening up.
Farah Nayeri:
These are all very important voices that need to be heard because museums, as one of the people I quoted in my book was saying, they are very, very heavy, old-fashioned places. It takes about a decade for them to cotton on to trends and things that are happening and that need to be reflected.
So, I think we need to hear protests, we need people complaining about salaries, complaining about job losses, complaining about board representation, diversity and that incrementally I think over time things will change more and more.
Charlotte Burns:
I asked Max Hollein, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, if he feels museums can play a role in society when times are so divided.
Max Hollein:
In the whole world, we've seen further polarizations and further inabilities to talk to each other. And I've always felt, and I continue to feel that way, museums are one of the very few platforms where you can have a complex discourse, an informed discourse, a dialogue without immediately yelling at each other.
Charlotte Burns:
Of course, none of this is necessarily easy.
Max Hollein:
Museums are, by definition, conservative institutions. And, in a sense, the idea that basically you have to continue to not only evolve but actually to question yourself is important for an institution, but it sometimes is a complex, and sometimes even cumbersome, process. A lot of what we're experiencing now is right at the source. It’s basically also the result of capitalism and the spread of wealth going farther and farther away. And the pandemic has been an accelerator of things. It basically means the institution became a bit more insecure.
Institutions like ours have a tendency to feel that everything that we do is excellent and that basically is a protective shield. But once you question that idea of excellence and what it really means, and you want to be excellent, but actually who defines that and what is it being defined? Then the conversation becomes more challenging and interesting.
Charlotte Burns:
For me, this begs the question, have museums been failing us — or have they rather been succeeding to excess? Museums have been measuring their success with a language that’s really a market metric for other more popular forms of culture, like music or movies. And it’s a language steeped in growth — audiences, appetites, material, gift shops.
And museums have mostly succeeded in these terms: there are more museums around the world than ever before, there are larger and broader audiences, too. And the buildings are bigger. Like someone once said to me about New York, every good story is really a real estate story. And that’s true of museums: their property portfolios have expanded and they’ve become self-professed gentrifiers.
Here’s Deana Haggag, one of our editorial advisors, who is an arts administrator and funder.
Deana Haggag:
One observation I have is that many museums are corporations and really need to behave as such. They are corporate structures, they are businesses. There's a little bit of a tension between what does the corporation owe its workers? What does the corporation owe its audiences? How does the corporation center the consumer, the user, the person who most needs these services? How do we think about what the corporation's purpose is, which is a little bit different than perhaps, underdog mentality of the origin story of many of these institutions.
One tension here is perhaps where the institution forgets where it is on the scale. Organizations are living organisms, they evolve and they change and they grow and they re-adjust and they re-adapt. And I think what's happening is the museum is doing that at a pace that's actually a little bit faster than how it's funded. And I think the funding mechanisms for the museums haven't evolved as fast as the museum itself. And so we still have this dichotomy where very few people, foundations and/or individuals, support the thing that is actually supposed to speak to a massive public. It's complicated. How do 50 people in a room, who have the resources to be in that room, know what millions of people that the institution is meant to serve need? And I think that is a complicated dynamic and is something that I think all museums are reckoning with right now, including myself who has served on a few boards.
I've been both people, I've been the user and I've been the person in the room. And they're not the same, necessarily.
Charlotte Burns:
Allan, Deana brought this up in one of our editorial meetings and it struck me as really profound, I hadn't thought of it that way, that essentially museums see themselves as these sort of scrappy underdogs on the margins of society when actually they've become these, in many instances, quite large corporate entities at the center of society. Can you talk a little bit about that growth as you've experienced it?
Allan Schwartzman:
Historically, museums have functioned as repositories for great works of art and as caretakers for those works. Over time, programs expanded greatly. With the invention of a Museum of Modern Art, the idea of exploring the new was introduced and that's radicalized the scope and the scale of the institutions that exist. It seemed like a most natural process for growth that as the number of artists grew, as the number of works that were being collected—and as the number of exhibitions that were being mounted—grew, that the institutions would have to grow. They would expand their spaces and need more exhibition spaces. In the process, they would need to raise more money, which meant they had to expand their boards and expanding their boards, particularly with eyes toward the financial growth to support the institutional growth, it was very natural, logical, for museums to populate their boards increasingly, or dominantly, by people who could generate the money.
And it seemed very natural that they would grow a museum along a line of thinking that was how corporations grew, how they grew their own businesses. And in many ways it provided for efficient and effective growth.
But, it didn't leave any room for the institution to step back and look at itself critically to recognize that if the scope of the museum's programs, the breadth with which a museum functions has changed dramatically who the audience is, who is reached, what the costs are, what the impact of money is.
Charlotte Burns:
Something that you said to me that I thought was really interesting, too, was how this has shifted over the decades. That if you look back to the Museum of Modern Art in the days of Alfred Barr, the then-director, he drew this torpedo and the torpedo moved through time and it should eschew everything old as it was no longer new. He saw the museum as a dynamic, alive thing that wasn't actually passive; it was very active and it was constantly purging itself, whilst redefining, in a very broad way, what art was.
Allan Schwartzman:
And what culture was. I mean, you would see "high art" displayed with popular culture. Photography and its very presence within the museum changed constantly as the use of the medium changed.
But that all did change as the market started to rise. I mean, once you step outside the 1950s, when you have a very small population of "avant-garde artists," and you enter into the 1960s, where pursuing art becomes a career, you see a growth of a market and a growth of an industry.
And you shift from this questioning and exploration into a breadth of cultural material, into the formation of a canon of most important artists; artists who are, in a sense, rated for their significance and their influence, which is mostly — if not almost always — reflected in the market and the relative values for art within those markets.
And so, the museum is no longer on the front line, but it becomes another iteration of the historical museum that is preserving a status quo.
Charlotte Burns:
That's really interesting that the canon and the market grow, making the museum become somehow less active. It's really interesting, that idea of corporate growth and it's a new phenomenon. But while some of the issues that we're talking about are new, let's face it, many are not and it's a sort of amnesia that many of our institutions are so surprised about the calls for change when these have been going on for decades.
Sandra Jackson-Dumont:
When it comes to this kind of work, whether it's women, whether it's LGBTQAI, whether it's issues of equity, issues of diversity / inclusion, race, class, I have to say the art world has an episodic love affair with it. A couple of years ago, I was like, "Well, I guess Black is the new Black."
Charlotte Burns:
Sandra Jackson-Dumont is director and CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, set to open in 2023. Her insights into institutions’ fair weather friendships with equity and diversity has fascinating historical precedent. We’ll let her talk through it.
Sandra Jackson-Dumont:
In the 1960s, there was a great conversation that a lot of people don't know about that took place at the Met on this grand stage. It was moderated by Romare Bearden. And it had a very young William T. Williams, great abstract artist. You had Jacob Lawrence on the panel. Tom Lloyd. And on that stage, they were talking about all the things we're talking about now.
I wasn't even born yet. And they were on that stage talking about race and class and collecting work. And it was as people were starting to protest the “big four” in New York City around their collecting practices, around their showing practices. And so, you have artists that are doing exactly what a lot of institutions have done, which is like just cut a new path.
It's like we want to say all of this as objective, but it's through the lens of who we are. The changes that have happened over the last few years didn't change because the people who were actually doing the collecting before changed; it was because the field got infiltrated with new voices that represented a buy-in for the diversity that was needed in the art world.
So, the canon only changes if the thinking changes and the people who are doing the work changes. So some thinking has to change; it can be in the same bodies, but the thinking has to change on some of these critical issues that I think have been here for a while. I mean, they've been here forever.
Charlotte Burns:
Sandra says the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will aim to do things differently, showing a diverse range of art that tells as many different people’s stories as possible. As she says, it can take someone from outside the art world, like the filmmaker George Lucas, to make a
museum that offers a different take. It reminds her of the foundation of a certain New York institution.
Sandra Jackson-Dumont:
When I think about our museum, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, I think about it through the lens of these various organizations and institutions that are now kind of iconic institutions, but they weren't when they were formed. Say, the Whitney, and I worked there, and so you kind of get indoctrinated with this amazing story about Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney going over to the Met and offering her collection and them saying, "Uh-uh. No, thank you." And so then, this radicalized woman goes — and they're looking at these dirty ashcan artists and saying, "Uh-uh. No way. Living? No way."
So she goes down the street and builds not only an iconic fortress of a piece of architecture — the Marcel Breuer building — but just down the street nine minutes walking distance away from this institution, which later ends up being the place that it also occupies for its transitional moment — the Met Breuer.
So the Whitney becomes a place that is like, “American 20th-century artists should have their place in the sun.” The International Center for Photography, from a medium-based perspective they're like, "Look, why are you treating photography like it's a stepchild?" So then, they form themselves and from a medium point of view, they're saying photography is a fine art discipline and practice. You have MoMA, Modern art, same thing.
And then you have a place like the Studio Museum that is like, "Okay, so all of you guys have been like kind of dancing around this issue of Blackness, but we actually feel like we need a place that goes deep and broad and puts a flag in the sand around Black art and culture.”
And narrative art is the same thing. How do we actually go deep and broad? And I love when I think about the work of narrative artists and how it helps us understand the world. It gives shape and character to real events, imagined realities, systems of power. I mean, that is the function of narrative art and it cuts across time and place. It's one of the oldest creative impulses that you'll find, but we don't talk about it that way.
So I think part of this effort is actually around how do we rethink the canon of art history in ways that are much more inclusive.
Charlotte Burns:
Sandra is steering the creation of a new museum and I love that she mentions older examples of this, including the Studio Museum. It’s notable that one of the voices encouraging young people today to think about building new includes Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum. She recently said in an interview in Artforum magazine, and I quote, “I feel like we have to take this current moment and look at museums writ large and ask, ‘What’s necessary?’ And what I hope — and I say this to many of the young people on the front lines — is that some of them will start another museum right now.”
Another person wielding enormous power who points to new models is Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation. His is real power: as someone put it to me recently, museum directors live in fear of his op-eds in the New York Times. Walker regeared the $16 billion engine of the Ford fortune towards social justice, and he is changing the roadmap. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, he praised the billionaire founder of Crystal Bridges, Walmart-heiress Alice Walton, who has been using her power to bring attention to overlooked artists. Walker says, “She created a museum that was not a 19th-century idea of a museum, with ascending steps and gatekeepers on top who get to decide who can come in and who can’t, and curators who’ve prepackaged what you are about to experience. People often think these projects are sort of follies when, in fact, they represent the future.”
Allan Schwartzman:
I think it's truly exciting that on the one hand you have some of the most prominent, senior foundations which were rooted in massive wealth that was formed at the end of the 19th and early 20th century becoming the most progressive funders within the arts. We see that across many of the most significant foundations. That's truly exciting. They found a way to remain relevant and actually to lead the way amongst the very institutions who they are funding. So they do, they have — that's power. That's real power.
What we're seeing opens the door to the possibility that some of the extremely massive blocks of wealth that have been created in the last few decades have models they can look to that are inspiring, that seek to be as innovative and creative in what they do as public institutions as what they did in the businesses that they created and the technologies that they worked with.
Charlotte Burns:
So let's return to a simple question here. Museums say that they're for the public. Are they? Here's Roxane Gay.
Roxane Gay:
I think at its best a museum is a civic space, and I think that they were intended to be civic spaces, but I think that they are treated as exclusive spaces. And there's a lot of gatekeeping as to not only whose work is shared within those spaces, but who’s allowed to be in them and to partake of what they have to offer. A lot of museums have beautiful art and everyone should be able to see it, but they do very little outreach to communities beyond their target demographics.
A lot of the fees to visit museums are cost prohibitive for people who are working class and don't have disposable income. I bet the desire is there, but it's not going to happen.
Charlotte Burns:
While museums freely use words like “public,” “international,” “academic,” other words such as, “education,” “local” and “community” tend to be avoided. I wondered why.
Here’s Sandra Jackson-Dumont.
Sandra Jackson-Dumont:
So “community” and “education” are two words that are considered like, “ugh,” for a lot of people. The word “community,” it means to commune, to be bound up, to be engaged with, to actually be in concert with, to create space.
I also feel that what's happened is people aren't necessarily skilled enough to address some of the real serious tensions and honest conversations that when you are in the notion of community, when you are having conversations with people that have a certain skin in the game around your existence then people get passionate. And we don't want to have those passionate conversations oftentimes because they get uncomfortable.
And even if they are in situations where it is challenging and they're grappling with some of the most tough questions, or they don't know how to answer a certain question, the fact that they're having the discussion makes them palpable. And the neighborhoods actually rise up with them.
So why not be local? Why not be local? Communal has the history of social justice tied to it, it has the history of family, and domesticity tied to it; communal has the history of place and location — specificity of location. So then you have to talk about the faces of those people, who those people actually are.
Charlotte Burns:
So, who gets to feel like a museum is for them? Certainly not everyone. Here’s Miki Garcia with more.
Miki Garcia:
I don't think that I've ever looked at museums as other than needing to be changed because of the very person I am, the point of view that I possess as a woman of color, as a person growing up in the United States and Latin America, going to museums and feeling like there was a version of the truth, a version of history, a version of quality that was being presented that wasn't the full truth. It wasn't the whole truth that I knew to be true to my own lived experiences.
Charlotte Burns:
Art can change lives, she says: her family is proof. Both of her parents were artists. Her father grew up in a small town in South Texas that felt segregated, she says. He was the first in his family to graduate college, with an MFA, and he found his way in the world through art after involvement in Chicano civil rights, creating works of art that aimed to claim identity and were about finding one’s own space.
Miki Garcia:
I had this man who would walk me through the museums and push past all of the signifiers and symbols that said, "You don't belong here." He pushed past all of those to get us in front of artwork that did indeed say, "This is about us. This is about connection.”
And yet, as I grew up, especially a Mexican American young kid living in South Texas, going to UT, University of Texas for grad school, where all of the statues face South because the South will rise again. What I want to say, what I want to proclaim is that for many of us who are people of color, who live and exist in museums, in this industry, this topic isn't timely. It's not as a result of the pandemic. This topic is about years and years of being gaslit and really finally getting centered to be able to have conversations about what really museums are.
Charlotte Burns:
Certain communities have grown old hoping for change. Some people feel like they’re really banging their heads against museums’ marble pillars. That the steps being taken are not ambitious enough: they should be great leaps for humankind.
Miki Garcia:
Hiring an EDI consultant would've been fine 20 years ago, but we're not there anymore. We're not at a place where you can just diversify your board, hire an EDI consultant, have more funding for "outreach," and show Black and Brown artists. The next generation is not going to have it. More and more young people are demanding more nuanced conversations around the world that they're living in, and the museum is just one of the institutions among many in which they're being more and more critical. 1969 was 50 years ago. Again, here we are, having youth-led discussions around policing, incarceration, institutions, museums, all of these systems that are failing.
The only way that we'll really have change is if everyone who is working in this institution begin with personal accountability. It's not a checklist. It's not appointing someone. It's not hiring a person. It really is doing a very rigorous accounting of one's own understanding in the world, and really an audit of their own fears.
Charlotte Burns:
Miki Garcia there, getting to the heart of the matter. Next, Lulani Arquette who is President and CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. A native Hawaiian herself, her role at the foundation has allowed her to broaden visitors’ understanding of what native art is and who gets to decide that, anyway.
Lulani Arquette:
There was stereotypical beliefs and kind of a romanticized version of what Native American art was and is, and so we intentionally wanted to expand that into what is the contemporary evolution of Native American art? And is it Native American because the person is of a Native American, Hawaiian, from a tribe and/or Alaskan Native? And so that was a big one for us.
Charlotte Burns:
Is there a kind of community? Is it too big to be a community? Is it the landmass too vast to have that sense of community?
Lulani Arquette:
It's very big, Charlotte, that's true. And that sometimes gets complex and confusing to the broader public because, there's what, 575 federally recognized tribes in Alaska Native corporations, there's about almost 600,000 Native Hawaiians across the continent. And then you have state recognized tribes and other non-recognized tribal communities. So it is vast, and it's complex, and it's diverse. There's no one monolithic Native American culture. It's not homogenous.
Charlotte Burns:
I asked Lulani how she manages that complexity, and how she makes difficult decisions herself, among conflicting points of view.
Lulani Arquette:
It's not easy. It really is about doing it, and practicing it and engaging that kind of a process. I think, to some degree Native communities have this understanding, because in our own communities there's quite a bit of diversity too of thought and belief, but there's also practices that kind of ground us in certain values.
In Hawaii, we have a process called ho'oponopono and it's a kind of a healing reconciliation process, and it's a practice. There's a certain spiritual aspect to it, and about forgiveness and talking, and forgiveness and talking, and problem solving through that, and you will sit sometimes 24 hours in a group until everyone can come to forgiveness and resolution. So, we bring that to contemporary modern life now and in ways that it can engage all kinds of, all peoples.
Charlotte Burns:
I so enjoyed interviewing Lulani, and we’ll hear much more from her in a future episode centered on Portland, Oregon, where the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation is based.
Meanwhile, Sandra Jackson-Dumont shares a similar idea of the institution as a place of care that could and should be about more than just objects.
Sandra Jackson-Dumont:
Since their very inception museums have been places that were about care, care of objects, care of people's wealth, care of identity, care of legacy, care of all those things and everyone gets that. But for whatever reason, we have created this space where people feel like all of those things belong to someone else: “Whoever that someone else is, they don't belong to me.” I think that cuts across race and class in many ways or it's applied to particular races and particular classes. And I think that this is the moment where people are saying, "I want some of that too. And I deserve some of that. And by any means necessary, I'm going to have that."
Charlotte Burns:
We’ll cheers to that. For now, the questions are: how do we measure the success or otherwise of institutional efforts to reach a much more varied public than the one they currently serve? Did all of this growth lead to success, or did we get further away from our missions?
When museums look in the mirror, what do they see?
We’ll go into the museum in the next episode, looking at the problems plaguing the staff. But for now, to refer back to the title of this program, do our guests feel hope or dread when they consider this brave new world? I'll leave it to some of them — Max Hollein, Deana Haggag, and Lulani Arquette — to round out this episode. But before we go, just a reminder to tune in next Wednesday, when we'll take you behind the scenes at the museums.
Max Hollein:
Hope is part of the human condition. We just overcame a monumental global crisis and we will see the effects of it for many more years, some of them substantial and very complicated and negative. On the other hand, it's only our own energy, our positive thinking, and our empathy, and our way of working together, how we can move forward. And museums, and also in that sense the museum director, would play an important role in that.
Deana Haggag:
Change is scary and because I think we're treating justice right now, like there's some kind of endgame. “We're going to do this until we die. We will not win while we are alive” — that's not how this works. This is long game. You have to make space for the language of the street to actually be said out loud within the walls of your institution, and you have to build up a stomach for it.
Lulani Arquette:
Institutions are trying, but everybody needs to try harder. I worry that we may have a revolution in this country because there's so many different viewpoints.
Cultural spaces I think are the places that people attract who they need, because it's places where you feel more sense of hope, not the dread, because we are singing and dancing and chanting and creating together. That's a place that's very powerful.
Charlotte Burns:
Tune into Hope & Dread every Wednesday and subscribe wherever it is you find your podcasts.
Follow us on social media for related show content, and tell us what you think @artand_media.
Hope & Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&.
The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.
Robert Bound is our associate editor.
Holly Fisher mixed and edited the sound.
And, additional research and support has been provided by Calder Singer, Catherine Sensenig and Ali Nemerov.
Music, of course, by the inimitable Philip Glass.
Podcast Art: MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images
