Hope & Dread Extra: Dr. Kelli Morgan
Hope & Dread Extra: Dr. Kelli Morgan brings you more from Kelli Morgan, who recently left the museum field for academia after experiencing profound racism. She is now the professor of the practice and director of curatorial studies, history of art and architecture at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
Hope & Dread Extra is a series of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring your season favorites from Hope & Dread. Our guests were brimming with additional ideas and extra insights that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting room floor. Join hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman for new Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday.
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Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
This is Hope & Dread Extra. I’m Charlotte Burns.
Allan Schwartzman:
And I’m Allan Schwartzman.
Charlotte Burns:
Hope & Dread was a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art. We’ve heard from people who are making change and from people who are resisting change.
Our guests were brimming with ideas and off-topic thoughts that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting-room floor. So now, we’re bringing you a set of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring some of your season favorites, which we’ll be dropping twice a week.
Today we’re bringing you more from Dr. Kelli Morgan, who left the museum field because of racism. Her departure is a loss.
Many of our listeners were struck by Kelli’s appearance in the show so here today is more. Kelli, who’s now the professor of the practice and director of Curatorial Studies, History of Art and Architecture at Tufts University, talks about how systemic racism undermines society and its cultural institutions, and how nonetheless, she feels hope.
We talked about how the same fights are playing out in American culture and education wars, beginning with critical race theory.
Dr. Kelli Morgan:
Critical race theory is a scholarly, analytical theory that was put forth by several scholars; Kimberlé Crenshaw being the most popular one. But you think about Derrick Bell at Harvard too, was an early critical race theorist.
And what this theory does is it really analyzes the way that the US law, right—the US legal system—works to maintain and perpetuate racist structures that define cultural institutions, education, the criminal justice system, the healthcare system, the structures of everything that we know to be true in the country.
And that was late '80, early '90s. It really took shape, like I said, coming through the '90s. And you really didn't study it, or even, you weren't really introduced to it unless you went into the social sciences and the humanities at the graduate level. Or, of course, if you went to law school. You wanted to be a civil rights lawyer, for instance. [Laughs] You really didn't see it outside of that. I had no idea what critical race theory was until I got to grad school.
So the issue now is that parents are concerned, in various states about... I would say, in my opinion, just the ideas of critical race theoretical study being offered or utilized in K through 12 education. And in all honesty, that has never been the case, one, because the level is too high.
What teachers are actually doing is teaching children how to have a more sophisticated understanding of race and racism in the country. And you have, again, just White parents, and some Black ones too, that are really concerned about this. So it's bursting the bubble of privilege that we tend to keep White kids in, in suburban public education systems.
And some of it, I think, is beneficial. Because a lot of these kids, I'm getting them as undergrads. And they've been asking these questions, and not getting answers to them. And I think that's also another kind of fear, because as long as people of color are kind of leading the charge against systemic racism; we're familiar with that in this country. If, and ever, White folks, particularly young White people, begin to lead that charge, it becomes a completely different story. I think putting a White face, and particularly a White American face, on social change in this country would change the conversation tremendously.
Charlotte Burns:
I think there's so many things, obviously, there's racism, and there's also this generational fear of things changing.
Dr. Kelli Morgan:
Oh, I think that's absolutely true. I've said, and this has been a very controversial statement, that what we're witnessing, in terms of this anti-critical race or anti-anti-racism response, is younger boomers, and Gen X-ers. We're dealing with two generations of people, who have never had to do anything in their lives other than be White.
And then society changed. And this is just a manufacturing example: So you can't walk into the plant and get the job that your grandad had, that your great grandad had, that your dad had because the plant no longer exists; that industry is gone. Because that was a generational sort of ace in the hole, for you and your family, you've never even put a resume together before. So you find yourself kind of out on a limb at 55, where you should have been or you felt like you should be planning for retirement. That extra 10, 15 years that you thought you were going to be able to work, you can't.
Not only do you not have the skillset to reenter the job market, but there's nowhere for you to go. There's no program for you to get into, and now your White middle-aged maleness, or White middle-aged femaleness, doesn't just open the door. And when that's been your life, when you've witnessed how so much of that was your parents' life, your grandparents' lives. And, the narrative around that reality was, they were just hard workers. Not the fact that they were also White. And I'm pretty sure, they probably were hard workers.
But where there's nothing in your orbit that has ever delineated out to you, the privilege that comes from being a White or being male, and all of a sudden that's thrown on top of you, as this reasoning for your life being what it is right now. It doesn't help. And so, the negative response is actually pretty normal. But because we don't have a very sophisticated understanding of the psychological ramifications of race and how race functions, it is this... the melee that we are witnessing right now, where everybody's screaming.
Dr. Kelli Morgan:
I showed up to the field at the perfect time because my first curatorial position was at the Birmingham Museum of Art. I hadn't finished my dissertation, but I was fresh out of coursework. So, I'm a culture historian. I’m not a traditional art historian. But learning at Birmingham and learning at PAFA [Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts], and I was like, "Does no one else see the cycle? It's a pattern."
Charlotte Burns:
I was going to ask you that, because you said in an interview, “Same shit, different institution.”
Dr. Kelli Morgan:
Yes. And I was like, "It's a pattern." So, no real answer. So finally, a senior colleague of mine, White female senior colleague of mine said, "You are not supposed to say that. You're not supposed to ask that question, Kelli." And I said, "Yeah, maybe you aren't." And, not meaning her, specifically. But it was just like, "Mm."
So I did little—again, as the historian that I am—I did a little digging. And I said, "Oh, this is purposeful, too." And that was the kind of the impetus for which I was approaching, and still do, approach the work, approach institutions was trying to get people to acknowledge the fact that it's purposeful. From the market to Mellon [Foundation] and Ford [Foundation], and Getty [Foundation], it's an ecosystem that sort of begets itself, over and over and over again.
Charlotte Burns:
How do you change the institution?
Dr. 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, or come into is, there's ways that we can disrupt. So it's like, you have to do the work in a way that forces them to expose themselves.
Charlotte Burns:
How do you do that?
Dr. Kelli Morgan:
We had a core team process, so we worked as a cooperative across departments. So, everybody's at the table at the beginning of any program, in any exhibition. So there's input from pretty much every department. And when you work like that, you care about your colleagues and you care about your colleagues' ideas, opinions, their lives, and livelihood.
So whenever there was something coming down from the senior level that was going to disrupt what we had collectively put together, we moved as a whole around it, or we would do the bait and switch—where we would have somebody distracting senior staff over here, while five or six of us are over here, doing this other thing, to make sure that the community is taken care. It's guerrilla warfare, basically.
So another concrete example that I can give is, for the Samuel Levi Jones show. It was the first show of a Black Indiana artist solo exhibition that the institution had ever done. Curated by the institution's first Black curator. Co-curator was also a curator of color. And marketing just pretty much decided, "We're not marketing this to Black communities." And I said, "Why not?" And this was also something that was only communicated to me verbally. So this is the other thing the institutions will do when they're doing really undermining, discriminatory, racist shit. They don't write it down. So this was not an email or a memo. This is a verbal meeting. And I said, "Why not?" And they were like, "That's not our target audience."
And so, I said the same thing. I said, "So, okay. Black artists, two curators of color, the art is specific to the Black experience. And you're just not going to market it to Black communities? Okay." And I was, in my, I didn't say this to them in the meeting but in my head, I said, "Yeah, I got something for that." And so, I reverted back to my early 20s, when I worked on a street team for Def Jam music. I worked for a record store. Every Friday, you go out and you pass out a gazillion, million fliers, for whatever album is coming out. And so, that was my plan, along with some other things. I did Black radio in the city. I did interviews for all of the Black publications.
But as a team, one of the designers–who had worked on some of the other marketing materials or visual materials for the show–that person said, "Don't worry about it. I'll make you a flier, and I'll print it."
Because I teach, I have a homogenous network of students, and so I gave them out to my students. Got together with some of my friends and every weekend we put them fliers everywhere that we could get them in the city. And, it worked. People came.
People also came because of the relationships that they had with the artists, personal relationships, or professional relationships they had with me. It was like we made ourselves visible to the community in Indianapolis in ways that the administration didn't, and didn't care to.
So when people are showing up and saying, "Oh my God, this is great." It's like, "How is she doing this? How is she getting people through the door?
So, they didn't take the audience engagement data for the show like they would have for any other show. The excuse for that was, it wasn't a flagship show, that was in the major temporary gallery space. And I get that.
And even the marketing excuse was, "Well, we don't market exhibitions anymore." Because exhibitions are not revenue drivers. And, fine. I get that, as an institutional procedure. But there should be exceptions made when there is a project, be it an exhibition, a program, whatever, that is doing for the institution what it claims to want to do in regards to equity and inclusion. And instead of actually supporting that, they specifically undermined it.
And then I had to say to myself, "Oh, this is also purposeful." So it was undermining the success of the show, because what the show stands for, what the artist stands for, what I stand for, is not what the institution stands for. They don't want to do that deep equity work.
I've realized now that this is the work. The work, to a certain degree, is the trauma. And it's my job to illuminate that, and how massive that is in and how it's happening, on such a massive level.
And so that's why, in the essay, and even in my public lectures, you'll hear me ask that rhetorical question. "Why has 30 years of quote unquote ‘representative programming’ in exhibitions haven't changed a thing? Matter of fact, it's worse. In some cases. It's worse." And the silence speaks volumes, right. When nobody can really answer that question, or people choose not to answer that question.
Charlotte Burns:
I'm going to leave you with one question, which is the question I ask all the guests at the end. The show is called Hope & Dread. Looking forward, what do you feel?
Dr. Kelli Morgan:
Both. Because I feel like, I think the dread is necessary. Or I should say, the things that we're dreading—like the things that we kind of see, the things that I see happening. Like the dismantling, the reconfiguration of the field—is not going to be pretty, and it's not going to be short. And it's not going to be pleasant. And that is scary to think about, but I feel like it's necessary. And I think staying in that space of necessity for it gives me hope. Because I know, one, that I represent and two, that I am training. All the people are so cool, many people who know how, who have the skills. And know how to rebuild the right thing in its place. And that part is, like, I'm super hopeful, because I'm like, "Yeah, we got this."
Charlotte Burns:
For more from Kelli tune into episode four of Hope & Dread, “Burning Down the House?”, episode six “Take Me To Your Leader” and episode 12 “Are You Sitting Uncomfortably?”.
Listen to Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday and subscribe wherever it is you find your podcasts.
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 mixes and edits the sound.
Additional research has been provided by Julia Hernandez.
And our theme music is by the inimitable Philip Glass.
