Hope & Dread Extra: Sandra Jackson-Dumont

Hope & Dread Extra: Sandra Jackson-Dumont brings you more from the inaugural director and CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which is scheduled to open in Los Angeles next year.

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 Sandra Jackson-Dumont who’s in charge of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. It’s shaping up to be one of the most important new museums in the US, scheduled to open next year.

Charlotte Burns:

So, Sandra, you are the director and CEO of a museum that's under construction. Essentially, you're imagining what you will be when you physically exist. How do you imagine that during such a profound period of change and unrest?

Sandra Jackson-Dumont:

I guess it's no different than what I imagined before the world started focusing on this as a collective group, you know. I mean, I think that this has been a conversation that has been a part of the world discourse for quite some time, but whether or not people feel like it's set up camp in their personal lives in the way that it has right now, that could be argued, you know. 

I think as a museum, we want to be in and of the world, we don't want to sit adjacent to it. I think that's the case for most museums. I think that's the function and role and essential practice of museums, whether or not we are great at that as a whole or as a profession is something else.

Charlotte Burns:

I mean, you've said... I'm going to quote you here, you said "Museums have this history that has been presented as elitist or hierarchical as places where people don't see themselves, but museums have the potential to be powerful places.” Talk me through that belief. I know that you said that when you were a kid, you just saw the museum as a place where you could get a glass of water when you were playing in the park. How did you go from being a kid to someone running one of the most exciting new museums in America?

Sandra Jackson-Dumont:

Wow. Thank you for saying it's going to be one of the most exciting museums in America. That's great. I would say that it was popular culture in a very strange way or access to mass media. I was watching a PBS special and I saw some of the most interesting people speaking on public television about the Studio Museum in Harlem and about Black art and culture. I'm an alum of that museum. I feel like the lessons I learned from there and places like the Whitney [Museum of American Art] and the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art] have shaped so much of who I am. But I also think that I went from being the kid who was just like, the museum is a place to get a glass of water to still being the adult who feels like the museum is a place to get a glass of water because that means it's a usable vessel.

It actually serves my current and contemporary needs. And so I think we go from one place to another by actually seeking places of relevance. And so I think that museums became more relevant to me. They became interesting. They became a part of my daily discourse and how we arrived at that was through social issues. And so I ended up being invited to things that were critical and catalytic and the museums that were presenting that work were actually bound up into the daily lives of people. So that's actually really interesting, right, when you actually find yourself not going to a museum for an event or going to a museum for a tourist moment, but going because that's where the actual conversation is happening that means something to you. And so I feel that's how it shifted for me.

Charlotte Burns:

I really love the idea that you situate the needs of people within the institutional space because it feels like that hasn't been a priority within most museums to think about who you're taking care of within your program and your physical space.

Sandra Jackson-Dumont:

Who you're taking care of intellectually, physically, emotionally. I mean, an ideal world I think since their very inception museums have been places that were about care, care of objects, care of people's wealth, care of people... Whatever those things were, but it has been about 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. And I think that cuts across race and class in many ways 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."

And I think that also there's a generation of directors and curators that actually are systematically shifting some of that. And I think that libraries and museums are very similar in that way. They're both places that have collections. They're both places that the public believes will tell them the truth about society or create spaces for them to interrogate the truth or interrogate lies on their own.

And so I feel like they are the most dynamic or they can be the most dynamic and critical places for people to form their own ideas. And that is not necessarily the history of how academia has worked. That's not the history of how museums have worked. And I think that that is something that is coming forth, where we are places to prompt dialogue, not to just tell people what to think.

I love when I think about the work of narrative artists and how it helps us understand the world, it gives shaping 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.

And it also illustrates how we actually, I think sit passively alongside what visual literacy and visual storytelling does to us, what it can do to us, what it has done to us, how it shaped societies, is shaped our perceptions of each other. And so here at the Lucas Museum, I'm super excited that we're taking an inclusive approach to visual storytelling. And I think people will find themselves in the works of art that are here that also pervade almost every collection there is in a museum right now. You just happened to come here and be able to have this conversation in a specific 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:

This point that you wanted museums to be irresistible and necessary to healthy communities, I think is really interesting because communities has been a kind of strange word that like people don't even necessarily want to use in museums, or haven't necessarily. What do you mean by community?

Sandra Jackson-Dumont:

So community and education are two words that are considered like, you know, “uh”, I mean, for a lot of people. Scholarship even though that is a form of education, ironically, interestingly enough people it's like they prefer that word over education to learn because that feels too layman. It feels too every day. And the art world is about being exceptional like it's this really exceptionalist approach to the world. Right. And so when I think about the word community, I think about like kind of the root of it. It means to commune, to be bound up, to be engaged with, to actually be in concert with, to create space. And so I do not see that as a bad word. But you see this a lot, if you say diversity too much then it moves on to something else. Can't we talk about inclusion? Yes, but inclusion includes diversity. Like, are you just not willing to talk about race? Like, let's talk about race. Like, let's talk about it.

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, right, because they get uncomfortable. And they are not esoteric and they're not just intellectual, it is where your head meets your heart meets your everyday. When people feel that, when they feel those three things, you really start to see the institutional shifts. 

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. When I worked at the Met we used to talk about being international. When I worked in Seattle, we talked about being international, being the Pacific Rim, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the things that's super positive about some of the conversations that happened, I feel like I experienced in my time at those institutions was that they also started talking about the local being a part of the international.

New York is one of the most amazing places to live because like a place like London if you are looking at your community, you're looking at the local community people that live in a 10 to 20-mile radius of your place you're looking at the world in a city like New York. So why not be local? Why not be local? Right. Like, let's actually unpack what this means. A place like Los Angeles also, there's a certain kind of discourse that's happening here that I think is really eruptive and critical. And so let's not be naive about the conversation, let's have it.

Our building is this amazing building here. And so Ma Yasong, who's the architect, he talks about a lot of his buildings as clouds. Right. And so I had a conversation with him and I was like, "Okay, like cloud over LA. That's not my thing. I don't really understand." You know what I mean? "What?" I said, "I see this building. It has these two sides of the building and it almost feels like a little person coming up out of the ground in some ways."

And he said, "It's so weird that you say that because when I first looked at the building there were these trees on the land." And I said, "Yeah, this feels like we should be talking about it growing out of the land. We need to understand the history of this place, the tongues of people, the Indigenous people of this place. How has this place changed and evolved over time?" And he said, "It's so fascinating." When he first came to the place, he saw these big giant trees and they had these massive canopies. And he said he stood under them and he thought, "Wow, this is so incredible." So the building for him actually is a canopy and I think that's a metaphor for what museums can be, canopies where people gather and have their version points of view. We don't all have to agree. We can argue, we can share ideas. We can like, grow and expand and contract. But my hope is that these places actually can be places where different types of people, different kinds of communities can come to what would be a cultural kind of commons or democratic place. I don't even know if that's the right word, but something that vibrates a little bit and makes you feel something. And you become changed by it, but you always remember the local. You remember, who's here that you can look in their eyes and be held accountable to.

Charlotte Burns:

The show is called Hope & Dread. When you look ahead, how do you feel?

Sandra Jackson-Dumont:

I'm hopeful and dreadful. I always tell folks that years ago I saw a sign in some space that I was in and it said, "Speak the truth and point to hope." I don't even know why I saw the sign, but it's such a great quote. And I live with that all the time. And I think that I'm hopeful about our field because of… I think people being more truthful. It used to be that a piece of data could come out and people would say, "That's just not true." And the field would move on. Like I read these transcripts historically that articulate that, you know. 

So I'm extremely hopeful about the future because I think that people are being more honest and I think that people are being more brave. And I think that we have a growing group of people that are well-equipped to have those kinds of conversations. They're reading more, it's not just their opinions. And that's what I found has been one of the major differences in this moment. People are like all of this work is just what I feel, what I think, what I experienced. And I'm like, no, there's entire bodies of research, they're fields of studies, they're academically, rigorously rooted material out there that you can read that actually leads you to a different conversation. And so I'm hopeful about the future of museums because I think they see themselves as being, I'm going to keep saying it, in the world and of the world. I think that's the future of museums versus kind of being this adjacent, close-in-proximity repository of selective things that are pulled from the world. We're going to talk about people and objects together versus just the object.

Charlotte Burns:

For more from Sandra,  tune in to episode four of Hope & Dread, “Burning Down the House?” and episode six, “Take Me To Your Leader”. 

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.