There is a familiar refrain at museums that goes along the lines of “we see ourselves as a platform for debate,” or “we hope to start a conversation.” But too often such debates or conversations are one-sided; as much as these institutions may seriously and sincerely desire to function in the role of interlocutor, few are set up to do so successfully. Conversation requires two-way communication: the roles of speaker and listener are traded back and forth, with each participant able and willing to shift from one to the other in turn. Museums are great at speaking but rarely great at listening. While they might try—for example, by installing reader-response stations in galleries or holding public programs specifically to hear what people think about their exhibitions—it is very uncommon for such responses to actually impact what art is collected or shown, or how it is explained or framed in context.
To my mind, this situation is rooted in the fact that museums often rely on fairly narrow notions of expertise when it comes to art. The job of curators of historical collections, as it is traditionally defined, hinges on these individuals’ art historical and technical knowledge, their ability to limn new approaches to looking at the past, their capacity to deepen our knowledge of what the museum already owns by putting it into new and interesting contexts. Alternatively, we rely on curators of contemporary art to have their fingers on the pulse of new and interesting trends in the art world, to discover emerging artists and help us bring into focus the work of established ones, to help us make sense, in the end, of our social, cultural, and political landscapes. In U.S. museums, these curators work with museum boards to shape exhibition programs and acquisitions; while artists are often represented on those boards, museum constituents seldom are.
But what if these institutions were to expand their ideas of what constitutes expertise, moving it away from a relatively limited and academic definition of the term and toward a definition that acknowledges lived experience, intuition and other “soft” forms of intelligence, or the insights that come from a deep knowledge of materials and making, for example? What if we were to recognize that museums talking at their publics will never produce the kind of engagement that results when museums talk with their publics?
In fact, there are important models for this effort—art museums in general lag far behind children’s museums, science and natural history museums, and museums dedicated to minoritized communities in the United States when it comes to listening. A few years ago, I interviewed leaders of top science and natural history museums in the United States who were working to bring audiences who had till then not really availed themselves of the institutions or their resources.1 For all of these museum directors and curators, the solution to their dilemma was to better understand the role science and natural history played in their desired constituents’ lives, then build future programs around that new cultural insight, with teams of community advisors to guide them. More recently, I spoke to a curator at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture whose collection was built in part via donations from regular people—family heirlooms, mementos, and the like. She told me that as these items were added to the collection, the donors were able to provide their own metadata for the objects’ records in the registrar’s system—keywords and information that derived from the donor’s vernacular knowledge rather than remaining limited to the museum’s “expert” forms of categorization.
What is extraordinary about Making Room: Familiar Art, New Stories is that the Weatherspoon Art Museum figured out how to listen: how to take the input of five thousand community members, gathered in multiple ways and taking a variety of forms, and use it to guide the hanging of the museum’s permanent collection as well as its acquisition, conservation, and commission programs. The result was a set of thematic rooms organized around ideas visitors care about—family, community, place, memory (fig. 5.1)—that allowed the museum to mine its holdings in new and interesting ways, and to frame these works afresh.
The new approach invited Helen Frankenthaler’s Houdini (1976) (fig. 5.2) to enter into dialogue with Shinique Smith’s Out of Body (2015) and Faith Ringgold’s Coming to Jones Road #2: Under a Blood Red Sky (fig. 5.3), a quilt from 2001, rather than remain stuck with all those old white Abstract Expressionist men, as it usually is.
It encouraged us to see Nan Goldin’s photograph Bruce’s Mirror. Portland, Maine (1996) (fig. 5.4) as a depiction of a chosen family and not simply the record of a queer subculture.
The museum’s wall labels included reflections by those with training in art history and those without; by those that museums traditionally define as experts and those that they do not; by people with many different relationships to the museum, including that of “outsider.” The result is not, by any means, a retreat from the strictly art historical—a fear, I think, that leads museums to shy away from such forms of community engagement—but a different way into art history, and certainly a different way into art historical analysis.
I have been an art historian and art critic for thirty years, and I was stopped short, for example, by a wall text written by Bobby Holt (UNCG ’21 BA Studio Art, Weatherspoon Visitor Services and Security Associate) about Janine Antoni’s Umbilical (2000) (fig. 5.5), a sculpture cast from the inside of the artist’s mouth as she was biting on a spoon; the hand holding the spoon was cast from her mother’s.
“When I look at this piece, I feel nostalgic, remembering what it was like to be young, worriless, and cared for, and I think about my current role of supporting others,” Holt wrote. I am not sure that I ever understood with such clarity what Antoni was getting at in this work, and how it might connect to my own experience. Another label, by Julia Ridley Smith, a former museum docent, cuts through a lot of interpretive debate around Willem de Kooning’s Woman (1949–50) by relating a story gleaned from Smith’s interactions with the museum’s public: “Once, when I looked at Woman with students, they said she had the eyes of a cat. Why does she look so angry?, they asked. Why is she baring her teeth? What did somebody do to her?” What the Weatherspoon has achieved with this new attitude toward a museum’s role is energizing, and I hope it will be a model for institutions going forward. It is no surprise that this kind of innovation is happening on a college campus, and one like UNC Greensboro in particular: it is precisely the diversity and polyvocality of the place that allows for such rich, collaborative models of institution-building.
