Making Room: Familiar Art, New Stories, a new year-long installation of about forty works from the Weatherspoon Art Museum’s collection, debuted in June 2023 with university and wider Greensboro audiences in mind. It is part of the larger project titled Leading with Objects: Engaging the Community in Institutional Change that launched soon after Director Juliette Bianco became the museum’s first new leader in over twenty years. The confluence of Bianco’s arrival, impacts of the global pandemic, and concurrent racial and social justice crises, all of which had local reverberations, inspired this work. The installation planning and implementation occurred over eighteen months, a relatively fast timeline given the pandemic. It was funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Henry Luce Foundation, entities known for their support of collection presentations.
The overall project and the installation component had ambitious goals. Specific to the collection display, there was the desire to shift from showing discrete pockets of the collection in small exhibitions devised by single curators to a cohesive, more inclusive display that created a greater sense of the collection’s identity and served as a vehicle to initiate systemic change within the museum and in its relationships with the community. Indeed, the museum hoped the collection re-presentation, which unfolded over 4,000 square feet in four galleries on two floors of the museum, would serve as a springboard for transforming the museum’s internal and external cultures.
Community input had its greatest impact on the themes ultimately chosen for the installation. Varied constituencies voiced some common threads regarding what was important to them personally. The concept of caring—and its corollary, connecting—rose to the top. These ideas formed the backbone of the installation. Family, community, place, and memory were identified as locations where caring and connection frequently resided, and thus each topic became an organizing principle of a gallery. Coincident with listening to the community regarding content, the museum’s care for its communities was perhaps most visible in the selection of the installation’s objects, which were chosen, and even acquired, due to community responses. Serving a city and student body that is about 43 percent African American and 53 percent female, the Weatherspoon is to be commended for having about half of the objects on view in the installation made by female-identifying artists and an equal amount of non-White or otherwise underrepresented artists. Care for the collection was also part of the museum’s work in this project. For example, conservation of African American artist Tom Lloyd’s significant 1960s race-related electronic sculpture Clavero allowed it to go on view for the first time in over three decades.
Making Room offered visitors a considerably different view of the collection than in the past. Although thematic installations have appeared previously in Weatherspoon rotations, this presentation displayed many more collection objects than in recent years and simultaneously offered different lenses through which to consider them. The choices of art in each section also reflected the conversations with community members. The “Family” gallery (fig. 6.1) was one of the most successful in reflecting the goals of the installation through its inclusion of a multiplicity of subjects in works by mostly artists of color or who identify as queer. It presented many variations on who might comprise a family as well as varied expressions of positive and challenging family dynamics and experiences.
In addition to the selections of art, the layout of individual galleries often encouraged visitors to consider the relationships among works of art that are disparate as well as those that are similar. For example, in the “Place” gallery, Pat Stier’s Melancholy Painting I / Red Waterfall (fig. 6.2) and Roger Shimomura’s Dress Rehearsal (see fig. 4.2) were hung on a sight line across the entire space.
This view prompted contemplation of these paintings’ differing concepts of place and approaches to painting abstracted reality. Loosely painted and appearing on the verge of spilling off the canvas, Stier’s image, while generally recognizable as derived from nature, takes viewers beyond an experience in nature to the realm of inner emotions. Shimomura, on the other hand, employs a composition of carefully arranged rectangles and squares like puzzle pieces to reference specific places with personal associations. With a nod to Japanese prints in the design of the painting, he recalls the actual housing of the Japanese internment camp in Idaho where he spent some of his youth and his family’s Japanese homeland, which is hinted at in the figure’s traditional dress as well as the composition.
Visual comparisons between works like that of the Stier and Shimomura joined with quite pointed text panels and labels to underscore the possibilities of more open-ended definitions of each gallery’s theme. Overall, the text panels, which varied in their methodology from the singular voice found in the “Family” and “Place” galleries to a less restricted inquiry-based mode in the “Community” gallery, worked hard, though not always successfully, to help visitors feel part of the whole enterprise and see themselves represented in it. To the museum’s credit, the in-gallery interpretation was more accessible than at many university museums that also want to attract local constituents beyond campus boundaries.
Did Making Room ultimately meet the Weatherspoon’s goals of giving the collection more of an identity and opening its doors to build more inclusive engagements with the greater community? Given that the artists in the 6,000-object collection are predominantly white and male (true for most art museums in the United States), it created a laudable aspirational identity, and what was on view put a more inclusive face on the museum and gave the 45 percent of the population that are students and community members of color a better chance of feeling included than ever before. While the installation was by no means revolutionary compared to the wider museum ecosystem, the Weatherspoon should be credited for moving away from its long-time traditionalist approaches to more inclusive engagement and choices of works on view. In doing so, its practice and presentation came into better alignment with the current positive trend of greater inclusivity in museums. The conversations in the museum field around the needs for museum change—to be more inclusive in their staff and art, to be more community connected, to ensure that a variety of voices are heard, and to guarantee equity is a core value—were all included in the Weatherspoon’s considerations. For such a short-term project, meant to include testing and learning, the Weatherspoon’s choices to focus on new acquisitions and beginning community collaboration make sense. In the end, the methodologies and actions employed to create Making Room put the museum squarely on the right path. It is exciting to contemplate the shape of future collection presentations if the museum digs further into its own ways of working and continues to build broader and deeper relationships with the university and the citizens of Greensboro.
