In July 2022, seven staff members from the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro spent two days at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson learning with that museum’s staff and from its pathbreaking exhibition A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration. One thread that bound our dialogue together was organizational transformation—what it looks like, why it must be intentional, and how to notice impactful changes in museum practice and community engagement. The visit was part of a two-year project, generously supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art, in which the Weatherspoon sought to learn as an organization by adopting a transformation mindset. Our visit to Jackson (fig. 1.1), separately funded by the Luce Foundation, was foundational to this aim and initiated a lasting partnership between our two organizations.
The contents of this book reflect on that grant-funded project, which we titled Leading with Objects: Engaging the Community in Institutional Change when we undertook it in spring 2021.The overarching goal of Leading with Objects was to learn how a transformation mindset—focused on continual learning and growth rather than strict goal achievement—can help a museum be responsive, flexible, and relevant within a changing world. It was designed to encourage process-rich organizational learning not as means to a particular end but as a model for how collaboration among staff members, and between staff members and our stakeholders, can lead to transformation.
We started Leading with Objects with a few overarching questions: What stories do the museum’s collections help to tell and which do they not? How can engaging with American art build bridges with individuals and communities? Who does the museum’s collection represent, who does it omit, and how do we fill these gaps? We chose the title Leading with Objects to signal that the artworks in the museum’s collection can be activated as participants in the dialogue—energizing the creative voices behind each unique artwork—rather than be regarded as passive relics to be acted upon, interpreted, and consumed. How might organizational behavior change with this shift in mindset? The project’s inquiry-based methods were designed to disrupt predetermined outcomes and enable organizational learning through doing.
This book’s chapters are written from the multiple perspectives of museum staff, faculty partners, other museum partners, and independent critics. Together, they present examples of how the Weatherspoon behaved and acted differently over the course of this two-year period, and a picture of how the intention behind these activities could contribute to organizational transformation over time. Leading with Objects visitor engagement fellow Haley N. Blake-Lee documents how we activated the museum’s collection for generative dialogue between and among museum staff members and diverse constituents to facilitate sense-making, collaborative learning, and decision making. Weatherspoon curator Emily Stamey and UNCG professor Nicole Scalissi explore how collaboration among museum staff, faculty, and students presents a model for responsive and responsible collecting. Weatherspoon curator Elaine D. Gustafson and Studio Museum of Harlem curator Connie H. Choi describe how equity-minded collections care and stewardship can address gaps in the narrative of American art that is presented in art museum installations. Art critic Aruna D’Souza and independent curator Margaret Conrads reflect on Making Room: Familiar Art, New Stories, the Weatherspoon’s four-gallery collections installation that opened toward the end of the project, and place it within national discourses on community-responsive museum practice. Museum director and curator Paul Baker offers an afterword on the history of inclusion in museums, reminding us that our work must be deliberate and never considered conclusive.
In addition to the topics explored by the book’s authors, the Weatherspoon team made deliberate changes to organizational structure over the project period to further activate organizational learning. Bringing extant staff members and hiring new ones onto the Leading with Objects project exposed certain longstanding practices that were not aligned with our collaboration goals. For example, there was no formal staff or project onboarding process at the Weatherspoon, and community engagement was buried within the education department, whose agency was somewhat limited. Learning from our Mississippi Museum of Art partners, we wrote a “living” onboarding manual (each new staff member is invited to respond to the process, and the manual is updated accordingly) that is becoming increasingly useful as a statement of organizational values for all who work at the museum. When a part-time membership assistant position became vacant, we transformed it into a full-time assistant director for strategic initiatives and hired Mei Méndez, former special collections librarian and associate professor at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, in January 2023. This leadership-level job elevates the interaction of organizational policy, processes, and community engagement to activate a learning loop among them. Finally, we wrote the values and goals from our 2021–24 racial equity plan, Leading Together, into the Weatherspoon’s 2024–28 strategic plan to ensure that its principles of access, collaboration, and organizational transformation remain at the core of the museum’s strategy moving forward. These three intentional changes emanated directly from the transformation mindset of Leading with Objects and will fuel organizational learning as part of the flow of activities at the Weatherspoon going forward.
The initiatives explored in this book’s chapters and our adjustments to organizational structure are intended to help the museum staff learn, mutually adjust, and think differently over time. In keeping with the project’s commitment to this organizational learning, we occasionally acted upon unplanned opportunities that arose as we worked. Several ambitions that we had for Leading with Objects were not fully realized, while others—like inviting constituents to participate in keywording the art in our collection for our database—have just started in 2024. We have pulled the latter out of our initial planning document, invited our external publication authors to add their own ideas, and gathered them together in a section at the end of this book titled “Suggestions for Future Practice.”
Adopting a transformation mindset is not about beginning and ends, in the sense of changing from something into something else, switching out a program or activity, or achieving a discrete project goal. It is an ongoing process of learning, adjustment, and learning again over time. We are grateful to the Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for helping the Weatherspoon seek transformation and growth through their granting guidelines, which make room for institutional learning. Leading with Objects was not so much a project as it was an organizational resetting that will continue far into the future.
The “final” installation of the museum’s collection, then, was less this project’s completion than another step in the flow of the museum’s ongoing activities. “Making room,” we learned, was ultimately the point of Leading with Objects. We opened some doors, interrogated some long-held practices, laid out some new and inclusive paths, and accumulated just as many possibilities for the future. What emerged from Leading with Objects is that making room is foundational to intentional transformation, to sharing power and telling new stories through gameplay, collaboration, collections care, and learning to behave differently. Reimagining the museum as a platform for learning helped us to embrace the unknown and forge new relationships—to understand that the collective pursuit of making art accessible is enriched through intentional, innovative, and inclusive action.
The Weatherspoon’s engagement with the staff of the Mississippi Museum of Art in 2022 was, again, a formative contribution to our project. We are grateful to Betsy Bradley, the museum’s Laurie Hearin McRee Director, and the museum’s generous team of visitor services associates, registrars, preparators, educators, and curators that spent time thinking and learning with us. Those lessons were reinvigorated in October 2023 when Monique Davis, the Mississippi Museum of Art’s chief diversity officer, came to the Weatherspoon to lead two days of anti-racist workshops for museum and UNC Greensboro staff, docents, faculty, and students. Our two museums have now chosen to partner on presenting Of Salt and Spirit, a paradigm-resetting exhibition of quilts by African American women from the Mississippi Museum of Art’s collection, in 2024–26.
We hope that you enjoy the chapters that follow and reach out to the museum with your thoughts, questions, and ideas. Visit us online or when you find yourself in Greensboro. Our journeys continue.
Note
I would like to credit museum practitioner and theorist Jay Rounds and leadership practitioners and theorists Peter Eckels and Adrianna Kezar for their helpful frameworks for thinking about collaborative leadership and the value of organizational learning and transformation. Particularly influential were Rounds’s article “The Museum and Its Relationships as a Loosely Coupled System” (2012) and Eckels and Kezar’s book Taking the Reigns: Institutional Transformation in Higher Education (2003).
