While art has enormous potential to shift society, the institutions upon which it relies help hold systems of power in place. As much as I love museums and have dedicated my career to them, they are repositories of cultural hegemony, mirrors of society’s ills, from enormous wealth gaps and other legacies of colonialism to the exclusion of historically marginalized groups. Museums and cultural spaces are part of the systems that protests hope to undo.
I believe this undoing and redoing can not only make museums better for more people, but also can map ways to make change in society at large. My experiences as the director of the Queens Museum (2015–2018), by turns exhilarating, challenging to my core and heartbreaking, are central to this thinking. I led the museum for three extraordinary years through moments that proved to be highpoints of my professional life, and others that threatened to thwart my deeply held convictions of art and culture’s vital engagement in societal change. A public museum, it is situated within a public park in one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse geographies on the planet. In a city of immigrants, Queens, host to New York City’s two airports, is the place most newcomers arrive. Many stay in the string of neighbourhoods along the 7 train, the borough’s spine, which transports a population that speaks over 138 different languages and dialects.
Each subway stop opens doors into different cultures. And yet, we are all New Yorkers. In awe of these realities, I took up my post at the Queens Museum in January 2015. Just eighteen months later, the election of Donald Trump would dramatically shift the landscape in which I worked. While the museum remained on an upward trajectory of increased attention, support and visibility, the results of the election deeply impacted the staff and our publics and collaborators surrounding the Museum. Over a decade before I arrived at the Queens Museum, cultural organizers had been hired in a brilliant move to connect with nearby immigrant communities. Led initially by Jaishri Abichandani, and then by Prerana Reddy, this organising effort created a new model for how museums could engage with their publics. The goal was not just to bring people to the museum, but rather to leverage its resources to surface and enact desires of these communities via cultural organizing.
In the aftermath of the election on November 8, 2016, the Trump administration’s policies and rhetoric unleashed a Pandora’s box of hate, and one of its primary targets was immigrants. At this museum these new conditions were no mere abstraction, but an all-too-harsh reality. Five percent of the Queens Museum’s staff received Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections, President Obama’s executive order that provided legal status to many people brought to the United States without documents as children. This group heard Donald Trump’s promises to repeal DACA, without which they would risk losing temporary relief from legal uncertainty, or even face deportation to countries they had never visited. Further, in the weeks following the election, many of the people with whom the museum’s staff had collaborated for more than a decade and a half—through its free family programs; the New New Yorkers art classes taught in over a dozen languages; gatherings and classes at Immigrant Movement on a day they felt so vulnerable. On that rainy day, it never crossed my mind that just over a year later I would resign my post.
What happened over the following twelve months would prove immensely complex. Several trustees did not like the fact that we were joining the Inauguration Day strike. Their position was that we should continue to do the work we had always done, but to do it quietly. At least one trustee expressed a fear of retribution from Trump via punitive tax audits of board members. From my perspective, not only had the political environment created a predicament in managing a staff with a significant number of increasingly precarious immigrants, I also felt strongly that we needed to be forthright and direct in our support for the communities with whom we had built a great deal over the years. Trust was at issue.
The staff and I drafted a restatement of values, which we felt would be an important buttress of our work. This took the form of a letter ‘from the director’ that we posted to the museum’s website. I presented the values statement at the next board meeting, where it was unanimously approved. The statement, since removed, included the following:
The Queens Museum asserts a deep commitment to freedom of expression, and intentionally supports and celebrates difference and multiplicity as fundamental to our collective liberation. We believe that art can shift the ways in which we experience our world, and therefore art, artists, and cultural institutions have a powerful role to play in society.
Therefore, the Queens Museum:
- advocates for art as a tool for positive social change, critical thinking, discussion and debate, discovery and imagination, and to make visible multiple histories and realities;
- supports and initiates projects and programs that are inspired by actively listening to the needs and aspirations of the communities we serve and consider to be our valued partners;
- works to engender respect for a diversity of cultures, broaden access to ideas and art, and connect the public to opportunities for civic agency;
- uses our resources—human, financial, environmental and beyond—to create greater equity, inclusiveness and sustainability, both within our institution and in the broader society.
Outside of the Queens Museum, artists, art workers, curators, professors and others started organising with, as one Google group’s name made clear, a Sense of Emergency. Around this time, New York’s Museum of Modern Art installed an exhibition of art from their collection by artists who would no longer be welcomed into the United States due to the Trump administration’s so-called Muslim ban. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum submitted amicus curiae briefs[1] to the Supreme Court to overturn the ban, which were co-signed by the Association of Art Museum Directors, the American Association of Museums and more than one hundred museums all over the United States.
Smaller organisations were doing whatever they could. From the Sense of Emergency cohort, a new working group formed, calling ourselves Art Space Sanctuary. The group was headed by Abou Farman, an artist and professor of anthropology at the New School, as well as a dedicated immigration rights activist. We looked to the sanctuary movement of the 1980s in Latin America, largely carried out by clergy members committed to liberation theology and using churches to shelter people fleeing violence, and the New Sanctuary movement of the 2000s, spearheaded by an interfaith group of leaders in the United States seeking justice for migrants and immigrants.
We thought that Art Space Sanctuary could communicate that cultural spaces were, in fact, for everyone, and that within these spaces there could be ways of conveying care and support. The Queens Museum had a long history of collaboration with frontline organisations, including the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road, and addiction support group Drogadictos Anónimos, among others. The idea was to create a series of protocols that would allow museums and cultural spaces to make connections between audiences and these organizations so that we could support vulnerable populations. I strongly believed that the Queens Museum would be an ideal organisation to embrace this concept given our long-term relationships and the extant programming of the museum. We hoped to gather a critical mass of cultural organisations that would become Art Space Sanctuaries by agreeing to the guidelines Farman had developed and made public on a website.
This, we hoped, would signal the cultural sector’s support for the vulnerable people who worked in the museum as well as visited. The guidelines were flexible, and given that the Queens Museum already had relationships with many frontline groups, it made sense for us to sign on. Buoyed by the enthusiastic support of a few trustees, I presented it at our next board meeting. The response was profoundly disappointing. A handful of board members thought the idea completely untenable, expressing fears that the notion of cultural sanctuary would turn the museum into a place for people ‘to hide out or sleep’, a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept. With outspoken opposition to the initiative, it was impossible to move it forward. Moreover, the rhetoric of the rejection was grounded in the notion that as a public institution we should not, and indeed could not, ‘take sides’ in the political debates around immigration: we had to repudiate a pro-immigrant initiative like Art Space Sanctuary in order to maintain a supposedly ‘neutral’ position. It was demoralising.
The situation was further complicated in June 2017 when the Mission of Israel to the United Nations contacted the museum about renting the galleries to hold an anniversary event for the historic vote that paved the way for the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The Queens Museum’s physical building was an appealing location for the event because it was where the UN General Assembly met from 1946 to 1950, prior to the museum’s existence. Their proposal was to re-enact the vote that took place on November 27, 1947; then–vice president Mike Pence was to be their keynote speaker, addressing hundreds of invited guests. I felt deeply uncomfortable with this space rental proposal.
Typically, rentals of the museum were for weddings, bar mitzvahs and other types of celebrations that provided a form of earned income very much needed to financially support the museum. What was proposed was a very different kind of event. Not only was I gravely concerned about the operational impacts of an event of this scale, as well as its security implications; the mission’s confirmation of the vice president of the United States attendance more than four months strongly suggested the political nature of the proposed event. With its government sponsorship and roster of politicians speaking and attending, I believed this was an event engineered to support the views of particular government aims, and that this violated what had been a long-standing practice—and at the time, I believed, a policy—of not renting space for such political events.
Recognizing the unique character of this proposed rental, the matter was escalated to the board for consideration. I recommended against hosting the event, but the decision was ultimately up to the trustees.
After much debate, the board decided to decline the Mission of Israel’s proposed event. Two days later an article appeared in the Jerusalem Post stating that I was ‘anti-Israel’ because I had edited a book about cultural resistance that contained a section about BDS, the movement inspired by Palestinian civil society’s call to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. The article was highly critical of me for my supposed cancelling of the event. A New York City Council member called for my dismissal and started seeking support for a petition, and the New York Post piled on with additional criticism. The board then reacted with great speed, reinstating the event it had days earlier rejected. No public statement corrected the misperception that the initial decision was mine.
I found myself under an avalanche of hate for alleged anti-Semitism. In the aftermath of these articles, I felt I had to prove to board members, never mind the online universe that was now propelling vitriol at me at staggering speed, that I was indeed not an anti-Semite. My Jewish husband counselled me to talk publicly about his family’s history, to relay that his grandparents were Auschwitz survivors, that our son had a bris, and that my grandmother had helped Jewish men escape across the border of fascist Italy during the Second World War. It felt horrible to trot out these facts about my existence in the effort to convince people who had known me for years that I did not hate people for their cultural or religious backgrounds.
Meanwhile, the work of the Queens Museum was garnering broader acknowledgment by the public. It was particularly encouraging when the New York Times profiled my work at the museum. We had just opened a series of successful exhibitions, among them Never Built New York, which featured an array of architectural projects planned but never realized that made unique use of the Panorama—a 10,000-square-foot model of every building in New York City’s five boroughs that is a centrepiece of the museum’s collection. I was also deep into planning a major exhibition of artist Mel Chin’s work (which I would co-curate with Manon Slome and the non-profit arts organization No Longer Empty) that would fill the entire museum, with major projects that would spill into various public sites throughout New York City. Additionally, we had recently received significant grants from prestigious foundations. With these promising fundraising results, we had achieved a financial milestone towards which I had been working since my first days at the museum. There was a lot to be proud of for everyone associated with the museum.
Nonetheless, as fall unfurled and the Mission of Israel’s event took place at the museum, the politics of the event became clearer. At the November 28 event, Vice President Mike Pence delivered his speech as planned, which went far beyond a celebration of Israel’s anniversary: it turned out to be a forty-five-minute policy speech previewing the Trump administration’s intent to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Trump made his public announcement of the move from the White House just a week later, and in the days that followed protest led to violence in Jerusalem and criticism from many US allies and the United Nations. Against precedent, the Queens Museum’s building had been used as the backdrop for an announcement of a major shift in US foreign policy.
As fall stretched into winter, I could tell that a small group of board members were unhappy with my leadership, particularly around my recommendations that we participate in the Art Space Sanctuary initiative and decline the Mission of Israel’s event. The job of the director is difficult enough without this kind of doubt from a board, and after a gruelling year-end, I decided in late January 2018 to resign. It broke my heart to come to this conclusion because I knew I had so much more to contribute to the museum and its publics.
There were a few board members who did not like that I was determined the museum should take a position on events that deeply impacted our staff and surrounding communities via our operations. I believed that as a cultural space reflecting our collective values that we could not remain ‘neutral’, especially as the very foundations of democracy seemed to be crumbling around us. Neutrality, in fact, is not at all neutral; rather, to paraphrase the South African anti-apartheid leader Desmond Tutu, it is a position in and of itself that supports the status quo. And given how the museum had always operated, as well as its commitments to its own staff and collaborators, we knew the realities that confronted us could not be met with indifference.
Since my departure from the Queens Museum, I have been contemplating the history of how museums came to be in the United States, and how they operate today, particularly in the ways their modes of storytelling embody specific politics and how we might understand their connection to a whole matrix of power relations and ideologies. Amid calls for diversity, equity and inclusion in our spaces of culture, there is no way around a confrontation with neutrality as a persistent ideology within the museum. In a sense, it is the expertise of the museum that makes it trustworthy; that it selects art and makes exhibitions that are educational, that instruct its publics.
However, there are many structures, from operations and governance, to curatorial choices and the treatment of staff, that undergird these selections, and the ways in which they are presented and interpreted by the museum, that are directly oppositional to any desire for diversity and inclusion. The problem lies in the fact that these structures are unseen and unregistered, and that they undeniably privilege those of specific class, race, educational and social backgrounds. If we truly want to undo barriers to inclusion, we must face this false neutrality and dismantle it.
Further, the problem with neutrality as a claim for a museum is that it fundamentally neutralises any criticism, dissent or alternate history that it might present, which contradicts its very claims to education and free and open exchanges of ideas. Neutrality, in effect, results in the disenfranchisement of artists or publics that may engage in debate within its walls because the institutions’ very power structures, historically and operationally, nullify concepts of civics to maintain a neutral position. This manifestation of ‘neutrality’ requires that both sides of any debate are equally strong, or must be equally represented. This simply doesn’t measure up in reality and denies the possibility of multiple realities.
According to the American Alliance of Museums, ‘museums are considered the most trustworthy source of information in America, rated higher than local papers, non-profits researchers, the US government, or academic researchers.’ [2]But they are also places of profound alienation. Their typically grand architectures have served many purposes beyond the ‘simple’ task of containing and ensuring the safety of artworks. These include signalling the importance of art and culture in a society; the colonial might of a nation; the generosity and largesse of major arts patrons; and, perhaps most tellingly, the tastes of the patrons who founded the institution or provided its foundational collections and objects. And even still, there is a common misperception of what non-profit, tax-exempt status means, particularly as it pertains to remaining ‘neutral’; it is consistently held, by trustees and staff alike, that there are limits on what kinds of opinions institutions might express in order to protect their tax-exempt status. In fact, there are only two things that by statute non-profits may not do without jeopardizing their status: 1) they may not campaign or lobby for or against an individual candidate for office, and 2) they may not campaign for or against a particular piece of legislation.
Over the past several years, protests have erupted regularly around how museums are funded, how they are organised, what they show and how, who holds power within their structures, and how they reflect, or fail to reflect, a whole diversity of identities. As publics increase their demands for greater agency, inclusion and diversity, cultural spaces must examine their own ways of being in order to remain relevant. I believe that to address the inequities that continue to haunt our institutions, and indeed society, we could not find a better place to begin than by dismantling the myth of neutrality in our cultural spaces. You might be thinking that everyone knows there is no such thing as a neutral space. However, the idea of neutrality manifests within cultural organisations in surprising ways. Consider this: with a membership of over 40,000 people and organisations, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) bears considerable weight in its areas of expertise. Founded in 1946, for nearly fifty years the organisation has defined the museum as ‘a non-profit institution’ that ‘acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment.’[3]
In 2019, however, a group of ICOM members decided to revisit this definition, as some felt it was out of date. They proposed new language that describes museums as ‘democratizing, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures’ that ‘safeguard memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.’ The proposed language goes on to say that museums aim to ‘contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary well-being.’
In mid August 2019, backlash against the new proposal culminated with its dismissal as ‘ideological’ by more than twenty-four of ICOM’s country branches, including France, Italy, Spain and Russia. While such disputes over the definitions of long-standing institutions are not rare, in this case it is noteworthy that the branches framed their objections in terms of the ‘ideology’ the new language signalled; the implication is that the previous definition was not ideological, and by extension that the activities of museums proceed from a ‘neutral’ space.
This question of whether museums are neutral, then, is the crux of a contemporary conundrum about how stories have been told, who has told them, why and how they have been framed and historicized and what it means that foundational stories are being challenged today by a whole diversity of perspectives. The people who hold these diverse perspectives, it must be noted, have been marginalized from society for their race, gender identity, class, educational levels, ability, etc., throughout many decades. Since museums are the West’s mode of preserving history, we then must ask, has the museum ever really been a neutral space? Has it not always had an agenda in its formulation? Is this necessarily always a bad thing? Especially if those agendas include things like ‘human dignity’ and ‘planetary well-being’[4], which are clearly positive aims? There seems to be widespread discomfort around these ideas, as well as fear that cultural institutions and museums will somehow be reduced if their founding biases are made visible. It is my contention that these biases exist throughout human culture and that we must, at minimum, see them and confront the intended and unintended consequences of this very human condition.
At a moment in human history when we must contemplate our own potential extinction due to extreme climate conditions we have brought about, and when nationalism has risen and xenophobia internationally has reared its head yet again in increasingly virulent and violent ways, how does culture respond? And how do museums remain relevant in such times, especially when various publics and foundations are calling on museums to be publicly accountable for the ways in which they make decisions and for the ways they work? It is in this context, and at this urgent moment, that I believe we must be able to identify the biases of our museums, to understand the worldviews they both promote and marginalise, and to interrogate these ways of being, working, organising and making culture.
My book, Culture strike: art and museums in an age of protest, not only offers analyses of the sometimes-obscured problematics of museums, but also points toward some ways they can be better for more people—questions I approach through speculative thought, including on how we might act collectively to achieve these important transformations in the cultural field. Via these two sides of the same coin, I hope that with some care and patience, as well as some fortitude, we might look deeply at what can and should shift, and then imagine how.
Adapted from the introduction to the book by the same name (Verso, 2021)
[1] In full, an amicus curiae brief is ‘a written submission to a court in which an amicus curiae (literally a “friend of the court:” a person or organization who/which is not party to the proceedings) can set out legal arguments and recommendations in a given case,’ [translator’s note]. Source: ‘Glossary,’ European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), https://www.ecchr.eu/en/glossary/amicus-curiae-brief/ [accessed: 29 February 2024].
[2] American Alliance of Museums, as cited by Philip Kennicott, ‘Is it a museum or not? The question is worth asking’, Washington Post, 12 October 12 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/is-it-a-museum-or-not-the-question-is-worth-asking/2018/10/12/54eded68-c5c1-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html [accessed: 29 February 2024].
[3] International Council of Museums (ICOM), ‘Glossary’, Art. 3, Statutes, 2007 as quoted by UNESCO. Institute for Statistics at: https://uis.unesco.org/en/glossary-term/museum [accessed: 29 February 2024].
Odniosłam się też do komentarza redaktora/-rki, bo dokonałam nieco innego podziału na akapity w tej części. Tak lepiej/bardziej logicznie brzmi.
[4] International Council of Museums (ICOM), ‘ICOM announces the alternative museum definition that will be subject to a vote’, 25 July 2019, https://icom.museum/en/news/icom-announces-the-alternative-museum-definition-that-will-be-subject-to-a-vote [accessed: 29 February 2024] .
