Creating Inclusive Museums
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Catherine Cooper: My name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with ... Dr. Porchia Moore: Hi. My name is Dr. Porchia Moore. I'm the rotating program head of Critical Museum Studies at the University of Florida. Dr. Rose Paquet: Hi. I'm Rose Paquet. I am an independent scholar and artist living in California. Aletheia Wittman: I'm Aletheia Wittman. I am an independent consultant and coach working with museums and the cultural heritage sector. I am in Seattle. Catherine Cooper: Wonderful. Thank you all so much for joining us today. To kick off the conversation, I'd like to ask each of you how you became involved with the discussion of inclusion in museums. What are your stories? Aletheia Wittman: The way that I came to this subject and personal connection with this subject, is really through starting my graduate studies at the University of Washington. I was getting a degree in museum studies. Rose and I were in the same class. We had different tracks to the research and to projects that we were doing. But through seeking out resources, voices, some practices that were emerging in the field related to inclusion that we really were looking to, to understand inclusion better, so that it could inform our research and our areas of inquiry. We were really feeling at a loss for where to go for those resources. So for us, it was really this connection that we had, that we were both interested in subjects that are leading us to asking new questions about inclusion, "Who's talking about inclusion? What are the different frameworks for talking about inclusion?" For me, I was really interested in the lens of social justice as the fore of how I was investigating emerging curatorial issues in museums. I was interviewing people at different art museums that were talking about how they were committed to social justice. I really wanted to understand, what was the conversation like, before I arrived as an emerging scholar and person who wanted to enter the field. I was really wanting to know, "Where can I build my work from? And how can I find community in accessing information about inclusion?" Really building and making my practice one that I felt ethically good about, both as someone who wanted to work in museums and a scholar. Dr. Rose Paquet: Like Aletheia said, we met when we were in this graduate program, both investigating questions of inclusions from different perspectives and from different projects. I'd moved to Seattle from living in Alaska and working on repatriation projects for a museum called the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak, Alaska. I had experienced a sense of vibrancy around museum really being a place and a resource for the community in terms of the stories that were being told and how they did their work. In Seattle, I was working with an organization that was offering art classes and museum visits to adults who were experiencing homelessness or recovering from homelessness. That became the focus of my work in the museology program; really trying to look at it from the perspective of people who tend to not be included in museums. In fact, I would encounter homeless people sitting outside the museum in Seattle and felt this dissonance of, "We want the museum to be for all people and for our community, and here are people who maybe we consider not part of our community, although they're sitting right here.” What are the resources we have? We have shelter. We have art. We have these things that provide wellness. All sorts of things for people." I don't think in a prescriptive way. Whatever it is, it is valuable regardless of your background. I was focusing my work on that. From the perspective of, "People who had been homeless and who were homeless, how would they want to engage with the museum? What would be meaningful to them?" That’s how we started the Incluseum —as a space that could connect people, connect ideas, and show that this is a network and there are a lot of people who care about these matters. Together we create more strength for this work to happen in the world, rather than working in isolation or in a way that you think, "I'm the only one who cares," which is really saddening and can be discouraging, so building that momentum together. Dr. Porchia Moore: It's so interesting, every time we share that story it's like I get excited because, quite literally, discovering the work that Aletheia and Rose began changed my life. In 2011, I was enrolled in a library information science program at the University of South Carolina. I had been awarded a Laura Bush 21st Century Leadership Librarian Grant. It stands for Cultural Heritage Informatics Leadership Librarian, or CHIL Librarian. It was a small cohort of us, about eight. Our responsibility was to look across the GLAM sector, so galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, and identify and attempt to solve some really critical problems across the GLAM sector for the 21st century. My mother was a fourth grade teacher. She was largely in charge of organizing her school field trips, so I would go with her. Most weekends, instead of us going to a football game or a basketball game, we would hop in the car and go check out a historic site. My mother was really into history and culture. Her love of history and culture definitely shaped my love and passion and understanding of it. So being in this doctoral program where our entire lens was looking at problem solving across the GLAM sector. And we could also specialize, so I specialized in museums. I also earned a graduate certificate in museum management. One of the critical issues that was really important for me is, as someone who was born and raised in the Deep South, someone who is female bodied and Black, when I would go on these trips, I would be invigorated by beauty and the history and memory, and all of that, but I would often feel like there was a lot missing, a lot of narratives missing. I really wanted to try to also understand why when I would go on these trips, I would either be the only person or one of a small handful of people of color. So that was my original guiding question in my doctoral program and my doctoral research. Then I was really fortunate enough to be able to have a mentor and connect with other doctoral students in the education department who introduced me to critical race theory and this notion around scholarship as a form of activism. So thinking about activist scholarship and thinking about the power of problem solving within that context. Within the context of museums, thinking about repatriation, restoration, social justice, as Aletheia mentioned. I became really, really frustrated because I was not seeing language or ideology or even analytical frameworks that helped me really understand and unpack this issue of barriers to participation in museums. Then somehow I discovered The Incluseum. I was like literally shouting, "Oh, my gosh, these people speak my language. I found my people." So I reached out. I think I heard back from both Aletheia and Rose, but I know that Rose and I spoke for well over an hour in our first conversation. I was so elated. I was looking for new language and new rhetoric, so words like liberation. One of the things that I really did not understand is why within museums we were constantly still having a conversation about diversity, because diversity is a really hegemonic term that does not in any way speak to dismantling current systems of practice or thinking about future building . So this notion around inclusion, I thought to have this collaborative inquiry space where we could all collectively unpack what that word inclusion meant for us in our little part of the globe was really, really important. Dr. Rose Paquet: We'd been talking about publishing a book for a few years prior to working on this concrete project. We thought, "Oh, it'd be fun to do something like this together." Bounced around different ideas. It seemed that with the coming 10-year anniversary of The Incluseum, and of our work together, it was a good time to look back this last decade and everything that transpired in this work together, and what we've learned, so that we can also look forward and position ourself for the future. I was finishing my doctoral studies, this was a couple years ago, and it seemed like, "Wow, maybe some of this research I'm doing for my dissertation could be well suited for the book." So these different pieces started to come together about what this book could include with different reflective pieces, and then a bit of a research piece, and then a looking forward piece. I was like, "Wow, here we go. This is it. We’ve got it." Dr. Porchia Moore: I will also jump in and just kind of say, I think, like she said, we have been talking about writing a book for a really long time. I also feel like a kind of catalyst for writing the book was, especially at the height of the quarantine and COVID-19, was kind of taking a critical assessment of the field in general. In particular in 2020, when we saw so many museums closing and people being laid off and furloughed and we saw open letters, that museum landscape seemed really, really rocky, if you will. We thought it was the perfect time to be able to take an assessment, to be able to look back, especially in light of this notion around museum activism. Rose, Aletheia, and I were dubbed museum activists very early on. We were trying to figure out what that really meant, but we were identified as change agents. I think we all collectively felt like change agents, but I think, like Rose said, it was just a perfect timing to look back at the impact of The Incluseum as a project, look at all of these wonderful collaborators that we've been able to work with for about a decade. And how all of that synergy coming together at varying
United States
