The Engaged Museum

PDF: The_Engaged_Museum.pdf 

Saturday, April 6, 2006
Panel Discussion
The Engaged Museum

Janet Marstine, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Music and the M.A. in Museum Professions program, Seton Hall University
Susan Schwartzenberg, Senior Artist, Exploratorium, San Francisco
Jill Sweet, Professor of Anthropology, Skidmore College

Moderator: Lisa Aronson, Associate Professor of Art History, Skidmore College
Introduction: Susan Bender, Professor of Anthropology, Skidmore College

Conference transcript editing by Sarah Goodwin, Professor of English, Skidmore College; copyediting by Kathryn Gallien.


Susan Bender: Good morning. Let me add my warmest welcome to John’s. It is indeed a pleasure, I must say, as well as a bit humbling, to host such an accomplished group of conferees. As a context for what is about to unfold, I would like to provide you with a little bit of a personal-cum-institutional perspective on the work that has led to this conference.

Today’s gathering feels like a milestone in a journey that began 15 years ago under the leadership of then-President David Porter and Dean of the Faculty Phyllis Roth. That is when Skidmore faculty and administrators came together not only to plan a program for our newly envisioned college museum, but also to select an architect to realize that vision. In keeping with our academic history of interdisciplinarity, we decided from the outset that our museum should function both as a gallery to display works of art and as space to mount exhibitions aimed at provoking interdisciplinary inquiry. We chose as our architect Antoine Predock, because he understood best what we were after in our program; and he was able to envision how to make our ideas manifest in the museum building through references to geological and cultural history, as well as intersecting sight lines in the space. While the task of overseeing the building’s construction fell almost entirely on the shoulders of the museum’s then-skeletal staff, creating its interdisciplinary program was from the outset a collaborative effort between the museum staff and faculty. The museum staff were decidedly way out in front of the rest of us, and I might add it was also a pretty scary thing for all of us to embark on many of these conversations.

In my role at the time as an associate dean I oversaw and looked for multiple ways to support efforts to collaborate with faculty. Key questions that we grappled with—and these are questions that I heard yesterday as well—were: How do we entice busy faculty into working outside their usual comfort zones and encourage them to truly engage the possibilities presented by our interdisciplinary exhibition program? How do we even make such a program happen? One answer was to recruit faculty to co-curate interdisciplinary shows. That is where I moved from administrator to willing faculty guinea pig. An archeologist by training, I always understood the power of objects and images to convey meaning. But in my collaboration with Malloy Curator Ian Berry, and professors Richard Wilkinson [Anthropology/Archaeology] and Bernie Possidente [Biology], I was brought into a new world of creating object lists (I didn’t know what that was), writing wall text, and making provocation through visual juxtaposition in the galleries. Indeed, I think it wasn’t until our show [The World According to the Newest and Most Exact Observations: Mapping Art and Science, 2001] was finally hung that I really understood everything that we had to say about mapping. While my own understanding of museum exhibition was profoundly affected by this experience, from an institutional point of view the show’s greatest success was that so many of my faculty colleagues came away from it saying, “Now I get it, now I see what the Tang is supposed to be doing.” That show, which hung in the gallery upstairs five years ago, has since been followed by five faculty-curated and co-curated shows, with the sixth one, Molecules That Matter, scheduled to open in the fall of 2007.

As our faculty has come to understand the purpose and possibilities of these shows, as well as a number of provocative exhibitions of contemporary artworks, such as the Kara Walker pieces that you see displayed here, they have been encouraged to experiment with using exhibits as text and laboratory in teaching their students. All of us engaged in this work have discovered how different this work is from usual faculty ways of uncovering and revealing knowledge. Workshop discussions yesterday make it clear that we are not alone in this discovery. You heard yesterday about how our attempts to bridge this gap led to Fred Wilson’s residency at Skidmore. The diverse background of today’s speakers—museum professionals and critical theorists, faculty and artists—reflects the wide range of topics that our conversations with Fred have covered.

Our panelists’ impressive array of experiences is summarized in biographies found in your conference packets. We will keep our introduction to each panel quite brief in an effort to provide ample room for the fascinating conversation that we are quite sure is about to unfold today. Welcome to you all and thank you for your contributions to our successful conversation.

Lisa Aronson: Good morning. My name is Lisa Aronson. I teach art history here at Skidmore College, and I have been asked to moderate this panel, entitled “Engaged Museum.” It will be drawing, as I am already beginning to see, on all the rich ideas and intellectual exchanges thus far; but more particularly it will look at specific case studies or specific experiences that people have had working with exhibitions in museums.

I come to this panel because of my own experience overseeing a number of student exhibitions, including one that I did in 2001 on African body arts. It was in conjunction with a seminar that I taught at the time. The exhibition was entitled Africa Embodied: Language of Adornment. It utilized works of art from the Tang and also from private collections. In the space of 13 weeks, we as a class went and got the objects, researched them, considered ways to group them—by which I mean conceptualized the show—wrote the labels, and with the Tang staff arrived at the most effective ways to exhibit them. And then of course we did just that. It was exhausting, and as well it was exhilarating. The students truly owned that show. They organized the opening, they invited African dancers and performers to come, and we saw more students in that show and present here in the museum than we had up to that point here at the Tang. I am again teaching that seminar this semester, and while we are not doing that show again—it really was an exhausting experience—I am having the students work on pieces that are in the Tang collection, writing labels for it and thinking more hypothetically about how these pieces could be grouped together. It is this kind of engagement that we want to be talking about on this panel today.

I will introduce the three panelists briefly, and then each of them will speak. First we are going to hear from Janet Marstine. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Music at Seton Hall University, where she teaches in a masters program in museum professions. She explains to me that they teach everything about museums but curatorship. In 2005 she published her edited volume, New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction, in which she includes an essay about the Tang, and it is that essay, I think, that brought her here today. She is currently working on a book titled Feminist Curation and the Post-Museum: Theorizing Change.

Our second panelist will be Susan Schwartzenberg. Susan is a senior artist at the San Francisco Exploratorium; that is a science museum of sorts, but even more a kind of laboratory for the exploration of scientific ideas and human perception. It is also a space—what Susan describes as a creative lab or studio—to which artists are invited to come and explore their own work; so it is its own form of that petri dish that Fred Wilson was talking about yesterday.

Finally we are going to hear from Jill Sweet, professor of anthropology here at Skidmore College. She teaches about Native American cultures, most particularly in the Southwest with a particular focus on aesthetic expressions, including dance; and more recently she has been looking at the impact of tourism, community development, and other contemporary topics related to expressive culture. In 2002—and this is the real reason that she is here today—Jill co-curated an exhibition here at the Tang titled Staging the Indian: The Politics of Representation. She used Skidmore’s complete collection of Edward S. Curtis photographs as her point of departure to essentially deconstruct those images, and she did it by inviting Native American contemporary artists here to participate and respond to Curtis’s work.

Let me begin by welcoming Janet Marstine. The title of her talk—and it’s exhaustive—is “The Transformative Exhibition, the Museum Intervention, and the Transformative Pedagogy; New Museum Theory: What Students Need.”

Janet Marstine: I am glad you said it because I didn’t want to. In conversations with colleagues over the past few years I have been surprised to find that there are sharp disagreements over the state of the university museum today. Some, with a dismissive hand and grimace, complain that the university museum is the dinosaur of display institutions, too bound up in agreements made with alumni and the red tape of university administration, in the woes of cost-cutting and in the pressure to market itself as a tourist attraction, to take on a leadership role in the 21st century. Others, with a hopeful smile and an appreciative nod, champion the university museum as the harbinger of the future, a utopian laboratory that effortlessly generates critical thinking. University museums do come in a bewildering array of sizes, shapes, and forms. What is clear is that the dearth of research on the teaching potential of the university museum has led to the polarization of voices. What are needed are initiatives such as Skidmore’s to encourage study and discussion of the topic.

It is my own view that the university museum does have something special to offer and can in fact become a model of the emerging post-museum. The post-museum is an institution that clearly articulates its agenda, strategies, and decision-making processes and continually reevaluates them in a way that acknowledges the politics of representation. It shares power with the communities it serves, including source communities. The post-museum listens and responds sensitively as it encourages diverse groups to become active participants in museum discourse. It does not shy away from difficult issues, but exposes conflict and contradiction. And most importantly, the post-museum addresses human rights and prompts social understanding. As the example of the Tang demonstrates, making the university museum a centerpiece of the curriculum—thus opening it up to scrutiny from diverse scholarly perspectives—is a powerful means to create an emerging post-museum.

The university museum has the potential for transformation because of its ability to assume risk. Most other kinds of museums, in meeting the needs of a wide audience and attracting a range of funding sources, aim to minimize risk, to control institutional narrative by defining from the outset a project’s end result and ensuring that this conclusion follows from a script. Alternative spaces, such as street corners and cyberspace, assume risk as their primary objective; and while they provide input for transformation in the museum, their ephemeral and radicalized nature in many cases eschews institutions altogether. I see the university museum as a third space, protected by intellectual freedom. The third space of the university museum can develop interdisciplinary, open-ended projects without forgone conclusion and can foster multilayered connections and contradictions rather than linear exegesis. By guiding the diverse campus community of students, faculty, and administrators from across the curriculum to become stakeholders, as Fred has done at Skidmore, the university museum can become a third space that prompts critical thinking and redresses social inequities.

Particularly as institutions reject notions of the university museum as a storehouse and reconceptualize themselves as meeting places, spaces of encounter, they have the power to generate a thriving learning community. To exploit its transformative potential, however, the university museum in my estimate must accept certain responsibilities. First, staff must be willing to examine closely held assumptions—particularly choices and behaviors long naturalized as the best practice in museum work—and to share the evaluative process with the university community. The museum interventional critique as defined by Fred’s installations is the most effective means to question common practice. An artist-driven theoretically savvy project or exhibition that identifies and challenges the underlying value systems encoded in institutional narratives, the museum intervention provokes museum staff and audiences to participate in the critical discourse on power and representation. In the university museum it capitalizes on the academic rigor and intimacy of the campus community to galvanize students. Museum interventions are perhaps the riskiest of exhibition strategies as the institution gives up control to an outside source, the artist; but there is a direct relationship between risk taking and the intensity of a learning experience. In fact, the intervention may be the most profound kind of learning opportunity in the museum. As Fred’s work demonstrates, museum critique is a telling means of examining the most pressing issues of our day. Fred asserts, “The museum is a microcosm of the society to which it belongs,” and it is the act of artist interventions and critiques through learning experiences that are always participatory, often collaborative, and sometimes even performative that most directly lead students to reassess that culture. The popularity and success at university museums of Fred’s exhibition objects and installations and Mark Dion’s digs and curiosity cabinets, as well as multi-artist critiques such as Deep Storage at the Henry [Art Gallery, Seattle] and Blind at the Museum at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, indicate that campus communities see these projects as vehicles to field discourse.

Second, university museums must commit to long-term change fueled by insights from the intervention; university museums, with greater transparency, self-scrutiny and power sharing can become models of the emerging post-museum. In response to criticism that the impact of museum intervention is short-lived, creating a rhetoric of change rather than change itself, some university museums have found ways to continue their efforts through ongoing exhibition series, such as BAM’s [Berkeley Art Museum’s] Matrix and the Henry’s Short Stories, and through unique ventures like Skidmore’s Program in Object Exhibition and Knowledge. Moreover, individual curators, educators, directors and other museum staff are working to transform museum policy so that change does not occur only in some designated wing of the museum or at some designated time of the year, but is embraced throughout the institution. Transparency, including declarative wall text, is key to meaningful discourse. By articulating a project’s agenda and the questions and controversies that arise in development, the university museum empowers students, faculty, and administrators to become full partners in learning.

Third, the university must accept responsibility for teaching critical museum theory as a means to help students and the wider campus community to embrace and to call into action that deeply transformative potential of artist interventions and critiques. Artists such as Fred who create museum interventions and critiques have been major players in defining new museum theory, and only by understanding its precepts can students really grasp the subversive nature of the intervention. It is no accident that many of the most innovative university museums and galleries—for example the Grey [Art] Gallery at NYU, the University of Toronto Art Centre, the California College of the Arts Wattis Institute and the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies—are bolstered by strong museum and curatorial study programs with a central theoretical component. But to realize the full potential of the university museum across campus, schools must not simply ghettoize critical museum theory and museum studies programs, but infuse them across the curriculum. There are many ways to infuse museum theory across the curriculum: it can be the subject of seminars, a unit in the methodology course, the foundation for a student-driven exhibition, a subtext for special events, and a framework through which faculty and students across the arts and sciences discuss processes of classification and representation. Fred’s seminars with faculty here at Skidmore have prepared professors from diverse disciplines to share with students key issues in museum theory through a wide range of strategies; such an approach can become the linchpin for transforming the university gallery into a laboratory of critical thinking.

I believe that the student-driven exhibition is among the most profound means to explore and integrate attitudes from new museum theory. The student-driven exhibition involves high risk—one has to be willing to accept that some projects may go awry—but if the university is really committed to using the museum as a laboratory it must embrace process over product. Now is an opportune time for curators and directors of university museums to open their spaces to students, not just as viewers or as interns learning professional practice, or as classmates churning out annual student shows, but as critical thinkers with the potential to effect change. Providing students a space to consider the parameters of the post-museum as they examine the relationships among the exhibition, the permanent collection, museum policy, and their own academic work reinforces the unique mission of the university museum as a pedagogical tool. By entertaining the model of the post-museum, students, with support from faculty, can take part in the decision making that defines the politics of representation and ready themselves to claim a place at the table as museums rethink and revise their agendas.

The student-driven exhibition informed by museum theory is collaborative in nature, with clear educational objectives and self-reflexivity. There is no established hierarchy, although projects might dictate that certain positions take leadership at particular moments in time. All student participants, including curators, exhibit designers, educational programmers, registrars, Web designers, tour guides, and others are asked to see their contributions as part of a larger framing process. In the student exhibition modeled after the post-museum, frames are challenged, fragmented, and made transparent as the project creators declare themselves active players in the construction of meaning. What’s typically marginalized or beyond the frame is brought inside of it to dissolve the frame itself. Projects are culturally sensitive; they openly engage difficult issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class to promote social understanding. Ideally, student-driven exhibitions have a strong curatorial vision articulated through wall text, multimedia, and brochures that reveal authorship, define goals, and discuss choices made. Exhibition design is methodology considered. Installations support the consideration of multiple viewpoints, make theoretical connections, and spark critical inquiry. The theoretically grounded student exhibition uses resources creatively, not only from the museum’s permanent collection and from lending institutions, but also from around campus and the community: outdated equipment from a science lab, a student’s or professor’s private collection, even student note taking can become the impetus for a student exhibition. For example, Communicating Otherness: Cultural Encounters, organized in 1996 by Elizabeth Hallam and Nicky Levell at the Brighton Museum and [Art] Gallery, put on display the research notes of anthropology graduate students from the University of Sussex, including work from the field, the archives and the museum. By exposing this usually private domain, the show revealed processes of constituting representations.

Student exhibitions can also present more than just material collections; they can tell stories, project sound, and exist solely as a Web presence. Students engaged in education and outreach for theoretically charged projects show an attitude of respect for audience that puts project participants and visitors on equal footing. They generate constructive learning opportunities that empower the visitor to become an active and politicized participant in an open-ended educational experience. In addition, student participants make a concerted effort to get to know their audiences by assessing the quality of the visitors’ experience. They engage in front-end evaluation to respond to visitors’ suggestions before, not just after, an exhibition is complete. They acknowledge diverse learning styles and offer a variety of means for the campus and local community to participate, and they recognize that visitors process the museum through the lens of their own experience and value systems.

Some student-driven exhibitions also create Web sites to provide new pathways to interaction. The student exhibition’s Web site can offer detailed context, interactive activities, and a glimpse into the project’s inner workings—including curators’ journals, designers’ sketches. It can also include discussion pages where visitors communicate directly with project participants and even help shape exhibitions. Projects that engage the post-museum conclude with an assessment of how the exhibition encouraged critical thinking, how goals were met, and how the experience helped participants envision future projects, as students, as museum constituents, and as emerging professionals. In an ideal world one exhibition builds upon another to create a learning community of students committed to examining the politics of representation. Susan Bender, with the assistance of Fred and the Tang Museum staff, engaged in this process with her spring 2005 senior seminar in anthropology. Given their own exhibition space in the mezzanine of the Tang, the students created many different heavens which introduced non-Western perspectives to the museum’s concurrent Eurocentric exhibition, A Very Liquid Heaven<, on the history of astronomy. This was a bold move that many university museums, fearing that student projects could undermine the institution’s authority, would never take; but Tang Museum staff had the confidence to know that a student critique of a major exhibition only serves to encourage discourse, the primary mission of the institution.

Student papers, which were so generously shared with me, demonstrate how such projects have the potential to create systemic pedagogical change. Students learn firsthand the benefits of revealing conflict and contradiction. For example, one remarks, “By contrasting so many different sky traditions originating from areas all over the world, our exhibit successfully achieved disorder and dialogue.” Students also came to see the difficulties of abandoning “othering” and the necessity of rethinking best practice. Typical is this participant who wrote insightfully, “Challenges to representing non-Western cultures are pervasive and perhaps impossible to overcome without directly and explicitly challenging traditional ways of representation.”

Student exhibition should not be limited by the schedules of on-campus gallery spaces; creating virtual exhibitions could be a liberating process, for these opportunities invite participants to rethink what they assume to be the parameters of the museum. In a virtual exhibition students can reject the masculine space of the traditional museum architecture and generate plans appropriate to feminist curation. They can create interactivity that collapses the boundaries between museum educators and visitors. They can form collaborations with students from other universities around the world. They can become activists who link their projects to Web sites with social, political, and economic agendas. And they can create ’net art that undermines the traditional museum as a patriarchal and fetishistic structure.

By definition the Web is all about building networks and communities, real and virtual. In opposition to the unapproachable museum, the Web is infinitely addressable. Media theorist Toshiya Ueno describes the Internet as a way for people who are physically distant from each other to forge strong ideological ties as in a diaspora. Students dissatisfied with the kind of community that museums produce can design projects with a singular presence in cyberspace and that are expanded by the user. Web-based exhibitions can shift authority to community, freeing users to transform a site and themselves, though the presence of the creator is usually still inscribed. Online exhibitions can spawn collaborations between curators, between users, and between curators and users who often become artists in the process. The beauty of such projects lies in their inherent changeability and sensitivity to the users’ needs and desires. His model, of course, differs markedly from the museum, where an entrenched hierarchy and capital investment dictate a slow pace of change. Web-based exhibitions, whether maintained solely in cyberspace or brought into the physical space of the gallery, can help students to envision a post-museum that is flexible and dynamic.

It is easy for university administrators, faculty, and museum staff at other kinds of institutions to dismiss as a special case Skidmore’s project of making its museum into a centerpiece of the curriculum. And indeed, a specific set of variables has come together to make this project work. Skidmore is an elite private college with a strong undergraduate program that has long privileged critical thinking. It has an administration that recognizes the value of the arts in interdisciplinary learning. The Tang is a new museum without historical entanglements that might hinder older spaces from reinventing themselves. It has a small permanent collection and its leaders understand that its most important resource is ideas. Its architectural design by Antoine Predock and particular location on campus encourage making connections and creating collaborations. Fred’s residency with support from the Luce Foundation has introduced museum theory across the curriculum and has facilitated the process of translating theory into practice.

But it is important to understand that these projects are not merely the domain of well-endowed prestigious college and university museums. The primary ingredient is visionary leadership that promotes the museum as a bridge to interactive learning, and such leadership is cropping up in unexpected places across the landscape of higher education. In a recent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, the president of Queensborough Community College describes its gallery as “at once a laboratory and textbook for students from all disciplines.” Nursing classes use it to explore artist therapy; chemists’ courses spotlight conservation issues. As museum professionals, academics, and artists, it is our job to prompt this model of the university museum or gallery as a means for change, both within the university and without. Some museum theorists argue that museums by definition cannot change and they are fast becoming obsolete. By nature they are patriarchal and imperialistic. The skeptics point out that the mere act of display is always a political process that imposes a hierarchy. I hope that museums can in fact change, and that object-based learning is an essential part of undergraduate and graduate education. And I consider the post-museum a powerful agent of cultural- and self-examination by empowering students to become critical visitors and in some cases museum workers, academics, and artists. The university museum has the potential to lead in the creation of the post-museum. We must become activists to see this development to fruition.

Lisa: Now if you have any pressing questions or comments, hold your thoughts, because we are going to wait until after the three presentations. Our next presenter is Susan Schwartzenberg, and her talk is roughly titled “From Private to Public: Empathy and the Experimental State.”

Susan Schwartzenberg: [Slides] The Exploratorium looked like this about 30 years ago. That little guy in the middle there is Frank Oppenheimer. Frank Oppenheimer started the Exploratorium in 1969. I was just reading some of his papers, which you can find on our Exploratorium Web site, and I found one little paper—it is just three pages, published in Curator Magazine in 1969—called “Rationale for a Science Museum.” It is interesting to see what he wrote and what actually happened. He envisioned the idea of a museum that would really be a place where people would connect more directly to phenomena. Frank was a physicist; he went to Cornell and Cal Tech, he worked on the Manhattan Project, he was an educator at the University of Minnesota and was black-listed during the McCarthy era, lost his job, and became a cattle rancher for about 10 years (and a quite good one, apparently!) and a farmer. When the fog lifted he came out of it wanting to develop a museum. I think from those Manhattan Project days a lot of the scientists went on to feel that for people to be informed citizens they really needed to understand the fundamental principles of science, and that possibly by making people empowered they could make better decisions and even vote the right way if some of these issues ever came to the ballot. So he went around the world looking at science museums and came up with this idea for the Exploratorium.

I have this image of him there, and I asked a lot of the staff that remembered him, “What’s he doing?” And that’s the whole point: this is his office and he built exhibits at the Exploratorium. One of the ideas was that we would make displays that would connect people more to nature, but another idea is that we would gather all of the kinds of props that people use in their classroom, scientists and professors, and bring them to the Exploratorium and people would check them out, and when they came we would also provide some other help with explainers kind of helping them understand. If a power plant closed its operation, we would take their generator and we would have it on the floor so people could see how big the machinery really is. Frank was a musician as well, and he knew the role that art could play in connecting people more to the natural world and to phenomena and to their own sense of who they were. One of the first exhibits we had came from an exhibition that was traveling—I think it started in LA, maybe around Cal Tech; somebody here probably knows where exactly it originated from. It was Experiments in Art and Technology, and it was artists, scientists, and researchers who built some wild and fantastic pieces. We have some of those in our museum. One day they forgot to close the doors and people started wandering in, and Frank said, “Well, I guess we are open,” and that’s how it started. We had a machine shop that encouraged making things. There were expatriates, I call them, from industry, people who worked at Bechtel or IBM—remember this is in the late ’60s or early ’70s—and a lot of college students who really wanted to go anywhere else, but still be in a creative college-type atmosphere, I guess.

We made a million things. I have these slides here in no order at all really. This was just taken a few days ago, but it has that same spirit of people connecting directly to things that are made and testing their sense of what these things are, what they mean, and what they can learn about themselves in the process. The exhibits are all built on-site. The machine shop has continued to grow; we don’t have many people that have left industry anymore, but we have a lot of young art students that have graduated from CCA or the Art Institute and they don’t really know yet what to do with themselves. We welcome them in, and they know how to make things. By working with teachers and our staff scientists, gradually they become interesting exhibit developers. The Exploratorium’s philosophy now is called constructivist, or inquiry-based science. At the time it was kind of like the existentialism of education or something: it is just you and your experience and the phenomena. So often you see people in weird states in that place, learning something.

We have a strange relationship to objects. I have been hearing people talk about objects and collections. We are happy to say that we really don’t have a collection, and we don’t have anything that you can’t touch, but in fact we have about 700 things that we can’t throw out. We are just now, in the last 10 years, beginning to decommission things. Usually they get recycled in some interesting way, and usually there is a fantastic story about how something arrived. You know, hello, this is a sound board from a piano, and you make the strings go [noise] and you can watch the vibration patterns in a strobe light. This is in a section about sound and hearing. There is always a story connected to these objects, and someone here should do an ethnography of this place because the stories are quite fantastic, almost fantasies about how these exhibits came to be.

The founding principle of the Exploratorium was perception. Frank wanted to call it the Exploratorium, but he didn’t think anyone would know what that meant, so he subtitled it A Museum of Science, Art, and Human Perception, and the earliest exhibits were really about light phenomena, vision, optical illusion, that sort of thing. In this image on the left you can see these disks; there are painted patterns on them, and when they turn, it looks like they are moving. It is kinetic op art, and it is an optical effect; it is in your eye brain. These disks founded the exhibits.

More recently, this toilet here is a new exhibit, and it is in our section called “Mind.” It is about consciousness, and instead of talking about perception we are getting into what we are calling acognition. This is a toilet that has been changed into a drinking fountain. Everyone gleefully watches to see who will drink out of it. There is a sign there that says that this is clean, it has never been used for a toilet before, and so on, but it is interesting to watch people’s inability to drink from it. The Exploratorium has lots of interesting visual contradictions about it.

This is an early picture of the machine shop. Although we don’t have things in cases, we have all those tools in cases there that you see. I don’t know what happened to them, but they were a beautiful collection of tools. You can see and talk to exhibit developers when they are making things. We are in a historic building with a bunch of these old angels around; they are from the Panama-Pacific [International] Exposition in 1915. There is this headless one there that we gave to a gallery that sits over the machine shop in this interesting way, as if to say that the mind is really in the things and not in the icon there. The shop exists right at the front of the museum. We may move, and we’ve talked about renovating the place, and the biggest argument everyone has is about where the shop should be. If the shop isn’t the first thing you see, people are in a panic about the fact that people won’t know we make things. Even though the visitor experience is about playing with things and working with things, from the other point of view, the staff’s side, the idea is really that we make everything. Not very much is made in our culture anymore, and so it is important to us as an institution that people see that, that we still can make things. With prototyping, everything is tried over and over again; it is tried in the shop, it is tried out in the floor, and now we have an evaluation department. Janet outlined beautifully all the ways that things are being done these days. And we are learning more about how people learn.

We have an exhibit development program with visiting artists who are residents and work with the shop and teachers. Some of you may know these two, Patrick Ready and Jim Pomeroy. I put this in for you, actually. This is Ned Kahn. You can see that he is trying out that little prototype in the shop, which turns into that exhibit that you just saw.

The other part of the museum is the public side of it; it is a very public place, and people somehow feel empowered in that environment. I went out to take just a few new pictures before I came. I went up to a bunch of kids and was looking at them and taking a picture, and there were a lot of people standing around, and some kid looked at me and said, “What does it do?” And I thought, you know, I don’t know. We all started playing with it. But I thought, that never happens in an art gallery, where someone looks up at me and asks me what does it mean or what does it do, in the same sort of uninhibited way. We use the floor to experiment a lot with things, trying different exhibits, moving things around. We do a lot of festivals and have special events that happen on the floor. This is a piece by Bill Fontana in the late ’70s—a sound artist—and these are speakers just taped crudely to some chairs as he is piping in sounds from the fog horns across the bay or across the street from us. This was an experiment that Frank wanted to do, having some artists come in and just set up free-form painting studios on the floor so that people could watch a painting in development, thinking that somehow the process of developing an exhibit or understanding is very much about doing something and then changing it and then changing it again and then deciding when it is done; and he felt this might be a really good thing psychologically for people to just see on the floor. I think it drove these two artists nuts, but he didn’t even mind if they were there painting, it was more that you could just see the process.

Everyone thinks we are a children’s museum, and yet it is not just about fun. There is a level of science, of real learning, that we aim for. These bubbles here: our scientists can teach a lot about these bubbles. This whole piece was developed by Ned Kahn as an artwork, getting people to engage and make bubbles, which are really about surface tension. They really show light phenomena; there is a lot of science in bubbles.

We also do a lot of Webcasting. We send teams around the world to show things. There seems to be a whole crazy bunch of people who are in love with eclipses of the sun. This is from a couple of years ago, but you may have seen it: we were in the news recently for sending a team to Turkey. We have people spend the night and they bring their sleeping bags and their kids and school classes come and scientists talk to them for a while, they play with exhibits, they sleep, we feed them a little bit, and then when the eclipse happens we wake everybody up and we all become druids or something. We have all kinds of demonstrations, from Tibetan monks doing butter sculptures to blacksmiths there, and people making violins. The floor is really like a plaza, and we try to use it that way.

Many of us are visual artists; I am really a photographer, Liz Keim is our film curator, and we have an ongoing argument: you hang things on walls; can’t we have walls? We are always arguing about why can’t we have a painting show, or why can’t we integrate other kinds of things in the Exploratorium. And this is a film projection on one of our angels by Jeanne Finley that was in a kind of a temporary exhibition we had. We have done a lot of projecting films outdoors in locations about historic sites or taking phenomena of water and projecting it on sails of boats when people are in the bay, you know, trying to think of ways to bring our ideas out of the walls of our museum.

This is a show that we did with architects and designers; I think it was called Cabin Fever. We had people come in and build structures on our floor that were temporary. There’s also a new thing that we are trying to do a little bit, which I wanted to show because it is similar to what you all are doing: we are beginning to work with college galleries. A team of two of our young exhibit developers went to the Materials Research Lab in Chicago where they are doing emergent studies about the properties of materials and granular studies of things like sand and water. They are working with the scientists in the lab developing prototypes that may come back to the Exploratorium as exhibits. But this college lab is interested in working with their college gallery to possibly do an exhibition, first in the gallery, and then develop an emergence festival about emergent properties. This would be a way of getting students and the university gallery thinking, “We worked a lot with children, maybe if we work with an older group, we can actually extend our education more directly to people who are going to just get jobs and maybe even make a better impact.” So there is some interest there; but rather than working with the faculty only, it is developing things especially for an exhibit. I am hoping we can curate in things from collections too, because that is another interesting way we can enhance what we are doing.

Another project that Peter Richards—the first director of the artists and residents program—and I are working on is a project we are calling Invisible Dynamics. It is bringing artists as residents into the museum, but then sending them out to do projects about the urban world. They are exploring systems that give the Bay Area its character. In this case this is Scott Snibbe and Stamen Design who put GPS devices on Yellow Cabs; then we are getting the feed from the cab company and the red lines—that’s going over the Bay Bridge there, if anyone can recognize the San Francisco pattern here—and the red lines are fast-moving cabs, and the white lines are slower-moving cabs. It makes the city look like an organism, like a heartbeat or something. We are trying to think of different ways to explore phenomena that are more sociological.

This is another project where there is one guy flying a kite with a camera and photographing the renovation of salt ponds. When he was out there working on this, he discovered this guy who is a field biologist who goes around with a little microscope making films of critters that he finds in those same sites. We have attached a curator to them to try to make sense of this different micro/macro world that they are discovering about one place, on totally different scales. We are hoping we can make some sense out of looking at the world from the point of view of different scales.

Just in ending, I want to say that we are all in the business of education. That means asking questions of ourselves, but I suppose even more really empowering whoever your clientele is to feel that they can come away from an event and have it form them as a person. It is about self-confidence, in the end, that you feel empowered to move on and make a decision or do whatever you are going to do next. I just wanted to put this thought in your head: that the place is not as important as what you put in people’s minds, and to think about your place in flexible ways. Thank you.

Lisa: Thank you Susan. Our third and last speaker is Jill Sweet. The title of her talk is, “Is There Life after the Exhibition Comes Down?”

Jill Sweet: This was my first experience of designing an exhibition. I should have been used to this sort of thing, because I was a dancer and a choreographer, and you get used to the fact that your performance is over, and—oh my gosh—we worked so hard and now there’s nowhere to go. I should have been used to that. But when they finally came to taking the exhibit down it broke my heart, of course. Now I am learning and finding out that what we did that spring has made a tremendous impact on my scholarship; it has made a tremendous impact on my teaching; and it has made a tremendous impact on the many students that have been involved in it. What I want to talk about with you is coming up with creative ways to make the exhibit continue to make an impact.

The exhibit was originally released here from February 2nd to June 2nd in 2002. The staff at the Tang is the most amazing group of people. I was so green as to how to do this. I had all these wonderful ideas and they made it happen, particularly Ian Berry, who just put a professional touch on it and helped steer me from some areas that would have been not so good. All this really began with a problem that I faced in my teaching. I taught many courses on Native Americans, and one of the things that I have done—I just realized that I have been here now 24 years—but right from the beginning, I started a practice on the first day of class of having students close their eyes and picture an Indian and write down what they see, and then we go around and we talk about the image that comes to their mind. It was almost always male individuals that they pictured, it was almost always on horseback on the plains with the feather headdress, and it was always frozen in time; it was always images of people from the past. What I began to realize is that a lot of the images that they were talking about and describing were a lot like Edward Curtis images.

At the same time I discovered my first year here not only that I have this problem of trying to get the students to break away from these static images that they had of native people; but I also discovered that Skidmore has a complete collection, and this is pretty rare. I was totally amazed that little old Skidmore had this. And I wanted to be able to use it, but I suddenly realized that I would just keep perpetuating some of those images that I was trying to get my students to get past. The whole project started out with trying to deal with that problem, and with wanting to do something with this amazing collection that Skidmore has.

I am not going to go into a great amount of detail, but just for those of you who might not be familiar with the Curtis Collection: between 1900 and 1930 Edward Curtis set out to photograph what he considered to be the old-time Indian before the old-time Indian disappeared. At the same time, he collected stories from elders in tribal groups, again trying to capture things before they disappeared and were no longer on the scene. And he had this great view that he was going to come out with volumes—20 volumes of ethnography written about the people, and each volume has the corresponding portfolio. Both the ethnographies and the portfolios are full of the amazing photographs that he took. He has been criticized over the years because sometimes if the Indians didn’t look Indian enough, he would whip out a wig or do a few things to make it seem like the real thing. I discovered—with help from some people that read about Skidmore and the history of this place in old newspapers all the time—that in 1911 Edward Curtis came to Skidmore as part of a tour of the East Coast where he was trying to raise money for these expensive publications that he was doing. He was on schedule to give a talk at Skidmore in 1911; we were then called Skidmore School of Arts, and so I was able to find that out. Then somebody else who was looking at old annual reports—now you know, annual reports, you always feel like you waste your time with those things and you put so much effort into them and nobody uses them—but here we had an annual report from 1940 that showed that the Skidmore board of trustees funded a special chunk of money for the library to purchase this collection. In 1940, the interest in Curtis’s work had dropped tremendously, so we probably got it for a song. Then in the 1970s, he was rediscovered. Now the librarians are telling me it is the most valuable collection that we own and they take very good care of it, so I was a little nervous about asking them if we could pull some of the images out to put them in the exhibit. But we worked that out. Curtis originally planned on producing 500 sets. He stopped at 272. The great depression hit and people couldn’t afford them; and the interest in Native Americans at that time had sort of gone down. So here I was, faced with the fact that Skidmore had this whole collection, and what was I going to do with it to try to help break those stereotypes that my students kept walking in with? Well, it is hard to know where the idea comes from when you are collaborating all the time, but in my conversations with Ian and some of the students—and I had a student do a summer collaborative research project with me when we were trying to decide how to do this—we came up with the notion that we would invite Native American artists to submit works of their own in response to Curtis and his work.

We sent out copies of all of Curtis’s collections to a group of artists. In deciding on the artists that we were going to invite, we made trips down to New York City. Looking at different examples of works and some suggestions from one artist to another, we came up with this list. The people that we invited to participate Marcus Amerman, Judith Lowry, James Luna, Shelley Niro, Nora Naranjo-Morse, and Bently Sprang. We sent them a booklet of all the pictures, and we said, “If there are certain images that you would really like to make sure are in the show, let us know. And these are some of the ones that we can work with. So they helped make the decision about which images we were going to include. I also had some of my favorites that I got in there, too.

I was also very interested in being able to involve students in every step of the way. I started out with a collaborative research grant with one student, and he went with us on those trips to New York and helped make decisions about artists. Then in the fall I taught an honors course; it was the usual course that I teach on North American Indians, but it was taught as an honors course. What that means is not that there is more work, but that it is different kinds of work that the students can do. The project that we were involved in was to do a lot of research on Curtis, to think about the show, and to come up with ideas of how we might do this. After doing all sorts of research on Curtis, they then wrote papers, and I lifted some passages out of their different papers, with their name on them, and we used them eventually in the show for the signage and also in the catalog. So they were able to be part of putting this thing together. It was also kind of ironic, because we had been talking about politics and representation, and suddenly they realized that they were writing about Curtis and representing Curtis. They were a little self-conscious now that they had seen what we all do: we represent other people in words and images. They were thinking about, “Wow, this is what happens, isn’t it?” When the artists came and they were installing their pieces, some of the students were able to go see what they were doing, talk to them a little bit. Some of the artists came to classes and talked about what they were up to, so there was a lot of exchange that way.

I will show you a few slides quickly from the exhibit [Staging the Indian: The Politics of Representation] and then I am going to focus much more on the main topic here.

[Slides.] Marcus Amerman was one of the artists. Edward Curtis’s piece is on the left, and Marcus’s response to it is on the right. Edward Curtis called this “Before the White Man Came,” and it was done in 1924. Of course, that is ironic, that there is Curtis taking a picture of “Before the White Man Came.” The one that Marcus put together in response to that he called “After the White Man Came,” and that’s in 2001.

These are two others; the first one is “In a Piegan Lodge” by Curtis in 1910; Marcus’s response to it was “A Moment in Time.” One of the things about the original Curtis photograph is that when he went to print it he was disturbed to see that there was a wind-up alarm clock between these two wonderful looking guys. He wanted to get that out of there, so he touched it up, to get that out of there. So when Marcus went to do his piece, he put his laptop computer and his digital clock right out front in the foreground there.

This one is Curtis’s “Grinding Meal,” 1907, and Amerman’s “A Day at the Beach,” 2001. This was another one: “Zuni Girls at the River,” 1903 was Curtis’s photograph; the other work was untitled, but it was right in the beginning of the exhibit; you would walk up there to that image and you could walk around the back, put your face up to it and have your photograph taken. So you could kind of reverse the process of the Curtis photographs.

One of the other artists that we brought was Nora Naranjo-Morse. She typically works in clay. She is very involved in her village in Mexico, where you build your house out of adobe; she built her own house. On the left you’ve got Curtis’s photograph of plastering the adobe houses, which they do periodically. The other picture is of her in her studio. She was really moved by three Curtis photographs: one was the women plastering, another one was this older woman working with clay, and the one below it was two little kids sitting in the dirt eating clay. She said about these different images: she liked the image of the older woman because her wrinkly arms blended into the clay, and you couldn’t see where one starts and the other one ends. The two little kids on the bottom meant a lot to her, because she remembered as a child in the pueblo, when dances were going on she would be with her little friends and they would be playing in the dirt and eating dirt. She had the notion of the earth and the dirt being so much a part of her and her culture. The piece that she did for us was entitled “Mud Grandmothers, Mud Mothers, and Mud Me,” and that’s that figure there.

This is by James Luna. We’ve got buffalo dancer photographs by Curtis on one side, and the other is detailed from his “Petroglyphs in Motion,” 2001, and you get a closer picture of what James Luna had to do. Bently Sprang was the next one. When Bently saw the space here—a number of them were able to come and see this space before they actually started their installation—when he saw one of the areas upstairs he was very excited about creating a New York-style boutique that featured authentic Native American objects. You’ve got hanging from the ceiling this drying meat that you might have in a household when you are eating game and drying it and so on. But he also had all these little packages on the wall that would say “Authentic Native American Popcorn” because it was owned by him. One of the biggest controversies of the whole thing was he had one bag that was marked “Authentic Native American Shit.” He had taken brownie mix and put it in there. He looked at me and said, “You anthropologists, you think you’ve studied everything about us; I bet you haven’t studied this.” I said, “Wrong, actually, archeologists have done that, yes, yes, yes.” But anyway, people got a little upset about that.

Shelley Niro and Judith Lowry: Shelley was working with photographs and her piece was called “The Essential Sensuality of Ceremony.” There are two by Judith Lowry. One was the cover, and it was called “My Aunt Viola,” 1996, and the other one is called “Road Kill Warrior,” 2001. The story behind “My Aunt Viola” was great. She remembered her aunt when they had the big country fair in the area; a lot of the people in the area would ask people like her aunt to dress up in “real Indian clothes.” What they would get in return was free tickets to the fair. Judith said, “Why did you do that? Why did you submit yourself to that?” “Well, we got free tickets and it was fun.” That seemed to go along with our exhibit quite well.

Now we are moving into the life after the show. One of the ways that doing this exhibit affected me and my scholarship very directly: I had published a book in 1985, and it was pretty successful. The School of American Research wanted me to do a revision, and I really didn’t want to do it, because you know you get onto other projects, and who wants to go back? But doing this exhibit made me start to think about representation, and it made me go back to my original book and read it from a whole new perspective—how was I representing these people, did I do a decent job, where did I screw up, and all those kinds of things—and so then there was a reason for the project. I did go ahead with a second edition, and I made a lot of changes in terms of bringing the voices of native people right up front, having them represent themselves more, including more native art that was applicable to the whole question of dance. That first piece there, the color piece there, is a piece by Nora Naranjo-Morse, which again came out of working with her on the exhibit.

Another thing that has had happened since then is I have certainly become more interested in the museum world. I took a group of students to New York City to the American Natural History Museum, to see how Native Americans are portrayed. Most of the stuff is back to Franz Boas’s exhibits. We looked at that, and then upstairs they had a very contemporary exhibit. They were presenting and representing Native people in a very different way, where they weren’t just generic representation of a culture, but they were real people. They are making their jewelry and they are talking to you on a video, and we could see a very profound difference since the ’20s; we saw that in terms of dealing with and representing native people, things are getting better. Then I took seven students to Washington, D.C., to the National Museum of the American Indian. We went for four days, and I brought two women from the village of Santo Domingo, old friends of mine, to come out to Skidmore, visit the classes, and then go with us to the exhibit. Neither of them had seen the museum in Washington yet. They were very excited about seeing it. We would spend the day exploring—there’s a lot to explore in that museum—and then at night we would sit around and talk about what we had seen and what we were thinking about. It was a wonderful moment of dialogue between the two women from the Santo Domingo Pueblo and my seven students who had never really interacted with Native people. To see them just really start to appreciate Joan and Pat, the two women from Santo Domingo, as real people, was great; we began to break down some of those barriers that we put up.

Another part of doing this exhibition was going to the different artist studios when we were making decisions about the artists. I was able to finagle the trip to Santa Fe and go to some of the artists’ studios. It was wonderful. And this is just the closing shot that I quite enjoyed, “Watching the Dancers,” 1906, and “Watching the Rally,” 2001. Thank you.

John Weber: Thanks, that was a great panel, and clearly you seeded a discussion that is going to keep going through lunch.