Christy Coleman
Executive Director, Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation
Makeda Best
Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University
Sven Beckert
Laird Bell Professor of History Harvard University
Moderated by Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Dean, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School; Professor of History, Harvard University
Transcript
American historian Christy Coleman is the distinguished lecturer for the 2021 Seminar in Innovative Curatorial Practice. Coleman is renowned for creating innovative, engaging, and inclusive museum exhibitions and programs that tell a comprehensive story of American history. In this program, she will discuss the power that museums have to genuinely engage with communities around what matters most to them. While expertise within the museums is invaluable, it is wasted if not used to help communities address their issues and aspirations.
Established in 2014, the Seminar in Innovative Curatorial Practice is a partnership between the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture and the Harvard Art Museums. The program engages renowned scholars whose innovative and interdisciplinary practice challenges traditional approaches to exhibitions. These innovators share their work with the broader public through a lecture, and with Harvard students and faculty, through discussions focused on rethinking ways to integrate the university’s art, natural history, science, and social science collections with the teaching and research mission of the university.
Virtual Lecture and Discussion presented March 24, 2021 by Harvard Museums of Science & Culture in collaboration with the Harvard Art Museums and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, as part of the presidential initiative on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery.
About the Speakers
With a career spanning over thirty years, Christy S. Coleman has served as the chief executive officer of some of the nation’s most prominent museums. She is a tireless advocate for the power of museums, narrative correction, diversity, and inclusiveness. Ms. Coleman is an innovator and leader in the museum field having held leadership roles at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the American Civil War Museum, and now as Executive Director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. She has written numerous articles, is an accomplished screenwriter, public speaker, and has appeared on several national news and history programs. Most recently, she served as Historical Consultant for the film Harriet and Showtime’s Good Lord Bird miniseries. She has also been a featured public historian for several documentaries, most recently the acclaimed miniseries Grant. Ms. Coleman is the recipient of numerous awards including honorary doctorates from William and Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the University of the South for her decades of impact. In 2018, Time Magazine named her one of the 31 People Changing the South and in 2019, Worth Magazine named her one of the 29 Women Changing the World.
Sven Beckert researches and teaches the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and transnational dimensions. He just published Empire of Cotton: A Global History, the first global history of the nineteenth century’s most important commodity. The book won the Bancroft Prize, the Philip Taft Prize, the Cundill Recognition for Excellence, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times named it one of the ten most important books of 2015. His other publications have focused on the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, on labor, on democracy, on global history and on the connections between slavery and capitalism. Currently he is at work on a history of capitalism. Beckert teaches courses on the political economy of modern capitalism, the history of American capitalism, Gilded Age America, labor history, global capitalism, and the history of European capitalism. Together with a group of students he has also worked on the historical connections between Harvard and slavery and published Harvard and Slavery: Seeking a Forgotten History. Beckert is co-chair of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University and co-chair of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). Beyond Harvard, he co-chairs an international study group on global history, is co-editor of a Princeton University Press book series, America in the World, and has co-organized a series of conferences on the history of capitalism. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. He also directs the Harvard College Europe Program.
Makeda Best is the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums. Her exhibitions include: Time is Now–Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America (2018), Winslow Homer: Eyewitness, and Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art (2019). Her fall 2021 exhibition is Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970. Prior to joining Harvard, she held professorships at the University of Vermont and the California College of the Arts. She has written for numerous catalogs and journals, most recently for the National Gallery of Poland, Kunsthalle Mannheim, The Archives of American Art Journal, The James Baldwin Review and the Rhode Island School of the Design’s Manual. Her most recent book is Elevate the Masses–Alexander Gardner, Photography, and Democracy in Nineteenth Century-America (Penn State Press, 2020). She is coeditor of Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art (2016). Her current book projects explore the intersection between photography, gender, race, and ecological issues. At Harvard, she teaches courses in curatorial practice, and in the history and theory of photography. She holds an MFA in studio photography from the California Institute of the Arts and a PhD from Harvard University.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin is dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is an award-winning legal historian, an expert in constitutional law and education law and policy, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Law Institute, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She has published articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, including the Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence, civil rights law and history, the Affordable Care Act, and education reform. Her 2011 book, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford), won six awards, including the Bancroft Prize in U.S. History. In her new book (Pantheon, forthcoming January 2022), Brown-Nagin explores the life and times of Constance Baker Motley, the pathbreaking lawyer, politician, and judge. In 2019, Harvard president Lawrence Bacow appointed Brown-Nagin chair of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery, anchored at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Brown-Nagin has previously served as faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute and as codirector of Harvard Law School’s law and history program, among other leadership roles. She earned a law degree from Yale University, where she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal; a doctorate in history from Duke University; and a BA in history, summa cum laude, from Furman University. Brown-Nagin held the 2016–2017 Joy Foundation Fellowship at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Transcript
Welcome everybody to the Intentional Museum and it's a great pleasure to have everybody with us today and in a special pleasure to have Christy Coleman as our guest. My name is Peter Galison I'm the professor of history of science and of physics at Harvard, and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to the 202, lecture in innovative curatorial practice.
This annual lecture was established in 2014 through a collaboration between the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture and the Harvard Art Museums. It features renowned artists, curators, and scholars, whose interdisciplinary creative approaches to thinking about and exhibiting objects reshaping the museum field today.
Learning from these innovators is meant to provoke conversations among Harvard's museums and encourage new ways of curating objects across disciplines. In this process we want to rethink how museums can bridge the science and the arts.
How the universities collections are integrated with the teaching and research mission of the university. And ultimately, we seek to give curation an exhibition a central place in the cultural, intellectual, ethical, political landscape at Harvard.
Past practitioners who have featured in this program have included Carolyn Christoc-Bakargiev who's an author and curator, Leah Dickerman from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tom Rockwell from the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Laura Kurgan Columbia University, Fred Wilson an independent artist, and Paola Antonelli the design curator also at MoMA.
This year we are delighted to be partnering with the Harvard Radcliffe Institute to feature Christy Coleman as our 2021 distinguished lecturer. Christy will begin the program with a 30 minute presentation in which she will share her approach to creating innovative exhibitions.
And programs that tell a comprehensive story of American history and discuss the power and responsibilities that museums have to genuinely engage with communities around what matters most to them.
Following her presentation Christie will engage in a conversation with Tamiko Brown-Nagin Dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute Daniel Paul, Professor of constitutional at the Harvard Law School, Professor of history in the Harvard faculty of Arts and Sciences, and chair of the presidential committee on Harvard and the legacy of slavery.
The conversation will also include Makeda Best the Richard Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums and Sven Beckert the Laird Bell Professor of history at Harvard. Makeda is an accomplished scholar, curator, an innovative thinker, and a passionate advocate for teaching with original works of art.
Sven is an historian who specializes in 19th century American history with particular emphasis on the history of capitalism in all of its aspects, including slavery. After about 20 minutes of conversation we will address questions from the public.
Please use the Q&A feature at the bottom of the screen to submit your questions. Our speakers will try to answer as many of these as we possibly can. It's now my pleasure to welcome Martha Tedeschi Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot director of the Harvard Art Museums who will introduce Christy Coleman. Over to you Martha.
Hello everyone. Nice to be with you, thank you Peter. With a career spanning over 30 years Christy S Coleman has served as the chief executive officer of some of the nation's most prominent museums.
She is a tireless advocate for the power of museums, narrative correction, diversity, and inclusion. Miss Coleman is an innovator and a leader in the museum field having held leadership roles at the Colonial Williamsburg foundation, the Charles Wright museum of African-American History, the American Civil War museum as now in her role as the Executive Director of the Jamestown Yorktown foundation.
Christie has written numerous articles and is an accomplished screenwriter, public speaker, and has appeared on several national news and history programs. Most recently she has served as the historical consultant for the John Harriott and Showtime's Good Lord Bird mini series.
She has also been a featured public historian for several documentaries and most recently the acclaimed mini series Grant. Miss Coleman is the recipient of numerous awards, including honorary doctorate from William & Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the University of the South for her decades of impact.
In 2018 Time Magazine named her one of the 31 people changing the South and in 2019 Worth Magazine named her one of the 29 women changing the world. I know you will join me in welcoming and looking forward to hearing from our guest Christy S Coleman.
Hello everyone. Thank you so much for the invitation to join you this is an exciting day and I love whenever I have an opportunity to talk about museums and intentionality. And so today I'm going to take you on a little journey. I hope you will indulge me.
But I'm going to take you a little on a little journey about how this has evolved. And when I say, Intentional Museum what is it exactly that I'm referring to. So I started-- a lot of people may or may not know but I started my career in museums actually relatively young, 17 years old got my first job.
It was a living history character portrayal job scripted beginning of that work. But my first professional job and I say that in that it was a full time job with benefits, actually came when I was 22 in Baltimore, Marilyn at a museum that unfortunately no longer exists.
It was called the Baltimore City Life Museum and it was a relatively new enterprise when I went to work there. The interesting thing about the Baltimore City Life Museums it was six museums that had taken up essentially a city block, but literally across the street from this museum where I was working was a public housing complex.
Those high rise towers that were built in the 70s were literally all around the museum. So this museum was sitting there in the middle of the Lafayette neighborhood. And we didn't have a word for it, today we call it community engagement and all of that.
One of the things that really struck me is that number 1, aside from our security team and our housekeeping team I was the only person of color on the staff. I was the only Black woman and I would every day come to work in the beginning and see black children from the neighborhood at the street corner with buckets of water they used to call them squeegee kids.
And these kids were just trying to make a little money for the summer and unfortunately, the museum saw this as a distraction and potentially as a threat to getting people to come into that section of the city to experience the museum.
I mean, there was a huge brick wall that was constructed and the whole everything facing away from the neighborhood. Things got so bad that the children were constantly chased off by security.
These children would literally have their buckets of water turned over by museum staff to prevent them from standing out front on that corner, this was in the late 1980s. And it greatly bothered me, quite frankly it angered me to see this happening and to see this being approved by the museum.
And so one afternoon-- and again, I had only been there maybe a month or two. But one afternoon I walked out of that building and around the corner where the kids are and I sat down with them and I told them who I was and what I did. And I wanted to know who they were and what they are doing.
And I asked them if they had ever been in the museum and the answer was no. And this was a museum that was talking about the life and the history of the city of Baltimore. And these children were prohibited from being a part of that institution.
So I knew then I had to change the way the folks all around me were thinking about these kids, we're thinking about this neighborhood, and we're thinking about our work. What we had to do, and that experience stayed with me.
And so on the days that I didn't work I actually started hanging out in the neighborhood, in the front yards of these towers talking to the kids and inviting them on the weekends, on usually on Sunday because I had the worst possible schedule my job schedule was Sunday through Thursday.
And on Sunday afternoons I would go and get the kids and I would bring them in and give them tours of the museum. And in time like within the next 18 months, I was doing programming in the schools with the kids.
Now, mind you a lot of this was personal initiative because the museum was not-- there was literally a school two blocks from us and the museum again, was not engaged with the school that these children were going to nor were they engaged with the teachers.
And I started to do this on my own, what do you need? How do we do this? When it was all said and done I had a group of about 15 children from the neighborhood ages 12 to 15 who became junior volunteers.
And they did everything from helping file paperwork in the offices, they were doing interpretation in the living history site, they were working in our archeology museum, they were greeting guests and escorting them to the different buildings.
And all of the vandalism that the museum had experienced prior to my arrival stopped. The children and the community felt a part of the organization. Now, that was over 30 years ago.
But what I found is I moved from one community to the next in progressive jobs and progressive work, what I found is that, museums were at that point finally starting to turn their lens a little bit.
And I might need to correct myself here and say, non ethnic specific museums were starting to turn their attention not just to impressing each other with their exhibitions and programs and the research that they were doing, but they were actually now starting to pay attention to the public that they serve.
And I say that happened in the late 80s and early 90s because that's when our institutions began to come under threat. What was then referred to as the culture wars. And we saw at that time government funding local, state, and federal, funding for museum experiences plummet.
The operating model shifted so now all of a sudden museums really did have to pay attention to what community is doing because they needed them for those ticket sales they needed them as donors.
But were they really listening? That became the question then I again have pondered as I've prepared for today's discussion. And I would say again, aside from ethnic specific museums the answer is likely no.
But we did start to see interesting change because it was during that time in an effort to begin to expand audience reach is that, we were also gaining greater expectation about diversifying the histories that we're being told in some of our most venerated institutions.
There was a desire from the public being driven by the public to want to know more about people who looked like them, what would they have done back then? Women you name it. And so museums were beginning to pivot to respond to that.
And the more that they responded to the public's question questions around these issues there became a greater connect with the academic community because the idea of curators creating all the content or curating all the content that was flowing through the museum, because it was happening so fast because the public demands were so great it became increasingly difficult for them to do that.
And so they turned to those in the traditional academic world i.e. at the colleges, and universities, and the institutes, and so forth for support. And bringing those people into the museum experience to really begin to explore the idea in greater detail of what really is public history.
And public history to me began to formulate as more than just going to the museum and creating memories and playing with fun stuff and seeing fantastic art. But really this confluence became clearer and clearer as time went on.
And I share this comment a lot with folks and I hope you will bear with me. Because I think it's important in understanding the powerful role that an intentional museum has when they recognize this confluence.
The first at least in our field, is the history itself that you are dealing with. Now in your field. It may be art what is this art trying to say? What did either the creator of art or the impact of that art on a community? So that's a slightly different conversation.
But when we're talking about public history there is the forensic evidence, that is what has been left to us and letters, diaries, collaborated oral history, traditions storytelling and the like.
But it is those things that can be reviewed, looked at, studied. Archeology and adding to that or several of the sciences i.e DNA evidence that is adding to our friends evidence of the past.
But we are often up against two other forces. And those other forces include heritage. Now, heritage is a slightly different thing heritage is not often history it may have tidbits of the forensic but more often than not heritage is what has been negotiated by a community and what that community has decided that number 1 it wants to value and number 2 what it wants others to know about them.
Because here's the little aside for you, the idea of heritage making is really about a community again, trying to navigate itself, trying to find cohesion with itself. And I'll give you two prime examples because I am sure that among the 488 of you that are joining us right now, regardless of your age that at some point, you may have grown up hearing one of two things.
George Washington never told a lie when he cut down the cherry tree or that he had wooden teeth. Well neither of those things are forensically true. Back there out now not true.
But that was a part of American heritage for a long time and why? Well, the answer is simple. As the new nation was coming together they rallied around the one person, the person who led them to victory against the British empire and the person who would serve as our first Commander in Chief.
And they needed to create a set of values, a set of ideals to continue to bring these disparate 13 colonies and expanding territories into cohesion. So they built them around George Washington and they built them around a lie. And that happens time and time again.
So what is the third piece of this? The third piece of this is about memory. And that is what each of us as individuals bring to the table and oftentimes, memory is faulty. We change our memories with more information over time we may end up creating details or adding details to either fit a heritage narrative or one we are talking amongst ourselves about similar experiences.
And sometimes memories are simply based upon things that happen and that you make a part of your understanding of the past. One grand example I will give you is, when I started off at Colonial Williamsburg those many years ago, they used to have programming to show you.
Allow allowing visitors to churn butter and do all this other kinds of stuff, make soap and dip candles, and all of this kind of stuff that is fairly common at yield historic place. But for a place like Colonial Williamsburg, Williamsburg was the capital of the wealthiest of 13 colonies.
Williamsburg at the Eve of the American Revolution was 52% black the majority of which were enslaved people. At the Eve of the American Revolution Williamsburg residents could buy their soap, and their candles, and their butter.
They did not have to make it because guess what? They were living in a city. If they didn't have a farm, or plantation estate, or something like that, that was supplying those goods for them they could simply buy those items in the market.
So these things are not being made in the city and so when the decision was made to pull those particular activities out of the offerings at Colonial Williamsburg a lot of people got mad because we were changing history.
No, they were correcting history, they were correcting the narrative and trying to move the organization and our guests from heritage making into historical thinking. Now, I say all of that again, around the idea of intentionality.
In the public history realm, in the museum realm we are a public institution. Our work is to bring about enlightenment and diffuse knowledge to a public who may have varying levels of understanding about a particular thing.
And again, as I was growing in my career and moving from one organization to another I was picking up just bits and pieces that would help really define when I finally got to sit-in the director's chair how I wanted the museum to function.
Because I also developed during this time a personal mantra about the work. And for me that personal mantra is history has never been for the dead it has always been about the living.
Our extensive knowledge and increasing knowledge about what we understand about the past has been brought about because of the questions that we are asking of ourselves and in the present. We are looking for grounding we're looking for connection we are still looking to belong.
But in order for us to do that in a healthy and sustained way it was very clear to me as many others, but it was very clear to me that in the museum space we had the greater opportunity to help bring visitors to a greater understanding of the forensic past.
Now, why would that be important? It's important because I'm sure you have all heard or said it yourself, we have to learn from the past so we don't repeat it. The problem is we repeat a lot of things over and over again.
And part of that reason that we do so is that we have managed to-- well, we get into heritage making. We get into spaces where we are not often able to really contend with repeating patterns of either particularly, when you're talking about things like injustices or breaking treaties with indigenous people, or police state violence against black and brown people, or suppression of voting, et cetera.
There's just a list a plethora of things that history if we follow that history and we also sync up our ideals, we realize there's a disconnect in the past and a disconnect in the future.
And so if you don't fix that disconnect by being truthful about what that past looks like, what the forensic evidence tells us then we again, we repeat these patterns. Again, as I moved in finally had the opportunity to sit-in the director's chair I realized that I wanted desperately for a history to matter.
So that goes hand in hand with this idea of history's never been for the dead, and it's always for the living and it has to matter. This is something that I wanted visitors who whatever institution I was working for, when they left us I wanted them to feel something profound.
I want it there, whether the action took place in that immediate moment or five years down the road but I wanted them to learn something and to feel something when they left our institution.
Because when that happens that is when there is that opportunity, that window of opportunity to move them into really delving into the forensic so that new heritage is created actually at the nexus of truth versus memory.
So with all of that said, I find myself here 30 years later running the Jamestown Yorktown Foundation and I've been here a little over a year I actually I'm going into month 14.
And prior to this and this work has played out fairly consistently, prior to this role, I was at the American Civil War museum for 12 years. Now, I will tell you coming into that space in Richmond, Virginia the former capital of the Confederacy where the Civil War has predominantly as in many places throughout the South been told from a southern perspective a lost cause narrative, this was an extraordinary move.
And I will also tell you that I was deeply intrigued by the role because the museum that I joined the Civil War center at Historic Tredegar we started-- was the first museum to really explore a union Confederate and African-American perspectives of the war.
But being at that institution. I quickly learned that there were more than just those three perspectives and in fact, they were not they were not in this trinary position. In fact, there was a whole lot more going on the more I got into the work.
But there was something else that was happening in the city of Richmond immediately and that was Richmond was still on a daily basis contending with the legacies of the Confederacy.
And it was on the landscape, it was still being the way that it was being taught in Virginia's schools was also extremely different. I found that we had a city that was roughly 42% black and most African-Americans in our community wanted absolutely nothing to do with any museum that dealt with the American Civil War.
Because they knew or they suspected that they will hear the same narrative that they always heard and that was, the South went to war for states' rights and to fight for constitutional principles and slavery wasn't that bad.
And we loved our people and, what's the other one? There's some really ugly things that get thrown in there. And essentially South was right and they were so successful with that narrative that was created post-war that it spread throughout the country.
As the general understanding of the Civil War that black people had no agency in their own freedom or in that war. Lincoln freed the slaves and that was it. That was problematic because again, forensically it wasn't true.
And so we started doing the work from contemporary perspective. We started looking at the neighborhoods, we partnered with other museums in the city and together 21 cultural, and academic, and University organizations came together because the commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the 150 on the anniversary of the Civil War was bearing down on us.
And we wanted the world to know that Richmond wasn't just the former capital of the Confederacy when we talked about the Civil War. Richmond was also the place where Emancipation Day came into being.
That Lincoln walked the streets as Richmond burned. After the Confederates set their own city on fire, and folks knew the war was over. When Richmond fell. So we decided we were going to commemorate Civil War and Emancipation Day and that changed the game and it changed the narrative.
And from that work of those partnerships with other museums and we were centered in that discussion, not only did our staffing was among the most diverse in the city, young people we had-- it was just a remarkable experience because it was again, intentional.
We wanted anybody who walked through that door to see somebody in that space that looked like them doing all manner of work in the organization. And so it was that intentional work around diversity in the core of staff and actually digging down into our job descriptions to determine, were we unintentionally out of habit and following what other institutions were doing?
Were we unintentionally gate keeping on some positions that would enable us to diversify our teams and to bring in real talent? People who had a talent for talking to the public, people who had a talent an artistic eye, or whatever to be able to pivot.
And we continue the series of yes, we had book talks for the hard core Civil War fan and there are quite a few of those, but we also did what was called the foundry series. And that was looking at those things in our communities life that had historical connections.
So when we talked about when the opioid crisis was coming, we talked about the opioid crisis following the Civil War. And we talked about the resources that were not and are available. And we partnered with the VA, and we partnered with drug advocacy programs so that people understood that there was yes, there has always been this historical connection about soldiers coming back broken and bruised emotionally and physically and what did that look like.
And so we created that line of programming. We had a robust program for school educators. Because we knew that elementary school teachers more often than not are specialists in early childhood education.
They are not specialists in history but they are required to teach that as a part of that. So how could we best train them and to help those teachers improve what they were doing in the classroom?
So we didn't have these unfortunate situations of teachers asking kids to imagine you're a slave and write a letter to your family. That nexus of work of being intentional about serving your community is extraordinarily important to me.
And that then means that you are looking at your collections, you are looking at the disparity in your collections but you're also looking at your collections and saying, does this piece have another story to tell us?
You mentioned Fred Wilson he was the one who truly inspired me around the collections issue from his exhibition at the Marilyn Historical Society back in the 90s mining the museum. People are still talking about that work because it was so impactful.
He showed us succinctly and beautifully that an artifact could tell more than one story. So as we were looking at the Civil War museum, we realized that there was just extraordinary things if we dug a little deeper and it was never a stretch.
So for example our museum one of our predecessor museums, the Museum of the Confederacy had been given by the US government in 1904 and 1905 about 350 captured flags from the American Civil War.
And for decades of course, the Museum of the Confederacy showcased those flags for the units and the men who fought under that particular regimental flag. And they were different flags by the way, there are several different designs of regimental flags in the American Civil War and for the Confederacy.
What we know of what we refer to as the Confederate flag today was actually something from Tennessee it's the battle flag I'm digressing, but this is how again, forensic history and heritage becomes something completely different.
The rectangular flag that we know is or assume as the Confederate flag actually wasn't, it was designed in 1864 it was for the army of Tennessee, the Confederate army to Tennessee but it was never accepted.
When it got accepted, when in 1866 Nathan Bedford Forrest establishes the Ku Klux Klan and it becomes a worldwide symbol of the South after Griffith's Birth of a Nation in 1915.
That's when that flag became popular but there were several other battle flags. But again, that's another example of forensic history versus heritage making and how people push memory into that heritage piece without having the full picture.
So back to the artifact. So we had a series of flags that had been captured by federal forces. And as we looked at the history of those particular flags we realized that many of them had been captured not only in Virginia, but had been captured by United States Colored Troops.
Which then attached to a particular US team regiment, which then attached us to particular African-Americans who had either been runaways or freemen who joined the fight, the 200,000 plus black men who joined the fight. Who represent over a million African-Americans who run away and provide material support to the United States Army in the American Civil War but most of you probably never knew that.
So again, this is about intentionality and it's from our collections, it's from the way that we engage in our communities and widely discussing what our communities are. And we have to get away from this idea of when we say, communities we want to know what's out there.
No, you need to go out there to hear what they need. Because if you are listening, your community will tell you if you are paying attention, the community will tell you what it needs. And when you are engaged with that community in ways that help them navigate the daily living.
That's when we see these remarkable transformations of community. That's when we see communities finally addressing the harms that it may have caused. That's when we see communities embracing a new narrative and creating one that is more tied to again, the forensic realities that we know.
Now again, you could take this example for those of you that are interested in art, or science or natural history, you can take your particular areas of specialization and think about that particular model.
But again, the larger point is we have to begin to move away if you're still struggling with what this means. We have to really be listening to our communities and provide them what they want versus this is what we think you need, or this is the stuff that really fascinates us.
Don't misunderstand me the stuff that really fascinates you might be pretty cool and people might like that a lot, but you have to connect it if you want them to care, and you have to connect it if you want change. Because if you want change it's going to be trouble for a little while.
But the truth of the matter is we can always look forward to good trouble. So as I'll wrap up my comments as we think about this I just want to remind you that, the Intentional Museum is thinking about all of the pieces of the puzzle. And all of the ways that they engage with the public.
The Intentional Museum matters to their community at the end of the day. Not just because it's a place where they can go and feel good but because it's a place that truly lifts people up, and lifts all people up not just the ones who write you the big checks.
So with that, I will stop and I will reach out to Dr. Brown-Nagin who I understand has a few questions for me. And I think then we open up the floor for you all and I think you can start putting your questions in the Q&A box at the bottom. But Thank you all so much for your time and attention. I greatly appreciate it.
Wonderful. Christy if I may thank you so much. That was a fascinating talk perfectly blending your professional experiences with your personhood. And I hope we can spend some time now asking you to drill a few of the things that you said during your talk.
Now, you've clearly had to do some educational and community building work within the museum itself, with staff, with boards, and other stakeholders to create this Intentional Museum.
I wonder if you can share how you've approached the task of helping internal stakeholders see the need for change and just what you can share about the struggle frankly to do so.
Certainly, so I'll give you two examples. When I first went to Detroit to run the Charles H Wright museum of African-American history, at the time it was the largest museum of African-American history in the country before the Smithsonian came into being.
And the Charles Wright museum had an extraordinary legacy because it was actually started by Dr. Wright an obstetrician who started collecting things and showcasing it in the basement of his OBGYN practice.
And when I got there the museum had evolved and grown quite a bit but what most folks felt is that, it had moved away from the community in its effort to better professionalize not only their processes and all of that-- that some folks felt that it was no longer for the community.
And I heard that refrain over and over and over again. And so to help move the board and to help think about what we could do and what I could do in that chair about helping move the board in the direction that the community to address this community need, I had to have the community there with me.
And so it started frankly with a conversation, a series of conversations all over the city and it wasn't just please join us at the-- excuse me, please join us at the museum it was me going out into at the neighborhood centers and the local churches and asking people to just share with me what you love about the museum, what you want to see improved about the museum, what you think we're missing.
And at the end I probably talked to 2,500 people in that first 3 to 6 months in the job. It was exhausting but it was highly-- it was an extraordinary enlightening.
And so I was able to take that compiled information back to my board and say, this is what people are telling us, and you're out in the community too and you're probably hearing some of this and I think there may be a solution to this problem. And I want to have a little latitude here to play with some things.
And so that's what we did and within two years I came back to the board and I said OK I need $43 million to make these changes. And they thought of course, that I was crazy because the museum itself had cost $43 million and they just opened it three years prior to my arrival.
But this was about investing in not only endowment but new exhibitions and really ramping up some of the communities-- again, addressing what the community said they needed. And it wasn't just talking to the usual suspects.
It was talking to people in the hood frankly, who used to depend on the museum as a place where they could go with their kids. but who some of them rightfully or wrongly no longer felt that they belonged in the space that they thought was theirs or should have been.
So that's one example but it does take careful planning to figure out again, what a community may need. And so it is a mix of things staff can tell you, especially front line staff can really inform that discussion.
But you're basically collecting data sets, and you're looking at trends, and you're looking at needs, and you're looking at assets the museum has. And then you begin to lay out what the strategy can be to address them. But you also have to have a willingness for risk. You also have to have a willingness to risk.
Yes, wonderful. Thank you so much for that. I want to return to Fred Wilson for a bit and ask you to talk more about the everyday practicalities from the perspective of curatorial practice of telling a more complete and more accurate history of the United States. And this is bearing in mind an observation by Fred Wilson that, objects have memories and we have memories about certain objects.
That's correct and I agree with him wholeheartedly. I think, with curatorial practice we tend to either think about the maker or the owner of the thing not always the additional users offset thing.
And so another example of this in my prior role we wanted to tell the story of Mary Elizabeth Bowser who was a free Black woman who conspired with union sympathizers in Richmond Black & White and she was hired in the residence of Jefferson Davis during the American Civil War.
And she was a spy this black woman who touched everything because her role was she cleaned his office, she set dinner tables, she touched virtually everything in that house.
But there were certain things that were particular to her and the work that she had been assigned. And so now those objects were the things that the tea cup sets and the punch bowls and things like that, were things that we know she touched.
That she was a part of that and as she was touching them as she was gathering them, she was gathering information and sending it out of that house virtually every day. It was a remarkable spy network.
So much so that at the end of the war Grant goes to see her partner in crime Elizabeth Van Lew and her to personally thank them for what they had done. And we were able to tell her story again, through this object.
Because the way we have collected, the way we have collected object, artifacts, and art in this country has always favored white people and a white narrative. And so the things that have value to others has as only been collected in the past 20 to 30 years in most cases-- again, outside of ethnic specific museums.
And so we are at a deficit but that deficit does not mean that we don't have anything to talk about or to show. Because again, black and brown hands have touched virtually everything that white hands have made or been given credit for.
I can guarantee you and it's not hard to look so as a curatorial practice you have to look beyond again, the maker of the thing or the owner of the thing. You have to look for those million and one stories that object can tell if you're creative enough to look for it.
And if you are acknowledging of your own blind spots when it comes to research and are calling on the support of other scholars, and other curators, and other thinkers, in your area that you're reaching out for.
Very good. And so it sounds like you have a great number of researchers who are looking for to tell these alternative stories and you also mentioned that you brought in staff members who have those expertise. Thank you for that.
So you talked a lot about engaging communities who have felt not welcome in certain of these museum spaces. I want to ask you a question about, how we work to encourage people who may not see themselves as part of a shared community to engage with one another?
So I mean bringing together, those who have been excluded from the museum experience and those who may have been taught to center themselves in history. Can you talk a little bit about that project?
Sure. Now, that I will say is becoming the newer experience. We did some of this in my early days but again, I wasn't in a position at that time to really influence it that way.
But it's the story of settlement when we talk about the founding of America it is grounded particularly in British American history. I am working at Jamestown which was the first permanent English settlement in North America.
The story of Jamestown-- you either grow up hearing the story of Jamestown in Plymouth for the most part, if you're on the West Coast you may hear San Jacinto or other places but in terms of American narrative it is this Jamestown and/or Plymouth. Plymouth seeking the first Thanksgiving with the Indians and all of this stuff.
Well, the reality is the making of America what will become the United States of America is actually far from its genesis. It is an extraordinary mix of different peoples because even though these 13 colonies are dotting the East Coast the Spanish were up in the South, the French were coming in from the North and the South along the Mississippi.
You've got Spaniards coming back into the West and Southwest you've got Germans who are coming in and settling in the Pennsylvania region. The point is and this is why the founders when they started talking about a model for the nation and things as chose E Pluribus Unum out of many one but that is not how we tell our story.
And here at Jamestown's even though we have talked about the power to peoples and their interactions with the English it has remained English centric and we're having these conversations now because our mission as an organization is to talk about the convergence of cultures of the indigenous, the English, and the Africans, who were brought here in 1619.
So what does that look like? Stay tuned because I'll show you we're just still working through what all of that means right now and it is bringing the community along with us but as a community, we need that.
And at the core of your question is how do you engage people who didn't feel like they belonged? You engage them by showing them that they are a part of the story, then, now, and always. That's the first way that you do it.
Wonderful. Thank you Christy. And I want to now turn to Makeda and span and bring them into our conversation. And I thought we would begin by asking each panelist to react to this idea that Christy offered that museums sit at the confluence of history heritage and memory. Makeda would you like to begin with the reaction to that idea.
Thank you so much, Michael and thank you Christy for your wonderful presentation. I really found it useful this rubric because it offers a way to understand what contested objects and stories mean to people or for space.
For people to have their responses and their feelings but also a way to understand how they fit together. So I actually found it really useful because so often we think we have an object that can shift people's opinions.
But we don't realize as you articulate that what we're up against is also issues of heritage and memory. And so it was really exciting to hear you describe this and to explore the ways in which it has worked in your own museum, in your career.
OK. Thank you. Sven.
I very much agree this was such an inspiring presentation and it is such inspiring and really important work. Because not least because we need to see that more people encounter history through the kind of work that you do in a museum and the kind of work that I do by writing articles for academic publications or academic books.
So much of the narrative that we tell about history comes through institutions such as museums and I think the work that is being done in institutions like museum, the work that you do there is important because it has huge audiences.
It is important as you say, it's important to get the story right. So much of the history that we tell about ourselves is not really based on academic research it is not the kind of forensic history that you mentioned.
But it's really a history that's mostly rooted in myths and things that have very little to do with what actually happened and how it unfold. So it's important to correct these narratives in themselves because it's important to get that story right because it does tell us who we are as a people and where we come from.
But it also helps us to understand our contemporary, the problems that we face, the contemporary issues that we're dealing with and just to cite one example. So we are thinking a lot about inequality today and we are thinking also about inequality along ethnic and racial lines.
But if we don't get the history right, if we are not aware, if we don't keep the promise of keeping the front of our minds that many Americans for generations were forced to work without being paid, for many generations many Americans were slaughtered in the worst possible jobs they could not accumulate wealth.
And that gives us a totally different perspective of contemporary inequality than when we get this history wrong. So it's an intensely political project as well. And of course, because it is such a political project it is as you mentioned but as you undoubtedly also experience in your daily work it is subject to passionate political contestation.
Which in some ways is a good thing because it does tell us that people greatly care about what it is do and what I do, but it also of course, makes it politically very, very difficult to navigate that.
But I think, it's really important to keep this story straight and to have a large audience for that story. Because we cannot build the future, we cannot think about the future build upon the historical values.
We need to understand where we come from in order to build a future and you work for the reasons that I mentioned at the beginning it is exceedingly important in communicating that history to a broader audience.
Wonderful. Thank you Sven. You anticipated in the latter part of your comments my last question for you and Makeda which goes back to something Christy said about museums being for the living not for the dead, history is for the living.
I wonder-- and I'll direct this to Makeda what decision makers can do to ensure that this moment of racial reckoning translates into concrete steps and American institutions from museums to schools towards a vision of justice?
That's a great question. It reminds me of Chris's opening story and the potential there of literally opening one stores and finding ways to connect with the people that are in your community, who are coming to your doors, or not and find out why.
I think that there's potential there and that has to be part of any kind of reckoning that direct connection. The story that you told us is so powerful because it reminds us of the ways in which these experiences that we have in these spaces stay with us. And also impact how we understand history that those places represent.
And so there's so much possibility for us to connect with people from our local communities, from that's around our museums that may or may not be visitors yet but that kind of personal connection makes such a difference.
And I think, that that's where we have to start is trying to figure out these personal connections. What I really enjoyed also about your comments Christy is that, you're saying that the Intentional Museum is a museum that isn't looking for a kind of approach that is taken from any kind of generic list of best practices.
It is a museum that is necessarily looking at its own habits as you describe them, at the ways in which it has become out of habit as you said. And I love that because I think that how we move forward each museum is going to have to do that work on their own to figure out what that means and how those connections can be made.
Thank you Makeda. And spend Sven would you like to comment briefly before we move to audience questions?
I just would like to add one thing. I think, Christy what I really liked about your work is that you claim the center, the core of the National narrative. So you're not adding another group and another set of people somehow in some corner of the museum, but you say these people are really central to the National narrative and that's exactly I think what needs to happen. So I really appreciate that part of your work.
Wonderful. Thank you. And we have a lot of audience questions, good questions. So let me turn to some of those and bring Christy back into the conversation. So the first is about that opening story.
A viewer asks when you first brought the neighborhood kids into the museum on Sundays what was the museum's reaction and how did you manage it?
Well, like I said I did it on Sunday so the only people who were at the museum that day were myself and the security team who was black. And so they were very excited to see the kids there and the security guys started sending out fresh water for the kids in the buckets.
So the what's interesting is my boss was really upset with me that I had done that. But it turned out to be a remarkable thing, it really did. Like I said, all the vandalism the windows that were broken out of those historic buildings and houses, all of that just stopped.
The kids really felt engaged and every weekend I would do, that every Sunday that I had to work with the volunteers I would bring those kids in. And I had a chance to go, I left the museum but I had a chance to go back to visit because they were opening up a new museum building so they were having a grand opening and I was already I think out in Detroit at that time or maybe I was back at Colonial Williamsburg.
I came up for the event and several of those kids were actually working there as adults. And there were, it was just this-- and the community mass choir that they formed to celebrate period black music and it was stunning.
I mean, but all of it started with again, just really wanting to connect with these kids. But it was not easy I will tell you. A lot of the initiatives I was blank told that I would have to do that on my own time.
That's how it started in the first probably two or three years. Well, actually the first two years saw it I was told I had to do a lot of that work with those kids on my own time. When we saw the success the executive director she was she ended up being far more supportive, which created some other problems because then she's like I want you to do more of this.
So that was taking me away from what my immediate supervisor wanted me to do to this initiative that she was now embracing, that she understood what was happening. So it was it was a challenge though no doubt.
Great. Thank you. You're asked about how all of this applies to the history of slavery in the North. That as you spoke about dominants other narratives around the Civil War and this viewer who wants to know about the unique problems and challenges of unearthing the history of slavery in the North and the North's financial entanglements with slavery.
Oh, I love that one. So the narrative around the American Civil War, the South went to war to preserve slavery the North were the great emancipators and so forth and so on.
Well, that again, forensically isn't true. I mean certainly Northerners were opposed to slavery but it was really about the expanding political power. The political power and wealth of the North of which, I mean, I'm sorry, of the South of which the North was intricately involved with.
I mean companies that we know like Brooks Brothers for example, provided clothing, they made sack cloak clothing mass produced for people with enslaved populations. Insurance companies that insured the slave property or the shipping of those people.
At the start of the Civil War at Wall Street-- Wall Street I'm just going to say, Wall Street was adamantly opposed to the war because they supported the South because so much wealth was tied up in Southern products that were made and produced by slaves or the slavery itself.
I don't remember it maybe you remember Sven, there is an extraordinary number of comparative numbers something billions of dollars like a third of the nation's GDP at the time, was in the bodies of black people, enslaved black folk. That's extraordinary number, it's extraordinary.
More capital was invested in enslaved people than in railroads and in manufacturing enterprises.
Because enslaved people-- this is a highly adaptable workforce, wasn't just picking cotton this is a highly adaptable workforce. So yeah, it was something.
Yeah, Christy let me follow up that question with another from an audience who wants to know if any museums in Massachusetts and we'll just have- [INAUDIBLE] contacted you to help them change their rhetoric and make their museums more intentional.
The answer is yes. Either formally or informally I've worked with museums all over the world actually. Sometimes consulting, sometimes just talking to them and getting them thinking about this but I'm very active in two of our museum organizations in particular.
I'm very involved with the American Alliance of Museums and the American Association for State and Local History. I used to be involved with American Museum directors but not as much anymore. And not because I don't like it but I have to focus my time. But yeah, I have. Do not to ask me to think about which ones off the top of my head I'm afraid I can't do that, but I have.
That's good. Thank you. So this next question is about the nuts and bolts of the work. Someone asks, how might museums respond nimbly to engage in urgent and timely conversations when full scale exhibition installations take months, if not years, to curate and pull together?
So the question is how you balance traditional museum curation, and exhibition, planning, and the rigor, that are involves with being responsive to communities immediate needs, for pressing conversations?
The first thing that I will say is that, you have to really rethink what your curatorial practice is. We did a test program because I was convinced that you can have that rigorous scholarship to support your exhibitions and quickly turn that around.
And so we got a really extraordinary grant from the Mellon Foundation to test the theory. New scholarship from academia, take that scholarship turn it into an exhibit within a year. So what this model did is, instead of relying on an on staff curator to do the research and then the planning and then-- we partnered with UVA to select the two most promising and the most innovative research in the scholarship of Civil War that they had there were two of them that were selected.
And when I read the first one I thought holy cow, what the world have I done this is going to be a hot mess nobody is going to be interested in this. Because it was about the greenback, establishment of the greenback the American money and the unification of money.
And it ended up being wildly popular. Once we sat down and talked to the scholar who was a lot more fun than his paper, we found the way to really break down the essence of that paper and to create that exhibition.
The second exhibition that is actually still up, actually both of them are up if you down this way. The second exhibition was about Southern-- it's called Southern Ambition. Again, a different way of looking at the scholarship around the Civil War and that was done by a Brit named Adrian battle.
And Adrian's work looked at the behind the scenes work because the Confederacy expected that they would win or that they would be let go. And so this exhibit explores their expansion plans.
And their intent for increasing the numbers of-- its it's an extraordinary bit of research. And he just won an award for that but we took his research worked with him, he hated every minute of it.
So it it's a very different experience because he wanted all 7,000 words and that essay to be on the panel. And I'm like, dude, that's not what we do in the museums, let's break it down.
And so but we were able to pull that off. So that is the model that we wanted to test to see if it could work. It did work and it's a model that I will take with me forward. Another example was done actually by the museum as well, at the meusium had a exhibit space that they literally could change and exhibit in 24 hours.
It was about breaking news and new information but they built sort of a template environment that they literally could remove panels within 24 hours to change out the story, so that was another example.
But at of all of this is about shared research again, I think I am not saying museum curators don't research that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying don't write, what I am saying is stop thinking you're the only one in your museum that can get the work done.
Think of yourself as a curator of knowledge, so you are gathering the minds that you need to pull the work off in a quick way. And if you do that when your community is in crisis and you've got already that handy dandy resource that you can pull in at a moment's notice, you can create something very quickly. Very quickly.
Thank you. Another questioner wants to know, should we try to create smaller museums to keep artifacts and stories within a community? Or should we have large institutions to collect them to centralize fundraising preservation and increase access what are the trade offs?
Oh goodness. I just think, in general that government needs to be far more supportive of the work that museums do in terms of preserving a community's history and aspirations as expressed through its arts and Culture.
But do I think there should be large massive institutions? No, not really. I think, a nice midsize organization that celebrates all these things is nice. I'm not saying we shouldn't have the big ones, I'm just saying that I think there is something intimate about having that entree into a story we can literally take the story of us and put it in the story of US.
And that's where I think the smaller community based museums are so important. That's just my opinion about that. I share lots of them so feel free to join me offline whenever a random thought it's me.
Thank you. There's a question here asking what your thoughts are about programs that provide special access to the donor bases that fund many cultural institutions from early access, to exhibitions, to special parties.
And relatedly this individual would like you to talk a little bit about how fundraising evolved at the Museum of the Confederacy as it pivoted to a more intentional museum.
There's a lot in that question. OK, so because of the model that we have in the United States that was based off of our early museums being formed from philanthropists wanting to do something with their money or to clean up their images, that's how a lot of our museums got started, that way.
So money has always been at the heart of our work and the donors that support that. Now, I think that people give for a variety of different reasons and when you understand why they are giving it makes it a lot easier to figure out what works best for them.
Yes, there are people who give who think that their money should give them access to special activities and events, and so it's far less altruistic. And then there are donors who give generously and don't expect anything at all. In fact, get really upset if they think that too much is being spent on donor perks. I mean, it really can vary so I think you have to manage that yourself.
Now, when we merge those two museums the American Civil War center and the Museum of the Confederacy in 2013, we planned to lose donors. And we planned for about 40% of our membership base to leave us.
And we thought that we would have time, and we built it into our pro forma as our projected budgeting to lose that 40% and we said well, it'll give us time as we're building the facility to continue to build and broaden out new audiences around the country, some people may come back we'll see how it works.
And we ended up losing 43% of those members and donors. And the financial impact was about a half a million over the first couple of years. But because of just the extraordinary work that the team did we were able to not only regain donors but had people continue to garner national attention to the work that was done.
Is we went into that work knowing that about-- not a great statistic about 90% of museum mergers will fail in the first five years because they have not been intentional about their mission, their purpose, their vision for the institution, how best to bring those.
It's not just it's not just a financial transaction it has to be a cultural transaction as well. Because there are institutional cultures as well as a new Culture that you're trying to build and so yes there's a lot there.
Great. Well I'm afraid we are--
Out of time.
Yes, So on behalf of the Harvard Art Museums of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute I want to thank you Christy Coleman for being with us as well as Makeda Best and Sven Beckert for joining us today. I thank the audience for all of your wonderful questions and I want to say have a good evening.