If you’re a fan of Matt Damon, art, or WWII history, you’ve probably seen the movie Monuments Men – a mildly fictionalized story about a group of heroic men and a token woman who banded together to save art stolen by Nazis.

At its core, the preservation and protection of important works of art in a war zone is a beautiful show of international friendship, but when you look beyond the surface things get murky.

As US News states in their article about the movie and the history behind it, the art “repositories held objects evacuated from museums in the Third Reich and stolen from German-occupied territories across Europe, such as Belgium’s Ghent Altarpiece and the Bruges “Madonna” by Michelangelo. Most tragically, the Nazis had plundered much of the loot from Jewish art collectors, while agents working for party leaders had bought thousands of pieces relinquished by Jews under duress.” It does make for a compelling story, but where have we heard something like this before?

The removal of art from those “who can’t protect it or don’t understand it” is a classic colonialist argument for the removal of art from its homeland. (Think about all of those meticulously organized photos the British took when they looted Benin) Though the idea was “pure” in conception, let’s consider what happened after the war.

After the war, majority of the items recovered stayed in American museums (most are still there today).

Though they promised to try their best to restore works to their former owners, most were not found or no effort was made to find them.

Families who successfully petitioned for their works are few and far between – the most notable being Maria Altmann’s lawsuit for ownership of a Klimt portrait of her aunt. (made into the movie “The Woman in Gold”)

Many museums simply didn’t put in the effort because these famous works had come into their possession and they didn’t want to lose a cash cow.

In 1990, the US government passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). With this legislation, museums were required by law to do a full inventory of their collections and make native communities aware of any artifacts that may belong to them, including the bones of ancestors. But was it as effective as intended?

This legislation cost museums thousands of dollars and objects and to this day they are still finding more artifacts belonging to native communities.

Harvard Museum (click to read the full article!)

The Harvard Museum system came under fire recently when their anthropology collection was discovered to have hundreds of indigenous remains and only slightly fewer remains of enslaved people in its archives. They claim that they are present in the collection due to their anthropological research and scientific studies, but how were they able to keep that secret for so long? They have been legally required to report any items/remains belonging to indigenous people for 20+ years and simply didn’t.

The real reason many museums followed the law to begin with was that if they were found to be non-compliant, they would lose all federal funding (which is a crucial part of operating budgets).

Harvard as a university has a multi-billion dollar endowment (yes you read that right). Much of this money comes from white donors, historical privilege, and colonial profits.

In theory, they don’t need to follow the law because they don’t need federal funding. Non-compliance is a viable option for the uber-wealthy museum.

First Americans Museum (click to view their website!)

On the other hand, when NAGPRA is followed correctly and even viewed as the absolute baseline for interaction between institution and native communities, collections can flourish and better stories can be told.

The First Americans Museum in Oklahoma works closely with the 39 nations present in the state to ensure that objects are cared for and displayed correctly, but perhaps more importantly is the stories they tell. The museum tells the individual stories of all 39 nations and does not use the word “was” like many museums tend to do.

Many institutions will talk about native history as if it is something that is over and the culture is gone. This couldn’t be further from the case.

Native Americans are still present, thriving communities and deserve to have their stories told accurately, their objects and remains back in their communities if they so wish, and to be respected as a living breathing community.

In her article “The Story Behind the Green Air Force 1s Virgil Abloh Made Exclusively for Museum Guards”, Eileen Cartter explores the latest exhibition on display in the Brooklyn Museum: a retrospective show about Vergil Abloh’s long and historic career in fashion design, art, sculpture, and architecture. The show was originally co-curated by Abloh and Antwuan Sargent but following the designer’s passing in late 2021, it became a solo curation by Sargent. The exhibition has rooms of sneakers, sculptures, and archival books of Abloh’s design work for Louis Vuitton during his historic revitalization of their menswear collections. Notably in the middle gallery is a gift shop called “Church and State” that sells exclusive merchandise relating to the exhibition. However, the most exclusive Abloh design in the exhibition was the one no one could take home: the outfits and sneakers made specially for the guards.

            Abloh was best known for his ambitious sneaker designs and for collaborating with other brands to make exclusive short runs of sneakers, which merged art and commerce (like “Church and State”). He was a firm believer that art could not exist without commerce, and vice versa. But he also was a believer in the power of democratizing art[1]. While a few hundred dollars is a steep price for sneakers to most consumers, they are a piece of wearable art and considerably cheaper than most artworks that can be purchased at auction or in an artist’s studio. They are collectible capitalism, which was a concept that fascinated the designer. In some way everyone could own art, even if it was mass produced. But what happens when people are allowed to wear art that no one else can but are not allowed to own it? As the Brooklyn Museum has discovered with their guard outfits and sneakers, a paradox of exclusivity, objectification, power, and money emerges.

The look in question is a black tee shirt that reads “PUBLIC SAFETY” across the front, black joggers, and electric green low top Nike Air Force 1’s. The very choice of all black with bright green shoes highlights how special they are, and in an exhibition space where many visitors are interested collectors, appreciators, and owners of shoes, they stand out while the people the shoes are attached to stand watch for the safety and success of the exhibition. Guards are not allowed to take their outfits home and must keep them in special lockers at the museum.[2] They can only wear the look when working in the exhibition space and are not allowed to sell any pieces to anxious sneakerheads with hundreds or thousands of dollars in hand. The outfits are so exclusive that the museum had to stop accepting guard applications from obsessed fashion collectors hoping to nab a pair of the shoes to sell online for staggering profits.

Throughout his career, Abloh was very aware of the collectability of his pieces and the way that the resale market played into the perceived value of each sneaker design. This was considered when placing the merchandise store in the middle of the exhibition space, encouraging those who had bought tickets just to get to the gift shop to actually look at the art around them before buying large bags of items to resell. The items in the gift shop were also designed with collectability in mind. With such a focus on owning material culture in the exhibition, the inability of the guards to own the shoes they are required to wear on their feet seems like it goes against all that Abloh stood for in his design work. If one of the guiding principles in all his designs was to make fashion accessible and subvert the hierarchy of designer brands by embracing streetwear, then why deny the people safeguarding a collection of those democratizing designs the ability to own the shoes on their feet?

One argument for this practice could be that if the guards wear the shoes outside of the museum, they could be damaged, stolen, or sold. This would mean that the museum would have to come up with another pair of specially made shoes in the guard’s size or that they would simply lose a worker in the space. If the guards were to wear their shoes home, they could also be attacked and have the shoes stolen due to the popularity and notoriety of the exhibition. Since these shoes are exclusive, they are as valuable as the art on display, if not more so because they cannot be purchased in a Nike store or in an online auction. However, by having staff members of the museum that are often overlooked or ignored wear the art that is not on display, they effectively become models and mannequins for people to stare at.

This creation of mannequins out of guards is an interesting contrast to both the intentions of Abloh and also to the inspiration for the outfits: Fred Wilson’s work Guarded View (1991)[3], which consists of four black headless mannequins wearing the uniforms of prominent New York City museums. This work was very impactful and highlighted the anonymity of museum guards and how many are people of color from working class backgrounds. The uniform is all that patrons see, and so the person becomes invisible. In some ways, Abloh’s shoes also play with this idea of the uniform being the only thing that people see when visiting the space, but instead of becoming invisible the guards are almost hyper-visible because of the shoes they wear and the inherent value they present. The all black outfit also promotes a blending in that is impossible due to the brightness and “hype” around the shoes. However, the treatment of the person wearing the shoes is still largely the same: they are what they wear, and the reason that most people in the space would interact with them is due to the uniform they wear.

While the sentiment of drawing attention to the guards and the important job they play in the museum is honorable and well intentioned, it makes them part of the exhibition in an uncomfortable way. In a space where everything is for sale, many guards are accosted by sneakerheads looking to buy the shoes off their feet or the shirt off their back. This makes the guards seem like another commodity to be bought, especially because of the limited number and high value of the shoes they wear. Ultimately, this decision to have the guards wear exclusive designer shoes draws unwanted attention to museum workers who already have one of the hardest jobs in the museum space.

What does this mean for museums going forward? Is it a good idea to have special outfits for those that are working the key and popular exhibitions? To answer the first question, one need only look at the immense popularity of this exhibition. Whether this popularity is due to interest in Abloh or owning the merchandise, there is no denying that the sneakers are a major draw to the show. Having a piece of art or a specialty look that can only be observed by visiting the space draws people in, if for nothing else than to simply say “I saw it”. This exhibition has been reported in Cartter’s article and in the New York Times[4] as having lines that snake through galleries and people waiting outside before the museum opens so that they can be first into the space. There is an undeniable power in having something unique to set the exhibition apart from others, especially if it is a traveling show or a “highlights of the collection” show. Many museums are already capitalizing on the power of merchandise, with institutions like the Louvre and the Met partnering with fashion companies to produce limited run tees[5] or with brands like Casetify[6] to have limited run phone cases. In the world of fast fashion and renewed interest from consumers in owning art (partially thanks to Abloh), everyone wants to have a piece of the institution that can come home with them at the end of the day. Limited run exhibition merchandise that mirrors a specialty docent or guard uniform capitalizes on this excitement to own commercially available art. It could be a great way for museums to make revenue, much like Disney selling officially licensed costumes of its princesses – if someone wants to buy it and you can create the product for a price that benefits you as an institution, why not?

To respond to the question about these specialty outfits and merchandise as a good idea, the answer gets a bit murky. Museums can choose to run and market their exhibits however they, their boards, and exhibition planners so please. There are no other exhibitions to base this practice off of at the moment, but Figures of Speech can act as a trial run for other museums looking to get in on the publicity/merchandising opportunities. The exhibition is wildly popular and a large enough draw to the public that Cartter and GQ were interested in reporting on it, which is not something common for the magazine aside from reporting on the material aspects of it (Met Gala looks, stores, objects that people own). However, Figures of Speech should also act as a cautionary tale to the museum looking to highlight its guards: there is a difference between highlighting and isolating. In the case of this exhibition, the value and inability to own the outfits draws unwanted attention, harassment, and alienates the people that are there to make sure that the exhibition runs smoothly and safely. Highlighting largely overlooked staff members is admirable but making them part of the exhibit and putting people trying to do their job on display is less so.

Works Cited

Cartter, Eileen. “The Story behind the Green Air Force 1s Virgil Abloh Made Exclusively for Museum Guards.” GQ. GQ, July 8, 2022. https://www.gq.com/story/virgil-abloh-brooklyn-museum-nike-guard-uniforms?fbclid=IwAR0Pv3vN5yhrWSk4PptZxFOuRGcRc5oY5lHSLi0Pk-H1IvzK2ZHeFw-HgTM.

Casetify. “Louvre.” CASETiFY. Accessed November 16, 2022. https://www.casetify.com/co-lab/louvre.

Casetify. “The Met.” CASETiFY. Accessed November 16, 2022. https://www.casetify.com/co-lab/the-met.

Lee, Anna Grace. “The Thirst for Merch.” The New York Times. The New York Times, July 6, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/style/virgil-abloh-museum-merchandise.html.

“The Louvre × Yu Nagaba Special Site｜the Louvre Museum(Musée Du Louvre) Partnership｜Uniqlo.” UNIQLO. Accessed November 16, 2022. https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/contents/feature/louvre-x-uniqlo/ut-collection/.

Wilson, Fred. “Fred Wilson: Guarded View.” Fred Wilson | Guarded View | Whitney Museum of American Art. Accessed November 16, 2022. https://whitney.org/collection/works/11433.

[1] Cartter, Eileen. “The Story behind the Green Air Force 1s Virgil Abloh Made Exclusively for Museum Guards.”

[2] ibid

[3] Wilson, Fred. “Fred Wilson: Guarded View.” Fred Wilson | Guarded View | Whitney Museum of American Art.

[4] Lee, Anna Grace. “The Thirst for Merch.” The New York Times.

[5] “The Louvre × Yu Nagaba Special Site｜the Louvre Museum(Musée Du Louvre) Partnership｜Uniqlo.” UNIQLO

[6] Casetify. “Louvre.” CASETiFY, Casetify. “The Met.”

1. Do you understand the basic language tools for racial equity? (Do you have mechanisms in place to ensure that this language is not being co-opted by the values being employed?)
2. Do you apply trauma-informed and healing-informed care to your daily museum work?
3. Do you know your museum’s racial history?
4. Is your board still predominately white?
5. Are your collections still predominately lacking complex, multilayered narratives/representation?
6. Is your social media still only speaking to your “base/core”?
7. Is your development department still only targeting Black, Indigenous, and other people of color as beneficiaries of donations instead of donors/philanthropists themselves?
8. Do you understand what anti-blackness is and what it looks like in your decision-making approach?
9. Do you believe that race and/or racism has nothing to do with museums or museum-going and doesn’t impact the work that you do?
10. Has your museum created spaces, opportunities, advisory capacities, and more to elevate the presence, power, and voices of historically marginalized communities in your institution in a tangible, visible way that shares authority and ways of knowing?

When you think of a museum, do you think about community?

Personally, I don’t and can’t say I have, and this is what I want to do for work.

The museum is a space that many people in a community can go to learn about new things, explore parts of the world they may never be able to travel to, and experience pieces of heritage that may otherwise be inaccessible today. But can anyone say they have felt like there was a strong community presence and not just a bustling environment of museum people that seemed to care more about the collection than the people it is supposedly for?

In the case of the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle, Washington, community was key in the defining of the museum’s goals, audience, and also in figuring out who should come up with ideas for programming and collecting.

During a keynote speech at the 48th Annual British Columbia Museums Association Conference in Nanaimo, B.C., Canada, in October 2004, then-director Ron Chew spoke about the importance of community in the metamorphosis of the museum from crumbling to thriving. Originally founded in 1962 as a memorial foundation for Wing Luke, a beloved city council member and immigrant from Hong Kong, the museum has had a focus on telling asian stories from the beginning. The problem was that even though this was an asian focused museum in a primarily asian community, it used a very traditional model for exhibitions and displays that wasn’t very engaging and didn’t bring the community in.

The solution to not having good attendance from the community? Ask them what they want to see and how they want to be presented and represented in the museum. Instead of focusing on the broad history of China (for example), they started to zero in on Asian American history and how the people in the community are related to this broad history. Jobs were opened up in leadership for young people with fresh ideas and from diverse backgrounds. The museum asked the community what it wanted and took the words said to heart. It reached out and found so many stories to tell and ideas for exhibitions from the people around them. Attendance skyrocketed, locals wanted to donate to the museum, and through crowdfunding and growing resources the museum was able to afford a $23 million renovation of the space so it could house more community programs and exhibitions. By highlighting the community it represents and directly working with the public, the museum can thrive.

TOP 10 PRINCIPLES FOR COMMUNITY-BASED WORK (Courtesy of the museum’s website)

1. Community-based work must be rooted in relationships of trust and respect.
2. Community-based work requires a safe, comfortable environment to express ideas and share experiences.
3. Community-based work requires listening, flexibility, agility and patience.
4. It is democratic in nature – not top-down, and not a funnel for input.
5. Community ownership of their stories enables communities to hold and use them towards their own self-determined purposes.
6. Opportunities to learn abound in community-based work.
7. Community empowerment results from bringing together diverse people within communities who might not otherwise connect and collaborate together, increased community pride through increased visibility, development of professional skills and resources within the community from grant writing to educating to publishing and more.
8. Community-based work draws together communities and creates deep engagement and connections within as well as to the broader public.
9. Community-based work creates a safe place to speak your story and your truth.
10. People get involved in heart-felt work, doing something that they believe in.

The more I thought about how much of a role colonization played in the creation of the first museums, the more that they seemed to be petri dishes breeding white supremacist bacteria.

The first museum that was open to the public was the Louvre in 1793 and it set the precedent for other European museums to follow. On display were the royal collections and some new works by current artists, but mostly what was on display was the power of white europeans to subjugate non-whites. Ethnographic museums and natural history museums started to pop up, and with them came an implied narrative of non-white as sub-human. Mills describes this framework, stating that: “There is an opposition of us against them with multiple overlapping dimensions: Europeans versus non-Europeans (geography), civilized versus wild/ savage/ barbarians (culture), Christians versus heathens (religion). But they all eventually coalesced into the basic opposition of white versus nonwhite.” (Mills, p.20) While over the years more curators and board members of color have been influential in the “decolonization” of museums, we can still see the contract in action when considering their layouts and facades. American museums especially wanted to copy European style and built their facades after palaces, temples, and plantations. All of these places historically were used by whites to deny personhood to nonwhites.

When looking at the layout of museums, Greek, Roman, and European art are the easiest to access and usually the “gems” of the collection. Meanwhile, African, Asian, and Native American art is off in a corner and often the museums do not have a clear provenance or history of ownership for the items, or simply don’t wish to acknowledge the fact that they were stolen goods. No clearer is the case for decolonizing the museum than that of John Oliver, whose recent episode of “Last Week Tonight” showed the darker side of diversifying a museum’s collection and how institutions are so panicked about looking like they want to represent more cultures that due diligence goes out the window. The white board members, directors, and heads of museum simply don’t invest the money or time into non-white art because it’s considered lesser than. Whether or not they realize it, they are perfectly embodying the Racial Contract by creating a space of white colonial glorification that pays special attention to white art and less to nonwhite art, which in turn encourages nonwhites in the community to not go to the museum, or makes the space uncomfortable for them. 

The more I thought about these parallels, the more I wanted to learn about these systems and how the next generation of museum professionals can do better by the communities they serve.

In her 2017 book Curatorial Activism: Towards and Ethics of Curating, Maura Reilly brings to light some alarming statistics. Museums love to put on short term exhibitions featuring artists of non-white or non-male identities, but yet their permanent collections on display betray the thoughts under the surface. Take for example the display practices of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Of the “410 works in the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries, only a paltry 16 were by women. There were even fewer works by non-white artists, and those who were given exhibition space were segregated in a single room dedicated to Diego Rivera and Mexican Muralism”. (Reilly, p.17) New York is a diverse city that has neighborhoods dedicated to various cultures from around the world, yet if anyone from off the street were to go into the museum and ask if they see themselves represented on the walls, they would statistically say no. Museums today love to perform acceptance and welcoming, yet they don’t follow through on their words and instagram posts. The Contract lives on and continues to lurk and change forms so that it seems inviting and changed, much like a toxic ex.

Later in the chapter, Reilly does provide some hope to change this relationship between museum and community. She offers different curatorial strategies to encourage more representation of BIPOC and female artists.

First is to revise the canon that we use to educate visitors with and make it more diverse. Often this is done by finding other artists that were active or in the same circles as blockbuster artists of the time (finding the Lee Krasner to Jackson Pollock or the Dora Maar to Salvador Dali) and putting them in conversation with each other. Although this does leave some errors in the interpretation of history. Are new viewers simply supposed to know that these works are being introduced as a means of highlighting those who didn’t get proper recognition at the time, or is this just going to be hung on a wall with no context?

Second, she suggests “Area Studies”, where scholars and curators simply create new canons relating to identities and time periods (ex. Feminist Art of the French Revolution). This raises similar questions to the previous solution: will visitors be given context? Will this become its own canon and separate collection to be on display in a permanent gallery? How will this shift traditional museums and their display of art?

Finally, she discusses taking a “relational approach”, meaning that curators put many movements and moments within the same time period on display so that viewers are confronted by a variety of perspectives on the same time in history. Personally, I find this method fascinating and fun – imagine an exhibition that took a moment in time and got 10 different artistic takes on it. Most importantly, “a relational approach to curating … is interested  not in a monologue of sameness, but in a multitude or cacophony of voices speaking simultaneously”. (Reilly, p.30) With this approach, visitors are confronted by many ideas and make their on ideas and conclusions about the topic through establishing relationships between the images they are presented with.

Is this how curators, educators, and other museum professionals can escape Mills’ contract? Yes and no. While these methods of display are a great step towards equity in the museum, the framework is still inherently one of white supremacy. The only way to change the museum is to make it change from the ground up.

Step One: Educate the Museum about itself so it has to learn and be better.

Read the books:

Mills, C.W. (1997). The Racial Contract [Book]. Cornell University Press.

Reilly, Maura. “What Is Curatorial Activism?” Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, Thames & Hudson, New York, 2021, pp. 16–33.

Thanks for joining for today’s edition of Educating the Museum 🙂

If you have questions, feedback, an article or video I should read, feel free to email me!