Exploring ideas and engaging in conversation
Please join RISD and Waterfire Providence for a symposium on the controversial artist intervention on the Rosa Parks House. The day begins with a tour of the project followed by panel discussions about art, preservation, and memory. This project brings up questions of race, artistic appropriation and preservation and should be an important discussion for all. Free. For more information about the symposium, please visit their website.
Here’s your weekly roundup of new jobs! Happy Hunting!
New England
Collections Manager [Ecotarium, Worcester, Massachusetts]
UMCA Education Curator [UMCA, Amherst, Massachusetts]
Assistant Director [Carpenter Museum, Rehoboth, Massachusetts]
Executive Director [Albacore Park, Portsmouth, New Hampshire]
Assistant Preparator [Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts]
Museum Educator [Ecotarium, Worcester, Massachusetts]
Program Coordinator [Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts]
Exhibits Project Manager [Boston Children’s Museum, Boston, Massachusetts]
Director of Education and Experience [Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts]
Education Coordinator [Wilson Museum, Castine, Maine]
Mid Atlantic
Carpenter Foundation Fellow for Asian Glass [The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York]
Director of Education Programs [Jackie Robinson Museum, New York City]
Midwest
Curatorial Assistant [Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio]
Visitor Services Manager [Ford Piquette Avenue Plant, Detroit, Michigan]
South
Grants Manager [Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, North Carolina]
Museum Educator for Adult Programs [Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia]
Museum Educator for Curriculum and School Programs [Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia]
Collections Manager [Artis-Naples, Naples, Florida]
Museum Preparator [Artis-Naples, Naples, Florida]
Associate Registrar [Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland]
Director of Education [Cummer Museum of Art, Jacksonville, Florida]
Curator [President James K. Polk Library and Museum, Columbia, Tennessee]
Exhibitions and Collections Manager [Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Memphis, Tennessee]
West
Head of Volunteer Services [Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon]
Hello and Welcome Back!
It’s graduation time in academia! A time to pass torches, hand over keys, etc. As rising second year students in the Tufts Museum Studies program, we are very excited to take over where Dominque and Andrea left off, and we wish them heartfelt congratulations and lots of luck as they make their way into the museum world.
For our first post, we want to take a moment to introduce ourselves and let you know who we are and what we hope to bring to the blog this year. We also want to hear from you, to make sure this space responds to what you want to have in a museum studies blog. Please leave comments or drop us a line at our email in the sidebar.
With that, please bear with us for the long post this week and allow us to introduce ourselves!
Danielle Bennett, Museum Studies and History
Hi, I’m Danielle and I’m so pleased to be co-piloting this blog through the next year! I am a student in the Museum Studies and History program so I hope to bring you news and perspectives on that side of the museum field from little historic houses to large institutions.
I study American history, and am particularly interested in the intersections of race, gender, and class as the United States industrialized and took on the dimensions we know today. I am deeply interested in civics education in the United States and believe that museums have a large role to play as informal educators of both students and adults. I am a believer of the importance of polyvocality within museums – both on the exhibit floor and in the development stages, and strongly believe in grounding museums within their communities for mutual benefit. I hope to highlight these issues in the blog in coming months.
I received my BA in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, which was undoubtedly an influence on my historical interests. I am based in New York City, where I spent time working as a political and labor organizer before spending several years at a telecommunications tech startup. I am currently a Teaching Assistant for the Tufts History Department and I work as the Social Media Manager for the Alice Austen House in Staten Island, NY. This historic house museum gets to weave threads about an early female LGBTQ figure, New York City history, and photography into a unique story with a lot of contemporary resonance. If you’re ever in New York, make sure you pay us a visit! I’ll also soon be interning with New-York Historical Society, one of the first museums in the country, with a collection that ranges from Tiffany Lamps to vintage board games, to protest signs from the 2017 Women’s March, and beyond! I hope to share perspectives on presenting history influenced by both of these organizations.
Amanda S. Wall, Museum Studies and Education
I am Amanda and am so excited to be your new Museum Education Editor. I am originally from New York by way of Los Angeles and have just completed my first year in the Museum Education M.A. program. My journey to Museum Education started as a child with a love for museums and archaeological sites. I loved learning everything and was always so enthused to share what I learned with others. Museums were a way to connect with the past to understand the present. This love led me to pursue a B.A. in Anthropology and a minor in Spanish, concentrating in Bioarchaeology, at SUNY New Paltz. While at New Paltz, I had the chance to conduct research on a newly discovered skeletal population culminating in a final project and poster on sex determination. I also had the opportunity to attend an Archaeological field school at the National Historic Landmark, Historic Huguenot Street. Upon graduating, I chose to serve as an AmeriCorps volunteer with City Year New York working with students at an East Harlem elementary school.
Although I loved both archaeology and education, I wasn’t clear on how I could pursue both interests until I began volunteering at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. I started as a Gallery Interpreter, becoming certified in five different exhibitions as a Docent-in-Training, before moving on to the Vertebrate Paleontology collections team where I worked rehousing, inventorying, and researching archival techniques. My experience at NHM led me to realize that a profession in the Museum field would be a perfect way to merge my two academic interests. In the coming year I will be interning with the MIT Museum and the Tsongas Industrial History Center. In my free time I love to hike, travel, and play with my dog. As the Tufts Museum Studies Blog’s Museum Education Editor I will be focusing on museums and the public sphere, both in terms of education and how we are relating to and engaging our public.
Kelsey Petersen, Museum Studies and Art History
Hello everyone! My name is Kelsey Petersen, and I will be representing the art history side of Tufts’ Museum Studies program! Before I introduce myself, I would like to say a big thank you to Andrea and Dominique for this past year of thought-provoking discussions, helpful job postings, marvelous newsletters, and of course for their enthusiasm for all things ‘museum.’ We’ll miss you, and best of luck as you launch into your next stage of museum work!
It surprised me how fast my first year as a Master’s candidate in art history and museum studies flew by; in some ways it feels like we were just in Museums Today, debating the Berkshire Museum and exploring the multifaceted roles museums cast in our communities. As I reflect on my coursework over these past two semesters, I realize my favorite areas of learning occurred when discussions from my art history and museum studies courses intersected. For example, I first learned about decolonization methodologies in Museums Today, when I studied the Abbe Museum as a case study of a museum that has transformed its display, collecting, and consulting practices to prioritize Wabanaki voice. These critical methodologies are what I often ground myself in, whether it is in an African Art seminar or Exhibition Planning. Overall, I hope to bring these interdisciplinary intersections with me into my new role as co-editor, and further connect art historical approaches to the museum world.
Now for a little about my background: I grew up in the Bay Area, California and lived in Los Angeles as an undergraduate, so I must confess my first New England winter was a little challenging to get used to (although I did enjoy all the activities that came with it, like cider donuts and snow days). Now that spring is here and the sun is back out, I’m excited for more bike rides! Wherever I go, my bike and a book are usually not too far away.
My first entry point into the museum world was when I worked in a visitor services position at a contemporary art museum. I quickly fell in love with the power of art to connect people and ideas, and wanted to become more involved with the behind-the-scenes aspect of programming. After interning in the education department at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, I knew for sure this labor of love was for me, and decided to pursue my Master’s for more related opportunities. Since moving to Boston and starting the Tufts’ program, I started a collections internship at the Fitchburg Art Museum, and have happily discovered another possible career niche. Ultimately, this first year in the Tufts’ dual program has been incredible, and I can’t wait for another year of enjoyable challenges, new perspectives, and learning.
We are really looking forward to further exploring and discussing the museum world with you, and we welcome you to contribute as guest author at any time!
The Brooklyn Museum recently announced a new curator of African Art, Kristen Windmuller-Luna, a Princeton- and Yale-educated specialist in the field. This elicited some outrage in the museum community and the local Brooklyn community, especially in light of the recent depiction of the condescending white African Art curator in the recent film, Black Panther. Common questions include: “How can it be that the Brooklyn Museum could not find a qualified Black scholar for the position”, and “how hard did they look?”
In reporting on this issue, The New York Times found several museum professionals in the field of African Art who confirmed that it can be difficult to source appropriately diverse candidate pools for these positions.
“Steven Nelson, the director of U.C.L.A.’s African Studies Center, agreed, saying on Friday that he was “one of a very small number of African-American specialists in the field.” Art history as a whole has done “a very poor job of recruiting a diverse pool,” he said, adding that “African art history in the U.S. is primarily white and female.”
This matches much of what is already understood about the museum world and indeed college and graduate school candidate pools generally skew white. It is worth noting that Windmuller-Luna’s position was announced in tandem with another curatorial hire in Photography, Drew Sawyer, a white man.
Of course, it is not wrong for a white person to work in a subject that is about non-white art or other issues, but any opportunity to examine hiring practices and candidate pipelines is useful, and the Brooklyn Museum has been the subject of protests by Decolonize This Place and other anti-gentrification groups concerned about the Brooklyn Museum’s transition to catering to a whiter, wealthier visitorship, which corresponds to changes in the neighborhoods around the museum in the past 20 years. There are further concerns in the community about museum director, Anne Pasternak, who headed up a 2015 Halloween Party at the museum with the theme “The Bronx is Burning”, a reference to a rash of fires in the Bronx due to severe underfunding of critical services in the borough in the mid1970s.
In a neighborhood with its own history of racial strife and struggles with gentrification, with neighborhood organizations asking for the Brooklyn Museum to engage with them on these issues, it seems that the Brooklyn Museum could minimize public blow back when making announcements like this by taking actions to demonstrate their intentions to be a good community actor for all, not just the white sections of Crown Heights and surrounds. Community advisory panels, creating opportunities specifically for scholars of color, and good faith engagement when problems arise are only a few of the ways to build a better relationship with the Brooklyn community. However, the real issue at hand here is a structural one: Educational, economic, and hiring bias work together at every level of the process, reducing the pipeline of available students of color bound for higher education, reducing the amount of students of color accepted to elite organizations, and reducing the amount of people of color who make it through the resume review and interview processes. For the Brooklyn Museum to fail to acknowledge these structural issues means they are choosing complicity in a broken system rather than engaged action to create a better museum.
This post comes to us from Danielle Bennett, a first-year student in the History and Museum Studies Master’s program.
Historic Houses often suffer from two issues that make them less relevant to visitors. One, they
tend to present a history that focuses on great (or semi-great) men from history, ignoring the women,
people of color, working people, and queer people that enabled the actions of these great men (and
ignores the accomplishments of those people in their own right). Two, to combat a lack of interest in the
stories presented, some sites resort to gimmicky semi-relevant events and activities that divorce sites
from their specific historic interest and flatten history into storybooks. It is possible, however, to combat
these problems and capture new audiences for historic sites.
In “Ending Nostalgia at the Heritage Museum,” we learn about the process the new curator at the Museums of Mississauga (Ontario) has undergone to dismantle the nostalgic trappings that used to be present at historic house museums in Mississauga, including horse drawn buggy rides and costumed interpreters. Instead, he has commissioned contemporary artists to stage “interventions” in the houses to strip away nostalgia and re-engage the public with new thoughts about the houses that more fully reflect the diverse communities living in Mississauga.
One of the artist interventions, by Erika DeFreitas, explored how the history presented in historic
houses is staged and highly curated to tell certain narratives. Part of the work, titled “like a conjuring
(bringing water back to Bradley)” was intended to disrupt the understanding of the setting of the house
itself, which was moved from the shoreline of Lake Ontario for the purpose of becoming part of the
historic site several miles inland. The piece included singing wine and water glasses filled with Lake
Ontario water, as well as posters of the waters of the Lake, free for the taking. Another section of the
installation used blown-up photographs of a small textile woven by the hand of an unknown immigrant
worker alongside video of hands (the artist’s) dip dying into indigo dye, meant to evoke unseen labor of
many kinds, including that of the indigo plantation the Bradley family held in the (US) American South.
The program is scheduled to continue, with new installations from different artists coming in. All
the work on display intends to ask questions about the narratives that are on display at historic houses
and what other narratives are suppressed in service to the dominant ones. There are other examples of
using media to recontextualize historic sites, for example the Haas-Lilienthal House in San Francisco, but
the work on display at the Bradley is noteworthy for its intentions to encourage dialogue about larger
questions about who gets to have a history, and what we celebrate when we enshrine certain narratives.
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