Jul 16, 2020
Newark Museum of Art’s Linda Harrison to Speak at Iowa Arts Summit
Museum visitors can learn as much from what is NOT on display as from what is. When Linda Harrison was growing up on the south side of Chicago in the late 1960s, she and her grade-school classmates took a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her takeaway: “Museums are for white people,” she said recently. “We saw white people on the walls, in the paintings, and white people running around the museum. Never did I imagine that I’d be running a museum myself.”
Now, as the executive director of the Newark Museum of Art and one of just a handful of African-Americans to lead a major U.S. museum, Harrison makes sure her institution reflects the community it serves. At the virtual Iowa Arts Summit on Aug. 7, she’ll discuss how she has redefined the museum’s internal operations and public programs to include a wider range of perspectives.
“This is the power we have,” she said, “the power of healing.”
She’s spent most of her career in the corporate world and landed the 110-year-old Newark museum’s top spot after a stint at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora. Since both museums hired her to lead transformative change, the Iowa Arts Council is delighted to welcome her to the upcoming summit — in a year when transformation is more urgent than ever. Here are three broad lessons she’d like to impart:
Museums can take a stand
In the midst of controversy, “museums tend to be neutral,” Harrison said, “but we can no longer be neutral. As institutions, we must be activists for social justice. That means listening to different voices and having different conversations.”
She said Newark has made enormous progress since 1967, when 26 people died in race riots that stunned the nation and clobbered the city’s reputation. But there is still work to do, and she wants the city’s art museum to lead the charge.
Her team recently hosted a community program about the 1967 uprising — and its parallels to today — with the mayor, musicians, spoken-word poets and more.
Museums “have to put this front and center, and not in just an intellectual sense,” she said. “What are we really going to do about it?”
Internal culture matters
Harrison likes to mix things up. In Newark, she invites museum staff from different departments to join teams they haven’t in the past. A security guard, for example, now contributes ideas for exhibitions.
“Our internal culture is evolving so the types of ideas we generate, the discussions we have, the content we produce will be much more engaging for the communities we sit in,” she said.
She encourages organizations with smaller staffs to seek out fresh perspectives from community partners — universities, galleries and especially artists.
“The artists, they’re pretty well connected,” she said. “They have an ecosystem that really works.”
Digital outreach is essential
Like many museums, the Newark Museum of Art ramped up its digital programs when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down its brick-and-mortar facilities. The pandemic forced the staff to think bigger.
“How do we redefine the gallery experience?” she said. “How do we redefine learning engagement?”
These days, anyone can take a virtual tour of museums around the world, she said, and blue-chip art houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s are jumping into the mix.
“How do we compete? And when we come back (to the building), what does that mean?” she said. “Do we go deep in our community?”
In a word: Yes. Harrison encourages museums to focus on programs that only they can provide, with unique content that matters to all the people they serve.
The former Chicago south-sider made her vision for the Newark museum pretty clear: “We are not going to have kids walk into this museum and not show them people of color.”
— Michael Morain, Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs
