Day Four: Fraught Forums in an Uncertain Age

Museums should move away from being temples that enshrine the status quo of the elite (as they do the artifacts, artworks, and specimens in their care) to become forums that stimulate reflection and discussion on the day’s pressing issues. Most museum studies students pick up on that from their first readings, which may include or refer to Duncan Cameron’s lecture on the subject. While I find that a noble and admirable ideal, I am left pondering how do museums make this ideal a reality, and how large the burden lies on front-line staff such as visitor services associates, staff interpreters, and volunteer docents.

I found myself quite taken by Derrick Adams’ ‘Keep Your Head Down and Your Eyes Open,’ which features driving caps on wheels riding up, down, and across the exhibition on this wooden highway. Apart from hearkening to the old custom of dressing up for your leisure drive, their aerodynamic shape seems not too different from a real car’s. Setting them on wooden wheels and miniature tracks like this reminds me of a child’s toy set, and the wide-eyed excitement that kids feel when they’re gonna go on vacation. It only amplifies the heartbreak and sorrow for how many vacations must have been (or continue to be) ruined or cut short for children because they and their parents were black.

For today, we explored the Museum of Art and Design’s (MAD) exhibitions, Derrick Adams: Sanctuary and La Frontera, on a tour led by one of their docents. As we explored La Frontera, I was quite taken by a phrase she shared with us, that museums are “safe places for unsafe ideas.” With exhibitions that explore, respectively, the perils of “driving while black” for African-American motorists and the difficulties of undocumented immigrants crossing the border, MAD certainly presents heartbreaking and polarizing ideas to its visitors.

The selection of books available in the Museum of Art and Design’s exhibition, Unpacking the Green Book. Not only are there resources for research, but also for conversation: reading tables that also doubled as gatherings for conversation.

What does it take for a museum to function as a “safe space for unsafe ideas”? When we visited the exhibition library, featuring books about the experiences and histories of racism in the United States, I witnessed conversations stimulated by a book I picked up from the shelf. For that moment, it gave me hope that such an ideal can work, that museums can “bring intellectual developments to the public and to create thoughtful, stimulating and respectful conversations about them.” At least that’s how Jo Ellen Parker, CEO and President of the Carnegie Museums defined it in this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op-ed.

However, I could only wonder how much training and experience would temper them to broach these topics eloquently, thoughtfully, and winsomely. Moreso when I remember hearing of horror stories of museum volunteers crumbling before visitors who took great offense at exhibits that contradicted their own beliefs. Even more when my interests and experience place me in the position that such a time will come for me.

How can museums function as a forum when offense can be expressed so vehemently, even violently?