Look at Art. Get Paid.
Maia Chao, artist, Josephine Devanbu, artist, and Bryn Pernot, researcher
What does an art museum look and feel like to someone who wouldn’t normally visit one? Last November, 41 people who rarely, if ever, visit art museums came to the RISD Museum as guest critics. Each received $75 in cash for their insights.
In this paired video and essay, artists Maia Chao and Josephine Devanbu and researcher Bryn Pernot outline the program’s context, history, and politics. They recount the reception of the program by staff at the RISD Museum and examine their interdisciplinary approach to art, research, and activism.
The United States population is over one-third people of color, yet 90% of core museumgoers are white (Farrell & Medvedeva, 2010).
Art museums hear from, and answer to, the people who show up — a disproportionately white, affluent, and educated segment of the population that doesn’t reflect the whole public. This isn’t a coincidence. Most museums were built and curated under white leadership and center white narratives of history, value, and beauty (Dewhurst & Hendrick, 2016).
Conversations about social exclusion from museums have often focused on barriers like cost of admission, geographic distance, or a lack of interest in the subject matter (Dawson, 2014). One common response to this has been to create museum free days. But studies have shown that these days often end up serving the people already most likely to be aware of museum programs (Pekarik, 2007; Dilenschneider, 2017). Museum professionals and critical race scholars have aptly noted that the focus on barriers has assimilationist undertones, implying that individuals’ behaviors, rather than institutional structures, should change (Dawson, 2014). Non-attendance at dominant institutions is conflated with a lack of culture, which overlooks the ways that marginalized groups are already culturally engaged (Yosso, 2005).
These are not new issues. Museum professionals have been aware of systemic social exclusion in cultural institutions for decades. Yet the question remains: how can dominant cultural institutions ethically incorporate the voices and perspectives of marginalized individuals without requiring assimilation?
For staff of historically underrepresented identities, these issues are all too familiar. People of color comprise only 20% overall of art museum staff. And a precious few are in the position to shape policy: fewer than 5% of art museums have people of color in senior management positions (Betsch Cole, 2015). For a majority white staff, tackling issues of equity can be paralyzing. People don’t want to speak for others and don’t feel qualified to do so. The urgency to maintain operations as usual can easily overshadow the urgency to make deep structural changes.
Our Project: Look at Art. Get Paid.
Look at Art. Get Paid. (LAAGP) is an independent arts research program that pays people who rarely, if ever, visit art museums to come to an art museum as guest critics (1), look at art, and share their thoughts. The program convenes a conversation about art and museum access with individuals who are not presently served by these institutions. LAAGP focuses on lived experiences to identify the cultural norms and standards that currently exist within these spaces.
LAAGP started as an artwork dreamt up by two young artists, Maia Chao and Josephine Devanbu, grappling with the relevance of our chosen field to a wider public. Both of us come from upper-middle class, interracial (Chinese/White and Indian/White, respectively) households with teaching artist parents. The value of art and art museums was a given. But we recognized that this assumption was firmly rooted in the intersectional privileges of our identities.
Having both studied social science in addition to art, we craved a candid conversation about the structural inequalities of art and its institutions. We started LAAGP when we were students at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Using our institutional access, we decided to seek funds that would normally circulate within RISD and redistribute them to the public.
We first proposed the idea of paying people to visit the RISD Museum as a socially engaged artwork in 2015. The Museum was excited to invite people into the Museum who normally wouldn’t come, but steered us away from payment: What about compensating guest critics with donated student artworks, or offering free memberships?
But we persisted. We needed to make space for the fact that a trip to an art museum is not a universally valuable experience. We wanted to honor and name the work that goes into investing in a space that hasn’t shown an investment in you. To do so we resolved to compensate people in a currency that holds value across all intersections of race and class in our capitalist system — cash.
After a year of dialogue with the Museum, we came to a place where cash compensation was financially and logistically feasible. We acquired the $4,000 we’d need to run the program. Various academic divisions at RISD chipped in, including RISD Research, Liberal Arts, Fine Arts, Graduate Studies, and the RISD Museum.
In September 2016, the team expanded to include Bryn Pernot and Maria Paula Garcia Mosquera, students in the Master’s in Public Humanities program at Brown University. Bryn applied her background in museum research to develop a strategy for recruiting and interacting with the guest critics. Maria Paula brought skills in translation and facilitation to develop Spanish materials and lead the Spanish-speaking session. As a team, we used our varied interests and skill sets to build a program that was both art and research.
After advertising the program in Rhode Island’s public buses, we received over 200 inquiries and selected a final group of 41 participants. Based on information collected through a survey, we gave priority to individuals who had not been to a museum in their adult lives, and to people of color. The program took place over the course of five days in November 2016. Guest critics came to the Museum and offered powerful accounts of what the Museum looked and felt like. They observed the silence of the galleries, the “proper” dress and restrained manner of other visitors, the lack of “inner city” visitors and artists of color (2), as well as the evident cost of the building and collection. They had ideas about how to improve the space for non-English speakers, reduce the presence of security, boost public awareness, and enliven the galleries. (See video above for details and guest critic responses.)
Using the Master’s Tools
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never bring about genuine change.” — Audre Lorde (1979, p. 94)
We recognize that while we are redistributing institutional money, LAAGP still centers a historically white art museum, thereby reinvesting in it as a site of cultural production. Some of the strategies we used to confer a sense of authority to our participants borrowed the language of power used by this historically white institution. We hosted the program in the Museum’s Danforth boardroom, where the Museum holds its all-staff meetings. The room is a handsome space. Hanging on the wall is an oil painting of Mrs. Danforth. The windows look onto the Museum’s Radeke garden. By hosting the LAAGP orientation and group discussions at such a site, we employed the look of power in a white legacy space to communicate to the participants that their voices mattered. Our goal in doing so was to facilitate a conversation about mechanisms of power. But we recognize that our effort to subvert the authority of the museum boardroom also has the potential to reify it.
Paying people to visit a museum is a charged gesture that could read as problematic and paternalistic. Offering payment to engage in any activity creates a hierarchy of power and exerts control over those paid. But it was important to us that we transparently recognize the pervasive role of money in nearly all our exchanges — that we use it to invert the usual relationship between the paying and the paid. To leave money behind the scenes would minimize its presence. And we knew that, in order to talk about art, race, power, and institutions, we needed to foreground money.
One participant noted the effect of payment: “It made me feel important — like me and the group, we’re here to see what can be changed about this museum. Our words count. We’re going to be heard. I felt like that especially since I was being paid, that helped, a lot.”
Given the central role that money and labor play in this project, it’s important to disclose how our own labor factored into its production. We realized this project through several years of sustained unpaid labor. We must also acknowledge that, despite our unpaid labor, we have gained social and cultural capital by working on this project at a high-profile institution. While our unpaid labor demands sacrifices — we work late hours on weeknights and weekends — these are choices we make freely. That we have such a choice indicates a position of relative privilege.
Project Reception: Notes from RISD Museum Staff
In November 2017, a year after realizing LAAGP, the Education Department at the RISD Museum invited us to share the program as part of an ongoing series of all-staff dialogues about diversity, equity, and access. We each received an honorarium of $200 for our presentation, half of which we will direct toward further project costs.
Museum staff members responded to the LAAGP video (above) and engaged in a rigorous and nuanced dialogue about the Museum’s values. They interrogated how these values are conveyed — or not conveyed — to the public, locating discrepancies between theory and practice. People spoke self-reflexively from a variety of positions, referencing their particular departments and the broader efforts of the Museum. Most Museum staff members agreed that the issues voiced by the guest critics were not surprising to them. Still, multiple staff members articulated the impact of hearing the critiques from real people rather than theoretical individuals who do not visit art museums.
Conversation was wide ranging. Guest critics’ frustration with the Museum’s no touch policy sparked a staff debate about the tension between creating a welcoming environment for visitors and vigilantly protecting the art from physical contact. The debate corresponded to a poignant statement made by a guest critic: “They’re taking better care of the paintings than of us.”
One staff member pointed out that different jobs within the Museum require different priorities — a guard’s bottom-line is to protect the art while an educator’s priority is the visitor experience. Another person suggested that they assess the Museum’s priorities based on the distribution of staff time, examining the breakdown between time dedicated to the Museum’s collection and time dedicated to the visitor experience.
The guest critics’ comments also sparked reflection on exhibition design choices. Staff examined the sociological implications of aesthetically driven decisions, such as the choice to match mannequins to the white color of the walls. The group noted the magnitude of the work that lies ahead and discussed the difficulty of maintaining momentum on initiatives to address accessibility amid already steep demands on their time.
The Museum’s director proposed that deep changes can and must be made, inviting his colleagues to consider how the Museum’s values are displayed in what it chooses to show in its limited gallery space. He asked, “Do traditional cornerstones of the canon always have to be on view?” He reported that the Museum is making an explicit effort to acquire more art that does not center whiteness.
While most of the conversation responded directly to the experiences and observations of the guest critics, one staff member critiqued the project itself. They suggested we redo the program with more neutral framing to keep our politics from influencing the guest critics’ perception of the Museum. This critique highlights the program’s lack of objectivity, a characteristic central to one particular rubric — research. The comment prompted us to consider how we present ourselves and the program. Though we don’t have an interest in building a more “neutral” program (we don’t think neutrality is possible when navigating a history of systemic exclusion), we do need to confront the tension embedded within LAAGP between research and art.
An Interdisciplinary Approach: Art and Research
Our guest critics widely perceived LAAGP as a research study, some even expressing that they felt they had been educated by the program, a dynamic we tried hard to minimize. Indeed, we have presented this program within the category of “arts research” and used many signifiers of conventional scientific research. We went through the vetting process of the Institutional Review Board, advertised alongside sleep studies on public transportation, created an institutional website, interviewed the guest critics, drafted surveys, facilitated discussions similar to focus groups, audio-recorded all conversations, and presented PowerPoints at conferences. These procedures, methods, and materials have allowed us to be legible and credible in the ways we needed to realize the project. But in prioritizing legibility what do we forfeit?
From the beginning of this project, people have wondered about the value we hoped to offer. “What is your goal? How will this be useful? What answers will you provide?” Still, we encounter the questions: “What did you find out?” and “What are you going to do?” As artists, we have resisted promising an outcome or naming a conclusion. Nato Thompson speaks to the artist’s dedication to ambiguity:
An artist’s longing for ambiguity is understandable. The right not to be clear offers a tremendous kind of freedom: in a world that always wants something from us, isn’t it appealing to make something that makes sense to no one?…The dream of not being utilitarian is a courageous and exciting ambition that should not be squashed. (Thompson, 2015 p. 40)
While as artists we long for the poetics possible in ambiguity, we also recognize that the ambiguity of art can produce the very exclusivity and inaccessibility we want to interrogate. Artworks often bank on shared vocabulary with a viewer — an assumption that can bar those with a different vocabulary from access to meaning. In a field where ambiguity presides, the markers of what makes for a rigorous, interesting body of work are necessarily subjective. This subjectivity leaves ample space for those in power to validate works that center their experience over that of others. The inherently subjective nature of art makes it difficult to call out this preferential treatment, shielding discriminatory behavior from scrutiny.
As artists, the task we set for ourselves is to use ambiguity to challenge existing power structures. The value of our approach lies in its slippery status. The Museum is not our client. We were not invited or asked to implement LAAGP. We are not a company nor do we have tax exempt status to defend. The flexibility we have as artists allows us to appropriate, rethink, and transform existing models.
Like many RISD Museum staff members, we find ourselves asking: how we can maintain the urgency felt in the all-staff meeting in our daily work?
Part of our continued approach will involve meeting one-on-one with staff members to discuss possible changes and compile a list of recommended actions that could address the concerns raised by guest critics. But where meetings and documents may falter, we must also think in terms of interpersonal engagement. In light of the tension between protecting the Museum’s objects and putting visitors at ease, we are entertaining the potential of a participatory artwork that facilitates dialogue between the Museum’s security officers and the guest critics.
Where research may flatten and homogenize, art can enliven and complicate. And where art may speak to the symbolic, research findings can yield reform. As artists, we will pull from what is available to us. The result will inevitably be multifaceted. In crossing boundaries between disciplines, we accept that the program will be misunderstood, and that it will not singularly fulfill traditional metrics of research or art. But in doing so, we strategically occupy the in-between, with an eye towards urgency and accountability.
Maia Chao
Maia Chao is an artist interested in the questions and problems posed by cultural anthropology. In addition to art making she has conducted research on the legalization of Maya community radio in Guatemala, adoptive migration trends from Latin America to Spain, and the emergence of mestizo technology in Latin America. Chao holds a BA in Anthropology from Brown University and received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Josephine Devanbu
Josephine Devanbu sees art making as a space to prototype and share ideas. She is committed to working towards more just ways of distributing the resources that support the arts. Devanbu holds a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Science and Technology Studies from Brown University. She works at RISD’s Research Office, helping students and faculty initiate inquiry-based projects. @jdevanbu
Bryn Pernot
Bryn Pernot is an interdisciplinary researcher and program developer who seeks to bring together fields like anthropology, education, theater, and design to create innovative museum programs that integrate diverse backgrounds and perspectives and provide a space for public participation. Pernot holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and is currently an MA candidate in Public Humanities at Brown University. @bryn_pernot
Footnotes
(1) Guest Critic is a term used in an art and design context to refer to visitors invited to review works and offer their opinions, comments, and questions. The term implies respect for the individual’s expertise and insight. In Look at Art. Get Paid., the participants of the program received payment under the category of an “honorarium.” This is the same payment category that RISD uses to compensate guest critics invited to classroom critiques.
(2) The RISD Museum noted that there is indeed work by artists of color but that it is not clearly indicated to viewers.
References
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