Sharing Authority

In artist Fred Wilson’s conversation with numerous museum curators, he reveals that he was ultimately drawn to the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore for his Mining the Museum project because it made him uncomfortable. “I’m a black man, and I went to an institution about the 19^th century where they had basically nothing (on display) about black people in a city that was majority African-American.” [1] As public institutions whose exhibitions presumably change over time, historical museums have an important opportunity not only to cultivate interest in history among visitors, but to right past institutional wrongs. By sharing authority with local communities, artists, and others without public history backgrounds, museums can create exhibitions that truly feel public in their representation and involvement of potential visitors. As the edited collection Letting Go: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World shows, there are numerous ways of completing such a task.

In the example of Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum exhibit, museum curators invited in a local artist – untrained in the skills of museum curation – to use the Maryland Historical Society’s collection in creating an exhibit that addressed historical themes and topics lacking presence in museum displays. In the displays, Wilson placed slave shackles next to ornate silverwork, communicating American opulence as derivative of the upper-class’ use of slave labor.[2] Wilson’s displays ultimately resulted in mixed reviews. Some positive and some utterly appalled. Yet, this exhibit – in an extremely visceral sense – filled in the narrative gaps missing from the Maryland Historical Society for decades. Through the act of shared authority, Mining the Museum moved beyond representations of white bourgeois identity and showed the darker flipside that had provided for such comfortable lifestyles in Maryland’s nineteenth century past – slave labor.

Another example of shared authority once again enabling more inclusive exhibit is seen in the Oakland Museum of California’s section on Native California in the museum’s Gallery of California History. In this exhibit, Native Californians themselves structured the exhibit’s content, determining the focus of the content, editing video commentary, and selecting cultural objects that would be displayed in the exhibit.[3] Museums are often seen unfavorably in Native communities. Considering such institutions’ past as repositories of sacred cultural objects and occasionally human remains taken without tribal permission by anthropologists, such inclusions remain incredibly important.

When OMCA unveiled this exhibition, I remember it being a really big deal. I was in a Native California class at San Francisco State at the time and the teacher insisted that our class go to visit the exhibit. For a large portion of the semester, we had discussed the manner in which Californian anthropologists like Alfred Kroeber and others had looted Native grave sites and cultural ceremonies, storing such objects and human remains for preservation purposes in museums. The fact that the OMCA had consulted many Native Californians including my teacher Kathy Wallace – she is pictured on page 74 - to structure the exhibit around their communities’ historical interpretations and needs represented significant progress including Native communities in their representation. Through sharing authority with the communities that they represent, museums and other cultural institutions, curators gain the ability to correct the institutional wrongs committed by museums in the past.

---

[1]Fred Wilson and Paula Marincola, et al, “Mining the Museum Revisited: A Conversation with Fred Wilson, Paula Marincola, and Marjorie Schwarzer” in Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, ed. Bill Adair et al. (Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2011), 231-2.

[2] Melissa Rachleff, “Peering Behind the Curtain: Artists and Questioning Historical Authority” Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, ed. Bill Adair et al. (Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2011), 218.

[3] Kathleen McLean, “Whose Questions, Whose Conversations?” Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, ed. Bill Adair et al. (Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2011), 74.