In order to understand where museums are going, first we need to understand where they've been. In this episode, we speak to Majorie Schwarzer, professor of museum studies at the University of San Francisco. Schwarzer is the author of Riches, Rivals and Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America, which chronicles the transformation of museums in the United States. In this conversation we discuss the colonization, the professionalization of the museum field, and the power of objects.
On View is a production of the Knight Foundation, hosted by Chris Barr and produced by Katie Jane Fernelius.
CHRIS BARR: When I was 19, I changed my college major from journalism to art. It was later that year that I piled into an old yellow school bus filled with other students and professors from West Virginia University for a department field trip. It was my first time visiting an art museum. As a sophomore in college I knew that I loved art, but somehow I had never seen professional art outside of a book.
And, oh man, what an exhibition to start with! The Carnegie International that year featured artists like Kara Walker, Ann Hamilton, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. In a single evening, my ideas of what art could be and how it could be experienced were completely changed. My notion of the possible began to grow.
I’m Chris Barr, director of arts and technology innovation at Knight Foundation, where I get to spend time thinking about the roles of museums and other cultural institutions in our communities. In this series, we will be looking at how they are evolving to keep pace with society, how they can become welcoming to a wider public, and how technology might offer new opportunities to reach audiences. And we’ll hear from a lot of smart people along the way.
SOUND CLIPS: “My name is Nina Simon.” “Kimberly Drew” “I’m Vince Kadlubek” “Josette Melchor” “Kai Frazier”
CHRIS: Today, we talk to Marjorie Schwarzer.
MARJORIE SCHWARZER: I'm a professor of Museum Studies.
CHRIS: We wanted to talk to Marjorie because in order to understand where museums are going, we need to understand where they came from. And that happens to be Marjorie’s area of expertise.
MARJORIE: At University of San Francisco. I wrote a history of the American Museum which is now going into its third edition.
CHRIS: The history of museums can tell us a lot about why museums are the way they are. Why were museums first created? And who were they for? And when did they open up to the public? And what is a museum at all?
In asking these questions, and beginning to answer them, I hope that we will begin to understand the potential museums have to evolve and reach new audiences, while also being mindful of the way these institutions are deeply shaped by their past.
It’s hard to say when the first museum came into existence. People have been collecting things for a long time. Chinese emperors would decorate their palaces with exotic animals and plants. During the Renaissance, priests and explorers brought back “curiosities” from their travels.
But generally museums were places where objects were collected that told stories. And these stories were usually told by those who had power, wealth and influence.
MARJORIE: Aristocracy, kings, priests, explorers, the elite of society gathered up certain objects to kind of say, look what what we have and we are really the people who create the story. We control these objects we have these objects and we're going to arrange them to tell a story.
CHRIS: And those stories, she says, were often about colonial power.
MARJORIE: So when you think about this idea of museums embodying power and colonialism and then the current challenge to decolonize museums and really look at collections and really look at the messages and say, “Where did these collections come from? How did these museums get these collections? Why are they being displayed in a certain way?” That they really set themselves up to be the perfect place to be in the center of these really intense and embattled conversations, because they were very concentrated places of colonization.
CHRIS: At the center of these conversations are two of the very first public museums, the British Museum and the Louvre in Paris. Many of their most famous objects came into possession through the exploits of their empires. And for example, just this year, the Louvre returned 26 artifacts to the Republic of Bahnin in West Africa.
American museums don’t have quite the same history. But they do come out of periods when America became more powerful on the world stage, and our own elite wanted to be respected within Western society.
MARJORIE: The very first museums here were really kind of motley places. The very first museum actually was technically it was opened in 1773, so before the U.S., and it was in Charleston South Carolina. And it was a library.
CHRIS: A library housed things like the immigration papers, taxidermy and fossils.
MARJORIE: And it really starts after the Civil War, where the wealth in the world starts concentrating in the United States and you have industrialists who are using the natural resources and, to be honest, slave labor to build up these empires of industrial strength and power. And all of the sudden you have these self-made industrialists who have a lot of power and a lot of wealth. And they start going to Europe and wanting to position themselves as the aristocrats of America. They start wanting to show, no America has power.
We weren't like Napoleon and we didn't go out and conquer a nation like Italy, but we have money and we have lots of money. And so we can go out into the world and we can buy stuff. And we can show that we are the new kings, the new royalty, the new power of the world. They went and they bought masterworks, European masterworks. And then there was this idea that we will also start preserving the remnants of our great lands.
CHRIS: She says that meant showing off our natural history through plant specimens, animals and fossils. And it was during this post Civil War boom that some of our most famous institutions were born, like the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
So, why was object collection so important for telling the American story? Sure, you could read a book about America. But Marjorie says museums became particularly important for the mythology of America, especially as more people immigrated here.
MARJORIE: We've got to remember that immigrants didn't come speaking perfect English, nor did they come knowing the kind of British story about the origin of America. They were coming from Italy, they were coming from Greece, they were coming from Eastern Europe, they were coming from the southern United States. You had African-Americans, freed slaves or sharecroppers, coming into these northern cities. And we didn't really have a culture of literacy in the U.S. So objects could be really useful ways to teach.
CHRIS: So the first period of museum growth in the United States is traced to the growth of American industry and an rise in immigration. But the next two periods came out of the world wars. Both wars cemented American power in the world, and also situated America to use that power to grow their museum collections.
MARJORIE: So the post-World War I is where a lot of objects start flowing into the United States. And you have newly minted millionaires and you have new movements of art in Europe that the aristocracy can't afford or doesn't want to afford.
CHRIS: So European dealers are selling to US collectors after World War I.
MARJORIE: What happens after World War II, is there's so much damage in Europe and in Asia that America sees another opportunity to grow its collections.
CHRIS: And here, Marjorie says, is where we start to see American collectors going to Asia, especially to Japan. At the same time, you have more refugees flowing into the US, resulting in another boom in collections.
MARJORIE: You also have the development at that time of the department store and of the middle class. So art buying an art viewing and art as almost a suburban taste making becomes very popular in the 1950s.
And finally in 1965, we get something called the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The museum sector was really the last sector of the arts that had access to federal funds, because there was always a perception that art museums were for the elite.
This is the period where museums become more democratic.
You start getting grants flowing into museums to allow them to shore up their operations, to open up their doors to being much more educational and you get a lot of innovations within the museum sector.
CHRIS: So I'm curious after this boom in the 1970s and these changes that happened in the field. What are the professional roles that developed? What are the ways that museums started to restructure and act and innovate at that time?
MARJORIE: So you have a lot of tension in the field. Always. Always as in any field you have a lot of tension into what is the purpose of the museum and what are we really doing here. So you have a group that is still takes the ivory tower approach that we're going to have scholarly exhibitions, that we are scholars doing research with objects. But you also have this boom in museum education and museum educators start organizing. They start developing curriculum. They start developing new ways to interpret objects.
CHRIS: Despite this tension, this time represents profound shifts for the museum field. We have a doubling down on the public role on museums, we have professionals who are dedicated to museum practice, and we now have intentional efforts to contextualize objects for broader audiences.
MARJORIE: Even something, it's hard to even imagine this, but even something like a label next to a painting would have been a very radical kind of transformation within the museum that you would actually not just give an accession number, name of artist, title of artwork, but that you would actually explain a little bit about what the work is about is a pretty radical innovation that happened right around the 1970s.
CHRIS: Each of these periods follow dramatic social and economic changes in the US. But when it comes to technological changes, museums are a bit slower to adapt. Despite some lag time though, museums have always found ways to use technologies, even if at their core they are organizations that have been built to be risk-averse.
MARJORIE: Museums tend to be about 10 to 15 years behind the curve of technological innovation.
CHRIS: It’s in the 1930’s that Marjorie says museums start to use mass communication with “Interview a Curator” shows on broadcast radio.
MARJORIE: You also have something called television. Right around 1955 or so, museum start having these shows called “Ask a Curator” and they're hysterical if you watch them. They're kind of like they're kind of like early game shows where they bring on, they have a museum director and they have three curators and the director tries to stump the curator. And you also have these Mr. Science shows where you have scientists doing experiments in science museums. So museums are following technological trends about 10 to 15 years out.
Chris: I mean one thing you might worry about, right, is is if that 10 to 15 year curve were to continue into our current technological era you know that would put the field thinking about what was happening in 2004, and in 2004 the iPhone hadn't been invented yet. And I'm curious, in an era where the pace of technological change is so so rapid, how how does a field like this you know not get left behind?
MARJORIE: I'm really worried about this. I'm really worried because museums tend to be like I said traditional conservative institutions and the pace of change with technology is so fast, it can change in six months.
Museums look at themselves as places where people pose very deep questions where people have very deep engagement with with objects and we're looking for that secret source of combining something that's entertaining, that's fun, that's flashy, that's meaningful with something that's going to have very long deep lakes in society. We're not going to take every single technological trend and adopted into our galleries right away. It's expensive and it's going to go out of date in six months. And museums don't have that kind of luxury and nor should they. We’re about the long game.
CHRIS: And one of the interesting things, to me, as I think about the technology industry and I think about the museum industry, for example, is just how different the way that these two different fields work. On the one hand in the technology field you have folks who work highly iteratively. They make a small, little thing, the smallest thing possible, they test it they put an ugly prototype in front of people, it breaks. They learn from that prototype breaking then, they make a next prototype. They put out beta things to the public and openly say: this is incomplete. We'd love for you to use it though. On the other hand, you have museums where a typical exhibition might take 19 months to produce. And this notion of museum quality that, you're putting something out in front of the public that's perfectly polished. And I wonder how how we get a little bit of of that risky behavior from the technology space?
MARJORIE: I think that in terms of the way that the technology industry works with prototyping and throwing things out there and saying mess with it, play with it, create with it, experiment with it, let's keep trying to make it better is embodied in a few movements that are gaining ground in the museum world. So first of all you have the children's museum world, which is always open about experimentation, throwing things out on the floor. My background is in children's museums and we would just prototype the hell out of things. And we would throw them out there and kids get that.
CHRIS: But if you want to prototype, you have to pay people to do it. And this is one of the biggest challenges for museums.
MARJORIE: Museums are bottom line driven organizations. We had an era of federal largess, in the 1970’s and even towards the middle of the 1980’s, but it was really only about 3% of museum budgets. It was a drop in the bucket, but it loosened up money from other types of corporations and foundations and individuals who bought into the general vision. The era of government funding is tenuous right now. It always has been.
Museums used to rely heavily on volunteers and docents, they were almost amateur-run organizations. Run by a family, run by a collector, run by somebody who just wrote a check at the end of the year. You can't do that anymore. You have to pay a living wage or beyond a living wage. So you've got large human resources bills that you need to pay. Museums’ largest costs are their human resources costs.
CHRIS: Sure it’s expensive, but when the hard work of museum professionals comes together with the power of objects it can create powerful experiences.
MARJORIE: What I think it's the most important museum in the United States right now is the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington D.C. I was blown away by that museum.
I spent five straight hours, just in two galleries. I was so I was so emotionally moved by that museum. I forgot to eat, I forgot to go to the bathroom, I forgot to drink water. I was just in that experience. And it's a very object heavy, very traditional kind of museum that tells stories with powerful objects.
When I went into the room with the Emmett Till casket. And yes it's a very traditional display but that object and that story packs such a wallop that I don't think you need that kind of technology and prototyping to make that kind of a statement.
CHRIS: If you had a magic wand, Marjorie, what what would be the thing that you would change overnight about the way museums function in 2019?
MARJORIE: I'm a big proponent of really comfortable couches in museums. Just comfortable spaces where you can just sit.
It's interesting that sometimes the painting or the artwork that people will look at the most is not because of the artwork, but it's because there was a bench in front of it and you were tired and you wanted to sit down. So I'm a proponent of galleries just being incredibly comfortable physically. That's what I would do if I had a magic wand.
CHRIS: And beyond comfy furniture, Marjorie says museums could improve by regaining one aspect of their past.
MARJORIE: Museums used to be free and then we professionalized, and we had to figure out how we were going to pay the expenses of professionalizing and we had to start charging money because museums became more professional. So there's a movement now to make museums more accessible and to make museums free.
CHRIS: Despite these challenges, museums remain deeply special places where we can encounter amazing objects. And they can create powerful memories.
MARJORIE: My dad says that he used to take me to the Isabella Stewart Gardner all the time when I was a kid in Boston. He was a security guard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner in the late 50s early 60s. So he says he used to do that but I don't remember it.
I remember my first museum experience though. I was six years old. I'm going to get emotional when I talk about it. My parents and grandparents took me to see the Op Art exhibit at the Albright-Knox in Buffalo and I remember getting seeing this huge Roy Lichtenstein up on this concrete staircase and then I remember seeing this sculpture of mirrors that you could climb into. I don't even know the name of the artist. And I just remember seeing little images, lots of little Marjorie's all over the place in this giant box. And I just was absolutely mesmerized by that experience.
Then my grandparents took me to the gift shop and they bought me a print. I still have it in my office and it was just a print that was a souvenir of the exhibit. It's Gauguin’s painting of three little puppies drinking out of a little bowl and on the back of it they wrote, “to Margie on your sixth birthday. Grandma and Grandpa.” And that is one of the most precious objects I own. And it was something about the power of the space, about being with my family, about seeing lots of little Marjorie's on a mirror that has always stayed with me.
CHRIS: Oh, that's wonderful. And you know what? I've stood in that exact mirror box.
MARJORIE: I love that museum. And I've talked to other people who grew up in Buffalo and have had a very similar experience with that box. So it's so interesting how certain objects. Again, it gets to the power of the object. And how certain experiences with objects can really move you.
CHRIS: It’s these sorts of experiences that interest me in museums. Sure, museums have a history of telling the stories of the rich and powerful, and sometimes showcasing objects of questionable provenance. But museums also have the ability to tell our deep and diverse stories through the power of objects. And they can give people life-changing experiences, like the kind that inspired me to stay in art school 19 years ago.
In this series, we’ll be looking at how museums can tell better stories that reach more people. We’ll look at how different communities access, or don’t access, museums. How curators, teachers and tour guides are telling new brands of stories about museum objects. And how we can use new technologies to enhance the experience. We’ll talk to the people who are changing the landscape of museums through community outreach, Instagram curation, pop-ups, funny tours, and even virtual reality headsets. And we’ll visit museums in North Carolina, Miami, and New York City in order to see all the different ways that people experience museums across the country.
We hope you’ll stay tuned to On View.
On View is a project of the Knight Foundation. You can learn more about how Knight Foundation advances the role of the arts in communities across the country at knightfoundation.org
On view is produced by Katie Fernelius.
And I’m your host, Chris Barr. Find me on Twitter at @heychrisbarr. And thanks for listening.