This is a recorded session from the 2024 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. Throughout the museum field, institutions have been grappling with how to address problematic objects in their collection, taking various approaches from removing the works from view, deaccessioning them, or leaving them in place as is while they grappled with how to best address them. In 2021, the Chazen decided to take a path uncharted, entering into a partnership with the artist Stanford Biggers and MASK Consortium to undertake the re:mancipation project — an exhibition that sought to recontextualize an overtly racist sculpture in a way that felt authentic to the Chazen’s mission as a teaching museum, but also honest and inclusive. In this session, take a deep dive into the re:mancipation exhibition planning process to learn how the Chazen approached a project fraught with risk and uncertainty and which has influenced organizational change at the museum.

Additional resources:

Leveraging Permanent Collection Objects for Collaboration and Change slides

Transcript

Amy Gilman:

Thank you all for coming to our session today. I’m Amy Gilman, I’m the director at the Chazen Museum of Art. I’m really delighted to have you all here today. I also want to make a plug for the second session that we have tomorrow morning, it is not repetitive, right?

So, what we’re gonna talk about today has to do with the development of the relationship and the partnership that eventually led to an exhibition and really talk from an institutional perspective about what the challenges were, how we navigated all of that, and then the sort of outcome and some long-term effects of that. Tomorrow, we’re gonna talk about the object. We’re gonna really talk about the object. And I’m gonna guess that all of you in here, once you see which object, if you don’t already know, let me just flip this object here, you are immediately thinking about objects in your own collection. All of you have objects that are difficult, hard, problematic, to manage, et cetera. And I want you to keep that in your head, and I want you to come back tomorrow because we’re gonna really, tomorrow is the hour and a half, and we’re gonna do a lot of sort of getting you to really think about this from the kind of process that we started here, okay? So QR code takes you to emancipation .org. If you don’t get it now, you can get it later. We also have little business cards with the QR code on it, if you’d rather that. You’re also invited tonight to Creative Alliance, which is Google-able. It’s here in Baltimore. This is not associated with AAM, except that we’re here and we’re having a party. And we will be showing the 30-minute documentary of this project at that. You’re going to see a three-minute teaser trailer here. And then we’re going to have DJ Rich Medina spinning jump and funk for us for the evening. So, if you need to just blow off a little steam, tonight, creative lines.

OK, so I’m joined here today by Mark Hines of Mask Consortium, Kate Wanberg, who’s the exhibitions project manager for the Chazen Museum, and Katherine Alcauskas, who’s the museum’s chief curator. And we’re here today to talk about re-mancipation. And this project, which spanned multiple years, beginning in 2019, although we didn’t know it at the time, and really continues today, indeed just in the next couple of weeks, we will be releasing a catalogue about the project. We also have this beautiful vinyl, which has the romance -patient theme song on it, gives you a sense already about how multidisciplinary this whole project was.

And so, this project really started from a pretty conventional place in museums, which is inviting an artist to do a response work. But that’s not where we ended, and that’s why we wanna talk to you So, I’m going to start by flipping this slide and you’re going to see a teaser trailer for the Re-mancipation Project that will give you a broad overview.

[Beginning of video] “You think you gave us freedom? Is this emancipation? Is this the side you lead ’em? 9 -1 -1, what’s the address of the emergency? Please, Emmanuel Church is playing people’s shot down here.

Please send somebody right away. Emmanuel Church? (static) (shouting) What was his name? (shouting) What was his crime? (shouting) No justice! (shouting) (crowd cheering)

– It felt like an inside joke that everybody knew about, but nobody really talked about.

– I had very little ideas about sculpture and reimagining pieces that are It’s an incredible opportunity to really look at how we will move forward when dealing with contentious, challenging, problematic works from our American past and even our American present.

– Man’s inhumanity to man is especially terrifying to a black man who has experienced a fury of white mob violence.

– When there have been wars or when there have been conflict, those who lose are not celebrated.

– With a re-investigation at hand, we decided that it made more sense to collectively invite people to respond and react to the piece. And the resulting project, we believe, will be a compilation of all of that ephemera, all those conversations with micro-dialogues. The large -scale conversations amongst many people to the intimate responses from one individual directly to the piece.

– You did a lot of study, worked with, with your beautiful 3D scan. Was able to take apart and dissect all the different elements of this sculpture.

– With your artistic process, has technology always been involved in that or is that more of a new thing? – The energy of student involvement is perfect. That’s definitely what we want to have happen.

– I have loved you since ship shed bodies touched my water and made a country out of me.

– So, the response work is very much a story of love. – We are inviting people to create a counter monument that is actually a living, breathing thing. The dark side of the tomb, no apology. Call the monoxide in the booth. Do not follow me.

– Oh, holy honest aid. You can catch me because I’m gone. It feels both risky and scary, but it also feels like a learning place.

– How do we deal with our pasts in order to move on to our futures? Okay, so now you have a little bit of insight into the overall project.” [End of video]

Okay, so now you have a little bit of insight into the overall project. That was made in the fall of ’22 when we were pretty much in the middle, and you would think, because you all work in institutions, that by then we would have actually figured out exactly what we were doing, but that’s not true. We opened an exhibition in February of ’23 and still in the fall of ’22, we were honing in on design and layout and checklist. The things that we normally in museums start with, we actually left to the end. But before we get into that, and we are going to get into that, I want to go backwards in time from this moment.

This moment we’re actually pretty well into the relationship but that’s not where we started and where we started was actually 2019 so pre-pandemic when we had an we hosted an exhibition of Sanford Biggers work at the museum and as a closing event invited Sanford and Mark to come and perform with Moon Medicine which is their performance and music group and that was the first time the two of you had ever been to Madison and to the museum. And then we had a dinner as you do right and at dinner I think it was you who asked what other things are you guys thinking about? What other things are you working on?

Mark Hine:

Well, maybe I think as I’m remembering it, there was, I mean, there’s a lot of this monument energy.

Every, you know, a monument starting to come back.

Amy Gilman:

Right, like let’s remember sort of what the context was.

Mark Hine:

The text and you know so I think that at some point started to inhabit the dinner conversation and I think I was making a point to someone across the table to make a point I brought up the Emancipation Group which as far as I knew I had experienced it in DC I had experienced it in Boston and I was referencing these public artworks that to me were just indicative of what I thought was a problem and a good perhaps subject matter for a counter monument.

And that’s what tripped the conversation. It was—

Amy Gilman:

Like, oh, we have one of those. And that we didn’t, and that the conversation then continued.

I mean, the next day you guys went in and actually spend a lot of time with it. You looked at the gallery.

Mark Hine:

I want to talk about that for two seconds because I mean I think it’s one of the key things here. I was talking about a piece that I had already been moved by that I had been observing in public for a lot of my life and I think what really excited me was this opportunity to actually access that work. Because the public ones are larger and they’re set back and actually at this point they had become the point of several articles and started to be gated off to just something that you couldn’t really get up close and personal to.

So, to find that you had a version in your collection that we could go experience was exciting. So yes, that’s what happened the next morning and that was a trip because number one, I didn’t know that it existed in these other forms and mediums, but that room was weird, gallery four at the Chazen Museum of Art.

Amy Gilman:

You can all just imagine, right? Okay, so the room is a traditional 19th century portrait gallery, really. Now we’re a university art collection. We do not have, and we don’t aspire to have an encyclopedic collection. So, the piece was in the room, there was a second sculpture in the room, also problematic, of a young Native American boy really as a cherub, right? You sort of know these late 19th century sculptures.

This piece, and then it’s surrounded by portraits of white men and women that we all come to find out later, almost all of them have some kind of connection to the transatlantic slave trade in some manner, which frankly is not surprising given the time period in which they’re living, right?

Mark Hine:

So yeah, we would come to find that out, but for me, when I walked in that gallery, I was like, this is giving me heavy slave energy. And it was just this object in the middle, the emancipation group, and the only black person in the room is kneeling. And it was really strange. It was quiet. And I think mostly not just the object, but this presentation of it was, I think, what made me take a step back. Why is this here, this way, in this institution? How long has it been this way? What’s the information presented around it?

And I think that started a line of entry and to our delight, supported as artists. There were curators on staff who showed up with a ton load of information.

Amy Gilman:

Right.

Mark Hine:

Which really fueled our interest around actually doing a counter-monument project around this piece. I mean, that’s where this ends up going.

Amy Gilman:

Right, so we started this idea that we would invite Sanford to think about a direct counter monument interacting with our collection. And this is actually a pretty standard in the museum field way of engaging with collections. And that’s kind of where we began because I admitted to the group when we were talking initially about the object that we didn’t know what to do with it, right? And I felt personally really stuck because really, I felt like in the field, we have kind of three options. Add a label, this feels inadequate. Take it off view or most radically invite somebody to engage with it.

And I will admit here that even at the time it still felt inadequate, but it was the closest thing to something right that we could come up with at that moment and that’s where We started, that was 2019 into 2020. And then, then we had a bump.

Well, first of all, the world had a bump, right? So, March of 2020, everything shuts down, we all shut down, the whole museum shuts down, and we basically went totally radio silent with Mark and Sanford about this project.

Like I was just worried about whether or not we were going to be reopening the museum right all of that but this was like the hardest professional period I have gone through and We just dropped the ball right because we were doing other things.

Mark Hine:

From our perspective it felt like..We were strangely met in a place of excitement around potentially dealing with this object Intimated that we might be provided access to it to do this. And when the conversations went quiet the backdrop was Complete chaos in our actual streets.

So, for us the reading was you said one thing you’re doing another thing and probably at the time that it matters the most and it…

Amy Gilman:

Right

Mark Hine:

Really it was I wish it was hard it There that I think generated more of a little bit of anger and frustration And that was kind of where things set for maybe nine months…

Amy Gilman:

Yeah, nine months and then I think, so finally Sanford actually called me in October of 2020 and was like they’re taking the Boston piece down right so this was when they decided to take the piece off view in Boston. And he’s like there’s this group that’s forming Mask Consortium which hadn’t did before and it’s a collective including Mark and if you want to do something like this is the group right this is it and at that moment like we had just enough headway in the COVID stuff and we were partly reopened by then that we’re like okay let’s take the meeting let’s actually do this.

And I’ll tell you, neither Mark nor I knew that each other had those feelings until 2023, right? Because we didn’t, and I do think that this is part of what I really want to talk about is like the development of the relationship, right? The decision that we made that we were going to continue the generosity of our partners to continue even when we pissed them off, right? Or we mis-stepped, or we got stuck in our own, like, this is how we do things around here. And we just kept trying to say yes to things.

Mark Hine:

I think once the idea moved from, I don’t know, we don’t know, this is what my experience was in that meeting. You did admit in the dinner that we didn’t really know; we don’t really know what to do, but I heard you owning that ignorance and then actually acknowledging you all seemed to have an idea of what to do.

So Why am I resistant to accepting leadership of someone who does have an idea what to do when I am saying, I don’t know what to do? That’s what I got.

Amy Gilman:

And this is the hubris of museum professionals, right? As curators, as educators, we often are like, well, we know the object, right? We know the history.

And this is one of the most important lessons was to actually be humble in that space and know that some, that other people also are bringing not just an expertise, but a disruption to standard thinking that allows the museum to grow in ways that we had not anticipated. And then…

Mark Hine:

Well, oh great, we get green lit and we get this shift in no support to, we’re supporting you and it’s real and we can feel it. So we start giving that direction and I think that’s where things become challenging again because I think while we were entirely clear, what we were presenting was novel to the institution, Even in the first time out, so first part of our process, Mask does digital cultural heritage preservation.

And to study the object or the space or the people around it, we’re going to sample. We’re going to literally scan objects and spaces and engage people and film and record.

And all this digital information allows us to start to Synthesize some thing about what is it that we’re going to present? So I I Think the first set of look we not we need to come to the institution and we need to scan a range of materials Was including the emancipation group so it was one but when we added another 29 things to that list in the first place I think Kate as the preparator or head of the preparator staff can speak to what that felt like in terms of us essentially requesting a week with strange scanning rooms setups with strange lighting setups and pretty much having artifacts from all over the museum you know dragged it to us was a so much change, request. Why don’t you talk about how that? (laughs)

Kate Wanberg:

So, coming from a collections background, project management background, and going back to what Amy said, this idea of having artists and collaborators come in was not new, but the level of access that was being requested and how my team was being requested was new.

And so, a lot of these questions were about, well, what are we going to be doing? You want us there for a week, but what is actually happening? We’re bringing these objects. They’re going to scan them. What does that mean? What does scanning look like? Is it safe for the object? And so that, for me, I didn’t know how to answer those questions.

And so, there was a lot of excitement. We’re working on a project that we’re invested in, we want to be a part of, we’re supportive of this experimentation, but we have no idea how it’s going to work. And that’s scary. And so, it was kind of trusting this idea that we were going to show up, we were going to tackle these problems and look at them as opportunities.

And there was a lot of anxiety for that first visit until we met. And then once we were in it, I think there was this really important shift with preparators, with collections. We’re not typically involved in these in-depth conversations. We’re not creating content. We’re implementation. And so, we’re bringing the object, we’re assisting, we’re arranging, but then we’re not in there talking about this and suddenly we felt part of this project and I think I think that created a lot of buy-in It created a safe space where this idea of not knowing was more comfortable It was palatable and then it developed it gave us both the time and the trust between our two teams where we knew that it doesn’t matter if we don’t know where we’re going, like it’s gonna be okay. (laughing) I mean, at least until you left and then we got scared again.

Amy Gilman:

And that was the cycle, right? (laughing)

Mark Hine:

Right, but so that experience informed our relationships with each other and informed our relationship with the subject matter itself and I think we started to learn that this object, although it has a national mythological footprint, has a specific emanation in the museum that it had occupied and the people who have been interacting with it for years in the university, museum space, community members, et cetera, have been impacted, students have been impacted by it being there and not contextualized or poorly contextualized.

And so, we start to understand that we needed to actually, just as much as we’re exploring objects, explore the community members around it who have been impacted. And that’s what formed the next shift in the project.

So, we’re now moving away from this counter-monument model because Sanford pops up after the scanning week, which was great for all of us, and we learned a lot. He steps back.

Amy Gilman:

I mean, Sanford intended to come for a day, and he came for three, right? So, it tells probably really in a concrete way, like how generative that week turned out to be.

Kate Wanberg:

Yeah.

Mark Hine:

I want to mention, at this point about that week, we created outside, thank you, outside of the scanning operation, Sanford asked for a night at the museum. What does that mean? What it meant for us as black men was we wanted an opportunity to be able to engage the museum space and the art without always feeling surveilled.

Because essentially our entire experience in museums for our entire life is going in there and first being looked at and followed around and surveilled. So, there’s a whole other thing happening around you while you’re trying to look at the art.

It’s ever present.

So, it was kind of like, all right, we want some Willy Wonka stuff right now. We want a wish fulfilled. We see an opportunity for it. Clear the place, like, yeah, you can be there, Amy. And someone else who knows about the stuff, but we just want to be able to walk around freely and look at stuff. And when something excites us, put it on a list. Put it on a list, put it on a and we were pretty outrageous. I mean, we got pretty diva about the things that excited us and that, yeah, we want to see that and we’re going to scan that.

And I just wanted to make that point that for us, as this unfolded, it became, we were proxies for access. We knew we were proxies for access and what we were trying to do was punch at where access isn’t and open it up in a way that could potentially, you didn’t have to be a super famous artist or someone who’s really focused on a particular project in order to be able to access and experience these objects in a similar way. So, we’re trying to create experiences first that we could then model throughout through the process and ultimately remove what we call the force field that is around museum spaces for people of color.

So, I just wanted to make that point. That happened inside of the week. And it was fundamental to the kinds of objects that got selected, ultimately scanned, and brought into the overall digital survey that we had to then have a few months to really help inform what the project was going to be, which, according to Sanford, was now not a counter monument. So, it completely shifts. One day he says to me, yeah, I don’t know about this counter mighty thing. I’m like, okay.

Hard to grasp because I mean we, so we leaned into this university, to this university institution for a year for them to ultimately say we were wrong, we’re taking your lead, we’re gonna do your thing, what are we doing, we’re doing a counter mighty, bet, let’s go. And we’re gonna pull the rug out from under them and say what? Well, he says, Sanford says, all right. I want you to study Maya Lin. I want you to study some other artists who actually deal with space as art. For me as, I’m an engineer first and foremost. I’ve become an artist through working with Sanford and Sanford’s also a professor. So, he’s great at teaching art.

And I saw him attending his art classes on a regular basis. He sends me off, look this up, check this out. And he opens up for me an entire field of work that could, that didn’t have to be an object in order to be art, number one, or to be a response to something. So, he starts to say, look, let’s push this whole thing into a response perhaps from the people who have been impacted by this work, less so than the fabrication of something and that being the answer to the problem.

So, I didn’t know really how to respond to that except to go do the research and then get myself together, turn around to our partners and share with them the shift in direction which I guess you guys can talk about how that was received.

Kate Wanberg:

So naturally, as the person planning the exhibition, my response was, well, what is going to be in the exhibition? What’s on the checklist? What happened to these 29 objects we pulled? Like, what’s going on? And so, I think that was a big shift for us to really understand this is the project, this is the exhibition, and we still have to kind of work through it in trust. But I want to go back to this point of access because in order to do that, to create this experience, to create a space that allowed for responses in different mediums by dancers, musicians, bringing glue and glitter into the gallery.

This was a red flag all over the place. I’m like, whoa, what is happening here. I’m like, I like it. I want to do this. But like, really? So, I think that was, you know, you, you want access. You should have access. And it made me realize my role as a gatekeeper. And I think that’s really important, particularly in museums, you know, because when you’re not in a leadership position, you don’t always recognize the power you have. You don’t recognize when you’re giving expertise and saying like, no, we shouldn’t do this, that that can infect an entire project and it can really shut things down. And so, for me personally, it was acknowledging, I trust this group, I trust this process and in order to fully buy in, I have to let go of this preconceived idea that these are things that we shouldn’t be doing in gallery spaces.

And so that, I think, is something to take away from this talk, is like really question what your position of power is in your museum and how you can say yes and still do the things that you’re, you know, because I was also afraid, I’m like, oh man, if we break something, this is gonna kill the mood, you know? So, there was this feeling of risk and it was scary but that didn’t happen it was ultimately it was okay and then backing down and like trusting each other knowing that if something was going in a direction and suddenly you know we said okay we really have to kind of draw a line here which we actually ended up drawing physical lines in the gallery that that our teams were gonna trust each other and respect each other for kind of their role in the project.

Mark Hine:

So, what it ended up shifting to as we grappled with how does this object impact the space was delving deeply into the other communities and layers of the university that the object has impacted for years.

And for us, we’re interested in, yes, Wisconsin and this local Madison experience, but considering that this, for us, this is an investigation of how this has impacted folks of color, then we also needed to go broader than just Madison in order to get how does this impact folks. So, we pushed into Milwaukee to develop relationships with art organizations and leaders. Who could also continue to continue to inform us about, we’re New Yorkers, so inform us about what is the energy out here, what is the experience.

I think that in addition to pushing the museum to reach across the aisle with other departments, let’s put it that way. So, we were very much about cross-pollinating and multiple disciplines being inside of the conversation, so hopping out of the museum and working with the engineering school and working with the drama department and the dance department, and really, frankly, anyone who, the Odyssey group, which is a student group, you could probably explain better what it is, but various layers in making sure everyone’s invited to the conversation. Ultimately, and evolved to the second visit, which was April of 2022. So, the art piece that we’re now exploring is people interacting with the object.

The task we’re giving, everyone who we’ve invited is Bring yourself bring your art bring your medium, whatever it is into your thing. We’re here to document it.

And so we had spoken word dancers poets musicians

Amy Gilman:

the teaser trailer actually Has a lot of the footage from that second

Mark Hine:

and So Kate, Thank you for helping us move beyond the stresses of that moment to help realize that it would then I think that entire experience with Ping Pong to help us start to frame what the actual exhibition would be, which was not going to then become this combination of people responding and objects from the collection and new work that was going to get created by Samford, all to now fit in a new gallery that we were going to repurpose to look like the gallery where I originally had this first experience.

Amy and Catherine, maybe you talk about the sort of the next iteration of figuring out what was gonna actually show up in the exhibition. We had moved away from Counter Monument. Now it’s people respond, but then we’re also gonna make a piece. How much time do we have left before this exhibition? Is this supposed to arrive?

Kate Wanberg:

– I don’t know, about six months.

Mark Hine:

Okay, right.

Amy Gilman:

Right, I mean, just saying up here, like we started without a checklist, right? I mean, that actually, Mark didn’t actually know how radical that was until we were well into the process, and it became this like running joke, right? Like, I mean, Janine who will be talking tomorrow was like, it was not a joke. It was funny to me.

But I actually think that part of the thing that I wanna do here, Kate really gets to this is like figuring out a way to say yes, right? The gatekeeping is so often about figuring out how to politely say no, right? But figuring out how to say yes and keep saying yes to things. And at this point, six months in advance of an opening for a show, we did not know what was going to be in it. We had some thoughts.

And we actually started the exhibition planning process when I had a conversation with Catherine, and we were sort of talking about gallery four, which is where it had been, the work had been originally, and we were starting to talk about like what could be in the exhibition. And Catherine was like, don’t you was like, don’t you think you should be able to see it in that context, right? And then be able to see some of the response to it.

Katherine Alcauskas:

Yeah, and I think I also, I think the original idea was that you would start with gallery four.

Amy Gilman:

Right.

Katherine Alcauskas:

Because that’s what the project started with. And I said, if we’re really shaking things up, we shouldn’t do this kind of chronological way that we typically do exhibitions. Let’s put the gallery smack dab in the middle of the exhibition gallery recreated there and so that you don’t have this logical procession because that’s not how this project was.

It wasn’t clean, it wasn’t logical. Let’s mix it up.

Amy Gilman:

Yeah, and so the first exhibition design, quote, design that I tossed to Kate and Mark was literally on a scrap piece of paper that I think I was traveling at the time and I’d been thinking about this conversation with Catherine and I was like…here is the gallery it’s a big rectangle not unlike this room and then let’s start by just having the gallery four in the middle. Like that that was it that’s what we started with.

Kate Wanberg:

But I mean, this is not the first time someone hand me an exhibition plan on a napkin, so it didn’t throw me that much. But I think at this point, this is where I started to get even more excited because I’m like, okay, I know what we’re doing. Oh wait, no, I don’t.

But I think what really became clear is what creating a space for reflection means was actually reflecting the process, And so we’re going to walk you through some slides of the exhibition space.

Yeah. But ultimately, we ended up dividing the gallery into sections, which I’m sure everyone is accustomed to that idea.

But this really looked at how we approached the process. And so, the entrance to the gallery was more from kind of typical institutional approach and it created a timeline where we’re giving context to the object and thinking about the history of slavery in America.

But it wasn’t, you know, the text on the wall wasn’t as traditional. Where this information, kind of, you know, working with Mark, working with Mask Consortium, you know, we were working as a team to kind of about what is going to be included in this area. And then as you, and this really kind of reflects where we started with the process, like, oh, this is gonna be somewhat traditional, this is what we’re expecting.

Mark Hines:

But it’s also where the 30 pieces that we scanned originally start to come back into the picture because where, this is where the collection, and the things that we were inspired by the collection, we started to see how we could use the objects themselves as a better way to bring what we were learning to life and then explore the collection of the Chazen as a way to punctuate certain points that would have otherwise just been a card on the wall or a date or something boring.

I think that’s just how some of the original part of the process started to fall back over on the actual exhibition.

Kate Wanberg:

And so, we’re using other objects to contextualize this one object which I think worked really well and really kind of drew people into the exhibition.

And then you transition into an area that’s really a deep dive into the emancipation group itself. And this is looking at the iconography that is embedded within the sculpture and coming out of this different process of scanning, all of these things that you’re seeing surrounding our parts of the sculpture that have been then scanned and 3D printed, they’re surrounding the object in this constellation format, and then there’s lines on the floor leading you to other objects that further contextualize these specific parts.

So, thinking about the cap, thinking about the post, thinking about the shackles, and really a deep dive into what are these things mean and what is that kind of layering on the object. And a huge thank you to Janine, one of the curators on the project for just her incredible expertise and dive into this. And then we’re in gallery four. And so here, this is where we’re bringing the original context of the sculpture kind of into the exhibition, but instead of just having it by itself, it is reflected and challenged by this incredible Kehinde Wiley painting that’s reflecting the painting in our collection. And so, we’re starting to incorporate response. And so instead of this 19th century portraiture by itself, We’re seeing portraiture from people from the project, from these artists. We’re seeing portraiture that are overlaid with oak lads from our collection, from people of color in Wisconsin and UW-Madison’s past.

And so this is really kind of challenging that idea of who should be in the gallery, right? And as we kind kind of further go through the exhibition, we end kind of with this video. And at the time we opened, an empty pedestal. And so, the video is talking about the process, things that are, events that are happening. Here you see the Boston Memorial being removed, but it also has these performances. It has the dancing. It has the students you know, performing in the gallery space. And so, do we want to talk about the shift back, or?

Mark Hines:

Oh, maybe.

Amy Gilman:

So, the empty pedestal is because about three and a half months before the exhibition was scheduled to open, Mark calls me and goes, “Oh, and we had these zooms every other week right and we were recording them because we were recording everything, and Mark says we want to do a…

Sanford wants to do a piece so we’ve like come full circle now, but I do not think that the piece that he created now which is now in our collection and you’ll see this in a minute. I do not think he could have created that piece exactly without this whole process, right? Because it would have started and ended in a different place. So, it wasn’t physically possible for us to get this piece there by the end of January because it was being fabricated in marble, actually in Madison, coincidentally, but we finally had it for the end of the show. But, you know, here’s the thing, like, do we generally open things without all the objects?

No. Do you have to like actually to appreciate the actual power of the empty pedestal in this space right in front of the huge video wall, right? So, by diving deeply into this object and to our institution, into this thing, we actually started to take away some of its power, right? By like, decentering it weirdly because we have picked it apart so closely and we have we have all these incredible responses to it so in in fact the counter monument is the whole thing right and Sanford’s work which you now see here called lifting the veil is a part of the entire response to them.

Do you want to talk about that piece?

We’re also going to talk about the piece extensively tomorrow too.

Mark Hines:

Well, I think that once Sanford had gotten, you know, he had inspired so many different voices to participate then, and that was the piece, then he felt left out. who was like, “I want something in the show.” You know, it was all this great art that was forming. And, you know, artists that he’s a big fan of, like, Vareal Manj performing and becoming a part, a fixture inside of the exhibition, I think, inspired him, yes, at a very late date, as it relates to the exhibition planning, to make this piece. But it’s also, it’s representative of a lot of the layers of research that were done throughout the entire project.

And I think I talked about crossing disciplines and reaching across aisles, et cetera, but the piece itself and how it was created is also that same sort of amalgam of research, technology, traditional art. And challenges the, it’s more of an exercise in the iconography that we ended up getting from Jeanine and the curatorial team.

But it was great to have it not be there and have the video and all the responses function on the pedestal as the work for a period of time before Sanford’s piece could join that statement.

And I think the community appreciated the various layers that the exhibition grew through. I don’t think we mentioned it, but that QR code on the first slide does enable you to get to a virtual, a scanned version of this whole exhibition so you can go through it in detail, visit each of the pieces, all the actual pieces are, I mean physical artifacts are available in augmented reality.

So that, don’t forget when we first came to study then we scanned everything, so we were able to come back to this point about access again and make it with the exhibition because we wanted the exhibition to be accessible to people who didn’t, who weren’t necessarily at Madison. We wanted the objects to be accessible in a way to people who couldn’t necessarily have the proximity to them. So, to be able to bring that object into your own space via augmented reality, things of that nature.

I was really excited to see how all of these components came together.

Amy Gilman:

So, I want to get to the, what did this, you know, exhibitions are finite. Projects can be finite. This one has legs that will last for a lot longer. But like what is one of my things when we went through COVID was we cannot go back to the way that we were right.

And part of going through this process is also we cannot go back to where we were. We have to learn from what we’ve been doing, and we have to let it affect both us personally and the institution.

And so, I want Katherine to talk a little bit about that long-term.

Katherine Alcauskas:

Sure, so right now we are planning for a reinstallation of our permanent collection as a number of other institutions are as well. And we’re really drawing on the experience that we learned through the re-mancipation project to I think so, can everyone hear me okay?

– Okay, all right.

Katherine Alcauskas:

I’ll speak up a little more too. And so, we’re doing that in two ways, through process and content, so process-wise, we’re really working collaboratively across units. We have curators of works on paper working on paintings in their, you know, period-wise, their specialty, but lending kind of different approaches. We’re working in groups. We’re involving the preparators early, early on, before we even get to finishing checklists and layouts, so that they have not only the context when we get to layout, but they can actually contribute some really helpful vantage points. We’re trying to get feedback from staff, incorporate that in from faculty, from other constituents throughout the process. And in a very kind of informal and unstructured way, we’re kind of building the plane as we’re flying it.

And I think that’s really helpful because it keeps us loose and able to kind of adapt to what the objects are telling us. And so, I think that’s the other way we’re approaching this is we’re really starting with the objects, in our reinstallation, we’re going to center focus objects and then use our collection to contextualize those, similar to the constellation form around the Emancipation Group sculpture.

And we really hope that this helps our visitors look more closely at the object. Like, we are museums, we collect objects, we collect artworks, so encouraging close looking and thinking about what you see and what that artwork is actually telling you or implanting in your mind and so that students have more awareness of these kind of iconography and symbolism.

So, we’re really excited about this, and this is the first time we’ve publicly presented it and so we’re really looking forward to using what we’ve learned from re-mancipation to creating something new and different and exciting.

Amy Gilman:

So, you know, a lot of us are grappling with permanent collection reinstallation and, you know, chronologic, thematic, and the idea of taking what we learned from this deep dive into a single object and actually translating that into how are we gonna talk about our whole permanent collection by identifying single objects that are rich visually and give you lots of meat, right? And then connecting them, in this case, we have 2,000 molded ceramic vessels like the one in the center. Just one of those quirks of the collection.

And so, one of the spaces will actually, it will be historic, right? It’ll be historic, but it also draws out other parts of it, right, you’re able to really ground it in what you can see and observe. And I feel like it feels fairly radical to us, but strangely traditional also similar to the iconographic analysis that Janine did of the original object.

So, I want us to get to questions, but I do want to just talk a little bit about sort of wrapping up here some of the long-term things, which is that from my perspective as the director, was the risk worth it? Absolutely. Now, could we have done it the way we did it if COVID hadn’t happened?

I don’t know. Because it actually opened up something for all of us, institutionally and personally, that I think allowed for an acceptance of risk because the whole, everything was in such upheaval. But our major takeaways from this are that if you wanna do this kind of work, right, leadership has to accept a certain level of risk, right? And this project felt really risky to people on the team.

And one of the things that I said again and again and again about this project to the team was, I am out in front on this project.

You are not taking the risk, right? Kate is not going to get fired if got some feedback, a bad feedback about the exhibition. If anybody is going to get fired for this, it’s me, right? I didn’t actually think that was possible, right? I’m a total trust that what we were doing was right, but you have to, if you are directors in this space and you are pushing that kind of risk onto your team, stop, that’s for you, right? You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, right?

Like, you just have to be able to live in that space a little bit, and you just have to, like, trust this process that it’s going to– like, that we’re going to get to a good place, right? And that was something else that we reiterated to each other again and again and, and I have been really struck by this is that we have been grappling with some really tough stuff and the last five years have been really difficult, right? Just like COVID, the, like, I mean, everything, right, and the gesture to all the things is that this process was also incredibly joyful because of the relationships that we developed and that is actually enables the accepting risk, the being uncomfortable, right, because we have we have developed a level of trust, we have worked through conflict, but I do you know just to reiterate again like if you are in an institution and you’re trying to work on these kinds of things is you really have got to have leadership buy-in because that is the only way from my perspective that you’re really going to get institutional change, right, is when you get buy-in. And there’s lots of ways to do that. You don’t have to start with being like the director and having buy-in. You can work on that director to get them up.

But I just really, really developing the team and trusting the expertise that everyone is bringing to that space is really important. And so, I want to thank you all for coming and I hope that you will join us tonight for the documentary screening. Here’s the QR code again, if you didn’t say it, and we’re happy to answer a couple of questions. I think we have about six minutes.

Audience member:

Hello. Hi. Thank you so much for your presentation. Thank you for your honesty and transparency about the pain points that you encountered during this project. I was interested in knowing what Mask used the scans of the objects for.

Was that a way to increase accessibility? And then how did the museum engage with an outside understanding their objects and like did you have input on where those scans or photos went after it was scanned?

Mark Hines:

So, we use technology in a lot of our engagements and we’re often introducing those technologies to the institution where the points of education as to how to use it and how it might be applied.

So, we brought that requirement to the table, the Chazen accepted that part of our workflow. The initial intention was, we are where we are, you are where you are. We want to be intimate with these objects to be able to understand them over a period of time. So, for us to stay close to a digital facsimile of these objects was what was gonna enable a more intimate relationship with those objects to unfold.

So, they were used internally, initially, and as a point of research. The hope was that the Chazen would, since they had not had any 3D scans of any of their art objects in their catalog, that this would be the first set, since we did scan 30, related to the exhibition, that that would be the first set that the Chazen would be able to offer in that way. And it would just puts them on the forefront of exploring how to use these kinds of this medium to support education and exploration and access.

Amy Gilman:

And so right now, we own the scans, and if you are able to come tomorrow, Janine is actually going to walk through some of the iconographic things. And what you will see is actually some of the ways in which the scans helped us be able to literally pull pieces out to be able to look at them in a way that is really difficult when it’s just the object itself, right? It’s too small or it’s, you know, all of that. And so, I think we’re really just at the beginning of what would be possible, but I actually think it could be an enormous research tool for close looking.

And from an accessibility perspective, it does mean that people can explore the objects, but I just don’t think we know yet how to use that.

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This recording is generously supported by The Wallace Foundation.