This is a recorded session from the 2025 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. In a recent survey, a major Holocaust museum unearthed a disturbing truth: Far more students could name Nazi officials than Holocaust victims. Sites that tell the stories of atrocities must place victims’ dignity at the center of their storytelling, yet perpetrators’ viewpoints are often far more apparent. In this recorded session, explore three major challenges that museums face in centering victims—portraying them beyond their traumatic experiences, addressing silences in the archive, and determining whether and how to present perpetrators—as well as potential solutions.
Speakers:
- Kiah Shapiro, Managing Director, Luci Creative
- Suzanne Grimmer, Senior Director of Museum Experiences, Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity
- Deana Dartt, Independent Museum Consultant and Curator, Live Oak Consulting
- Johanna Obenda, Research & Exhibition Development Specialist
Transcript
Kiah Shapiro:
We’ll go ahead and get started because we have so much to share with you today. My name is Kiah Shapiro, I’m with Luci Creative, and I’m really just here to tee up three wonderful women who are going to share remarkable case studies with you about a really challenging topic. And the first thing I want to do is make sure you’re in the right room, in our voices, designing victim-centered exhibits about human rights issues. But something we’ve been talking about even just up until yesterday, is we should change this title because what we’re here to really talk about is centering the humanity of the individuals who have endured these histories that we need to tell stories about in our museums. Thank you for allowing us to pivot on the title here and draw attention to what we’re really trying to talk about together. You’re going to hear three stories from three very different institutions with very different challenges, but collectively we feel that there’s three main areas where telling stories about atrocity, histories of violence and genocide really are challenged.
The first one is narrative and nuance. How can we tell both a narrative about atrocity and depict those who endured and experienced those atrocities not as victims, but as whole human beings, not solely defined by their traumatic experiences? These three women will give you some tips on that. How can we think about that? The second is confronting silences in the archives. We know that a lot of these histories, there isn’t archival material, objects, photographs, documentation that can really give us a perspective of what it was like on the ground from those who endured. And so how do we address that? How do we create a compelling exhibition that can do that? And lastly, how do we address perpetrators? The stories can’t be absent of that context. We need to provide that for our visitors, but how can we do that in a responsible way? How can we do that in a way that doesn’t center perpetrators?
We’ll hear a little bit about that this morning or this afternoon as well. Like I mentioned, there are three remarkable women who are going to come up and tell us three amazing stories. The first is Deana, who will talk about resistance and resilience in action and a project on the indigenous coast narrative. And then Suzanne will come up and talk about centering victims in Holocaust storytelling and the work she’s doing with her institution. And then lastly, Johanna is going to talk to us about an incredible exhibition, In Slavery’s Wake, Making Black Freedom in the World. I’m going to flip to this slide so you can see our faces and you know who’s going to come up here and Deana will kick us off actually, so come on up.
Deana Dartt:
[foreign language 00:02:52]. I’m Deana Dartt and we’re standing in the homelands of the Tongva. And I just want to acknowledge that a genocide occurred right here in the land in which we’re standing and conducting this conference. And those people are relatives of mine. I am Coastal Chumash from just a bit up the coast. But these lands are Tongva lands. These lands were occupied and traded by the people listed here. And I want to just put a shout-out to those descendants of those communities and the people who have been really active in reasserting their presence on this landscape despite waves of colonization and erasure. If you’re interested to know more, the Tongva community, Desiree Martinez and others and I have worked on a project with LA County to foreground the histories and narratives of the local people. And if you scan this QR code, you can go directly to the land acknowledgement and how informed LA County is now in terms of the people whose lands it occupies. Thank you, Kiah, for pulling us together and keeping us on task. I am going to talk about a project that’s near and dear to my heart.
It actually stems from my dissertation research. As I said, I am coastal Band Chumash and on my mom’s side of the family, our people are specifically from Santa Barbara and Montecito. And I grew up in these homelands in a place where our stories were never told. In K through 12 schools I learned about pilgrims, I learned about Columbus, but I never once heard mention of our cultural history, a narrative that actually reflected my experience as a native young person. As a scholar, I’m also an activist and I bring that to all of my work as a curator. Just a bit about the Spanish mission system and the damage that it did. I’m not going to spend a lot of time there because we’re not centering the perpetrators, but can I see a show of hands of people who went to school in Southern California and the missions were part of the curriculum? Some of you probably built little sugar cube missions and you learned how native people were the labor force in those missions.
And you probably learned how the life at the mission was safe and good and wholesome and a good thing for native people. The younger generation might have had a teacher or two that told some hard truths about that era. But for the most part, those people who are educated in California get a very skewed history from a mission perspective. A more honest statement or perspective is one from Father Antonio Concepion Horra, who says that “The manner in which the Indians are treated is far more cruel than anything I have ever read about. For any reason, however insignificant it may be, they are severely and cruelly whipped placed in shackles or put in stocks for days on end without even a drop of water.” He was later excommunicated for being a heretic because he spoke honestly and truthfully about what he saw happening in California missions. The significance of this shifting the narrative is real and immediate for native people alive today. And so, here’s a depiction of the pre-contact California native territories in California. And then the second map you see is where the missions were in Alta California.
This is in the US side of California. And then the third map is where the federally recognized tribes are located. And you can see there’s a cluster of them in San Diego where there was a grassroots movement in the fifties of California Indian people who fought together for federal recognition. But other than them, there are literally no federally recognized tribes, no tribal organizations with sovereignty, with a relationship with the federal government from San Francisco down to Southern Orange County. This is significant because what is happening in the public history narratives is erasing our reality in the current day. How many of you that aren’t from Los Angeles knew who the native people were of this place? A few of you, probably like six or seven. Great, but there’s no sign of the Tongva people in Los Angeles. There are 20 million guests in these homelands, and most of them don’t know who the indigenous people are, so the erasure has been almost complete. The current El Camino mission narrative of the 21 Franciscan missions that were established in Alta California, 19 of them operate as museums to this day.
And these are the stories that are… This is based on my dissertation research, which visited all of those sites and did visitor analysis and interviewed all of the staff in those places. And these are the dominant narratives in those places. What happens for native people, all of our children who in the fourth grade have to go visit a mission, is that we’re confronted with this history from a very different viewpoint, a very skewed vision of what our history was. And so, it would not be unlike a visit to Auschwitz to learn Jewish history, and that’s pretty serious business. What’s missing are the deep ancient histories, the histories of our people and our diversity and our connection to the land and all of these really beautiful, deep, meaningful stories. Not just they lived at one with nature and they made shellbean money, but really like us as a complex people who changed over time, not that ethnographic snapshot of a moment that gets captured in museum narratives in Southern California.
These missing histories of our trade and interaction, of our later blending with the people who colonized upper California who are essentially Indigenous and Black people from Mexico. We are all a blended community now; you don’t hear about that. You learn the history and the missions as very siloed stories. And then what’s completely missing are our very interesting contemporary realities, The work that we’re still doing, the activism that we’re engaged in, the revitalization of our language, the revitalization of our basketry and other forms of material culture, anything about our living artists and the complexity and diversity and sophistication of our knowledge, these things are missing entirely from those mission narratives. Stemming from my dissertation research, I aimed to try to disrupt that old narrative. And so, this would have to be a multiphase, multi-institution intervention to actually disrupt this very dominant narrative. Through a series of story gatherings and the collection of archives from elders, from living people in our communities, we would develop an exhibition, a website, and a story map.
And we’re in the process of doing all of those things right now, but the exhibition component we were able to actualize. It opened in January of 2024, and it closes next month and it’s just down the road from here, so I would encourage you all to get out there tomorrow. But how it relates to this panel specifically is that the approach, the way in which we develop the narrative de-centers the perpetrator, it really centers resistance to the mission system from the arrival, from the very moment of arrival by Spanish colonizers, by all these different strategies. There are multiple video components with living native people speaking about survival, resistance, resilience, and also the ongoing erasure of us that’s perpetrated by these same colonial institutions. We talk about subtle forms of resistance, which are things like the adaptation and integration of these new ways of knowing to bolster our cultures and to strengthen what we were already doing and enable us to navigate this new landscape. How am I doing on time? Great. We only used historic materials as they related to stories of resistance.
For instance, we used some… When we talked about the change in currency, that was a complete disruption to traditional life ways. We showed the European coinage, but we showed it right next to shellbean money that continued to be made secretly and underground and we tell that story. With each impact we tell a resistance story, so it’s a double narrative all the way through. This was the impact, this is the way that native people responded to it or didn’t respond to it, continued to live as they lived, but in some cases that wasn’t possible, so how did native people respond? We did this in the form of a revolt timeline that shows those revolts and burnings down at the mission and the stories that aren’t being told in the missions. These are edgy, uncomfortable stories for people who have been indoctrinated into this royal road idea and the fantasy of the Spanish heritage. Contemporary art throughout, even in these depictions of history, there are native artists speaking back to that history and speaking truth to that history. One thing that was really important to me was to draw connections between the US and Mexico.
The indigenous people of Mexico are our brothers and sisters. And because of that political border that impedes our connection with one another, there’s also in the minds of most Americans, this very concrete separation between indigenous people on each side of that border. I tried to disrupt that by talking about these are forms of colonialism. These are capitalist systems that aim to denaturalize us, to take us away from the earth so that the earth can be exploited for its natural resources and human resources. In the experience of the missions, they were actually exploiting the human resources to exploit the natural resources. To unpack these laws, most people don’t know that in 1924, they started manning the US-Mexico border. That was also the year that Native Americans got the right to vote, so at the same point that Native Americans were being codified as Americans, Mexican Indians were being locked on the other side of the border. Most people don’t know this, and so trying to create that reconnection, reconnection to place.
Just a short case study is that one of the things that we did, and there were several of these kinds of interventions, but one was that we borrowed, the Autry Museum borrowed this hat that has been historically labeled as a Padre hat, a hat worn by one of the priests at the Santa Barbara mission. And it’s actually the Chumash names, that’s a Chumash mission, and the Chumash name for that hat is a Sumelelu. And so, when that hat arrived at the Autry Museum, we sang her back home. As they uncrated her, we pulled her out and we sang her back home. This is a women’s work hat that had had a brim attached to it to appease the priest, but it’s a women’s work hat, so it’s a woman, in our culture that represents a woman. A woman created that probably the only women’s hat that was made inside the mission because they weren’t allowed to weave for themselves. We sang her back home, and we thanked her for being a diplomat for us in Europe.
And then when we put her on display, a couple of days later, there was a gallery full of Chumash and Tongva weavers singing with her, handling her, looking at her, looking at the start of the hat to learn from her. And so, we thanked her for being a teacher that had been taken away a long time ago and held captive across the sea. It was interesting, a bunch of our elders were saying, you know that’s not going back home. Did the people at the British Museum know that’s not going home? It will return home, but with all the love that we gave her. And we did a whole weaving education day, a day long education experience for our weavers and for the public. And it’s those kinds of interventions, using the collections to really assert an indigenous history. This is an ongoing project. The exhibition was a piece of it, but there’s so much work to do to really center ourselves in this mission narrative.
Our word for the road is actually Cha’alayash, which means the road that connects us, so it’s really about reclaiming and renaming our places. And that road has connected us for millennia, it was a trade route, it was a highway for native people commandeered by the Spanish crown. And so, as the road that connects us, we honor it as a well-worn trade route, and we rename it. This is just another intervention and a long line of interventions that will be necessary in order for our people to really be seen in our homelands. Thank you.
Suzanne Grimmer:
Good afternoon. I’m Suzanne Grimmer, and I’m the senior director of museum experiences at the Holocaust Museum for Hope and Humanity in Orlando. I’m grateful for the opportunity to share how we are reimagining Holocaust storytelling by placing the voices of victims, specifically Jewish individuals at the center of our narrative, not the margins. This isn’t just a change in content, it’s a shift in values and perspective. Why does perspective matter? Because what we center in our storytelling shapes what people remember and what they often forget. We recently learned that students today can name more Nazi officials than Holocaust victims. And that tells us something important, that even in well-meaning education perpetrators often dominate the narrative in Holocaust exhibitions. Meanwhile, the Jewish people who endured Nazi violence and crimes are often depicted only in moments of suffering, their lives before, and their individual lived experiences during are frequently left out. And if we’re not careful, that imbalance becomes part of the memory we pass on. This isn’t just about what we teach, but how we teach it.
Traditional Holocaust exhibits often follow a chronological arc, the rise of Hitler, anti-Jewish laws, deportations, ghettos, camps, and for some liberation. And this format helps explain how the Holocaust happened from a political and military standpoint, but it tends to focus on powerful leaders and major events leaving the individual experiences of those who endured in the margins. It leans heavily on academic text panels and Nazi visuals, and often unintentionally renders those who endured Nazi violence as passive. At our museum, we designed our storytelling methodology with a specific question in mind. What did it feel like to live through this and what does it mean to remember it now? Instead of chronology, we organize around emotional and moral themes like injustice, unbelonging, power and absence to emphasize Jewish agency. And so that visitors don’t just learn history but experience it in a deeper and more human way. Of course, this new approach raises important questions. How do we tell full complex stories when so much was silenced or lost? And how do we responsibly handle the presence of perpetrators without centering them?
First portraying full lives. How do we show people as they lived, not only how they suffered or died? We prioritize photos, letters, diaries, home movies, anything that shows complexity and humanity. Second, silence, Holocaust collections and archives are incomplete, and they always will be. And we confront this not as a gap to be filled, but as a truth to be honored, acknowledging what was lost and what can never be fully known. Third, perpetrators, we cannot remove them entirely, but we refuse to give them narrative or visual power. Their actions are contextual, not central. This allows those who endured to remain the focus, not just as recipients of violence, but as people with relationships, culture and strength. This reimagining also reshapes the visitor’s role. Rather than standing at a distance, the visitor becomes a kind of companion following the journey of our four Jewish individuals throughout the museum. These are not composite characters, but real people presented with depth and care. Visitors encounter their childhoods, their communities, their experiences of exclusion and survival, and for those who lived their post-war lives. In doing so, they’re invited into connection and empathy, not just observation.
And we continue these stories beyond 1945, because Jewish life did not end with the Holocaust and the legacies of trauma, resilience, and memory continue today. Silence plays a central role in how we tell these stories. In Holocaust storytelling, silence is often treated as a problem to be solved. But in the context of the Holocaust, silence is part of the reality. Some people didn’t survive to leave a record, others could not or chose not to speak of their experience. And in many cases, Holocaust stories were deliberately erased by the perpetrators, so instead of filling these gaps artificially, we honor them. We leave room for silence. We allow open-ended questions and unfinished narratives to remain. In this way, absence becomes a kind of presence and a powerful reminder of what was lost. We also take care with how we use images. Images of Nazis in crisp uniforms or towering formations may be historically accurate but they also reinforce a narrative of power depicting the Nazis as larger than life unintentionally invites admiration or awe.
To counter this, we use this type of imagery sparingly and critically, and instead we amplify the presence of those who experienced the injustice. We also use physical space intentionally. Visitors encounter large-scale images of people who endured eye-to-eye. This visual proximity allows visitors to engage each individual not as a symbol of tragedy, but as a full person, someone whose presence, gaze, and life story, demand recognition and connection. Our goal is to shift what power looks like. Power becomes dignity, defiance, courage and hope, not control or domination. This approach isn’t only about the past, it’s deeply relevant to the present. When we highlight themes like unbelonging or silence, we invite visitors to consider who is experiencing those things today. When we demonstrate moral courage through the lived experiences of our protagonists, we ask, where is moral courage needed now? Because this approach helps build bridges toward groups who need protection, support, or help amplifying their voices, the aim is to personalize and humanize the people on the inside of the injustice from the beginning of the story. We intentionally connect Holocaust stories to broader struggles for justice.
Through our community partnerships, Orlando, we are engaging with Florida’s Black, Hispanic, Muslim, Indigenous, and LGBTQ plus communities to ensure that our work reflects diverse lived experiences and fosters a shared commitment to justice and inclusion. We want this work to be rooted in solidarity and empathy for others and relevant to the people in our own neighborhoods. And while our approach is grounded in values, it’s also supported by research. Neuroscience, education theory and psychology all tell us that empathy is built through perspective-taking. Critical thinking strengthens when people are encouraged to ask, what did individuals know and when? And self-awareness deepens when visitors reflect on their own thoughts and feelings, become conscious of how these thoughts and feelings shape their behavior and consider the impact of their actions on others. These are not just emotional responses, they’re cognitive outcomes. When people connect personally, they retain more, think more deeply, and are more likely to act on what they’ve learned.
In the end this all leads to one central purpose, to transform memory into meaning and meaning into action. Because storytelling matters, it shapes how we understand the past, how we relate to one another in the present, and how we build toward a more just future. By centering the experiences of those who endured the Holocaust, we don’t just preserve history, we affirm dignity. We move away from asking, how could this have happened to what will I do with what I now know? At the Holocaust Museum for Hope and Humanity, we believe memory can be a catalyst for justice, and that dignity must be at the heart of every story we tell. Thank you.
Johanna Obenda:
Hi. Hello everybody. I’m Johanna Obenda. I’m a curatorial specialist at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. And I’m one of the curators of our newest exhibition and our first traveling international exhibition, In Slavery’s Wake, Making Black Freedom in the World. I’ll talk to you a little bit about it today and talk to you a little bit about some of our interpretive techniques and approaches to telling this global history. In Slavery’s Wake is a project a decade in the making. It was co-convened by us at NMAAHC, along with Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, with participation from museums across four continents. It’s a global multilingual effort to tell quite an expansive story centered around a question which is, how has our world been shaped by the histories and legacies of racial slavery, colonialism and Black freedom making? It’s collaboratively curated and the exhibition is built to travel, so it opened in DC this past December. And this fall we’ll head to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, followed by Cape Town, South Africa, Dakar, Senegal and Liverpool, England.
As you can imagine across the tour of the exhibition, it will reach quite a diverse international audience. And we’re excited for each of our partners to activate the exhibition with local exhibitions themselves and local programs. A central goal of our global curatorial team was to tell an international history of slavery and colonialism through the lens of those who experienced that history. We asked ourselves, what can we learn about this history from the perspective of enslaved, colonized and liberated people themselves? And thus, the aim of the project was not to be encyclopedic in nature or even exhaustive, but to really create an expansive set of stories that uplifts the everyday people who have navigated these systems. I think it’s really easy to get lost in the enormity of a history like this in the statistics and the figures. However, that’s what was really important for us to name people when we could and to tell their stories whenever possible. And so, at the heart of the exhibition, experience is a large section that features nine personal stories of individuals who were making freedom for themselves and often under the most oppressive of conditions.
And so, through a act of curatorial assemblage, we’re able to piece together fragments of these everyday people’s histories by bringing together artifacts, images, oral history, contemporary art and music to tell fuller stories. While this is a history exhibition in many ways, we also sought to break down some of the disciplinary boundaries that are so common in museums, these boundaries that can exist between say, art and history or history and science. One of the ways we did this is by threading the work of contemporary artists throughout the exhibition experience. And so, on the screen you’ll see some of the works that are featured in the exhibition. We worked with several artists who actually created new works for the project, working with the curatorial and design team to reclaim fractured, suppressed and lost histories. For example, on the top right here, you’ll see a flag for the Bahia Conspiracy created by an artist named Nyugen Smith. Nyugen worked with our team to create eight contemporary banners inspired by historical flags carried during anti-slavery movements. These historical flags are known, and they’re noted in the historical record, but they no longer physically or materially exist today.
By working with Nyugen, he was really able to materialize a set of history through his own artistic perspective that provided a material touchstone for our visitors into a really important topic around armed resistance and political organizing that can be hard to tap into without that visual connection. This type of artistic reclamation in general, it really has allowed us as a curatorial team to creatively lean into some of the silences of this history and the silences you’ll find in the archive. There’s a historian, Tiya Miles, who’s talked about these silences in a few ways, and this addressed them as the space between the stitches. And I found that to be a really productive metaphor. And working with artists has allowed this to be in that space between, to see these absences as invitations perhaps for thoughtful creation rather than obstacles to be avoided. And so, there’s many stories around this history that we can address if we take a close listen and think creatively.
Another goal of this exhibition project is to help visitors make connections between the past and the present. Really thinking about how the practices developed from the system of racial slavery have been adapted and some of them really adapted and reinscribed across time. I think in creating exhibitions, and we probably all agree, it’s always best to show rather than tell. And so, we’re able to show these connections across time in a few ways. One way is by bringing artifacts together, so we have several artifact pairings in the exhibition that bring together contemporary and historic objects. This is one of the pairings here. You’ll see that we bring together slave ID badges from Charleston, South Carolina, and they’re in conversation with 20th century apartheid era passbook from South Africa. And this becomes a real material meditation on practices of surveillance and segregation of Black communities across geographies and time. And so, I think juxtapositions like this allow for us to simply but very powerfully convey these complex messages for our visitors, and in a lot of ways allow the objects to speak for themselves with pretty limited interpretation.
And I think it’s another example too, of just how powerful it is to work in collaboration, so bringing together materials from our collection with our partners allows us to tell a more global story that we couldn’t tell on our own. Pretty early on in the exhibition development process, it became clear to our content team, our curatorial team, that we would need to look towards new archives to tell this history in a way that was both global and international, that also respected and look towards the present. A type of archive that could center memory and really value intergenerational knowledge that’s shared and stored within families. Through the project, we collected oral histories of everyday people speaking about the wake of slavery, the wake of colonialism and freedom-making as well in their own lives. With our partners we filmed over 150 interviews with descended communities, and you’ll see some of the locations here, locations that touch this history and are a part of our collaboration and the tour of the exhibition. These interviews are now housed at a new archive at Brown University called Unfinished Conversations under a model of shared stewardship.
And some of the interviews are woven into the exhibition experience itself through media and film, which is really important. It’s another way for us to see the curatorial voice and for our visitors to understand the wake of this history, its legacies from the perspective of people like them who are sharing their own lived experiences, and that’s not something we could replicate as an institution. And it’s also not something that can be denied, which is so important in these times that we’re in, so the voices of these participants really add to the multi-vocality of the show. And finally, the exhibition experience culminates with a visitor response area. This is a space in the gallery where visitors can have a chance to process. They’ve taken in a lot of information. They also have a chance to add their voice to the mix of narratives and voices in the exhibition. They can answer one of three questions, so you’ll see them here, I pulled a few examples. What does freedom mean to you? How do the legacies of colonialism or slavery impact you, and what does a more just future look like to you?
We found this to be incredibly popular. We clear the space maybe two times a day, and hundreds and hundreds of visitors have left responses thus far. And you’ll see the range, sometimes they’re big, bold statements. A lot of visitors are leaving responses in multiple languages, so it speaks a little bit to the multilingual nature of the show. I think also the global context. And to me, I hope it means that people feel comfortable to come as they are. And then also sometimes visitors will leave drawings or poems. And so, it’s interesting to see the different modes of the way people are processing. And our hope is to collect these responses as the exhibition makes this international tour and have a really robust record coming out of the show and a way of understanding how our local and then global audiences are really grappling with some of the key questions in the exhibition.
There’s no particular call to action in this exhibition, but what we do hope is that as visitors move through and learn about different historic and contemporary practices of freedom making, they’re able to add some of these tools to their own toolkit. As they leave the exhibition and face the challenges that we’re all facing in our global and our local societies, we hope that they can see history as a thing that can be inspirational, something that can be actionable. And I think depending on the sort of perspective like we’ve been talking about today, could actually be quite therapeutic and even healing. I’ll leave us with this last slide. If you want to learn a little bit more about the project, we have a digital version, so you can scan the QR code if you’d like, and it’s on our museum’s searchable museum platform. But I also want to hand it back to Kiah to take us home.
Kiah Shapiro:
I hope you found that as enlightening and inspiring as I have in the process of working with these three amazing women in developing this presentation. They’re brilliant, aren’t they? Can we clap for them again? We’ve got a couple slides here that we thought might be helpful takeaways, also you can email us, and we can send them to you. I see photos being taken, but for each of our three challenge areas, we pulled together what we think some of the commonalities and key takeaways to make actionable decisions in the exhibits you’re working on today possible. Hopefully you can take these home, but again, email us and we can send them. I’ll flip through them real quick, but we’d love to do a Q&A if you are willing to and if you have questions. There’s a microphone up here, please ask your questions in the mic because we’re being recorded. And come on up. I’ll leave this one up for another couple seconds and then move us along. And if there aren’t a lot of questions, we can spend time going through these slides together instead.
Deana Dartt:
Or if you’re too nervous to come all the way up here, let me know and I can run to one of them.
Kiah Shapiro:
Yes, Thank you, Deana. That’s great.
Speaker 5:
Hi guys. I have two questions. First for you, you said that the oral histories were being kept at a university. Why there and how was that decision made?
Johanna Obenda:
Check. Hello. Thank you. Great question. The project was actually convened by the director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice back in 2014, so a project many years in the making and that center’s at Brown, so it’s a logical place in a few ways to think about us as the museum leading the exhibition development process and Brown as our partner with more experience around building archives. But the process was actually quite interesting, so the collection was really built under a model of shared stewardship, which means that while the materials are held at Brown, the actual filmed interviews, each of the interviewees actually owns their interview, so at any point, if they woke up one day and they’re like, “I actually don’t want to be a part of this,” it gets removed. That sounds really simple, but it was an interesting process to work out, but one that was really important to think about bringing it to the ethos of a project like this. While they’re there and being safeguarded at the same time, they don’t belong to the university.
Speaker 5:
Awesome, thank you so much. My other question is for all three of you, in many communities the LGBTQ plus community exists, we’ve always been here. How are you and are you telling stories about that in the mix of all of this too because they are often lost in stories as well?
Suzanne Grimmer:
Thank you for the question. I think a lot of us know the persecution of LGBTQ plus communities by Nazi Germany during World War II, and we understand that that story needs to be told in some capacity as a Holocaust institution. And what we’re actually trying to do is really listen to the very, very strong LGBTQ plus community that is in Orlando. We’ve worked with them quite a few times recently, most recently on an incredible pop-up exhibit for Cabaret, so I would say that right now also start this with our museum is not built yet, so we’re in a very unique position to really, really be influenced by the community groups that want to be seen in this space and acknowledged in some way.
I will say I don’t have the perfect answer for you today, but please know that it is something that we are 100% committed to. And I would say we are in the very strong listening phase, which I think is extremely important. And we have three years to really listen to that and figure out how to incorporate that in a way that reflects their experience without me telling them what their experience is.
Deana Dartt:
Our exhibition talks about the gender fluidity of Native life throughout time, the Two-Spirit gender movement along a continuum, so while it’s not spoken about explicitly, it’s inherent in the discussion among our contemporary native artists. And one of the interviews is with a Two-Spirit person named L. Frank, you need to get over and see this exhibition because she’s amazing. And one of the little videos is her voice coming through very strong from that perspective.
Johanna Obenda:
And I could just add to that, I think similarly in this exhibition project, I’m not sure how explicit we are, but there is a story, so those nine individual stories I was telling you about, one of the stories comes to us from our partners from Brazil, and it’s about a person named Anastasia. And it’s interesting, we asked each of our partners to bring a story of an individual, and they picked someone who perhaps is not a historic person, but more of a spirit and someone who’s actually prayed to today by people of the Afro-Catholic and Umbanda traditions. And I thought that was really interesting because that shows our perspective of thinking about historic people, and they brought in a different element. But Anastasia’s story I think has touched a lot of people that have come to the exhibition because similarly, it’s a story connected to gender fluidity.
I think she was initially depicted actually as an enslaved man by, it was a French architect who had come to the colony of Brazil at the time, it’s a Portuguese colony, to draw scenes of the architecture. And then obviously he also was depicting scenes of enslaved people. And so, there’s a portrait that he drew of an unnamed person who’s wearing a punitive face mask. And over the years that unnamed portrait has sort of transformed and even the gender of the person to become this person, Anastasia. And so, I don’t know, we don’t dive deep into it, but that’s a story that has stuck with a lot of our visitors and something that I hadn’t even really tapped into but thought like, wow, this is something we should be highlighting.
Speaker 7:
Hello. I work for the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle. And this is a question for all three of you. Something that we find really challenging is on the collection front, when people want to donate objects to us that are very clearly from the perpetrator perspective, as a museum how do we handle that? In some cases, just getting it out of the public versus having a straight policy against it, against its educational value. When things from a very clear perpetrator perspective are presented to you as a collection donation, what are the things that you think about? Are there policies in place? How do you handle that?
Suzanne Grimmer:
Well, I can just tell you flat out right now that as we are currently collecting for our new museum, we are not accepting perpetrator centered materials. I’m not interested in getting one more Nazi flag, one more dagger, one more thing with a Nazi symbol, and that might sound like in some way erasure of history. We have enough of them. Our institution unfortunately collected them for 40 years, and I have way more perpetrator items than I do artifacts representing the people who endured their crimes. At this moment, I wouldn’t say it’s a flat out… I’m not doing it for ethical reasons, I just don’t need one more. Now, if there was an interesting piece that came in as a symbol of a victim who has an item that is perpetrator centered and it’s symbolic to an act of resistance or suffering on their part, that’s certainly something that we would look into. But just honestly, I don’t want any more, so it may not be a good answer, but it’s the answer today.
Deana Dartt:
I have a cool story. The Autry isn’t my museum. I was a guest curator, so they may have a way that they interface with donors of those kinds of collections. One institutional solution though is to have a committee that’s made up of community members and have those acquisitions run by them. Is there value or use to you the community of these materials? But one thing that we did do at the Autry Show was a native woman named Leah Mata, a artist. She actually received a pew, a church pew, and we developed a program around it where during Indian market at the Autry Museum, there were Sharpies and paints, and we essentially reclaimed that pew, and people spoke back to the church and spoke back to the missions.
And it’s currently on view with a video of Leah talking about that process. And it’s being accessioned into the permanent collection. But another idea that she had and that they may pursue is putting it in the indigenous plant garden and painting it with chia seeds so that the earth can take it back over and compost it and bring that wood, that tree, the beautiful relative that it was a natural resource back to the earth, so having artists engage with these things is one way to utilize them for the resistance or for the justice making.
Johanna Obenda:
That’s a great question. I can speak in the context of this project, so we did do some collecting for the exhibition, but most of the objects are loans from different partners. And the materials we did end up bringing into the African-American History Museum’s collection are much more centered on the perspectives of enslaved people in their descendants. And even in the display, we’re quite sparing around displaying materials that connect to the acts of perpetrators. They’re there because it’s important to have that element of the story, but they’re very sparse.
And so that was a choice, and it was a debate truly amongst our curatorial team with people having different opinions. But from our perspective, from my perspective, there’s a lot of energy that you have to choose to place when you’re creating a story or an exhibition, and it’s about where you want to put that energy. But sometimes the smallest spaces, like those badges and that passbook, those items don’t seem necessarily inherently violent, but together I think they tell a pretty big story. And so that’s how we approached the display and the collection. Like Suzanne, we didn’t really, but our museum does have materials related to racial caricature, racial violence within the collection. That’s a bigger topic.
Suzanne Grimmer:
And I will just say really quick that we regularly receive donations or inquiries about donating things because they found a Nazi flag in grandpa’s no attic that he says he pulled down in Berlin during World War II. Stories lacking a little bit of the authentic angle that we would like, but we also understand that these people just want it out of their houses. And we have not decided if we are a repository for that, I don’t know… We don’t want it back on the street. I don’t want it in a neo-Nazi’s basement. But that is something that we are actively trying to decide, do we have a responsibility to keep that, so it isn’t a place that doesn’t continue the narrative of the perpetrator? And then also thinking about the cost and the storage that’s required to take on things that we have no intention of putting on display ever again. It’s a really interesting thing, and I’d love to speak to more institutions that are trying to deal with this and if they have figured out a way to balance both.
Speaker 6:
Hi. I wanted to ask, I don’t want to… Obviously it’s very important to have these spaces for community that’s involved for related communities and for allies, so I don’t want to belittle that in any way, but I was wondering if any of you could speak on the theme of the message not getting to the people who need to hear it the most. There’s a degree to which it’s like, okay, we’re not going to reach a certain segment of the population, and it’s not where our energy is best spent, but I feel like there’s a lot of gray area where somebody might look at one of these things… At the Autry maybe they might stumble into it accidentally and have a revelation, I don’t know, but where they look at it and go, oh, that doesn’t interest me, or that’s not for me, or whatever. Once they’re in, it sounds like they would be really sucked in by all these great things. But anyway, sorry, babbling, but that’s my question.
Deana Dartt:
It is a good question. There was a study done and completed in 2021, I believe, by the Kellogg Foundation called Reclaiming Native Truth. And for any of you that are interested in the ongoing impacts of really bad representation of native people, it’s just a great study, a systematic study. They interviewed and they collected all this survey data, so it’s really data rich. There’s lots of graphs, it’s just an incredible amount of information. And the takeaway is there is a segment, there are the people who already know, and then there’s a segment of people who know a little and want to know more. And then there’s a segment of people who don’t know very much and they don’t want to know more. And we focus on that center section.
If we can reach them and educate them, it’s much more likely that they will have an impact on the immovables, they refer to them as immovables, then it is for us to try to reach the immovables just because it’s frustrating and tiresome to try. But there is a hungry audience, an audience that does want to move into allyship and wants to move into really being a decolonization warrior, I like to say in my trainings. And so work with them, pull them in in a deeper way, and we may never reach the immovables and we just try not to spend a lot of energy trying to, because some are belligerent and don’t want to move, and so we could really expend all of our energy trying to move them.
Suzanne Grimmer:
So true. I think for us, this is not a topic for everybody. And we’ve seen that, and that’s okay to some extent. I can’t force you in the door, but our focus is primarily students, so we’ve worked very hard to get K through 12 through the door. We have incredible partnerships with the central Florida public schools and private schools, so we luckily are able to meet kids where they’re at, so we don’t really necessarily have a problem with that. I would actually say our biggest issue is how we get people to want to learn more about this is we are in a very competitive entertainment climate in Orlando. They do not come to a Holocaust museum, they come to Disney, so we are trying to figure out how to get people off of Disney’s property to come and learn about this. It’s not exactly something you sign up for on your family vacation, but it’s an important thing to discuss.
And something that we are trying to do is we definitely do not want to make our museum entertaining. This is not an entertaining topic. However, there are strategies to bring people into this, and we feel that we can best do that by telling individual narratives and by utilizing really creative interactives. I’m going to give a shout-out to the HistoPad guys that are here who are working with us for a prototype for augmented reality to tell one of our protagonist’s stories. It’s going to be incredible. But we are really trying to figure out how to get families to the door outside of our school groups, because that is actually our main audience that we have to serve. I don’t even know if I answered the question, but it’s tricky. I haven’t figured it out yet, but we’re trying.
Johanna Obenda:
And I think you both answered it beautifully and I agree. I think it is a little bit about where you want to place your energy. I feel like at the museum, we’re really lucky that we do have such a high visitorship just proving how much of a hunger there is for this information. And many of our visitors still to this day, we’re almost 10 years open, not only is it their first time to the museum, it’s their first time to a museum at all. And so that fact can’t be understated. And so, there’s kind of a mandate to keep telling the types of stories we tell and just really focus on what we call the unvarnished truth.
And that’s really what drives us, rather than thinking about how do we connect to people who might be ignorant at best or bad faith actors at worse. But really in this project, really just thinking about how do we highlight thoughtfully and carefully the stories of Black communities as it connects to this history. That was the main driving goal, and then making that as accessible as possible with multiple entry points so everyone can find a way to connect to the history, that was the goal. I think thinking in the other direction, it’s important, but like you said, it can drive you a little wild.
Deana Dartt:
I would just add too, that one of the things that I tried to do was invite visitors to step into an active role as allies, which gives them a responsibility to carry this message and these truths out into the world. But one of the things that we do at the end of the exhibition is introduce this Tongva belief that in order to heal, we actually have to travel back to the place of the original wound. And because the exhibition, it starts with pre-contact, but then the arrival of Spanish priests and the missions is a wound, it’s this juggernaut to native life. We invite the visitor to walk back, walk the road back to that original wound, and in doing that have a somatic experience that is an action of allyship. They’ve taken direction from native people to do that, and then they leave empowered. And so maybe, hopefully we’ve inspired them into taking that learning out into the world, so thinking about how to make allies of your visitors that are eager to learn, I think.
Kiah Shapiro:
We are out of time, and I don’t know if there’s a session coming in here afterwards, but please come up and chat. We can also find each other elsewhere. Thank you all so much for coming. I hope that you found some nuggets of inspiration and different ways of thinking that you can take back to your own work. And like I said, you have our email addresses. We can share either the presentation or the takeaway slides with you or hop on a call to brainstorm together, so thank you again for your time and have a great rest of your conference.
This recording is generously supported by The Wallace Foundation.
