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Episode 4: Dare Turner
111 Plays23 days ago
Breaking the Frame is a podcast featuring interviews that explore how museums and the people who work in them shape American history and culture — past and present. Our guest this episode is Dare Turner, the first full-time curator of Indigenous art at the Brooklyn Museum. Her curatorial work has been distinguished by projects that advocate for North American Native artists and communities in museum spaces, and she has been involved in collaborative projects that connect Indigenous- and U.S.-focused American art collections together.
To keep up with Breaking the Frame, subscribe or visit our website at zencastr.com/Breaking-the-Frame.
More information about the artworks and topics discussed in this episode:
- Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum https://artbma.org/learn/preoccupied-indigenizing-the-museum/
- First Americans Museum https://famok.org/
- Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, the reinstallation of the American art wing at the Brooklyn Museum https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/american_art
- Nico Williams https://www.nicowilliams.com/
Credits:
- Hosts: Emily C. Casey and R. Ruthie Dibble
- Production Assistant: Katherine White
- Graduate student guests: Jinhyun Cho and Amanda 'Sal' Salazar
- Additional research prepared by: The graduate students of the Spring 2024 HA 706/906 Seminar in American Art: American Museums: Race, Class, Labor at the University of Kansas
- Theme music: "Deliberate Thought" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
- Artwork: Designed by Katherine White, featuring a frame (ca. 1849-1858) created by the United States Pottery Company currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, available under Creative Commons Zero (CC0)
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Bye!
Introduction to Podcast and Hosts
00:00:14
Speaker
This is Breaking the Frame. A podcast featuring interviews that explore how museums and the people who work in them shape American history and culture. Past and present. I'm Ruthie Dibble, the Robert N. Shapiro Curator of American Decorative Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. And I'm Emily Casey, Hall Assistant Professor of American Art and Culture at the University of Kansas.
Pioneering Role of Der Turner at Brooklyn Museum
00:00:41
Speaker
Our guest today is Der Turner.
00:00:43
Speaker
Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. We're excited to talk to Dare because she is the first full-time Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Her curatorial work has been distinguished by projects that advocate for North American Native art, artists, and communities in museum spaces. At the Brooklyn Museum and before that at the Baltimore Museum of Art, she's been involved in collaborative projects that connect Indigenous and US American art collections together.
00:01:11
Speaker
So, Der, welcome. um We're so glad to have you. Can you introduce yourself and tell listeners about what you do? Thanks so much for inviting me. My name is Der Turner, and I'm a member of the Yurok Tribe of California, and I'm the Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum. And prior to this role, I worked at the Baltimore Museum of Art. And in both positions, I was the first Native person in my role.
00:01:36
Speaker
And it's such an honor and privilege to be able to be a Native museum professional and advocate for my community on the inside. It's fairly rare for Native people to be in these roles, but it's becoming more common, which is really worthy of celebration.
00:01:53
Speaker
Yes, and that is one of many reasons that we are so excited to have you on our podcast. And we also have with us Sal Salazar and Jin Cho, two graduate students from Emily's Museums in America class who helped prep for this
Guests Sal Salazar and Jin Cho Share Their Backgrounds
00:02:09
Speaker
interview. They are alongside our graduate production assistant, Kat White. Super excited to be back in the sound booth for another great conversation. Yeah.
00:02:20
Speaker
Hi, I'm Jin. I'm really excited to hear about your philosophies as an Indigenous curator. Hi, I'm Sal. I'm very excited to hear what you have to say. As a Mexican-American that was raised in South Dakota, I have a large background with Indigenous populations and excited to hear ah your advocacy. Wonderful. Thank you so much. So Kat, Jin, and Sal will also be asking some of our questions today, which they helped us formulate. Yes. We're going to start.
00:02:48
Speaker
with some origins questions and then spend time on your current projects and intellectual engagements and then wrap up with a lightning round and concluding questions that are more forward looking. Sounds great. Sal is going to ask our first question.
Turner's Journey into Museum Curation
00:03:03
Speaker
Yeah. Can you take us back to a moment in your life when you decided that you wanted to be a museum curator? How did you come to that decision and why?
00:03:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think museums were a space that I always returned to. It felt like a great space of possibilities. Museums are trusted as authorities in a way that other places simply aren't. They're ranking just behind family and friends for this place where you can trust the information that they're sharing. So that is an intriguing idea to me.
00:03:35
Speaker
um And right out of undergraduate, I worked at several museums and both of those instances at the Natural History Museum of Utah and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, I worked on some projects related to Native communities. I researched Native community advisory panels. I assisted with a show about representations of Native people through our art history.
00:04:01
Speaker
And after that, I decided to leave the industry for a while and you know try something else out. But I found myself drawn back to museums time and time again.
Transformative Art and Museum Experiences
00:04:12
Speaker
And the thing that really pushed me back towards museums was actually a performance experience. My husband's a performance artist and he creates long duration performances for an audience of one.
00:04:27
Speaker
So they get to know you really well. His performance group Odyssey works, um researches the participants and understands where they're coming from in their life and tries to make um transformative experiences to get them to think about their life in a new way. And so my Odyssey back in 2014, 2015, focused on museums in part. um We went as a group to the De Young
00:04:57
Speaker
and gathered outside. And at the time, I thought this was a legit you know museum tour. I then realized later that this was part of the production. But the tour guide said, today we are going to go inside and we are going to see three pieces of art. And I'm not going to tell you anything about them. I'm not going to teach you. This is a moment for you to be present with art and see if that transforms your way of seeing.
00:05:23
Speaker
um So we spent 10 minutes with this Judas O'Hare sculpture, which was, he's an Inuit artist. It was a large stone sculpture, and we stayed and just engaged with it um in a small group of maybe 10 to 12 people. After 10 minutes with that, we moved to a David Hockney piece, it's a large scale video work.
00:05:45
Speaker
That was and we spent 20 minutes with that and something really interesting happened at that point because it was at this crossroads where you walk by it to enter a different area of the museum. The security guards were nervous about us staying there. It felt so unusual.
00:06:03
Speaker
So one of the security guards asked a different one, what is this group doing? What's going on here? And the other one replied, I think they're looking at the art, which was such a wake up call revelation that people might spend more than 90 seconds looking at an artwork. um So after that, we went and saw Cornelia Parker, large scale sculpture.
00:06:25
Speaker
And we accumulated other visitors over the course of our journey. So by the end, there was over 30 people standing with us looking at this work in silence and just being present with them. And the feedback we got after that was quite moving. People had said, I've never done this before. um This changed my way of understanding. This was a practice that I had always loved. And this was pushing me beyond what I normally did. 30 minutes with one artwork was more intense than my usual approach. ah But that was the moment where I saw the possibilities of museums again. I was ready to return to the field. And so then I went to grad school and and got ready to you know be a museum professional.
00:07:11
Speaker
Thank you so much for sharing that, Darren. I think it's a great reminder of the role of artists, um not just in making the work, but shaping how we see it. Yeah, there's that great, ah Jenny Odell says that the role of the artist is to orchestrate our attention. You know, that sounds like what your husband's...
00:07:30
Speaker
area of expertise is. Also, I love collecting these, you know, funny things you hear in museums. Like, I think they're looking at the art. Like, why would you do that in a museum space? ah But kind of following on that, I, you know, one thing that I think is interesting about your training is the time that you spent at the Bard Graduate Center, which focuses on the decorative arts and material culture.
00:07:56
Speaker
And so I'm curious how that informed your approach to thinking about arts, objects, culture, you know both in an academic sense, but then also when you are are working with collections in museum spaces.
Material Culture vs. Art History
00:08:14
Speaker
Was there something particular that that you explored kind of during that time in your training that informed your curatorial approach?
00:08:26
Speaker
Absolutely. Studying material culture is very distinct from studying art history. And the way I think about it is you are entering people's lives in a way that you aren't with a painting. When I see this work that was in someone's home that they engaged with every day. Maybe this was a Native artwork that was part of a ceremony. the ideas that or The framework for understanding is very different than something out of art history where we're focusing on formalistic qualities. Thinking about the life of the object is at the core of material culture studies.
00:09:02
Speaker
So to me, that's more exciting because I see the way that these objects are networked in the world. I have a sense of the lives that those items or belongings or beings had and the way that they shaped the lives of people that engaged with them. So at Bard Graduate Center, I split my time between medieval art and native art. um And so medieval art, a lot of times people think that has nothing to do with native art. How could you possibly find you know, residents there, but that's that's wrong. When I think of Native art, I focus on this idea of the importance of the materials, the importance of how those those belongings came into existence. And that's very much at the core of medieval art as well. It's thinking about how this bone became this crosier, you know, this this object that an abbess used to guide her you know flock in a way. Same with the materials that go into Native art, you know, when there is buffalo hide used on this buffalo robe. It's ah it's not just a piece of fabric. This is thinking about the life of the buffalo before it became this object. um So there's really synergy there. And then another element that I appreciated about my graduate studies at Bard was that we got to spend so much time at museums.
00:10:25
Speaker
Because it's located in New York, I took many classes where we went to the Met and and talked with the American curators, American art curators, about how they were envisioning their wing. And this was before the Dyker Collection was on view. And the Dyker Collection is a Native art gallery in the American wing. So there were moments where you saw Native art alongside paintings, non-Native artists' paintings.
00:10:53
Speaker
So they were starting to enter this place that I think museums are more grounded in now, where we're bringing Native art into the American art history context, rather than having it siloed and being its own thing. So that was another benefit of studying material culture at MART.
'Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum' Project
00:11:13
Speaker
So, Dara, you started at the Brooklyn Museum in 2023, but After you started working at the Brooklyn Museum, you can you've continued to lead a major project at the Baltimore Museum of Art, your former institution.
00:11:29
Speaker
um The title of this project is Preoccupied, Indigenizing the Museum, um and it's launching in just a few days. So congratulations. It's scary that it's here, but we're here. It's happening. It's set to run through February 2025. We were struck by the title, and we wanted to ask you, what does indigitizing mean and look like to you?
00:11:52
Speaker
Yeah, so I am working really closely with my co-curator, Leila Grothe, the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the BMA, as well as Elise Bolanger, who's a citizen of the Osage Nation, and she's the Curatorial Research Fellow.
00:12:10
Speaker
So something that we did as the foundation of this project was we did something called the Unreference, where we invited every living artist and all the different contributors to the catalog, the designers, everyone that's touching on this project in a meaningful way. We invited them to gather with us.
00:12:28
Speaker
at a home where we could cook together and and have this sort of experience that's not stilted, that's not just at the museum, we're gathering, we're in the conference room. That is the exact opposite of what I wanted because I think that can feel really uncomfortable for Native people where they don't feel like they belong in these spaces.
00:12:49
Speaker
um And, you know, the track record of encyclopedic museums is bad when it comes to relating to Native artists or Native cultures, the way Native art has been represented over the years. So it was important to us to come together in a safe space where we're encouraging open and honest dialogues. So we gathered at a place called the Last Resort Artist Retreat, which is Derek Adams is a local artist in Baltimore who's put together a wonderful retreat space for artists to gather. This was one of the earliest off events in that space. So we had rooms for the different participants. We had a kitchen. We had amazing gathering spaces.
00:13:32
Speaker
areas with a projector, with amazing sound. you know So we each came to the Unconference with something we wanted to share. And in my ideal scenario, that wasn't everybody bringing a PowerPoint. That was you know people bringing, if they're designers of books, bringing in books. If they're artists showing us what they're working on, letting us listen to some of their newest music. I really wanted it to be an open space where people could just bring them their full selves.
00:14:02
Speaker
So we were lucky enough to have a small but mighty group come together for that gathering. And that was a moment where I went into that event with a really rigid plan of how I wanted it to be structured. I had five questions. We were going to have a five course meal where we talked through the five questions at the end. We were thinking through ideas of what it means to decolonize a museum. And Leela and I had always been uneasy about that term.
00:14:31
Speaker
But we couldn't exactly put our finger on why it was wrong. We knew it wasn't quite right. We have toyed with the idea of anti-colonial because de this um aim of decolonizing cannot happen. That's not achievable. We can't undo colonization in these encyclopedic museums. These are built on a colonial foundation.
00:14:53
Speaker
So at that gathering, we spoke about the this with the artists, and we came out of that with this new term of indigenizing. This is really gaining traction in the museum field now, and it's very much distinct from Decolonize in that Decolonize centers the colonizers. That is not what we want to do with this project.
00:15:16
Speaker
It's focusing on narratives that are harmful, that make people feel sad. I don't want to make people feel sad in the museum. I want to make them feel inspired and feel like there's a new way that these institutions can operate because a lot of museums have been stagnant. You know, maybe they're putting a couple of Native artworks in the American Wing Gallery and saying,
00:15:38
Speaker
Oh, hooray, we're done. This was meant to be a really radical um way to reimagine what a museum can be. So through indigenizing, that means bringing Native artists, Native voices, Native stories, Native histories,
00:15:54
Speaker
um that's bringing those to the museum on their own terms. That is letting indigenous people tell stories the way they want to tell stories, not the way the museum wants them to tell stories. um In this case, we commissioned several different artists to create work where they were and so maybe inspired by local indigenous histories. Two artists engaged with Piscataway and Potomac native communities to understand life ways in the region. um And then in other cases, artists just reflected on their own practice and thought, how can I advance this? How can I push myself and create something new for this project? So we're very privileged to work with many art, many dozens of artists. I think it's over 50 for the show. um And several of those have passed away, but many of them are living artists and we wanted to invite them to tell their story on their terms.
00:16:51
Speaker
A major initiative that went hand in hand with this project was an acquisition strategy where we really focused on acquiring contemporary artwork by Native individuals. And that was a huge gap in the Baltimore Museum of Arts collection. And we made a ton of progress over just a few years of focused research and outreach and reflection on where we think the field is going.
00:17:18
Speaker
So Indigenize felt like a better word to honor the sort of efforts we wanted to undertake with the preoccupied project.
Expanding Native Narratives in Museums
00:17:28
Speaker
Yeah. And another element of this project that really struck me, you know, i I'm a curator too. I work in museums and I am fascinated by the fact that this that preoccupied indigenizing the museum is not just an exhibition. And I can imagine that that's actually was probably something of a lift and to like justify why this needed to be more than simply an exhibition. um So I wondered if you could just speak a little bit more about why you needed this to be more than an exhibition in order to indigenize the museum.
00:18:04
Speaker
Yeah, we really saw this as a native takeover of the museum. So it includes nine exhibitions, which if you're listening to this program and you want to be a curator, never ever do that to yourself, ever. um But we're opening the nine exhibitions between now and August. Six of them are opening in just a few weeks in May, and then two in July and one in August. um So that's a really full court press where we're spreading out over the full museum.
00:18:33
Speaker
We're taking over a sizable chunk of the contemporary wing. We're engaging the prints, drawings and photographs, brand new center. We're engaging rotunda space. And beyond that, we're also working inside of the galleries, the traditional permanent collection galleries. We've invited Native community members to come to the museum and choose any object that they want, anything that's of interest to them.
00:18:59
Speaker
and speak about how they see this from their own perspective. And to us, it was really important that that goes beyond just Native art objects. We wanted people to engage with the American collection, to engage with paintings across the museum. Some people spoke about medieval sculpture from their own perspective. Others talked about, you know, a Teotihuacan mural fragment. So that is a way to sprinkle voices across the institution.
00:19:28
Speaker
And going hand in hand with that is um rewriting some labels to really foreground Native perspectives when Native subjects are depicted by white artists.
00:19:39
Speaker
To us, that was important. I don't want to hear the story about Alfred Jacob Miller and where he learned to paint and all that. I'm sure there are people that listen to this podcast that would be interested in that. And there are many museums that do that already that talk about his training. Instead, when he depicts two men on horseback,
00:19:59
Speaker
um who are pursuing an elk. I want to hear about what what's up with those men? What are they doing? How are they hunting? Why are they hunting it in this way? Why is the elk in the water? What was the goal there? um So really pivoting the story. So if we mention the artist, mention the artist at the end.
00:20:18
Speaker
He is not the place we need to start. So we're doing that work as well. Additionally, we are having some public programs, a large celebration once everything is open for the project for both community members and artists.
00:20:34
Speaker
It was really important to celebrate the hard work that the artists put in for this project, so that will be happening this fall. And we just really wanted to make sure that this is something that can last beyond the closing time of the exhibition. These audio tour stops, these rewritten labels don't go away at the end. This is a whole new way to see the collection, and we wanted it to outlast any single individual.
00:21:03
Speaker
That's really exciting. And I think, ah yeah, those ah thinking again about how, you know, exhibitions may have a lifespan, they open and close, but how does this work? ah Seed greater change through some of the things you've talked about, collecting having interpretive material that can be used again and in different contexts with works of art. So um yeah, I hope that we are able to see the show before it goes. Yeah, and even if you're not, we put together a beautiful catalog that expands beyond the scope of the exhibition. We've invited three different scholars, Heather Autone, John Lukovic,
00:21:44
Speaker
and Paul Chott Smith to reflect on the museum field in general that wasn't just essays about this project. To us, that was really important because we want this to have a greater impact than just the nine exhibitions we're doing at the BMA. Additionally, we invited a comic book artist and writer to create a comic that focuses on indigenous Indiana Jones figure. So to me, it's it's sort of astounding that we watch these movies and we root for the good guy looter instead of the bad guy looter.
00:22:20
Speaker
And why is that acceptable? Why are we not asking ourselves, why does the indigenous community, like, why did they set up so many booby traps to keep this object in the temple? Why are walls caving in? And, you know, you you're struggling. So why are these characters struggling so much to retrieve these objects? We never ask that when we watch the movie. So the comic was a good way to reflect on that.
00:22:44
Speaker
And we have beautiful plates from the exhibitions, and Leila and I both wrote a curatorial statement and then personal statements that reflected on what we hope to achieve with this. And then one thing I did that's a little bit unconventional is before each of these entries,
00:23:00
Speaker
where it's, you know, scholarly essay or a comic book or an amazing poem by Hyde Erdrick, we included a sort of diaristic statement that I wrote that's reflecting on themes related to this, related to the content that follows. So in some of those essays, you know, one of them I talked about, a community advisory panelist experience at a natural history museum when she was eight.
00:23:26
Speaker
um where she saw a diorana of her people and thought that those were taxidermied people. And that is something that is sort of unfathomable to non-Native audiences. So I wanted to make sure to share perspectives like that. I had another friend who had an incident at a museum where she was wearing her baby on her back in a traditional basket, and she was kicked out of a Native art exhibition.
00:23:52
Speaker
And that that was a very dramatic turn of events. It got a lot of press. The museum used that as an opportunity to grow and to better gauge Native communities. So it wasn't that the museum was being bad. It's that the structure of the museum is a problem. It's not considering Native people. It's considering you know protecting these artworks. When really, if you're a mother wearing your baby on on your back, you're going to be way more aware of that baby than ah you know, random security guard. So to me it was really important to include those anecdotes and those personal perspectives just to offer a different way of understanding the material to come. I even wonder, Dara, if like the way that the the way that you're thinking about temporality and stretching it out beyond the time frame of a traditional museum exhibition is also a way of indigenizing the project too. It's like, yeah.
00:24:44
Speaker
Yeah, and making sure that we and in involve as many Native stakeholders as possible with the catalog. We focus primarily on Native scholars and and artists and contributors, but we did incorporate the voice of settler curator, John, who with that by including John's voice, we show that non-Native people need to feel like there are stakes for this. We need to have partners um because without that partnership, we we can't get it done. There's not enough Native people in the field to do all this labor and we shouldn't have to do it by ourselves. We should have partners. So it was a good moment to build some coalition.
00:25:26
Speaker
So Native American art is a vast and incredibly diverse curatorial category. Just as an example, I now live in Kansas, where there are four federally recognized tribes that have distinctive languages. And there's also a long history of indigenous migration and displacement in what is now the state of Kansas across these lands.
00:25:51
Speaker
Ruthie, do you want to kind of share sort of your own perspective on just like making clear to listeners like how broad and culturally distinct the communities are that kind of fall into the category of Native American art within museum spaces?
00:26:07
Speaker
Dare, as we formulated this question, I was thinking about my visit to the first Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma about two years ago. Right at the beginning of the galleries, there's a label that just really like saw me in my tracks that pointed out that in Oklahoma, there are 39 distinct tribal nations and the phrase as diverse culturally and linguistically as the European continent And I thought that was such brilliant ah interpretive writing to take something that through a standard education most Americans are familiar with and totally shift the perspective on both Europe and how we understand Native American and Indigenous cultures in the United States.
00:26:56
Speaker
So we have such incredible diversity in terms of ah language, cultural history, um kind of material engagements. And I'm wondering, do you as a curator who's responsible for this range of work have strategies that allow you to emphasize both distinctive and shared values, traditions, or aesthetics from Native individuals, communities, and nations. I think for settlers, people outside of Native communities, there is always kind of the fact that there is this one umbrella title of Native American art creates a suggestion that it's all about similarities and there and it can be hard to
00:27:38
Speaker
um or or there's a lack of awareness about this kind of distinctive identities as well. And within museum spaces, as you said, because there are so few curators of Native art, curators are responsible for a vast array of collections, both in terms of time and culture. So how do you kind of navigate that?
Challenges of Curating Native Art
00:28:00
Speaker
Many Native art curators are responsible for an entire continent or two continents worth of people for all time.
00:28:09
Speaker
That's what I had under my scope of care at Baltimore Museum of Art was both North and South America for all time. And now I'm focusing on what is now the United States and Canada also for all time. So it's still vast. And I think that's something that people don't realize when they think about this industry. They think about, you know, a European art curator who focuses on French painting from 1820 to 1860, like there is a level of specificity that is assumed with other art areas that we don't, you know, Native art curators, yeah but to my knowledge, don't have the same sort of access to.
00:28:53
Speaker
um so With all of my work, the the major takeaway I want visitors to have is that Native communities are vibrant and living today. This is not something that, yeah and these are not communities that died out with the pilgrims. And there is a steeper learning curve on the East Coast, I've found, because education is lacking here and the history of colonialism is hundreds of years older than ah other areas in the US. s so
00:29:24
Speaker
We have some teaching to do in these institutions to drive home that these people still exist today and that not every Native person lived in a teepee. Not everyone, you know, creates ceramics like they do in the Southwest.
00:29:40
Speaker
So showing an array of different communities' artworks can be a great way to emphasize the fact that these are diverse communities. You can also emphasize that by doing a deep dive on cultures from a particular region and writing interpretive materials that hammer home, this is true of this region and regional specificity is helpful in allowing us to understand whatever story we want to tell.
00:30:07
Speaker
Yeah, it also seems like going back to something you said earlier, that your own interest in materials and material culture might really help with this in museum spaces that the the way you talked about the specificity of of materials and what they mean within a culture and how that informs the kind of objects that they become. I don't know if you found that to be helpful when you're kind of thinking about how ideas get implemented into gallery spaces. Yeah, absolutely. You know, to go back to the idea of ceramics, in many communities in the Southwest, clay is understood to be a living being. And so when you shape that clay into a vessel, you're bringing something to life in a new way.
00:30:55
Speaker
So telling audience members that this is the way this material is understood, this is the context that it's emerging from can be a really helpful tool in allowing audiences to understand Native art in a deeper way, in an indigenous way, rather than in a framework that centers the colonizers that's telling the story of how these objects were purchased. Yes, that's important to talk about provenance and to show your receipts, like kind of literally and how these objects came to the museum. But I don't want to tell the story of the collector. That's not that interesting. I think the provenance line can do a lot of work for that. And there are many exhibitions that already focus on that. So instead, focusing on these object driven narratives feels productive.
00:31:45
Speaker
Thank you. We are going to have Jin ask our next question, um which is going to move into some of the projects I think you're working on right now. So Jin, take it away. Yeah. um So at the Brooklyn Museum, there is an ongoing reinstallation of the American art collection due to open in October 2024. As you settle into your new job, how do you approach getting to know the collection and getting involved in the ongoing American wing reinstallation? And what changes would you like to see in the coming years?
Reimagining the American Wing at Brooklyn Museum
00:32:15
Speaker
Yeah, I was thrown into a huge project. My first day, you know, even leading up to the time i before I started working officially, I was getting my head around this major reinstallation of American art at the Brooklyn Museum. We are moving away from the traditional narratives that focus on maybe colonial history from start to finish of this is what America was. We're also not focusing on different art movements like Impressionism and the in America. That's not the framework we're using.
00:32:50
Speaker
Instead, the curator, Stephanie Sparling-Williams, along with a team of curators, leading the charge on reframing the way we think about American art and using Black feminist frameworks and indigenous epistemologies to inspire audiences and spark joy when they come to the museum. So the frameworks focus on eight separate themes or eight eight separate concepts explored in eight galleries.
00:33:19
Speaker
And some of those frameworks focus on Indigenous art in a really concentrated way. One gallery will speak to the idea of gratitude and this notion of rematriation, which is a term that's emerging in the field now and is not in contrast to, but it it complements the idea of repatriation, which repatriation means sending back objects.
00:33:44
Speaker
Rematriation means um getting in right relation with community and the land and the sort of narrative so you can tell using objects. So in a particular gallery, we're doing a very deep dive on in on these concepts um and focusing on object-driven narratives. So in that case, we are bringing out several baskets by women basket weavers from across what is now the United States um and showing that the five women who created these baskets came out of very distinct contexts. They had different ideas that they were working with, different materials. And this is why all of these baskets look so different from one another. That's a moment where we can hammer home that these are diverse communities. So it was a really exciting project.
00:34:39
Speaker
a little bit terrifying to join the team rather late in the game. I came in about a year out from the exhibition opening, which if you're curators or if you want to be curators, listeners, that is not enough time. Um, so I had about maybe a month, month and a half to change the checklist. I inherited a list of objects that they wanted to include.
00:35:05
Speaker
And I swapped stuff out and increased the number of objects for certain galleries where, you know, a gallery that focuses on the nude is not going to lend itself as well to Native art as the one that focuses on rematriation. So really making sure we have a very strong presence in the galleries where we have the capacity to speak to those narratives.
00:35:28
Speaker
So it was an exciting project. I got to know the collection very rapidly and a big piece of that was going into the vault and visiting and getting to see all of these items together, opening up drawers and getting inspired and seeing some things that hadn't been looked at.
00:35:47
Speaker
in, you know, decades. There's one bag that I'm including in the exhibition that was last on view in 1992. There are other items that have never been on view, though they've been in the collection for over 100 years. So this is a moment where we can really give those objects their due, we can care for them, we can do conservation work.
00:36:08
Speaker
um And we can show audiences both the tried and true favorites that people come back for ah and some new deep tracks from the vault is what I call them. that's I can't wait to see it. i'm I am love the idea of the Rematriation Gallery and I'm really excited to seek that out and when I come to the Brooklyn Museum later
Quick Q&A with Der Turner
00:36:30
Speaker
this year.
00:36:30
Speaker
We're now going to move on to our lightning round. And dare the idea here is you say what first comes to your mind. And it's going to be it's going to be fun. So um Kat, do you want to start us off? Yes. So what are three words that describe your ideal museum label? Short, ah targeted,
00:36:53
Speaker
and transformative. Writing something short is extremely difficult, but there's a lot of research that says that's how people are going to, you know, whatever it is, 80 words. People won't read more than 80 words. And so we need to be very targeted with those 80 words to make sure we're telling the story that benefits both our audiences and the artworks the most. So it's always hard to Chop down your word count, but that's a really important thing to do. What is a dream acquisition for you at the Brooklyn Museum? Oh, gosh, I don't don't know that I have an answer for that. I think we're now pivoting to acquiring works by contemporary artists. The collection is largely historical, and I'm privileged to work with
00:37:44
Speaker
over 13,000 objects that are coming out of a historical context. Many of them were acquired in the early 1900s by a sort of a collector who was extremely detail oriented. We know who we bought it from, who made it, sometimes he commissioned it. And we also know what he ate for dinner that day. So there's a lot of deep knowledge about the collection that we're uncovering now.
00:38:11
Speaker
And I think the area where I'm most excited to grow is contemporary art. If you could ask every visitor to the Brooklyn Museum one feedback question, what would it be? Gosh, that's a hard one. um What inspired you today? Let me just keep it really broad. And, you know, with those kinds of questions, I want spaciousness enough to allow all different types of answers. You know, ideally we're focusing on native art here.
00:38:41
Speaker
Another question we might ask is what questions do you have? I can inform like how we write labels in the future, how we think about the way we organize exhibitions. Great job. You kept past the lightning round. Oh, wow. That was shorter than I thought. I mean, it's a lightning round. It's true. But it's been a pleasure for us, I think, because we're finding that everyone approaches the lightning round differently and has different sort of first reactions to it. So it's like collecting these different perspectives has been really fun. Yeah, great.
00:39:15
Speaker
And so now we're moving into our forward looking wrap up. So one question that we ask everyone on the podcast, and we always love to hear the answers are, what are you most excited to be working on now?
Upcoming Installation by Nico Williams
00:39:30
Speaker
Preoccupied is just about to open. So I'm doing the final touches. We're doing gallery installations. Today I'm going into the museum to help with an installation of De'Ani Whitehawk's sculptures. So I'm very excited for that. But when I'm thinking forward to what I'm doing at the Brooklyn Museum, I'm excited for the American Wing, but I'm but Between now and the American Wing opening, we are going to debut Nico Williams, Art on the Stoop. For those of you who have not been to the Brooklyn Museum, there is a monumental sort of set of stairs to the left of the entrance. That's a place where lots of activities happen, like yoga classes and different gatherings. People eat out there, hang out, bring their dogs. um And that's an area of the museum you can access without setting and foot inside the doors.
00:40:20
Speaker
So we are working together, Nico and I, to create a major installation that will highlight his beadwork practice and expand his public art practice. There will be objects or items inspired directly by the collection. He drew some beadwork patterns from An Anishinaabe legging and garters from the 19th century, and he made them his own. And so photographs of his beadwork will be on the stair risers. We're going to have a major sculptural element that invites play and engagement. And that is going to be opening in June. So come to the Brooklyn Museum to check it out.
00:40:59
Speaker
That's cool. And actually, it prompts me to ask a question, which is, you know, you were talking about how you have this really strong historic collection that you're working with at the Brooklyn Museum, but that the museum and it sounds like you and your role are are looking to be acquiring more contemporary art and that you're also with a project like this working with a contemporary artist.
00:41:23
Speaker
And I'm wondering if you're seeing that kind of straddling between curating historic art, but also, you know, collaborating with contemporary artists as something that's kind of distinct in your role in the museum because of the the cultures and materials that you are responsible for, or is that like a larger curatorial strategy among your colleagues as well. And I'm just thinking, you know, about the way that museums are organized, you know, there is typically modern and contemporary art curators who are who more tend to maybe be doing those kinds of collaborations with living contemporary artists and and kind of some of the historic divisions. And if if the way that that's getting remixed is something that is part of a broader
00:42:13
Speaker
approach that you're seeing in the museum or kind of specific to your approach to your role? It's something we see with curators who curate art that used to be in the AOA departments, so Arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and um the Americas.
00:42:33
Speaker
It's something where, you know, the Africanist and the Asian art curator and I are all doing this. We're all working with contemporary artists and bringing those voices in. We also have to steward these really enormous and wonderful historical collections. Yeah, we see that largely with curators of, quote, non-Western art, which I think is an extraordinarily problematic term because natives are, we're here first. um So because of that, though, I think when you're construing these giant collections where you're representing an entire continent for all time, all time includes the contemporary moment. That's helpful thinking about it. It's like the all time part of your job. Yeah. I was just going to say too, like i I'm a curator of American decorative of arts and I'm responsible for, you know,
00:43:23
Speaker
timeline, early 17th century to the present. So I'm also doing that work of like having to go back and forth in time. However, the time scale is different because you're going so much farther back. I think you yeah, you're just covering such a vast amount of time. So even, hundreds of years yeah, even curators of American art of, you know, settler European American art who are responsible for from their beginning to the present have a far have hundreds of years rather than thousands of years to handle. It is definitely distinct in that way. So what do you wish people knew about the kind of work that you do?
Museum Infrastructure and Diverse Art Curation
00:44:03
Speaker
I wish that they knew how um museums are not set up to do the kind of work I'm doing. We, for preoccupied, inherited a colonial structure with our encyclopedic museum that we were working within.
00:44:18
Speaker
This isn't the fault of any individual workers that are there today. This is history living out in in the contemporary moment. But there are so many obstacles that we have to overcome as curators of Native art or other collection areas that haven't been privileged in the past. We didn't have dedicated gallery space the same way that European art does. We don't have the same space that American art does.
00:44:47
Speaker
So working within the confines of the you know material reality, the fact that we don't have the square footage, the fact that much of our collections haven't been conserved. So we can't just throw a you know a huge show together. We need to work really carefully with the objects conservators and make sure that what we are asking for is achievable. Those are unique problems or they can be unique problems to collections that haven't been served by museums in the past.
00:45:17
Speaker
Thank you for that. Yeah, I think that we're interested you know in these broader questions of how museums shape our ideas about culture, and in particular about American culture and identity and how that's been defined.
00:45:34
Speaker
and Remembering that so much of that is about infrastructure in the way that you're describing, I think is really important and are often the aspects that are not as visible if you're a visitor walking in. um And so it sounds like with a lot of the projects you're doing, not only are you challenging and transforming some of those systems, but in doing so also making them more visible in a way that I think they're not always. so
00:46:04
Speaker
yeah Thank you. Yes, thank you, Dara. This is really exciting to hear all the many different projects you're involved right now. And Nico Williams' work is incredible. I'm so excited to see what he does with you. I'm so privileged to work with Nico. This is a new direction for him, in my opinion. So we're excited to debut it together and you know be in close partnership. That's fabulous. Totally fabulous.
00:46:30
Speaker
Thank you. We did it. We did it. Woo hoo. Yeah. Thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of this. This was really wonderful. We're just like so excited that you said, yes, I think this is, like I said, I've admired your work for a long time, but this seems like a really exciting moment as you're embarking on some really big new projects. So we appreciate you kind of sharing your thinking at this juncture um yeah with us. Yeah. And we appreciate the work you do.
00:47:00
Speaker
And thank you to Sal and Jin and Kat too. Yes. Great questions.
00:47:16
Speaker
So after listening to Dare describe ah her work, I'm really looking forward to seeing it in action when the Brooklyn Museum's re-installation of its American Wing opens, um which is happening really soon. Yeah, in fact, it's opening October 4th, and I can't wait to see the really innovative work, that's in years of work that's gone into that.
00:47:41
Speaker
So now is our time for returning to the theme of this podcast. And we're going to take a moment to think about one significant way in which DARE's curatorial practice breaks the frame. And in this case, we wanted to highlight the way that she is reimagining curatorial practice to align with Indigenous ways of thinking and being. I was really impacted and fascinated by her move and shift kind of from the concept of decolonizing to the concept of indigenizing and the way that for her that is a way to move away from harmful narratives and practices into a space of joy that foregrounds
00:48:30
Speaker
not just Indigenous art, but Indigenous ways of being, Indigenous methodologies for bringing projects into being collaboratively with other Indigenous communities and individuals.
Reimagining Curatorial Practices
00:48:43
Speaker
So for me, that was a major takeaway of that's an important way to break the frame of American art.
00:48:49
Speaker
Yeah, I think that is a great point to end on. We want to thank everybody for listening to this episode of Breaking the Frame. ah Be sure to follow the link in the episode description ah for more information on some of the things that Dara talked about today.
00:49:07
Speaker
and keep your eye out for our next episode. And thank you to Kat for producing this episode and to the KU graduate students who informed our questions and participated with us.