Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: There's a huge question looming over collectors and museums right now.
Speaker: What do you do about the historical underrepresentation of disadvantaged groups?
Speaker: In recent years, we've seen a huge proliferation of interest and investment, but some of the fundamental moral and historical and economic questions are still vexing.
Speaker: It's one thing to say you want to do more to support these long-ignored fields of study and collecting, but it's another to grapple with the actual trade-offs, the costs, and the often unpleasant realities that brought us here in the first place.
Speaker: A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to organize a talk for the Winter Show at the Park Avenue Armory, and I thought this would be a good moment to take the bull by the horns, and if not definitively resolve those questions, at least ask them in a serious way.
Speaker: And I was thrilled to be joined for this by a collector and a curator who have two of the most insightful and innovative voices on these topics.
Speaker: That's Jeremy Simeon and Jesse Erickson.
Speaker: And we recorded the conversation, and I'm really glad to be able to share it with you now.
Speaker: I hope you find it as thought-provoking as I did.
Speaker: As always, you can reach me on Instagram at Objective Interest or via email at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: If you'd like to support Curious Objects but you don't have much time, you can just open the app you're using right now to listen to this and leave a rating or even write out a quick review.
Speaker: It's...
Speaker: a small thing, but it really helps convince the algorithms to show these episodes to more listeners.
Speaker: And I'm really grateful to those of you who have taken a moment to do it.
Speaker: I want to start by just quickly situating ourselves.
Speaker: We're here at the Winter Show, which, of course, you know, 20 years ago, you would have seen pretty much 18th century furniture and paintings and sculpture here.
Speaker: Now the scope of the material on the view of the fair is dramatically broader.
Speaker: But, you know, at the same time, this is still the marquee American
Speaker: fair, marquee American exhibition of traditional material that we all still treasure and love.
Speaker: But, you know, it's clear that things are different now.
Speaker: Collectors are paying attention to works that come from places and that were made by people that were previously easy to ignore by default.
Speaker: Scholars are turning over stones that have been right under our feet for a long time, but we're finally starting to see the undersides of them.
Speaker: And even the contemporary art world is making great strides toward greater inclusivity.
Speaker: And that is all very exciting and encouraging.
Speaker: But it also is raising a host of questions and challenges about how to approach these new categories of material and how to reconsider the traditional material that we still cherish.
Speaker: So we're talking today about collecting outside the lines, the lines of traditional Anglo-European material.
Speaker: I'm just thrilled to be joined by these two gentlemen who, they've both been pushing these lines through their world-class research, their connoisseurship, but also their deep thinking about culture and history.
Speaker: I want to start just by helping the audience to get together the two of you a little bit better and hear a little bit back about your interests, your research, your projects.
Speaker: Maybe you could, in just a moment, give a brief introduction to your area of focus and maybe tease us with something that you're working on at the moment.
Speaker: Jeremy, do you want to?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So my name is Jeremy Simeon.
Speaker: I'm from Louisiana.
Speaker: And my area of focus would really be 19th century portraiture.
Speaker: But every now and then I also get into 18th century portraiture.
Speaker: And more specialized still, depictions of people of African descent, which is quite rare portraiture.
Speaker: You may have looked around the show and you're not going to see many examples of that.
Speaker: It's a needle in a haystack.
Speaker: Been through a lot of haystacks.
Speaker: But luckily, I've had quite a bit of success in finding this African presence in portraiture.
Speaker: And because I am New Orleans-centric and Louisiana-centric, my focus has been on Louisiana.
Speaker: but also the greater what I call Creole or Caribbean world.
Speaker: So these colonies where we see the African presence there.
Speaker: And I've had some great success at finding some phenomenal paintings, some hidden stories, and occasionally some hidden sitters that were, well, buried beneath additional pigment.
Speaker: And currently right now I'm working on an 18th century French colonial painting
Speaker: of two sitters.
Speaker: One is an aristocrat.
Speaker: The other is a lady of color.
Speaker: We do not know her status and we don't know her position, but we know she's looking right at the viewer and says, you need to know my position and my status.
Speaker: And so I'm fighting very hard to try to demystify that and I'm hoping we can get that done.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Now about you, Jesse.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm Jesse Erickson at the Morgan Library Museum where I'm the ASTIC curator and department head of Printed Books and Bindings.
Speaker: My research is centered in a sort of nascent methodology called ethnobibliography.
Speaker: And ethnobibliography, as I have developed it, it was originally conceived by another bibliographer, a cataloger named Hugh Amory, back in the 90s.
Speaker: But my sort of development of this methodology has advanced it in a way where I'm looking at the intersection of the social construction of racial and ethnic identity and the book as a material object.
Speaker: So I'm really interested in the ways that typography and layout and binding and illustration and all of the various components of the book as a material text speak to the ways in which we construct racial identity.
Speaker: I started sort of expanding and exploring this methodology, well actually prior to my dissertation work, but my dissertation work was focused on analyzing black literacy practices in special collections libraries using ethnobigliography as that methodology, as a lens by which we can understand the nuances of the ways that black Americans interact with the book.
Speaker: Since then, I've developed a deep passion for Victorian popular fiction through my own personal engagement with a Victorian period author named Weta.
Speaker: So I've now directed that same methodology to the analysis of her literary corpus
Speaker: and looking at various substantiations of additions coming out of different regions and different languages and at the ways that that speaks to particular ethnic construction and ethnic identities within the communities of readership that's situated in those areas.
Speaker: Yeah, thanks.
Speaker: And, you know, I just... I think I want to start off by asking
Speaker: What the hell is happening?
Speaker: Because over the last three years we've seen this absolute explosion of interest in underrepresented artists, underrepresented areas of art and decorative arts, particularly since 2020 and George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests.
Speaker: And, you know, I've seen retail prices for works by black makers.
Speaker: Increased by a factor of 10 or 20 or 50 or more.
Speaker: I mean, is this just...
Speaker: society finally recognizing the true value of these pieces?
Speaker: Or to what extent is this a new fashion or a fad that's inevitably going to pass?
Speaker: I mean, is this more like a trend line that is just going to keep rising?
Speaker: And whose money is really driving that trend?
Speaker: Oh, I have to begin on this one?
Speaker: I mean, that's a lot going on there.
Speaker: It's a complicated issue.
Speaker: Or is it an issue at all?
Speaker: Well, I mean, I guess that's a matter of perspective, right?
Speaker: So some people would look at this and say, well, this is obviously a solution.
Speaker: This is an acknowledgement of a marginalized people finally having their day.
Speaker: But is it just a day?
Speaker: Or is it a week or a month?
Speaker: And I think some people could get very nervous thinking about that.
Speaker: But for someone like myself who's been collecting this for 10 years, not that long, but long enough to leave a mark, I don't concern myself with questions like that.
Speaker: because it's one to be a hipster.
Speaker: I liked it before it was cool.
Speaker: And I don't worry about if tomorrow they no longer recognize the importance of the African presence or this material culture.
Speaker: Sure, it's concerning on some level, but I don't worry about it.
Speaker: Where's the money coming from?
Speaker: Well, it seems like it's coming from the heavens because it's pouring down.
Speaker: Oh my God, like the rain earlier today.
Speaker: It's coming from everywhere.
Speaker: I think it's an apology, a recognition.
Speaker: I think we had this pressure cooker of social injustice broadcast in 4K, sometimes 6K.
Speaker: when we see these things happening with George Floyd and other black people and struggle.
Speaker: We'll leave that struggle.
Speaker: And so maybe it's an apology.
Speaker: Maybe it's a spotlight.
Speaker: I can tell you it's warm and it's refreshing because it's so cold for the years leading up to this moment.
Speaker: And I'm optimistic it'll continue, but I don't really want to speculate too much on where the money's coming from because again, as a person who's passionate about this, I can't get into those sort of things.
Speaker: It'll affect my ability to persevere and continue on and tell these stories.
Speaker: I love this question because it is a can of worms.
Speaker: I would love to think of it as an arc, but perhaps it's more of a pendulum.
Speaker: Black folks have been collecting our own history for generations.
Speaker: You just gotta go to Schaumburg, my neighborhood, to see how we can attest to that.
Speaker: But this resonates with me on a personal level because
Speaker: Number one, it is part of my own raison d'etre for how I approach the field at large, right?
Speaker: And the question that I'm always trying to address, the question that keeps me up at night and that I get up for in the morning is, how do we make this field more inclusive?
Speaker: How do we make this field more diverse long term, right?
Speaker: And a lot, you know, this was my question
Speaker: going into it more than 15 years ago.
Speaker: And more than 15 years ago, this wasn't a question for the field at leverage, right?
Speaker: So I've seen, I've watched this blossom.
Speaker: These conversations sort of come to the fore, especially since 2020, although the pendulum's swung back a little bit since then.
Speaker: Kind of giving me whiplash a little bit.
Speaker: But, you know,
Speaker: Closer to a decade ago, people started recognizing, oh, we need to do better with hiring people of color into libraries, galleries, museums, into the art world, into memory fields.
Speaker: But that's not really a panacea, right?
Speaker: And so this moment, I think it's a combination of, it's definitely multifactorial in that
Speaker: On the one hand, you have academia recognizing, okay, there's a clear need here because the curriculum's changing.
Speaker: Curriculum's changing, right?
Speaker: And so how do special collections, libraries, collectors of culture represent those changing trends within the communities of scholarship?
Speaker: That's when I sort of started to really observe a shift happening.
Speaker: So that's the next level.
Speaker: Right, so there's the demand and that great demand sort of creates a financial incentive, right?
Speaker: Because a lot of vendors have institutional clientele.
Speaker: So there's that aspect.
Speaker: But on the other side,
Speaker: it becomes sort of a double-edged sword in my opinion because, at least in my experience, you start to get into the more complicated aspects when you look at it in a holistic lens.
Speaker: You have a community of donors, right?
Speaker: You have your trustees, your board members, right?
Speaker: These are the individuals and folks that set up endowed funds for collection development, right?
Speaker: So if there's resistance there, there's a roadblock.
Speaker: And then you have the vendors themselves.
Speaker: And this is where it gets really problematic.
Speaker: Because when you're profiting off of black history, right, and it's so bizarre because, I mean, it's nice to say, it's surreal for me as a black person who grew up, sort of hip hop generation, I have looked at rare book catalogs that have materials
Speaker: that I would look at and say, oh, you know, that's just so-and-so from down the block, you know, a yearbook or a photo album or pictures of people that I would very much identify and I don't understand how now that is now worth, you know, $5,000, $6,000, $7,000.
Speaker: But then I see it in my own family.
Speaker: I've experienced this in that my wife, her late great grandmother was a woman named Jessie Mae Robinson.
Speaker: We believe she was the first black woman in ASCAP, very successful songwriter.
Speaker: She wrote a song, Let's Have a Party, recorded by Elvis, Paul McCartney, very successful songwriter.
Speaker: And as a black woman, you know, in the mid 20th century, producing songs, owning your own catalog like that was very, a big deal, you know?
Speaker: So, you know, we're at the point where we're trying to land these papers at an institution.
Speaker: And I've been on the other side of that as a professional, you know, bringing collections in, trying to do it in the most ethical way possible.
Speaker: But then now on the flip side, trying to do this as a person, a family member, you realize how many obstacles are in place.
Speaker: How do I get an appraiser?
Speaker: We can't afford to fly somebody down.
Speaker: It's very expensive.
Speaker: And then there's individuals that are interested in breaking up the collection so that it can be sold on the market.
Speaker: And there's a financial incentive in that, but you know that
Speaker: I know that it's gonna sell for a lot more than what people are gonna put on the table.
Speaker: So I imagine there's a lot of that kind of thing going on where you have really savvy dealers who are identifying sources of collections and are able to make a good profit off of these trends.
Speaker: So on the one hand it's a good thing because,
Speaker: These are stories that are now being told and how are you gonna tell these stories because people that are in positions of power to be able to preserve these histories, collect these histories, document them and make them accessible, now that we have an increasing amount of people of color in these fields, although we're just now making inroads after all these years.
Speaker: You know, it's good that that shift is happening.
Speaker: But on the other hand, there's still exploitation on every level.
Speaker: So the question then becomes, how do we diversify our donor base?
Speaker: How do we diversify our vendors?
Speaker: How do we diversify every single sector in this network of different sort of industries that create the environment within which these histories can be preserved?
Speaker: And Jeremy, on the collecting side of things, I mean, you've been acquiring materials through, at this point, what must feel like a real roller coaster of market interest.
Speaker: So, I mean, what effect does that have on your own collecting practice?
Speaker: as you watch the same material.
Speaker: Again, as you say, as a hipster, maybe 10 years ago when you were starting out, it was much easier to acquire.
Speaker: What effect does that have on you?
Speaker: Well, I haven't really had a problem acquiring pieces because I think I look in unconventional places and perhaps I have a bit of insight as a person of color.
Speaker: But what I have noticed, and this is unpopular, is a double standard in the industry as a person of color dealing with household name, auction houses,
Speaker: major dealers, and even certain other avenues.
Speaker: So it's worth more when it's somebody that they're accustomed to dealing with, somebody who wants to break up a collection, as opposed to a person of color who has an intimate connection with this, whether it's something that descended in the family, or it's something that descended in another family that you're sure could have been your situation, or was, echoes your situation.
Speaker: And I think what's important now
Speaker: Sorry, they jumped the gun.
Speaker: Is that we have to have transparency and we have to push these institutions to say, w ait a minute.
Speaker: We have to appreciate this, not appropriate it.
Speaker: And we have to share this and not sell it.
Speaker: Because that's what's happening.
Speaker: They're selling it and they're making it very...
Speaker: interesting narratives, you know, sellable, but those are not necessarily the truth or the true narratives.
Speaker: And what's the point of any of this if we're just going to get this and fashion it in a manner that the powers that be, the same old powers that be, see fit.
Speaker: Y'all could have just let me stay home and relax with coffee and eBay.
Speaker: I didn't need to be here.
Speaker: You don't want to hear from me.
Speaker: You just want what I have.
Speaker: Well, because there are, as Jesse is talking about, there are multiple sides maybe to this coin.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: One aspect here is that as interest grows, and of course interest in money go hand in hand, in many if not almost all cases, as interest grows, that also means that there are, in many institutions, there is preponderance of funding for research, for study,
Speaker: Of course for acquisitions for public institutions, which we'll talk about in a minute, but you know, how do you understand that side of things where perhaps the material is now able to be investigated in a way that they're just one of the resources?
Speaker: Well, so did we have to look at that?
Speaker: And I think it's important to look at that.
Speaker: And again, this is an unpopular opinion, but we have to look at who's investigating.
Speaker: And what are their instructions when investigating?
Speaker: Be safe with this.
Speaker: Don't be too radical.
Speaker: Now, whether they say that or not, that's what's happening.
Speaker: And who is doing this investigation?
Speaker: Who's looking into this?
Speaker: And do they have cultural insight to do that?
Speaker: And that may sound elitist at first, but it's not.
Speaker: There's cultural memory.
Speaker: There's things my grandmother told me that your grandmother may or may not have told you.
Speaker: And there's things my grandmother told me without ever telling me.
Speaker: And I think for certain pieces of material culture, especially when we're talking about the African presence in Louisiana, I think I'm a better, and not just me, there's others, there's many allies, I think I would be probably more fit to do a little digging than perhaps somebody who's not acquainted with that culture, whether being of it or just not in it.
Speaker: said I'm limited strictly to people of African descent, but you should have some insight.
Speaker: What's your take on that, Jesse?
Speaker: Yeah, no, I agree.
Speaker: And I'm actually, I'm encouraged by what I'm seeing on the ground.
Speaker: I'm sort of excited on a certain level on what's been percolating and bubbling up.
Speaker: And that is,
Speaker: the sort of final frontier in my opinion, that is opening up and diversifying the modalities by which knowledge is produced itself.
Speaker: You know, the traditional model for research in archives and special collections working with cultural objects is a very sort of
Speaker: settler colonialist enlightenment model where you have the lone genius sort of studying objects in a cabinet of curiosities kind of way to make discoveries right and then producing an essay or a monograph upon that very sort of
Speaker: individualized, almost a private form of research, right?
Speaker: It's very solitary.
Speaker: And this is fostered within the environment itself, which is often very sober and quiet, right?
Speaker: And so the means by which knowledge is produced through the engagement with these objects
Speaker: within academia, within research libraries, and in some respects even in public history through walking through an exhibition and interpreting a narrative, right, it privileges
Speaker: particular modality that is rooted in a Eurocentric perspective.
Speaker: But what I'm seeing now is even in the more empirical, or as I say, the STEM fields, the sciences, there's an openness to expanding that, at least opening themselves to the idea that there are various
Speaker: modalities by which knowledge is produced.
Speaker: And this is radical.
Speaker: I mean, I've already seen pushback in online forums and things like that about like, oh no, you know, the sky's gonna fall because science is science and you have to teach it.
Speaker: It's in accordance with the scientific method and that's that.
Speaker: the scrutiny that post-moderns apply to the sciences, right?
Speaker: Or historians of science who have unearthed scientific racism and all that kind of versions of scientific research that have happened.
Speaker: But at least to me, it seems to me that that's the final frontier, right?
Speaker: And this gets back to what you're saying,
Speaker: in that really when you're opening up access, it's one thing to start letting people of color or people from other cultures come in and look at, many times, their own cultural history, their own objects that have been sealed away almost hermetically and reserved for a certain segment of society that has traditionally been privileged with access to these materials.
Speaker: So, you know, when you have
Speaker: bringing more diversity to their collections.
Speaker: And you have sort of a critical mass of all these diverse histories now living in museums, galleries, and special collections.
Speaker: Yes, I mean it makes sense to me that now you're gonna have to open that up, not just to researchers of color, but the ways that they do research that may be different, may be uncomfortable.
Speaker: And so that requires rethinking the whole model itself and start rethinking how reading rooms operate.
Speaker: Not to say you have to throw the baby out of backwater and get rid of the old model, but just be open to exploring different ways
Speaker: that we can present these materials or have people engage with these materials that may be sort of counterintuitive to some of the concerns around preservation or conservation or some of the concerns around maintaining a so required environment.
Speaker: Maybe it's more conversational.
Speaker: Maybe it's more dialogic in nature and involves investigating particular materials as a group, you know.
Speaker: Or maybe it's engaging through producing other forms of art.
Speaker: So instead of a monograph or an essay or a scholarly presentation.
Speaker: So that's where I'm really excited about.
Speaker: You know, it's, we have a long inherited set of assumptions about the proper context to view the material and to think about the material.
Speaker: And maybe one of the side effects of the last three years is going to be, you know, to challenge some of those assumptions.
Speaker: that frankly have impact beyond just the racial history and the cultural history, but that speak more broadly to our experience of museums, but also just of decorative arts and art in general.
Speaker: So there might be some exciting changes to think about there.
Speaker: But I want to pose a hypothetical and sort of come at this from the opposite side for a moment, because
Speaker: So let's imagine, let's say I'm a collector.
Speaker: Maybe I'm even somebody who's on the board of a museum or two.
Speaker: And I have, for decades, I've been collecting traditional collectible material.
Speaker: That's the world that I've been immersed in.
Speaker: But now I'm slowly starting to think that
Speaker: there might be this whole other world that I haven't thought much about, that I haven't paid much attention to, that I've never really been educated about.
Speaker: And, you know, I'm seeing museum exhibitions that feature black craftspeople,
Speaker: I'm reading articles about black artists.
Speaker: I'm thinking more explicitly about the legacy of slavery and colonialism vis-a-vis the historic works that I've traditionally acquired.
Speaker: But I'm not sure how my own collecting should reflect this new paradigm.
Speaker: So what advice do you have for somebody in that position?
Speaker: Well, I think anyone who's interested in this, I would welcome you as an ally.
Speaker: And I think that is a wonderful thing because there's enough material culture out there for many more to get involved in.
Speaker: And I think if you go into this as a true collector who's always interested in learning more and gets that funny little feeling when we find something out we didn't know and we find these pieces that kind of reflect and tickle that, I think that's awesome.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: My only advice would be appreciate this, don't appropriate it.
Speaker: and recognize that I have indigenous ancestry, but I'm not Pueblo.
Speaker: I'm not Navajo.
Speaker: And if I have a question, I'm not going to assume the answer or presume it.
Speaker: I'm going to reach out to someone who has those insights and I'm going to want to seek and learn from them.
Speaker: And I think that's it.
Speaker: I encourage anybody to keep learning.
Speaker: I think that's part of the fun of collecting.
Speaker: We're going to be learning and hopefully, hopefully broadening our collection to some degree, if not majorly, but some degree.
Speaker: until we can't collect anymore.
Speaker: So I think it's a good thing.
Speaker: Anything to add to that, Jesse?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I'm having a difficult time parsing the question a little bit.
Speaker: And because I feel like there are layers there, and it can be a spectrum, right?
Speaker: I mean, on the one hand, what you're articulating is
Speaker: is almost like the model by which the British Library Museum was built.
Speaker: And then they had that rationale of, oh, we can preserve these histories better than the cultures themselves.
Speaker: And so we have a right to this material, and we're opening it up to scholars internationally.
Speaker: And there is some good that could come out of that, but when folks from a certain community want their stuff back, you have to take that serious.
Speaker: So then you get into questions of repatriation on that level.
Speaker: But as individual collectors who have interest in exploring other identities and other cultures and their history, I mean you see that all the time.
Speaker: And what I fear is that that sort of tension, that we have to balance between
Speaker: on the one hand, the most extreme cases of pillaging through the history of colonialism and then sealing it away.
Speaker: And on the other hand, somebody who is genuinely interested in the appreciation of a culture outside of their own background and as a collector uses that as a mean by which to engage with perspective that is, that, that, that
Speaker: they feel that they would benefit and grow as a human being from engaging with.
Speaker: That can be a good thing, but there's so much nuance to it, right?
Speaker: And so it's like, how do you approach your own collecting?
Speaker: Do you have, how are you, are these materials opened up to the people
Speaker: that would be sort of most impacted from being able to interact with or learn from these materials.
Speaker: How are you acquiring them?
Speaker: And then of course what you say about appropriation, that's so important, you know, especially when you think about indigeneity, which one of the most,
Speaker: egregious examples of continual appropriation by people outside of those cultures trying to step in and bond with an identity in really problematic ways.
Speaker: And then there's also the, you know,
Speaker: the risk of fetishizing, right?
Speaker: And that's another risk.
Speaker: Where's the line between appreciation and the fetishization of a culture outside your own background?
Speaker: But I think that as sort of a human family, we grow so much from learning about other cultures.
Speaker: And people are interested, you know,
Speaker: Black folks are interested in Chinese martial arts or Japanese interested in hip hop.
Speaker: There's a lot of cultural exchange going on and it's not all appropriation.
Speaker: That's how, in my opinion, we evolve culturally.
Speaker: It can be very much a good thing.
Speaker: And in my own experience, I collect Weta and she's not a person of color.
Speaker: She's a British writer, French father, lived most of her life in Italy, so very transnational figure.
Speaker: And it just so happened that I love her fiction.
Speaker: I got obsessed with it.
Speaker: And so I never predicted that
Speaker: I would be a collector of Victorian popular fiction, but then here I am.
Speaker: And to me, it resonates with my own personal penchant for what they call street league, or urban league.
Speaker: It's a guilty pleasure, but I've been reading that for many, many years.
Speaker: And there's a lot of synergy between my passion for
Speaker: for Victorian popular literature and street lit.
Speaker: So there's all these interesting connections.
Speaker: I can see that happening with other collectors.
Speaker: You don't know what will inspire them to be interested in something outside of their own cultural experience.
Speaker: But it's not always a bad thing.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But so there are...
Speaker: a lot of subtle shades.
Speaker: It's sort of a spectrum that you have to navigate very carefully, but you have to make concrete decisions, certainly as a curator at a museum, and Jeremy, you've had plenty of close relationships with and encounters with museums, as we've talked about.
Speaker: Yeah, not all of them are enjoyable or pleasurable.
Speaker: Yeah, and so I'm interested, when it comes to museum collections and acquisitions,
Speaker: you know, at the same time that we're becoming sort of more sensitive to appropriation, cultural appropriation, and looting and thinking about repatriation, you know, this is the same moment that many of these museums have a much stronger demonstrated interest in acquiring objects and artwork that tie cultures together, particularly underrepresented cultures, many of which are the same cultures around which we have concerns about appropriation and
Speaker: So, you know, when you think about these institutions, many of which, let's face it, have largely white boards of directors and donor bases, you know, snapping up pieces, particularly these days of African-American works of art.
Speaker: You know, how do you feel about that?
Speaker: How do you think these museums, what are the
Speaker: What are they doing right in their acquisition strategies?
Speaker: What are they missing?
Speaker: What should they be correcting?
Speaker: Jesse, do you wanna start us off with that?
Speaker: Yeah, hold on, it's a complicated topic.
Speaker: You know, we have entire committees devoted to thinking this through, right?
Speaker: It's such a complicated topic.
Speaker: But, you know, I would say that looking at the fuller picture, you cannot
Speaker: You can't sort of buck the trend and it's a good thing.
Speaker: You definitely want to embrace what's happening in the national conversation around bringing more diverse inclusive histories into conventional or traditional or canonical collections, right?
Speaker: And there's a lot of positive outcomes that can result from that, many of which I've
Speaker: touched upon already.
Speaker: But you're right, it becomes really complicated because you have, like I said, endowed funds, and when you have endowed funds, those funds are often restricted, and then that creates the framework that produces your collection strengths.
Speaker: And there's a certain momentum that
Speaker: a collection development policy will build upon from existing or core strengths.
Speaker: So that's one aspect.
Speaker: So then you have to think through the complications of how do you artfully or creatively interpret between lines of some of these stipulations so that you can pull in some of that work.
Speaker: So that's one of the challenges.
Speaker: And then,
Speaker: Once you determine that, you have to figure out how to acquire these materials, one, without stepping on the toes of institutions that already are strong in those areas.
Speaker: So you don't want to replicate what Temple has or what Penn has or in our case, what the Schomburg does.
Speaker: there's not really an incentive to try to create something new.
Speaker: So then you have to figure out how within your collection strengths, how can you build upon those strengths and be more inclusive about your approach and bring in more diverse histories from underrepresented backgrounds.
Speaker: So all those challenges are all right there.
Speaker: It's so much more than just like, oh, we're gonna buy more African American literature, or we're gonna buy more children's books that have positive representations of indigenous cultures or something like that.
Speaker: You wanna do those things, but there's all these sort of roadblocks and obstacles that you have to navigate through.
Speaker: And then once you figure all that out, you know, you want to make sure that you're dealing with vendors that are dealing in, you know, an ethical practice.
Speaker: And so then you have to do your research.
Speaker: And there are great book dealers, there are great booksellers out there that are really doing hard, difficult work of making their field more inclusive, apprenticing and training a new generation
Speaker: of booksellers and people that are trafficking rare books that are from diverse backgrounds that can speak to that history from personal experience and treat the subject as ethically and with as much sensitivity as possible because it's coming from their cultural experience.
Speaker: So those are some of the primary challenges that one has to encounter when they want to embark on that enterprise.
Speaker: Anything you'd like to add to that, Jeremy?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: To start......handle this from the opposite side of things.
Speaker: Well, to start a positive,
Speaker: There's progress.
Speaker: Look, I'm talking right now.
Speaker: I'm in New York.
Speaker: I flew down from New Orleans.
Speaker: It was a pleasant flight, thank you for asking.
Speaker: And we're having these conversations that very much need to be had.
Speaker: And we do see reflections of change, and that's wonderful.
Speaker: And what he just described would be the ideal way to do this.
Speaker: Fortunately, there's some museums just that got out their pocketbook and are throwing so much money at this.
Speaker: And they don't even know what they're throwing it at.
Speaker: And, you know, I look forward to the day, two to five years, when they're scratching their head and they say, we really shouldn't have bought piece number 126, 37, and 421.
Speaker: What are we going to do?
Speaker: And I hope to God somebody, a collector possibly of color, will say, well, I know what to do with these pieces and I also can assist you with the pieces you should have bought
Speaker: bought and we can strengthen the museum by narrative.
Speaker: It matters.
Speaker: It matters.
Speaker: I, you know, so often we see a piece sell at auction and there's this fantastical write-up about it and you're scratching your head like, what are they talking about?
Speaker: Who wrote this?
Speaker: Who wrote that?
Speaker: Did they not see this movie?
Speaker: I won't quote the movie Cinderella or read the story.
Speaker: Did you not read it?
Speaker: It's not about sisterly love.
Speaker: What are you talking about?
Speaker: Yeah, I said it there.
Speaker: It's there.
Speaker: And you wonder, y'all didn't call anybody of color about this.
Speaker: You just threw the money, the bank wire, and that was it.
Speaker: You got the piece, but you didn't get it.
Speaker: So that's the negative.
Speaker: Sorry to be a downer, y'all, with the rain.
Speaker: It's just a downer.
Speaker: But I'm going to be truthful because I think we have to speak truth.
Speaker: Because otherwise I should have been staying at home drinking coffee on the
Speaker: right, that's it, if I can't speak truth.
Speaker: Yeah, I completely agree and just to follow up on that, I think, you know, it's really, really important and it's sort of, it's imperative for museums to be very, very strategic about what the narrative is around their acquisitions and how they're going to make those accessible.
Speaker: in a curatorial capacity or otherwise, right?
Speaker: Because if you do that properly and it's the right fit, magical things can happen, right?
Speaker: And then you have the platform to tell the best story in the best way possible.
Speaker: But when it's the wrong fit, it could be a disaster.
Speaker: It could be a public relations disaster.
Speaker: And we've all seen stories in the news where this happens, where something goes completely right and something goes completely wrong.
Speaker: And it's really, really hard to get it right and kind of easy to get it wrong.
Speaker: So yeah, it definitely deserves a lot of attention.
Speaker: And that's why I think
Speaker: Responsible organizations will have this work done in committees and will reach out even to outside experts, perhaps create advisory boards when exhibitions are involved or when it's a potential acquisition of a major figure or an important group that would be perhaps better suited for a different institution or a community organization or something like that.
Speaker: to get all the input that's necessary in making really, really impactful decisions.
Speaker: Yeah, so we've been talking about the acquisition of underrepresented groups.
Speaker: Of course, museums are still full of not only material but also curators who work in these more traditional areas.
Speaker: And, you know, I've heard in some quarters
Speaker: Curators complaining that it's impossible to raise acquisition funds for anything in these traditional areas because it's been completely eclipsed by the sort of feeding frenzy around these largely underrepresented areas.
Speaker: What do you think the future looks like or ought to look like for specialists in 18th century French furniture?
Speaker: Just to take an example.
Speaker: I think things balance out.
Speaker: That doesn't mean there's not going to be.
Speaker: I don't want to talk about the trajectory.
Speaker: Is this just a fad?
Speaker: Because it's never going to be a fad for me and many people.
Speaker: And I'm not interested again in discussing that.
Speaker: What I will say is the world has a strange way of balancing out.
Speaker: So if these things are now included.
Speaker: then maybe there'll be kind of an even distribution where we can look at a great 18th century chair or portrait by Gobert or something and not say, oh, but you really should have bought that painting of the person of color.
Speaker: You know, because I think it'll balance out.
Speaker: But right now is the moment for this, right?
Speaker: We're talking about what's happening.
Speaker: And for those who feel a little lost or in the wilderness, welcome to my world.
Speaker: It'll get better soon.
Speaker: Just hold your breath.
Speaker: We'll be fine, I think.
Speaker: There's optimism after so much negativity from here.
Speaker: Yeah, it'll balance out, but right now just ride the wave.
Speaker: Well, I'll tell you, we don't have that problem at the Morgan.
Speaker: That's not an issue.
Speaker: We still have, a lot of our funds are devoted to
Speaker: collecting canonical figures and traditional, conventional, Euro-American, European histories.
Speaker: But, but, but, but, here's this huge point that I want to make in dealing with canonicity.
Speaker: That does not preclude, in my opinion, engagement with diverse histories.
Speaker: And that's why I'm so excited to be at the Morgan and have this platform.
Speaker: because I think we kind of fall into this way of thinking, this assumption that, oh, this is a canonical figure, right?
Speaker: Shakespeare, Poe, Longfellow, and they only had, only, you know, we imagine white readership, that's it, you know, as if,
Speaker: Nobody in the world, else in the world, was interested in that history.
Speaker: But it turns out people from all over the world are also interested in European and Euro-American canonical figures too.
Speaker: So there's a lot of stories there.
Speaker: I did one of my recent research projects for work that I'm currently invested in.
Speaker: I was looking at the question of how popular was WIDA among black Americans of the 19th century?
Speaker: And I was surprised to find lots and lots of articles in black periodicals about WIDA,
Speaker: advertisements for her books, all the stories that circulated about how much money she made and where she traveled and the controversies that she was in.
Speaker: They weren't paying attention.
Speaker: So then I looked at Dickens and Wilde, and I compared that to Francis Harper and Dunbar, and they were comparable.
Speaker: So all throughout history and up until the current moment,
Speaker: You're gonna find people of color invested in canonical works and there are ways to get at diverse stories within the histories of these figures and you start looking closely at their own biographies and you find all these intersections with multicultural narratives.
Speaker: Think of Beethoven and Bridgetower.
Speaker: It's all over the place.
Speaker: just to get outside the mind frame of like, okay, let's check these diversity boxes, you know, okay, we did the East Asian and now we're doing, you know, Aboriginal and now we're doing Native American.
Speaker: And start thinking more of, more about the connectivity of the human story.
Speaker: Think of America, I think of America as this sort of diverse
Speaker: cultural sort of quilts all interboken together with all these stories beautifully and sort of interestingly and poignantly intertwined, right?
Speaker: And when you pull that one thread, it's gonna tug at another.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is one of my favorite subjects.
Speaker: As a silver dealer, we are engaged in thinking about global trade at just about every moment in history because you think of the sources of the raw materials, but you also think of the design sources that these silversmiths and their designers are drawing from.
Speaker: It's all about communication really across the globe in a period when the globe is becoming more interconnected.
Speaker: Yeah, to think of it within a single box is really limiting from the connoisseurial perspective as well as from the historical perspective.
Speaker: And I'm interested in actually staying on that subject for a moment because
Speaker: um you know for centuries europeans have gone to uh tremendous lengths to acquire uh chinese porcelain and african carvings and you know and chinese merchants were lusting after venetian glass and and you know in europe and america this uh this interest came to be known as as exoticism
Speaker: But these days, you know, that term is seen as sort of like, you know, Orientalism.
Speaker: We understand that to be a sort of pejorative and diminutive way to think about material culture.
Speaker: And there's also, you know, there's a difference between objects of global defense nation versus objects that speak to a history of oppression, you know, here at home.
Speaker: But still, you know, it seems like it ought to be possible to collect
Speaker: outside the lines, if you will, to come at it from a place, as you were talking about earlier, from a place of respect and fascination with another people or culture rather than fetishizing or otherizing them.
Speaker: And I wonder if you have any specific advice or concrete advice for how to situate yourself in a sensible way on that question.
Speaker: Take it away Jeremy.
Speaker: Oh, sorry.
Speaker: I would say just do due diligence.
Speaker: And I would also say, and it's fine if you change your mind, but pick an area of focus.
Speaker: What am I looking to collect?
Speaker: Can we talk about why I'm looking to collect this?
Speaker: And I think you should create this outline, and I think if you stick by this outline, and I hate to limit a collector, but sometimes we all have to limit our collections,
Speaker: And if you sit by these guidelines and you state, well, this is why I'm collecting this, I think that goes a long way.
Speaker: And it keeps you in check.
Speaker: Okay?
Speaker: And it doesn't limit you.
Speaker: I think it actually allows you to search
Speaker: for a broader spectrum of within that.
Speaker: But I think you have to have some limitations as a collector.
Speaker: Otherwise you're all over and you're squandering not just money, but also more importantly time and attention.
Speaker: So I would say, observe and find what you wanna somewhat focus on or may not focus, but narrow in on.
Speaker: And I think that would be the best.
Speaker: I wish I could have told myself this about 10 years ago.
Speaker: No, I wholeheartedly agree with that approach.
Speaker: And yeah, I would just echo your sentiments in that regard.
Speaker: But I would add, you know,
Speaker: in thinking through that really essential question of the why am I doing this, pay attention to the answers, right?
Speaker: And
Speaker: If there's something that you would not feel comfortable in the answer to that, expressing or communicating to the people from which these objects originated, then you need to go back to the drama more.
Speaker: But I do think there's a, you know, sort of a vast gulf between
Speaker: collecting something like the decorative arts, porcelain, you have a nice china and a tea set, and you like the aesthetic, then sort of collecting, say, Ethiopic manuscripts, because you see them as a standard symbol.
Speaker: And there's a gulf because one deals with a sort of sacred literature and there's a religiosity about those objects.
Speaker: So in that case, you have to recognize the nuance and ask yourself, okay, is this appropriate?
Speaker: Not to say that it's never appropriate to acquire works like that, but just really think it through.
Speaker: And I have this example in my mind of a collector who
Speaker: for a long period of time poured a lot of energy and resources into building a collection of Jim Crow era postcards.
Speaker: These things were hideous, racist, offensive, it's a comprehensive collection.
Speaker: And it came to the University of Delaware.
Speaker: Now, one of my first, when I was teaching in the English department there, one of my first projects was to build a course around these horrible postcards.
Speaker: And I had to come up with a way to teach with them responsibly.
Speaker: But what I found out is that the reason, the very reason why they were trying to find a way to design a class around this, this collection, was because that was, that was stipulated by the collector upon donating the collection to the institution.
Speaker: And I called him up directly and I said, what's the deal behind this?
Speaker: I wanted to get a sense, I wanted to really understand.
Speaker: And he told me a story about when he was at the university, it was still pretty much segregated along the main street and black folks couldn't go in the restaurants right after the university, right?
Speaker: And this kind of like really opened his eyes to the injustice of it.
Speaker: And when he encountered these postcards, he saw that this was telling a story, the quotidian racism that was part of the sort of American cultural landscape.
Speaker: And he felt that a collection of this nature would document
Speaker: that history and so it should be taught with.
Speaker: There should be a way that we can responsibly educate students who were not aware of this aspect of material culture in society.
Speaker: And you know I said it was as challenging and as painful it was to devise a course around that.
Speaker: I took on the challenge.
Speaker: And so in that case you have a collector
Speaker: who on the surface you would think, oh this is terrible, they must be really into fetishizing the racist history of America or maybe themselves find these caricatures entertaining or wants to promote the narratives that these caricatures are proliferating.
Speaker: But when I was able to tap into the rationale behind what went into building that collection, it made sense.
Speaker: And the course was very effective.
Speaker: We had really, really, really hard, challenging conversations among the students.
Speaker: You know, it got emotional.
Speaker: And the way that I was able to responsibly handle these materials is that
Speaker: We all did a whole bunch of background reading into the history of blackface, negative racial stereotypes, caricature, before we even looked at the objects, right?
Speaker: So we had that grounding, right?
Speaker: Engage with works like Spike Lee's Mamboozled and all that.
Speaker: So by the time that we encountered the objects, we were able to have
Speaker: real adult conversations about what we were seeing that was grounded in generations of scholarship that went into understanding and unpacking how this came to be.
Speaker: And I'm glad for it.
Speaker: And so I was grateful in this circumstance that this collection was produced as egregious as the images that I encountered came off to me.
Speaker: And
Speaker: And so it always comes to that question of the why.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's all for now.
Speaker: Thanks so much to the Winner Show for hosting this event and to Jesse Erickson and Jeremy Simeon for sharing your insight with us.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm Ben Miller.
