A Call for Cultural CourageDear Friends,On opening night of the TED2017 conference, just before head

A Call for Cultural CourageDear Friends,On opening night of the TED2017 conference, just before headliner Pope Francis took the spotlight, artist Titus Kaphar walked to center stage declaring, “I love museums.” Standing in front of a large-scale replica of Dutch master Frans Hals’s seventeenth-century painting entitled Family Group in a Landscape, which depicts a European family and a Black servant set against a country landscape, Kaphar began his talk with a story. It went like this: While Kaphar and his two young sons were on an outing to the American Museum of Natural History, the boys were confronted with the 1939 Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the museum’s entrance. The sculpture depicts Roosevelt on a horse flanked by two men, one Native American and one of African descent. The boys questioned why one man got to ride the horse while the others had to walk. To the children, this seemed unfair. For Kaphar, it was a seminal moment that stopped him in his tracks—the question reminded him of the portrayals of white-dominated hierarchies that pervade our culture.Kaphar then posed a question for the TED2017 audience: “Can art amend history?” As he asked the question, he dipped a wide household paintbrush in white paint and began to cover his own painting until all the figures, except the young Black boy in the background, were obscured. The audience collectively gasped as Kaphar forced them to consider the focus of their gaze—and whose histories are seen or made invisible. Kaphar concluded his talk by sharing his desire to create art that “wrestles with the struggles of our past” and, in the process, models how art can contribute to shaping history.If artists and art can wrestle with the past and amend history, so too can museums. And we must. Museums like the Brooklyn Museum were founded on the fundamental belief that the sharing of world cultures would lead to greater understanding and empathy, thereby advancing civilization. Many of us in the museum field still value this glorious ideal. However, we recognize that museums have also privileged Western white narratives while often diminishing the histories of others. This is important to understand because, for better or worse, museums contribute to the narratives that shape our society, and our society is in great need of more empathy and respect.At this time of social unrest, people around the globe are using protest to call upon their museums to do better. We can debate the accuracy of information and the effectiveness of the strategy, but like it or not, we shouldn’t be surprised by protest. As the President of the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker, recently shared museums are in crisis because America is in crisis. In his recent op-ed in The New York Times, Walker urged museums to do better. Why? Because museums are fundamental pillars of our American democracy and among the few truly public spaces for people to come together, learn, share ideas, and debate; because art has the capacity to inspire empathy; and because people count on museums to confront difficult and important issues with understanding and respect.So how are we at the Brooklyn Museum striving to do better? Lots of ways.First, doing better means understanding that the stories we tell matter. We have therefore made it an institutional priority to present special exhibitions that shine a spotlight on cultural histories that have long been suppressed. For example, we have highlighted issues of systemic racism and have drawn attention to important African American and Latinx artists with exhibitions such as We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (2017), The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America (2017), Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2018), and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 (2018). We have looked at issues of gender equity across time in A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt (ongoing) and Roots of “The Dinner Party”: History in the Making (2017). With David Bowie is (2018), we examined the artist’s liberating embrace of gender and sexual orientation. And with our current exhibition Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall, we have taken a contemporary look at LGBTQ+ issues. In Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving (2019), we focused on disability and its impact on the artist’s identity and practice.In addition to our special exhibitions, we present works from our historical collections in context and in mutual dialogue with the communities they come from. In 2016, we reinstalled our American Art galleries to celebrate our nation’s rich history of immigration. And earlier this year, in the collection installation One: Egúngún, a masterwork from our Arts of Africa collection was displayed alongside extensive new research by the curator of the presentation, who consulted with Yorùbá communities in both Brooklyn and Nigeria to better contextualize the object’s meanings and origins. When possible, we also connect our exhibitions and collection installations to civic organizations devoted to advancing positive societal change that impacts our communities, for example, by partnering with organizations that combat mass incarceration and support the rights of immigrants.Doing better means becoming Brooklyn’s largest arts classroom by supporting the education of our youth, especially those in our most under-resourced communities. For example, thanks to a grant from the Kenan Foundation, we have partnered with some of Brooklyn’s most financially challenged schools to provide in-school art classes where there were none. Our education programs are also expanding the number of young people who visit the Museum every year with their schools, caregivers, and camps. We have grown our programming for teens, especially LGBTQ+ teens and teens of color. And doing better means supporting creative learning with teacher training and resources to bring the Museum into school classrooms throughout the City.Doing better means challenging the historical insularity of museums by broadening partnerships with our communities to provide services that are relevant and that have an impact. Today, the Brooklyn Museum works with hundreds of community organizations each year. We invite local artists, artisans, and community service organizations into the Museum to connect with our hundreds of thousands of annual visitors through public programs, workshops, and other events. We host public school graduations, serve as an election polling site, support funding drives for communities that have suffered from natural disasters, and lend our space to local organizations for meetings. We seek the advice of community members on the presentation of specific exhibitions. For more than 50 years, over Labor Day weekend, we have hosted the City’s single largest celebration of Caribbean culture, organized in partnership with the West Indian American Day Carnival Association, in our parking lot and culminating in a magnificent parade that ends at our front plaza. You can expect more as we work to grow these commitments.Doing better means being financially accessible to all, which means remaining affordable despite the very real challenges of funding a major non-profit cultural institution outside of Manhattan. We are proud to be one of the only major art museums in the City with suggested admission, making it possible for many of our audiences to visit our world-class collections for free. We are also proud that on the first Saturday of every month we offer free programming, musical performances, art classes, and other events from 5 to 11 pm, when the Museum is packed and buzzing with thousands of excited visitors.Doing better also means looking at ourselves and our operations with the goal of advancing our longstanding institutional commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion among our ranks. Through the guidance of our new DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Plan we are working to recruit more staff from communities historically underrepresented in museums, including disabled, gender-nonconforming, and transgender people; people of color; and those from varied socioeconomic backgrounds. Thanks to Citibank, we actively support pipelines for jobs in our field by partnering with colleges and universities with diverse student bodies (such as CUNY and HBCUs) to recruit interns. Doing better means working toward greater wage transparency and fairness. And it means continuing our efforts to cultivate diversity on our Board in terms of race, gender, disability, socioeconomic status, and professional background—from artists and scholars to community members and business leaders—who share a passion for our mission. We don’t have all the answers, and our work is not without contradictions, but we push ahead as we always have, because our work matters.Art—and museums—can amend history. And at such a pivotal moment, shouldn’t that be a priority? Indeed, it’s a priority for us at the Brooklyn Museum. So, today Kaphar’s painting is displayed in the very first gallery of the Brooklyn Museum, setting the tone for our audience’s journey as we consider who creates historical narratives and how those narratives serve us. It’s a reminder that great cultural institutions must do their best to contribute to a more equitable and empathetic world.Anne PasternakShelby White and Leon Levy DirectorBrooklyn MuseumBarbara M. VogelsteinChairman, Board of TrusteesBrooklyn Museum -- source link

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