Werbel
3.3 Successful museum staff reach out to diverse partners in interpretation – but it matters how it is done. A common strategy for museum and gallery staff is to invite collaboration from communities with lived experience relevant to exhibition content. Three decision-makers shared their feelings of success in creating expansive conversations regarding difficult subjects: We had so many panelists in this discussion [accompanying an exhibition related to mass incarceration]. We had lobbyists, we had people who were involved in voting rights for the incarcerated, we had somebody who was formerly incarcerated, we had state congressional representatives, we had a faculty member. Those were the kinds of people that we reached out to help us present multiple perspectives. It was a very civilized discussion and probably the most diverse audience we’ve had, the most, I’d say, non-white audience that we’ve had at a program in our museum.
Several examples where we had exhibitions that were dealing with complicated topics, I would try to bring together a team of people who could speak from different forms of expertise, from lived experience, from subject expertise and things.
They were prints of [lynched] bodies. It was right after the George Floyd uprising. I went through a lot of discussions with our DEI subgroup on the board, with our curatorial and our senior staff. . . We worked together with Black faculty and staff . . . It was very useful for us to get these different perspectives. Actually, we had a really great response in our local newspapers. The work was worth it. Two interviewees shared that they had learned from missteps when initially trying to add interpretation from diverse voices outside the museum or gallery. In one case, outreach that assumed a lot of shared knowledge resulted in a rocky start: We bring our own biases to the table whenever we talk about objects, and that’s where we didn’t start with that understanding when we went into that meeting . . . we’re trying to diversify and include more voices and that’s where you have to meet people where they are. In another case, timing was a critical misstep. Bringing people to the table early in the process is key: If you want particular voices or people in the space, work with them from the very beginning.
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