November 10, Some Thoughts from a Museum Veteran Peter C. Marzio, Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

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1 Peter C. Marzio, Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston I hate to tell you... I went to school in this city, and it s the first time I ve been in this building. And it used to be the library! Before I begin, I would just like to make two observations that I carry with me whenever I reflect on this topic. They re both anecdotes. One is an old joke that used to go around the University of Chicago about a rabbi who decided to retreat from public life. He went into seclusion for 40 years as he tried to understand what life really was about. And he thought and he read, and he thought and he read, and finally, as an elderly man, he came back. When addressing the group in the synagogue, after explaining what he had been doing, he said, Now I m going to tell you my conclusion after 40 years of thinking: I ve decided that life is like a fishing trip. With that, a man in the back of the room jumped from his seat and said, Rabbi, that s the craziest thing I ever heard. How could you be saying such a thing? That s just flat out stupid. And the rabbi looked at him and said, Okay, so life s not like a fishing trip. The whole notion of taking ourselves too seriously and looking for an absolute is one thing that I would warn against. The second anecdote is a personal one. The most successful magazinist I ever knew was a man named Ed Thompson. Ed was the editor of Life magazine when it was at its height. When Ed was in semi retirement, Dillon Ripley at the Smithsonian Institution asked him to found Smithsonian magazine. He gave him the grand sum of 75 thousand dollars to do so. I mean, it s impossible, right? Well, the magazine made it. And Ed had the touch he was just the miracle man. He understood his audience and knew how things worked to make a magazine successful. So, I was teaching a course on the history of American journalism, and I asked Ed to come and talk to my students. I had forgotten one thing. For almost his whole adult life, Ed started each day with a bottle of bourbon on his desk. It wasn t in the drawer. It was on the desk. By the end of the day that bottle was empty. And this went on always. Well, unfortunately, this was an evening class. So, Ed arrived a little under the weather. For almost an hour and a half of the most excruciatingly long period in my whole life in teaching (and believe me, I ve had some long, painful times), I asked my students if they would sort of start things rolling. Well, Ed decided to talk into his desk, instead of out to the audience, so no

2 one could hear him. They would say, How did you know how to put the headline here and the pictures there? and Why did you put this story first? and blah, blah, blah. He would give this long explanation, much like I m going to inflict on you in a moment. Then, finally, the only time he d come to life, at the end of every answer, he d lift his head and say, Besides, you do it by the seat of your pants. I think that if I had to say anything about this, despite the fact that I m going to give you my ten commandments here, I would say, don t lose sight of those two things. One: Stay loose, stay open. Two: Try to rely on your own resources, your own instincts, not on some formula that you think is going to guarantee success. Let me begin by stating my basic belief, which is not profound by any means. It s simply the result of 41 years of working in museums. The richest museums in the world cannot survive without the embrace of communities. That s because, in my opinion, one simple fact is clear: Art is meaningful only when it is shared. Another way of saying this in modern marketing talk is: Your museum needs communities more than those communities need your museum. At one level, the word community seems innocent enough. The dictionary says it is a group of people living in the same locality and under the same government. But a second definition suggests the theme that brings us together today: a group or class having common interests. In my personal experience, the shift in emphasis from the first definition to the second has created a lot of the domestic turmoil in the United States over the past 50 years. Flash back to the late 1950s, when American historians were beginning to divide into two opposing camps, ʺconsensus historiansʺ and ʺconflict historians.ʺ The so called consensus historians were considered conservatives. Their opponents were the liberals. When Daniel J. Boorstin opened the second volume of The Americans with the simple sentence, America grew in the search for community, he became the symbol of consensus history. People who propelled the Civil Rights Movement and the anti Vietnam war crusade, however, saw the word community as code for status quo. In their vocabulary, they were against community. How different it is today. Social reformers, activists, and all agents of change claim their power from the community. Personally, I have heard this word used as a weapon of protest in virtually every neighborhood meeting I have attended. I ll give you four direct quotes. The community demands more art in our schools. The community wants the art museum to exhibit art we care about. The community doesn t believe your museum welcomes us. The community will fight against funding for your museum. I think that, while it is difficult to say exactly what community means today, it seems safe to assume that the word does not reflect the halcyon era of Norman Rockwell or Leave It to Beaver. 2

3 This dramatic swing in meaning suggests that community is relevant to museums only as a plural noun, communities. This might become more obvious if I give you a brief outline of some not so brilliant observations, many of which overlap. The first observation, which is basically a conclusion of what I ve just said about the theme of museums and community, is to be clear about who you are addressing when you say community. Define your term. Second, who has the right to speak for a community? Just because I m a left handed Italian American who lives in Houston, Texas, does that mean I can speak for other Houstonians with the same handicaps? When individuals claim to speak for a community, be very careful. Too many of us have been led down roads paved with false entitlements. Third, whenever we work with a group or class having common interests, we come up against the inevitable issue of aesthetic standards. To me, beauty is universal. It flows from natural life and its dominant characteristic, as I mentioned earlier, is that it demands to be shared. Art museums are the laboratories where the physical reality of beauty is tested, reformulated, presented, challenged, and re made. The dialectic or pursuit of truth used to be the stuff of academic debate. But for the last 50 years, a second force has entered the discussion, communities. What do I mean? When I matriculated from the University of Chicago in 1968 to begin a museum career at the Smithsonian Institution, my University of Chicago colleagues in the departments of history and art history viewed this career path as strange, at best, and selling out, at worst. After all, museums are not intellectual institutions. So why would a person trained in scholarship even think of working in a museum? I did not have a simple answer. All I knew was that museums felt right to me. At the Smithsonian, most curators who worked in nonscientific fields learned their specialties on the job or in some way that did not include a formal, graduate school, Ph.D. level education. In fact, university eggheads were viewed with suspicion because their abstract theories about history, or art, or technology never seemed very helpful when dealing with specific objects. Museum professionals were supposed to learn from objects, while university people began with abstract ideals and looked for objects to fit their theories. At least that s what museum professionals profess. When I began my career as a curator, I interpreted my job as trying to figure out how I could present sophisticated ideas to the casual museum visitor. That was my first concept of community involvement. My belief was simple. The standards of beauty set by artists and philosophers, from Plato to Hegel, were sacrosanct. I wasn t going to do anything to destroy that tradition. 3

4 Then, in 1981, my comfortable worldview was shattered by an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Black Folk Art in America. As a young director of that museum, I felt a strong pull from these works by self taught artists who probably didn t give much thought to my standards of excellence. Yet, to me, these were life enhancing works, and they objectified beauty in a new visual vocabulary that insisted that I re think my beliefs. When I spoke to the artists themselves, they sounded like any other serious artists I had ever known. One said: Ideas are funny things. I think I know what I want to draw, but the idea slips away. I keep drawing and sometimes the idea comes back. Sometimes it doesn t. Sometimes I don t even understand what I am doing until I am done. The most obvious cliché became clear: The mystery of creativity is not the domain of past masters alone. Rather, creativity speaks to and touches each of us, whether we went to school or not. The visual language is often different and the pathway new, but the result can be a masterpiece. In looking at these works by self taught artists, I felt myself being drawn into the societies where these artists lived and worked. It was stimulating beyond belief, and I moved on to Korean, Islamic, Latino, Chinese, and Japanese neighborhoods, as well as to the innumerable zones of hyphenated Americans of which the United States community is comprised. It was clear that Mr. Ph.D. was going to make his museum significant only when he engaged the communities. So, my third observation is this: You must assume that you are the ignorant person who s going to the communities to learn. You have probably deduced my fourth observation already: Dialogues with communities do not have to lower aesthetic standards. Nobody wins if the result of this interaction is a sharing of ignorance or a lowering of standards. This sounds good, but it is difficult to describe. The formal training of curators and directors focuses on learning a visual language that has evolved over time. This is a useful base because all cultures in the United States have historical references to the past, but more often than not, it is the museum s challenge to figure out how these communities have morphed the present with remnants of the past. Therefore, an exhibition or a program of ancient Korean art, for example, might have special meaning to residents of Korean ancestry, but it is a serious misreading of mission if the museum concludes that it has done its Korean outreach by presenting ancient art of high quality. The real question is: How can a museum relate to and become part of the Korean community s interest, motivations, and concerns today? I would propose two actions. First: Work hard within communities to find the artists and the art works. Artists are great allies. I have found every artist brings a certain amount of energy and vision with his or her mission. Artists can help you find art in a community, and they can 4

5 help you understand a community s artistic preferences. I always find it curious that curators have the patience to go from gallery to gallery on 57 th Street or in Chelsea in New York, looking for art, but they seldom display that same tolerance going to schools, libraries, firehouses, or studios. Believe me, the art is there. My second suggestion is this: Do not assume that a given community isn t interested in anything that isn t art from their culture. That triple negative has been repeated to me for many years, and many times. Every community partner I have worked with says, Please show us other art as well. Now, the path to that goal of general art appreciation is indirect, but I guarantee you, it is true. The fifth observation can be the most difficult one to actualize, and it is often glossed over to the museum s eventual regret. Working in communities must be part of your museum s stated mission. It must be spelled out in the long range plan and in the mission statement. Working in communities must be budgeted, staffed, evaluated, managed, and led as aggressively as anything else you do. In short, there must be a total commitment. Remember, the long range plan that you worked so hard to develop is basically a contract between the museum staff and the museum trustees; and you need these trustees to succeed. Six: Be prepared to fail. Members of communities are not sitting around waiting for you to arrive. Remember, museums have been working closely with white middle and upper class audiences for at least 150 years, and most of these people still do not care what happens in the art museum. Yet many of my colleagues say they are discouraged because they put on a certain program and only a few people came. First, maybe it was a bad program. Second, maybe it wasn t advertised or marketed. There are lots of other issues to be considered. The point is this: We must not place standards of success on community outreach that are higher than our normal standards. Seven: Seek partnerships. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), has myriad partners, including churches, schools, Lion s Clubs, sororities, alumni associations, the United Way, libraries, businesses, universities, professional sports teams, hospitals, and on and on. Let me give you one example. Libraries have proven to be a quiet, powerful ally. The Museum of Fine Arts travels exhibits to libraries throughout an area in Texas that is the size of Connecticut. Many of these libraries are in low income neighborhoods, and the libraries are zones of safety and learning for children in that funny time of day between when school ends and when parents come home. There are special shelves of books in these libraries related to the MFAH exhibits, and we hire local artists who offer demonstrations related to them. This is fairly inexpensive, so often a local merchant will sponsor the program. In order to help the literacy effort, the MFAH now gives free admission to the museum to all children 18 and under if they show their library card. Sometimes we hire buses on a Saturday to take children 5

6 and their parents from the library to the museum and back. My point in relating this is to demonstrate the dynamic of how one thing successfully done leads to another. Eight: Engage the community in fundraising. Nothing creates a partnership and a sense of equality better than when a community feels it has earned its way in a museum. I have never understood why well meaning reformers think fine art should be free. It is the highest form of human activity and should be supported by everyone. This topic is complex, and we ll save it for discussion later, if you are interested. Nine: Enable the community to become part of your museum s power structure. If communities work hard, earn their place, and embrace your museum, then the opportunity for community members to join the board of trustees or to serve at equivalent organizations must be a real possibility. This is a vital step, and it must be done with clarity, fairness, and sensitivity. Remember, you are talking about bringing together outsiders with museum insiders. This can be explosive. You have failed if you drive away your major donors with your community action. Finally: Look at your staff. Do not assume that every member is driven by high minded ideals. Staff training in language, history, manners, management, and the museum s mission is critical. I ll summarize my ten observations as follows: 1. Define what you mean by community. 2. Work with bona fide leaders. 3. Be ready to encounter the word community as a weapon of protest. 4. Maintain high aesthetic standards. 5. Integrate the community program and the mission statement into your long range plan. 6. Be prepared to fail. 7. Seek partnerships. 8. Resolve that nothing should be free. 9. Empower the community. 10. Train your staff. Thank you. 6