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Herreria, C. (2018, April 06). People Want To Know Why Brooklyn Museum's New African Art Curator Is White. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/brooklyn-museum-white-curator-african-art_us_5abc09e6e4b06409775cd2d7

Levitt, P. (2015, November 09). Museums Must Attract Diverse Visitors or Risk Irrelevance. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/museums-must-attract-diverse-visitors-or-risk-irrelevance/433347/

Salam, M. (2018, April 07). Brooklyn Museum Defends Its Hiring of a White Curator of African Art. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/06/arts/brooklyn-museum-african-arts.html

Sargent, A. (2018, May 21). To Fight Racism Within Museums, They Need to Stop Acting Like They're Neutral. Retrieved from https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pavpkn/to-fight-racism-within-museums-they-need-to-stop-acting-like-theyre-neutral

Schneider, T. (2018, November 02). The Gray Market: Why the Brooklyn Museum Hiring Controversy Shows We Need Structural Action on Arts Diversity (and Other Insights). Retrieved from https://news.artnet.com/market/gray-market-brooklyn-museum-diversity-1257761

Wizard, M. (2018, May 05). Black Panther Museum Scene Full HD. [Video File]  Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYwr6Q1Hl_4

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Decolonization theory; words or practice?

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Decolonization theory; words or practice?

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Decolonization is a scary word for many, but it is an essential element leading to equity, equality, diversity, inclusion and access. Stating that the museum is committed to these ideals but not backing those words with action is a mistake on the part of the Brooklyn Museum. Decolonization is not an easy process but the push from local community groups should be addressed by the museum. Movements are taking place across the country pushing for the decolonization of many institutions and practices. A decolonization committee is a start toward fully integrating spaces, education, careers, etc. Accountability is essential to pushing decolonization. Director Anne Paternak's response to criticism is an example of how criticism of institutional issues is often taken as a personal attack. In practice, decolonization will force institutions to reflect the population of the United States. Equitable access to education and positions of power will dominate the culture.

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Rather than the abrasive tone of the response from director Anne Pasternak, more care should have been given to terminology used. Pasternak states that the African arts exhibit required the "highest level of scholarly excellence...the job required a specialist with a Ph.D. in this area." This statement implies that there were no qualified persons of color for the position. Additionally, Dr. Windmuller-Luna's PhD is in Art and Archaeology and is not afro centered, her post graduate research however is focused on African art. Furthermore, acknowledging that there are a lack of opportunities for people of color in the art world and in general is a great first step. It also could have been beneficial for the director to start a conversation about the alleged lack of POC possessing advanced degrees. Respecting the complaints of the public would have helped to alleviate and address some of the controversy.

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Kimberly Selden of Freedom Land Media tweeted, "People from the African Diaspora are frustrated w/ white people being gatekeepers of our narrative. We have yet to be afforded the same access & opportunities so it’s hard to swallow the image of TWO white ppl in roles that curate OUR culture and contributions."

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“The Brooklyn Museum recognizes that the longstanding and pervasive issues of structural racism profoundly affect the lives of people of color. It is right to press museums and other institutions to diversify their leadership. Museums help shape the cultural imagination and contribute to society, so we have a responsibility to bring the broadest possible range of voices into our work. Cultural institutions also need to do much more to support young people of diverse backgrounds in pursuing advanced degrees in art history and succeeding in leadership positions. Please know that every day the Brooklyn Museum is working to advance these efforts and its longstanding and widely recognized commitment to equity in all its forms, including race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.”

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Dr. Windmuller-Luna's educational background is impressive when viewed through the lens of privilege. She is Yale and Princeton educated, with a PhD in Art and Archaeology. She is also a lecturer at the Met on African art, has curated multiple African art exhibits, and appeared on a PBS special. She has published research on African art in academic journals. Despite these qualifications, the fact still remains that Africa, the diaspora, and its art are continuously presented to us by those whose connection to the diaspora is through violence.

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“The Brooklyn Museum stands by our appointment of Dr. Kristen Windmuller-Luna as the Sills Family Consulting Curator of African Arts. The Museum’s collection of African arts is among the most important and extensive in the nation. Giving the collection the prominence it deserves, in terms of both its aesthetics and cultural value, has been one of this institution’s most pressing priorities. In order to ensure the highest level of scholarly excellence in how we preserve and present our collections of historical African arts, we knew the job required a specialist with a Ph.D. in this area.”

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Appointing Dr. Windmuller-Luna curator of the African Arts exhibit is a failure on the part of the Brooklyn Museum to truly diversify staff. The message from the museum is that there are no qualified members of the African diaspora who could have been appointed. Of course, this is not truly the case. The response from director Anne Pasternak was also troubling. Pasternak's rebuttal asserts that there are no persons of African descent who hold the necessary education level. This brings about the question of economic access to education. Educational equity is just as valuable as monetary equity and the Brooklyn Museum has not thus far shown any initiative toward rectifying this problem. Paternak's assertion that the museum is committed to equity and promoting the voices of minorities is not in line with this decision.

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The controversy has been described as reminiscent of a scene from the film Black Panther. There is so much unpacking that could be done on this scene alone but the message between the film and the Brooklyn Museum is clear. African art and artifacts have been stolen by colonizers and now the descendants of those colonizers determine how the art if viewed.

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Museum Scene HD Complete  -  Black Panther - Killmonger Theme | 'These Items are not for Sale'

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Community activists were outraged with the appointments as they further highlight a lack of diversity and inclusion in hiring practices. 60% of the community surrounding the Brooklyn Museum are from the African diaspora, Latin America, or Asia.

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Museum's director expresses confidence in Kristen Windmuller-Luna's 'anticolonial' approach

The Brooklyn Museum issued a lengthy official response on Friday to the furor over the announcement of its newest curator of African art.

The controversy began March 26 when the museum tweeted that it had hired two new curators: Drew Sawyer, who will oversee photography, and Kristen Windmuller-Luna, who will direct an overhaul of the museum's extensive collection of African art. Both Sawyer and Windmuller-Luna are white.

In response to the hirings, a coalition of Brooklyn anti-gentrification groups called on the museum to create a "decolonization commission."

In a lengthy letter released to the press, museum director Anne Pasternak defended Windmuller-Luna against attacks that had been levied against the new curator, mostly on social media.

People from the African Diaspora are frustrated w/ white people being gatekeepers of our narrative. We have yet to be afforded the same access & opportunities so it's hard to swallow the image of TWO white ppl in roles that curate OUR culture and contributions @brooklynmuseum pic.twitter.com/apDv1Dc9lS

- Kimberly Selden (@KimberlySelden) March 28, 2018

"The Brooklyn Museum stands by our appointment of Dr. Kristen Windmuller-Luna as the Sills Family Consulting Curator of African Arts," Pasternak wrote. "The Museum's collection of African arts is among the most important and extensive in the nation. Giving the collection the prominence it deserves, in terms of both its aesthetics and cultural value, has been one of this institution's most pressing priorities. In order to ensure the highest level of scholarly excellence in how we preserve and present our collections of historical African arts, we knew the job required a specialist with a Ph.D. in this area."

Some critics made a connection between the museum appointment and a scene from the wildly popular Black Panther movie. In the film, Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) explains to a white curator at the British Museum that the only reason the institution holds African artifacts is because British colonizers raided the continent of its cultural and natural resources.

Pasternak pushed back on those making the comparison to Windmuller-Luna and the Brooklyn museum.

"With her anticolonial approach to curating, she has devoted her professional life to celebrating the individual identities of historical African cultures, and to communicating how those vibrant societies play powerful roles in the world at large," Pasternak said in a statement. "Her priority at the Museum is to create dynamic, multi-vocal installations that speak to all our communities, including those of African descent, both locally and nationally. All of us at the Museum are confident that with her expertise and care, we will revitalize and transform the presentation and interpretation of our collection, and amplify our capacity to illuminate connections and shared narratives with our broad and diverse audience."

The controversy over Windmuller-Luna's race highlighted a few points that usually don't draw widespread attention. Curation is a disproportionately white profession, as Kimberly Drew, an art curator, creator of the Black Contemporary Art tumblr and social media manager for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recently pointed out. And the profession requires degrees that can cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars without any guarantee of lucrative work.

"African art scholars in the US are overwhelmingly white and female, tweeted UCLA professor Steven Nelson, a professor of African and African-American art history who serves as director of the UCLA African Studies Center. "Given this situation and given that the very few POC in the field all have jobs better than this one, I find myself unable to manufacture any outrage over this."

Windmuller-Luna has undeniable expertise. She received her doctorate and master's degree in art and archaeology from Princeton and her bachelor's degree in the history of art from Yale. Her work focuses on the early modern period of African art, architecture and Christian Ethiopia.

"Given that the very few POC in the field all have jobs better than this one, I find myself unable to manufacture any outrage over this."

It's understandable that black museumgoers want to see themselves among the ranks of those curating black art, especially at the nation's most visible and highly regarded institutions. But not every black person who studies art history necessarily wants to specialize in art created by black artists.

Pasternak was sensitive to this too.

"The Brooklyn Museum recognizes that the longstanding and pervasive issues of structural racism profoundly affect the lives of people of color," she wrote. "It is right to press museums and other institutions to diversify their leadership. Museums help shape the cultural imagination and contribute to society, so we have a responsibility to bring the broadest possible range of voices into our work. Cultural institutions also need to do much more to support young people of diverse backgrounds in pursuing advanced degrees in art history and succeeding in leadership positions. Please know that every day the Brooklyn Museum is working to advance these efforts and its longstanding and widely recognized commitment to equity in all its forms, including race, class, gender, and sexual orientation."

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Brooklyn Museum responds to controversy over its new white curator of African art Museum's director expresses confidence in Kristen Windmuller-Luna's 'anticolonial' approach

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Museum's director expresses confidence in Kristen Windmuller-Luna's 'anticolonial' approach The Brooklyn Museum issued a lengthy official response on Friday to the furor over the announcement of its newest curator of African art.

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* The Brooklyn Museum is located at 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY.
* Kristen Windmuller-Luna (below) was appointed as the Sills Family  Consulting Curator, African Arts in April 2018.
* Additionally, Drew Sawyer, also caucasian, was hired as a photographer at the museum, the announcement with Dr. Windmuller-Luna's was poorly planned. Sawyer was hired in the photography department, not African art.

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The Brooklyn Museum's recent controversy has led to the unveiling of the president, David Berliner, and other board trustees ties to real estate companies that are promoting and participating in the gentrification of minority communities. This association removes any facade of neutrality that the museum held.

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Illustration is courtesy of Lia Kantrowitz for VICE

In April, the Brooklyn Museum hired a white curator, Kristen Windmuller-Luna to oversee its collection of African art. The appointment outraged skeptics who felt that a black curator should oversee the institution's African objects. Decolonize This Place, a New York activist group, staged a protest occupying the museum's Beaux-Arts Court and penned a letter publicly accusing the museum of racism and aiding gentrification, demanding prompt change. One protester flung a pink banner over a balcony that read: "THEY WANT THE ART, NOT THE PEOPLE."

The sign, for me, gets at the heart of the debate around how to combat racism in cultural institutions, which are both succeeding and failing to address the issue. The overwhelming whiteness of museums has discouraged communities of color from visiting their galleries. Nationally, about six percent of museumgoers are black and a 2010 study by the American Alliance of Museums predicted that in 2033 people of color would make up nine percent of museumgoers. Activists working within the system and outside of it want the same thing: for museums to stop acting like they are neutral and to acknowledge and correct the longstanding, racist histories that have affirmed white supremacy.

There is power in representation, and museums are tasked with selecting both their curators and the art on display. Recently, a pair of art world controversies-the Brooklyn Museum hiring and the Carnegie Museum of Art's exhibition of photos by Deana Lawson-illuminated the complex challenges museums must confront in battling racism and achieving a real sense of inclusion.

Relying on public protests to demand radical change, Decolonize This Place and the 20 or so groups that support their efforts are made up of activists who largely work outside of museums. Their marches recall groups active in the 1960s and 70s, like the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, who picketed outside of the Whitney Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, demanding to be included. Last year, the newer groups wrote and successfully lobbied for aspects of The People's Cultural Plan-an effort that countered the city's own cultural plan and that was likely instrumental in increasing New York City's local arts funding by $40 million.

Decolonize This Place is asking the Brooklyn Museum to remove David Berliner, it's president, and other trustees tied to real estate or corporations driving gentrification in communities of color, like Crown Heights, where the museum is located. They want the museum to hire more curators and directors of color, increase pay for grounds staff, acknowledge that the land the museum's building sits on was once home to indigenous people, and sweep its collection for colonial-era objects and return them.

The people of color actually working inside some of these institutions are, perhaps, more pragmatic. They consist of black museum professionals like Thelma Golden, the Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, who transformed the institution from a local organization into one of global importance. Golden has trained black curators who have gone on to present major shows by African-American artists at largely white museums across the country. The Studio Museum has also advanced the careers of scores of black artists, including portraitist Kerry James Marshall, conceptual artist Kevin Beasley, and abstract painter Julie Mehretu, all of whom completed the museum's artist in residence program.

The group also includes white allies like the Nasher Museum of Art's chief curator Trevor Schoonmaker, as well as black art historians like UCLA professor Steven Nelson, and celebrated African curator Okwui Enwezor, who defended the Brooklyn Museum's hiring of Dr. Windmuller-Luna, his former student.

"The criticism around her appointment can be described as arbitrary at best, and chilling at worst," he said in a statement released by the museum. "There is no place in the field of African art for such a reductive view of art scholarship according to which qualified and dedicated scholars like Kristen should be disqualified by her being white, and a woman. African art as a discipline deserves better."

Enwezor's sentiments are real. Race should not determine a curator's area of interest. However Enwezor's view clashes with Decolonize This Place's stance and overlooks the group's point. "The issue of the hiring is not just about these two white curators," art organizer Amin Husain told VICE. "There are over 20 curators at the Brooklyn Museum and two or three are of color." He sees its public face-as a champion of diversity and inclusion-as a scam.

Despite this controversy, the Brooklyn Museum is more progressive than most. It revised its mission to be more inclusive, rehung its American art galleries, and provided long-term institutional support for artists and thinkers of color. It's also notable that the museum has directed resources toward an African art curatorship and consistently mounted important exhibitions by black artists, including two surveys of Kehinde Wiley's paintings and a major showing of the work of Mickalene Thomas, now a member of the museum's board.

The museum also makes a point to acquire works by overlooked black artists, like their recent acquisition of a painting by Ed Clark at Frieze Art Fair, and to demonstrate the importance of black art within the history of visual culture. We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-85, co-curated by the gifted black curator Rujeko Hockley, who trained under Thelma Golden, examined the social, political, and artistic concerns of black women artists during the second wave of feminism and the Black Power Movement. This fall, the museum will mount an extensive look at early black contemporary art in Soul of A Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.

This is not to suggest that the demands of Decolonize This Place should not be taken seriously. They represent the structural racism embedded at the Brooklyn Museum-and at every museum in the country. According to a 2017 American Alliance of Museums report, 84 percent of museum curators were white, along with 93 percent of museum directors and board chairs. This means the vast majority of decisions are still being made by white gatekeepers, despite claims of diversity and inclusion and what shifts in power a "browning" America may bring.

The structural issues facing museums play out in ways large and small. Racism has forced black communities to create their own museums, like the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. These vital black spaces are an attempt to fill the void left by mainstream institutions, but this configuration of black and white art spaces has mostly resulted in a two-tiered system that has been ineffective at combating racism.

The root of the problem often comes down to money, however. One black gallerist VICE interviewed, asked to be kept anonymous because the art world is small, pointed to the practicalities of the Brooklyn Museum position: "Would you go to school for all those years for a part-time appointment at the Brooklyn Museum where you maybe make $30,000 or $40,000? Who would want to take that job?" Privatized museum funding results in anemic operating budgets and low starting salaries for staff. And because museums often require curators to have a PhD, the curatorial field is largely only accessible to the immensely privileged-those who can shoulder the cost of extensive schooling and then survive on a meager salary.

Even if museums allow for people with non-traditional backgrounds to diversify curatorial positions, they will have to address one of the most well-kept secrets in exhibition making: deciding which artists get wall space is rarely solely left to curators. Instead, it often hinges on the patronage of white art collectors, gallerists, and board members.

If Decolonize This Place succeeds in removing Brooklyn Museum board members with ties to real estate and finance, it could begin to rebalance power inside museums. But the question remains: Who will fund them? "The government," offered Husain. But it's an unlikely prospect, when you consider that staff at state funded museums in Europe are paid poorly, state-controlled museums in Latin America have often been used as a tool to push propaganda, and President Trump has repeatedly called for the defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts.

One art professional of color VICE interviewed called museums colonial projects where rich, mostly white people have historically stored their art trophies. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, is one of the largest museums in the world, but it is largely made up of galleries paid for by wealthy white families. And these endowments come with conditions: The Met's Robert Lehman Collection is on view forever according to a 1969 agreement bestowing the collector's 2,600 pieces of art to the museum. Museums around the country have struck similar deals. The newly created Edlis/Neeson Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago includes 42 works by artists like Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, and Jeff Koons-with the stipulation that the works must stay on view for 50 years.

I grew up as a black kid in Chicago and made frequent trips to the Art Institute of Chicago. I saw contemporary art made mostly by white artists. Their works told me what beauty was, how power looked, and that the world good enough to be displayed on museum walls did not reflect me.

It created a viewing experience that was at odds with the world I knew to be true. I knew black beauty. I knew black power. I knew black love. I encountered them in my mother's eyes, in music videos, at church on any given Sunday, and on the street corner where my grandfather and his friends hung out. Why didn't the people I know deserve space in that museum? Not as an occasional four-month exhibition, but permanently?

Looking at works by white male artists tells us that they define what is high art and culture- they are the ones worthy of being on display. We are not told, on museum tours with curators-whose jobs are often endowed by the families the galleries are named after-how the works ended up on the walls. It's a slick affirmation of white supremacy, a kind of gaslighting of the public for a museum to claim that it is impartial but is quietly allowing rich white collectors to define what we see.

The Brooklyn Museum attracts an audience that is 40 percent people of color, far above the national average. It's a statistic that makes the outrage and comparisons it drew on social media to that museum scene in the movie Black Panther awkward. The Brooklyn Museum is not the British Museum, which was recently asked by Ethiopia to return looted Maqdala treasures. If the Brooklyn Museum's visitor numbers are to be taken seriously, then audiences of color seem to feel welcome in the institution. So when groups like Decolonize This Place speak in the name of "the community," it's worth asking which one.

The museum system's history of racism weighs on individual institutional efforts to address their roles in excluding black curators and black artists from their walls. The Baltimore Museum of Art recently announced it would sell seven works by white artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg to increase its holdings of works by people of color and women. The sale and the mounting of solo exhibitions by black abstractionists, including Mark Bradford and the late Jack Whitten, is part of a broader strategy "to reflect the fact that the city is more than 60 percent black," the museum's director Christopher Bedford told VICE last year. The plan is a controversial effort, reflecting a rare radicality that speaks to the mixed reactions museums have received for their efforts to correct their favoring of white male artists over other groups.

The recent opening of a small exhibition of the black photographer Deana Lawson's work at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art was meant to be an act of inclusion-a celebration of everyday blackness across the African Diaspora. Yet, after the show opened, an African-American woman walked into the exhibition's small, first floor gallery and was stunned by what she saw. She turned on her cell phone camera and began documenting her disbelief.

"At the museum-I'm not really for sure what all these pictures is about," she said, panning over the large-scale photographs. Then she hovered over Lawson's Nation, an interior shot of three black men in a New York apartment. The two central figures are sitting on a dark leather couch shirtless with gold chains around their necks. The woman zoomed in on the man wearing a brown durag who aims his right hand, fashioned into a gun, at Lawson's lens. "It's kind of creeping me out," she said.

The video caused a firestorm when it was first uploaded to Facebook. Some commenters assumed that Lawson was white, while defenders of the images, who saw the show as a sign of progress at a museum, pointed out that Lawson is African-American. On the museum's Facebook page, a commenter named J Cameron Bayne wrote, "The Deana Lawson exhibition is NOT a 'Representation of African American Life.'" In Bayne's opinion, the Lawson show is "a racist insult" that narrowly represents the artist's personal experience in a way that would traumatize any black child who saw "such visceral images." The criticism echoes the outrage felt when the Whitney Museum showed white artist Dana Schutz's controversial painting Open Casket, a gruesome depiction of the body of Emmett Till. The African-American artist Parker Bright staged a one-man protest in front of it wearing a t-shirt reading "BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE".

The highly stylized and staged pictures in the Lawson show were intended to depict how black men, women, and children living on the margins throughout the African diaspora might appear if they were considered and celebrated. They were meant to elevate a different kind of black experience in a space that has historically preferred exhibiting respectable, middle class, or freedom-fighting depictions of black life.

The Lawson images upset all of that, critiquing not only the kinds of black representation we have grown accustomed to as a culture but also the very history of photography. Images like Kings, of black men posing at a party, and Eternity, of a nude, curvy black woman standing in her living room, exist in a grey area that should make an audience question them. Are they appropriated from a black family photo album? Are they National Geographic-style ethnographic studies? Are they simply portraits of the ways her subjects want to be seen? Because Lawson picks the people and the poses, are they a kind of self-portrait of the artist? Why does she photograph black men one way and women another? The fact that you can't pin down, at first glance, how and why Lawson produces the images gives them power and calls into question our romanticizing the still image, our wanting poor black people to go away, and the problematic history of suggesting a single picture can frame an entire culture.

Like the protest at the Brooklyn Museum, the outrage over the Lawson exhibition has less to do with specific institutions and more to do with the systematic issues of racism and inequality. Museums are broken because America is broken.

The Carnegie Museum responded swiftly, putting up a quote from Lawson that clearly states her intent and adding public programming, including an address by the artist. Still, there have been no announcements of structural changes, ensuring the community will continue to view the museum skeptically and perpetuating the possibility of avoidable controversies.

This is not to say audiences shouldn't do their research and read the wall text at museums. But the museum should consider that the audience brings its own understanding and knowledge to the space and art, too. Despite, the Carnegie Museum's best intentions, a black visitor walked into the gallery and immediately felt uncomfortable with images that were supposed to celebrate her because they were presented in a space where she wasn't previously welcomed.

The black female visitor recognized, like those who expressed their dismay online, that Lawson's deliberate images were once presented as stereotypes used to dehumanize black life. National Geographic recently apologized for its role in pathologizing blackness. But the legacy endures and colors the conversation about meaningful representation.

For so long, our own images were used against us to call us powerless, ugly, and more recently, to justify the killing of unarmed black men, women, and children. It's not hard to imagine why some people do not see "self mastery in the midst of chaos," as Zadie Smith has written about Lawson's photos. They are still living in the eye of the storm of injustice and they would rather, like the protesters in Brooklyn, see both cultural and governmental institutions make real changes around racism.

Earlier this year, the celebrated artist Carrie Mae Weems held a performative lecture at the National Gallery of Art. She spoke of her three-decades-long career before turning her attention to the "skin of a building." "We really have to understand the role of museums," she said. "How they play contemporarily, who's in them contemporarily, who's not in them. Right? Right? That becomes more and more important, certainly as the country becomes more brown."

Visibly exasperated at the thought, she continued, "Major institutions are going to have to redirect the ways in which they are dealing with us." That is not to say, she added, that museums have to only exhibit brown people, because that would be "boring." "But they certainly will have to have a kind of balance that has not historically been there."
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To Fight Racism Within Museums, They Need to Stop Acting Like They're Neutral

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Illustration is courtesy of Lia Kantrowitz for VICE In April, the Brooklyn Museum hired a white curator, Kristen Windmuller-Luna to oversee its collection of African art. The appointment outraged skeptics who felt that a black curator should oversee the institution's African objects.