REFLECTION ON CULTURAL OWNERSHIP
When I arrived as executive director of the California Historical Society, I inherited an agreement with UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library to mount an exhibition on the Chinese experience in California, to be curated solely by academic curators and scholars. No actual Chinese or Chinese American people were involved. Against rigorous opposition, I required that we invite the Chinese Historical Society of America to curate the exhibition.
The difference in the interpretive voice was as simple and dramatic as replacing one preposition in title: “The Chinese in California” became “The Chinese of California.” That simple change transformed an exhibition that originally treated Chinese as occasionally welcome and often despised guests, aliens, “other,” into an examination of how a people form and sustain community within an often hostile racial, political, and cultural environment. The scholarship was no less rigorous, but the story was changed by the people who owned it.
Today, many museums are facing—again, belatedly, for the first time—the highly-charged question of cultural authority. The question is a serious one: Who has the right to identify and address issues within distinctive communities? Don’t believe this is just a Black Lives Matter agenda plank or the product of a “cancel culture.” Indeed, it could be more correctly labeled an “expansion culture.” People who lived the story are demanding to be included among those who tell the story.
Museums traditionally have been fortresses of cultural colonialism, protected in the certainty that trained “experts” with a bunch of degrees know what is best for “you.” This colonialism has been deeply imbedded in everything we do, from how we acquired our collections to what we consider worthy of collecting to who staffs our institutions and who serves on our boards. We have always been colonial institutions. And for years, as a white, male professional, I too carried that water up the hill. But, the day or reckoning is upon us.
After years of trying to figure out how to be relevant, we suddenly are faced with armies of people telling us just what we said we wanted to hear. From huge multi-faceted art museums to the smallest local house museums, people we often have excluded are demanding agency. How we address their demands, how we share—or even relinquish—ownership will determine our individual and collective futures as museums. By the way, sharing ownership does not mean lowering standards. The very assumption that cultural communities cannot, or do not want to, adhere to high scholarly standards is pure colonialism in itself.
Personally, I am excited by this current demand to share ownership, what I consider a movement from cultural imperialism to cultural reconciliation. I look forward to every opportunity to work with museums and historical organizations to transform into community-owned, socially responsive institutions.
David Crosson, Senior Associate, Bryan & Jordan Consulting, LLC, david@bryanandjordan.com