James Baldwin, whose lived experience was sitting at the intersection of both American anti-Black racism during the civil rights era and anti-LGBT fervor had perhaps a more poignant addition to the “life imitates art” discussion going on over the past 2,000 years of intellectual dialectic. James Baldwin said, “Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.” When cultural spaces, art galleries, and other curators of artistic tradition fail to see this simple truth—that life supersedes art—they will fall prey to the white supremacist traditionalism that turns Black suffering into an exhibit.

The biggest mistake white curators and gallerists can make is to ignore Black voices or egregiously sidestep Black involvement while promoting Black art. This unsurprisingly is a common practice among well-respected galleries and art spaces.

CASE STUDY: THE WHITNEY MUSEUM

The Whitney Museum in NYC sidestepped and undercut Black artists to create an exhibit highlighting responses to the BLM movement and the COVID pandemic in 2020. The museum experienced severe pushback and calls to cancel the show via social media when the featured Black artists found out that their work was acquired without their knowledge at a discount.

The Whitney Museum reached out to the featured artists, informing them that their work had been acquired and that they would receive lifetime passes to the museum as compensation. The museum had announced the exhibit, titled Collective Actions: Artist Interventions in a Time of Change, before informing the artists and acquiring consent.

Not only was this move a blatant attempt by the Whitney Museum to cash in on a profoundly crucial social movement to demand respect for Black lives in response to systemic racism in the US, but the Black people behind the artworks were left out of the conversation entirely. Treated as an afterthought, they were denied agency by a powerful, mostly white institution.

This is not how galleries and art museums support anti-racism. This behavior commodifies Black suffering and further entrenches anti-Black racism by exploiting Black artists to appear progressive. Luckily the Whitney Museum canceled the exhibit.

HOW CAN MUSEUMS AND ART GALLERIES DO BETTER?

There are several ways museums and art galleries can actually help fight anti-black racism in the United States. Most of the changes have to start within the institutions themselves.

THE RACIAL MAKE-UP OF MUSEUM TRUSTEES NEEDS TO BE MORE DIVERSE

In 2017, the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) surveyed its members and found that nearly half of the museum boards in their association, which totals 850 institutions across the US, were entirely white. Museum boards with a more diverse make-up were still vastly skewed toward whiteness.

This shocking case of self-reporting by the AAM was an important inflection point for museum boards to take action and incorporate diversity into their ranks. Some have made progress diversifying their boards, but more progress is needed.

WHO GETS TO TELL THE STORY?

Museum donors and trustees strongly influence not only the types of exhibitions featured in their museums but also the narrative behind the artworks and, consequently, the narratives behind the artists.

Art curation is more than simply hanging paintings on a wall—it is meant to tell a story. When the writers of that story are mostly white, museums end up creating and recreating the Whitney Museum disaster.

THE RACIAL MAKE-UP OF MUSEUM STAFF NEEDS TO BE MORE DIVERSE (ACROSS ALL ROLES)

A 2015 study found that the racial make-up of museum employees was more homogenous than the actual demographics of the US, which at the time were 62% white and 38% non-white. On average, 76% of museum staff were white, and only 24% were people of color.

Then, in a follow-up study three years later, the numbers had improved slightly—72% of museum staff across the US were white, and 28% were people of color.

However, these improvements were unevenly distributed across various roles in museums. Most of the changes happened in curational and educational departments, but museum leadership roles were still mostly non-Hispanic white. 85% of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) directors were white as of 2021.

This shows that prominent and highly influential museums are slow to change in any meaningful way at an institutional level. Hiring diversity chiefs and thinking that the issues are resolved reveal either a genuine lack of understanding on behalf of museum boards or a disgraceful disingenuousness and lack of desire to grow into more equitable institutions.

FIND AND SUPPORT LOCAL ART GALLERIES, ARTISTS, CULTURAL CENTERS, AND SPACES THAT MORE ACCURATELY REFLECT AMERICA

Meaningful change is not easy. America unequivocally has an ongoing racism problem. This article focused primarily on anti-Black racism, but there are many heads on this historically omnipresent monster.

This problem is deeply woven into social, political, and cultural institutions. The art world and the powerful elites that direct its gaze is not immune to implicit and explicit racism just because their Twitter feed is full of upraised, Black fists.

Meaningful change starts with each individual examining honestly their relationship to white supremacy and their potential complicity in it. Then, after reflection, individuals must look outside themselves to examine how they can positively impact their immediate worlds—whether that world is a small art gallery or the MOMA.

About the Author: Roni Davis is a writer, amateur art enthusiast, and legal assistant operating out of the greater Philadelphia area. She writes for FNRP, a commercial real estate investment firm.

The post Intentional Anti-Racism Moves for Art Spaces and Galleries to Embrace and Deploy appeared first on Art Business News.

Pick up any art magazine published in the last decade and you’ll see articles discussing the intersection of art and technology. From a purely subjective perspective, it’s useful. It shelters artists who are uncomfortable under the tent of “conceptual art.” It suggests a cutting-edge approach, while terms like “media” might include relatively older gadgetry, like video art.

Technology has also radically altered the way we interact with art. Social media has provided a new platform for discovery. Savvy dealers and gallerists use online and social media as a means create a direct connection to prospective collectors. This gives galleries the ability to reach beyond their walls and showcase work remotely.

For all the advances in recent years though, it’s easy to understand why a field like art, which prizes expression and preservation over the ephemeral and efficient, might be reluctant to embrace technological change. But there are bigger, more practical reasons galleries struggle. Technology sometimes fails to deliver a personal connection and experience, despite its many promises. Then there’s the sheer physicality of artwork: it’s cumbersome to deal with. It defies easy digital solutions.

The Mingei International Museum in San Diego confronted these issues head on when they renovated their Balboa Park space earlier this year. They had to rehouse their entire collection in the process. “It was such an intensely monumental task that the people who were taking it on literally didn’t know where to start,” Alexis O’Banion, Creative Director & Technology Strategist of The Mingei International Museum recalls. “There was a lot of ‘What is this thing?’ We hadn’t done a thorough housekeeping in quite a while.”

The Mingei’s collection is a singular mix of decorative art and functional objects from across the ages, and around the globe. It’s a unique place, housing mid-century modern marvels alongside contemporary African masks and 13th century manuscripts. The collection comprises 26,000 objects of high art, all of which were designed with a functional purpose.

The task of moving and tracking this type of collection is no small feat when time isn’t critical. Not to mention, Mingei’s old inventory system was an outdated database that made everyday work a challenge. “There was no remote capability, no API,” O’Banion explains. “You had to be on a desktop to use it.”

The logistics for the project were further complicated by having to accommodate multiple stakeholders on different teams. O’Banion summarizes how a museum works: “Everything kind of is around an exhibition. You market it, you create programming around it, you use it to sell memberships. Everybody has their jobs to do, but it all relates to one big project.”

The museum needed a barcode system for tracking the movement of objects, all of which had to be packaged in different ways. As O’Banion recalls, “We had to create labels for the boxes that the objects were going in. One box could probably hold three or four objects depending on the size. Some objects were crated separately. You had the object, then you had a container, then you had a crate or pallet. These objects were kind of nested inside of their vessels.”

What’s more, every time an artwork is moved, a record has to be kept of the physical state the object is in, a process known as conditioning. “Any time that an object is packed, no matter if we are loaning something or storing it, we need to condition it. Another museum will condition when they get it, and then condition it again when it goes off view. We needed a way to quickly condition an object, label it, package it, and then crate it. Times 26,000 objects.”

The team needed a tool which that could be used remotely in their storage room, on a phone or tablet, which was robust and flexible enough to meet their own specific requirements, and which could be used by everyone on their team. Airtable was the solution—it allowed The Mingei to track the movements and condition of every object, every step of the way.

The approach was so impressive that they received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. “It’s a really big deal in the museum community,” O’Banion says. “They were the first ones to fund people digitizing their collections. They don’t really do that anymore, unless you’re doing it in a way that’s game changing.”

The IMLS grant came with a warning that what the Mingei was attempting was a huge undertaking, and that the funds might not be sufficient. As O’Banion recalls, “They said, don’t be discouraged if you don’t accomplish it. And that was all I needed to motivate the notion that not only are we going to accomplish it, but we’re going to accomplish it like it’s no big deal.”

Airtable wasn’t the first choice. O’Banion, at the time, was also trying to get everyone to communicate via Slack. It proved to be overwhelming to the team, who started to think that everyday there was another aspect of the system to employ and learn. The exclusion of non-technical staff in a project or process is antithetical to the way a museum needs to function. “Any time we introduce new technology to our group,” O’Banion says, “It has to be really easy to understand and catch onto. It has to be very accessible. Anything that needs intense training is just not going to fly because we have really lean resources.”

Airtable proved easy for the entire team to master. “It was just starting from a spreadsheet. Starting from a spreadsheet is great because everybody knows what it is and knows basically how it works.” And with the ease of Airtable, the use multiplied. “I think it inspired our team to realize, “Hey, this is a really flexible tool. It’s not just something that the design department can use to track their projects. We can literally move a collection with it. We can track our events with it. We can make it do whatever we want.”

If there’s a particular synergy between The Mingei Museum’s and Airtable, it relates to their philosophy. As O’Banion puts it, “Function and beauty are interchangeable, in a way. A well-designed piece of furniture, a beautifully woven textile, a beautiful piece of jewelry is just as valuable as a Monet. We think an Eames lounger is just as valuable as a Monet, and in fact, maybe even more so because you can sit on it and it’s comfortable.”

But a product is only as good as the results it allows users to achieve. And the results? “We can literally see how many weeks it took us to pack certain objects, and there’s a graph week-by-week of how many objects are packed in a week. You can see some weeks they packed close to 4,000 objects. You can also see by color, which person was doing the packing. It was just this really cool way to see the number always ticking up. Even our director commented, ‘Oh, looks like we packed 10,000 more objects this week.’”

“We literally moved every single object in our collection, we know exactly where it is, and it’s going to be something that we’re going to be using for years. Years.”

The Mingei has officially embarked on the major renovation of the Balboa Park building. Find portions of the collection popping up all over San Diego, including at the store and café now open at Liberty Station.

Follow the updates on The Mingei Museum move at www.mingei.org

For more information on Airtable, please go to airtable.com

The post Creating Streamlined Processes that Provide for Function and Beauty appeared first on Art Business News.

by Michael Mascioni

At museums across the United States, artists and visitors have embraced the “maker culture” of 3-D printing technology, which allows users to create a physical work of art from a 3-D digital model. Museums now use 3-D printing to educate visitors about collections, inspire them to view collections in new ways and encourage them to create new works.

The technology plays a key role in the museums’ education and enrichment programs. Kim Robledo-Diga, director for innovation and learning at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey, says that the technology aligns with the museum’s mission to “explore the nexus of art and science.”

The technique, along with Makerspaces, community spaces that promote creation and education, are “perfect fits for our museum’s long-term goal,” she says, and serve as ways to provide new educational tools beyond traditional art-studio classes. The technology gives visitors and artists the opportunity to use the museum collection as a resource to create new forms.

The Newark Museum first used 3-D printing in 2011 with its Makerspace Lab, which also offers a number of other creation tools for visitors. Robledo-Diga estimates that about 100 visitors have created objects using the museum’s two MakerBot 3-D printers, though thousands have observed the technology in action.

Robledo-Diga notes that the use of 3-D printing is at an early stage in museums, as museum staffs assess how to effectively use it. The museum plans to promote the 3-D printers to local artists and is especially interested in engaging the artist community in Newark and Jersey City, New Jersey. Robledo-Diga believes that 3-D printing will help meet the needs of local artists and allow them to complete special projects. Last April, the museum also hosted the Greater Newark Mini Maker Faire, which showcased 3-D-printing artists and creative makers in the area.

The process of 3-D printing is an involved one, but the museum offers in-depth classes and workshops for youth and adults. The use of 3-D printing at the museum varies significantly; some visitors create their own designs, whereas others use the museum objects as references. All participants take their creations home.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has also initiated a range of programs to explore the use of 3-D printing at its museum. Visitors create mashups of objects in the museum by taking photos; using free software, such as AutoDesk’s 123D Catch, to turn those photos into 3-D models; and uploading the models to the thingiverse.com content-sharing site for 3-D models. Don Undeen, senior manager of the museum’s media lab, notes that this application of 3-D printing has “taken off without the museum’s involvement,” with many visitors discovering the program by word of mouth.

The initiatives are outgrowths of the Met’s digital-media lab, which is dedicated to experimenting with new artistic technologies and examining how they affect visitors’ museum experience. Undeen says that the use of 3-D printing gives visitors a new way of viewing the museum’s collection.

Professional artists can also use the 3-D printer to scan and model objects in the museum collection. One of the great advantages of using the collection is that “much of it is free of intellectual-property rights, allowing [artists] to enjoy free creative reuse of the collection,” Undeen says.

The Met has hosted a variety of 3-D printing programs, including its first 3-D Scanning and Printing Hackathon in 2012, which enabled a range of digital artists to test the technology. Last summer, the museum organized a five-day 3-D-printing study program for high-school students and held a series of meetups providing instruction for adults. The 3-D printers are open to the general public through special events.

Undeen sees “3-D printing proceeding on an experimental basis, initially in museums and then generating mainstream usage,” especially as 3-D printers become more widely available in schools.

Through thingiverse.com/met, users have downloaded approximately 2,000 model files from the Met’s 3-D model collection of 70 designs. Of the 10 most downloaded objects, eight are from the museum’s American Wing collection, and two are from the Asian department. Undeen attributes the popularity of these objects to the nature of the materials they use and to the more active involvement of the departments overseeing those objects in 3-D printing. Figurative pieces, classical art, human figures and animal figures tend to be the most popular objects for 3-D printing in the museum.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York has also used 3-D printing to involve students with its collection. Barry Joseph, associate director for digital learning at the museum, explains that the mission of its 3-D printing programs has been to “harness the tools of digital fabrication to engage youth and immerse them more deeply in scientific content and processes.”

In February, the museum ran the “Capturing Memories” 3-D printing program, which gave students open access to memorabilia from the former planetarium, the scientific tools of explorers and models of exhibits and other objects from the museum. Students could scan the physical objects, work on computers to polish their scans and share that material with others online and in their schools. The museum’s 3-D printing program last summer, “Capturing Dinosaurs:  Reconstructing Extinct Species,” allowed students to prototype and explore dinosaur species through fossils.

Although the use of 3-D printing at museums is still at an early stage, the growing popularity among artists and visitors suggests that 3-D printing will soon become a more significant part of museum programing.

Michael Mascioni writes about digital media, clean energy and other topics for such publications as Internet Evolution, Inter Park, and Innovation & Tech Today. He is co-author of The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier, published by Gower Publishing. He also is a market research consultant in digital media, and serves as conference director of a hybrid energy conference. 

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