Tag Archives: personal agency

“It’s Been Two Years Since…” – Reflecting on being laid off & where I am now after two years

March 31, 2022 Mike Murawski 3 Comments

IMPORTANT NOTE: I want to let the Art Museum Teaching community know that I am moving my writing over to my new Substack publication called “Agents of Change.” I started this publication around the end of last year, and I’ve been posting there each month on topics that emerge from my book, Museums as Agents of Change, and issues related to change and how we can all become changemakers. The Art Museum Teaching site has been around for 10 years now, and I am grateful for the community that has formed here (and or everyone who has contributed to this site over these years). I invite you to Subscribe to my Substack, and join this growing community of changemakers. I’ll be expanding this publication throughout this year, adding different types of content and programs to offer strategies, support, and guidance. I hope to see you there. And, again, thank you from the bottom of my heart for being a part of Art Museum Teaching.

A week after the COVID pandemic shut down most museums across the country, I joined the ranks of thousands of museum workers who were laid off from their jobs. Of all the things that happened in the chaotic month that was March 2020, this is the event I remember most.

I distinctly recall the acidy taste in the back of my mouth after the brief, life-altering Zoom call. I remember feeling dizzy. It was quite literally a moment that threw me off balance more than almost any other single moment in my life thus far.

What I remember most was the seething anger I felt. Anger at the museum, of course—at those who made this decision—but also anger at myself. A part of me at the time couldn’t help but feel that it was somehow my fault. I felt ashamed, embarrassed, and experienced a lot of self doubt. The anger hung on for a while even as the initial shock and panic of losing my “job security” wore off.

But here’s the thing… over time, I was able to work through this anger in ways that have helped me to move on. And now, on this two year anniversary, I’m ready to share some of that process.

A lot of you have been going through your own “it’s been two years since…” moments this month. If you had an experience that was anything like mine, the memories have likely also brought a lot of complex and difficult emotions back to the surface.

The feelings are still here for me, too. But I’ve learned, and I’m growing, and I’m moving forward with a sense of optimism. And I’m hoping that by sharing my own process for getting here, it’ll be helpful for others too.

I took this photo of my empty desk and office after I packed up all my things (March 2020). It was the last time I was in that building, until just this past week.

A Journey of Healing and Repair

The sudden and dramatic shift out of museum employment (right at a moment when a global pandemic altered every aspect of our lives) was a bit like an out of body experience.

I’d been working in a museum for so long (more than 15 years, by that point) that I had forgotten what it was like not to. I had wrapped my identity so tightly around my work for an institution that I felt a blurry sense of loss of identity without my job. And then, of course, there was the anger; deep wells of anger that initially overtook almost everything else.

My first steps involved disentangling my own sense of self as a “museum employee” from all the other ways I can know and understand myself, my whole self. I found peace and joy in the simple things, like spending time with family and taking daily walks around our neighborhood with my spouse. I sought connections with close friends through outdoor meetups, and I connected with nature through regular hikes in parks and even gardening.

I also began to channel my creative energy into other kinds of work that felt rewarding, such as the illustration and design work that I do as a co-creator at Super Nature Adventures. I had been lucky enough to have started this small business with my spouse a few years before the pandemic, and helping it thrive gave me a new sense of purpose during those first tough pandemic months.

I also sought ways to engage my body—mostly through trail running, which has long been a tool for my own healing and care. I found community and a sense of belonging in a different way through outdoor running groups.

My social media post from the day I found out I was leaving my museum job; reflecting on what matters to me, above all else.

The Guidance of Key Teachers Through This Process

At the same time as I was working on disentangling myself from my identity as a “museum employee,” I was also seeking out spiritual teachers and philosophers that I had long admired or heard about in connection to their work on going through periods of upheaval and uncertainty. These included Lama Rod Owens, Kazu Haga, and Pema Chödrön.

I felt like I needed a North Star to guide me down this path of uncertainty and the unknown. And their writings, especially, helped me to get my head out of museums and to focus my attention on what matters most in my life, above all else.

These books truly helped me make it through this life change and the pandemic itself. I return to their pages on a regular basis.

Through the pages of his book Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger, Lama Rod Owens taught me how to gain control over my anger and see it as a teacher pointing me in a new direction. He writes:

“When I don’t have agency over my anger, it actually has agency over me.”

A reread of Pema Chödrön’s classic text When Things Fall Apart taught me (again) that these experiences of ‘falling apart’ are what make us truly human.

Like Owens, Chödrön invites us to treat these moments as our greatest teacher. Here is my favorite passage from her book:

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

Through his writings in Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm, Kazu Haga helped me understand the possibility and hope of radically transforming institutions—like museums—to center deeply human values of love, compassion, and healing. In his book, Haga writes:

“In the same way that violence has been institutionalized, we can institutionalize its antidote—nonviolence. We can build institutions, structures, and policies that are constantly reinforcing a new way of relating to each other. When practices are constantly reinforcing justice, healing, accountability, forgiveness, love, and understanding, we can start changing who we are.”

All of these teachings provided me with a reframe of everything that had happened to me, and allowed me to think in more complex and productive ways about how to move forward. Haga’s words even helped me to see my own agency in the work of transforming museums. All of this also became the groundwork that helped me return to museums through a different framework, and compelled me to finish the book project that I had been working on for years.

Before the end of 2020, I had submitted the final manuscript for Museums as Agents of Change, which took a slight shift toward being a resource for museum professionals (and anyone) interested in being a part of the transformation so desperately needed in museums. I wrote the final chapter of my book as a reflection from this place I now stood, asking from the heart:

“What if love, above everything else, was the core value that steered the radical change needed in museums today?”

Letting Go … Really Letting Go

Perhaps the most important concept for me to move on and through the process was to embrace the concept known as radical forgiveness.

Radical forgiveness is different from the kind of forgiveness we often see and hear in popular culture or that we learned when we grew up as kids. Often (too often), when we hear of forgiveness, we see it as a kind of tit-for-tat. It relies on receiving an apology from someone that has done harm to us, and then we can make a choice to extend forgiveness. In this traditional sense, forgiveness involves a certain amount of blame and judgment.

Rather, as psychiatrist Gerald Jampolsky has explained, radical forgiveness “really means letting go of our perception that we need to hold a grievance the rest of our lives.” It is essentially a process of letting go.

I first heard Amber Johnson speak about radical forgiveness during a Justice Fleet pop-up exhibition project here in Portland, and the way she frames it continues to resonate with me:

“Radical forgiveness is a fluid and deliberate process that allows us to repair the tears, rips, and gaping wounds that impede us from being better versions of ourselves and bettering our world.”

Radical forgiveness doesn’t mean we absolve the person who caused us harm. This is key. You have to let go of that notion in order to truly move on. Instead, what radical forgiveness focuses on is how we can learn to find growth in ourselves.

The journey of radical forgiveness is one of the single greatest challenges we face in life, yet moving through this process gives us a profound sense of freedom—freedom from the past, from grudges, from blame. We simply cannot let that act of harm, pain, and trauma continue to control the way we live our lives.

This framework is well expressed in these words from Rev. angel Kyodo Williams, spiritual teacher and founder of the Center for Transformational Change:

“The forgiveness is actually our way of ritualizing permission to move on, to not have our ability to reconcile pain and difficulty be incumbent on working it out with the other person. So it isn’t about forgiveness—I go and get them and tell them that now I have forgiven you—but it is a self-practice of releasing ourselves from the dynamic in which we’re wanting something from the other person that we can’t necessarily ever get.”

Giving Myself Permission to Move On

Last week, I took what I see as an important final step in this process of letting go and radically forgiveness.

I visited the museum where I used to work … for the first time since being laid off two years ago.

I stepped into the museum as a different person than I was before. Grounded in a new identity, I entered the space as a visitor, a guest, a community member, and a parent (who spent a lot of time exploring the galleries with his son).

After two years, this is the first time I visited my old museum. Lots of complicated feelings, and a lot more to process. I plan to visit again soon.

Was it easy? No. I still held a lot of complicated feelings from the past—that’s why it took me two years to return to this institution, this place. But it was good to experience the museum differently, as a parent and visitor. As someone disentangling myself from an institution.

It was also good to see and feel the experience of going there, and recognizing how my own work there had made a difference and shaped the change that continues to happen.

And throughout the process I was also reminded, as Pema Chödrön reminds us, that healing comes from giving room for all of it—grief, joy, relief, misery, all of it—to happen and happen again. To fall apart, and to come together.

We are in process, we grow, we change. And then it happens again.

It’s Been Two Years Since…

So. We are all in process aren’t we?

How about you? What do you feel comfortable talking about from two years ago? What have you been able to move on from, and what are you still working on?

Have you given yourself permission to move on? What might radical forgiveness look like to you?

I wanted to express special thanks to my spouse Bryna Campbell for helping me find my wording throughout this essay and personal reflection. It’s never easy putting words to this type of process and experience.

Inclusive Practices, Social Action

Towards a More Human-Centered Museum: Part 3, Bringing Our Whole Selves to Our Work

March 31, 2018 Mike Murawski 2 Comments

Written by Mike Murawski

Through a recent series of posts, I’ve been exploring the idea of a human-centered museum, why this is a meaningful way to think about the work of museums, and what changes we can make to bring people to the center of these institutions. Embracing a human-centered mindset in museums asks us to advance empathy, human potential, and collective well-being as integral elements to our institution’s values and culture. It is about putting people, not just visitors or customers, at the center of our organizational thinking. These people include visitors as well as staff, volunteers, members, donors, and community partners as well as neighbors and residents of our localities and regions. All of these individuals are part of a museum’s interconnected human ecosystem. I’ve written about how we can rethink internal hierarchies and work toward building a culture of empathy, and now I want to turn to the importance of cultivating personal agency in museums.

As museum professionals and workers, we too often ‘clock in’ to our jobs and check our own personal passions, values, and identities at the door. The personal communities of our lives float away as we embrace the existing institutional culture and branded identities of our museums.

In her 2015 book Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges, Harvard professor and social psychologist Amy Cuddy discusses her research into personal power in the workplace. “Some organizations,” she finds, “socialize new employees by focusing on the groups’ identity and needs, failing to acknowledge those of the individuals. Workers may even be discouraged from expressing their true identities” (p. 54). In many cases, these organizational or group cultures are grounded in legacies of oppression and white, male, patriarchal, colonial values, and they frequently conflict with our personal identities. Yet, for museums to become truly human-centered and inclusive, we must work toward valuing and celebrating the unique identities, experiences, values, skills, and passions that individuals bring to the institution.

So what does it look like when we bring our whole selves into our work? This core question was asked by Amber Johnson, Founder of Justice Fleet, in her powerful opening keynote at the 2017 MuseumNext conference in Portland:

How do we bring our whole selves into our work spaces and what does that look like? What does it mean to say ‘This is all of me and I’m going to put all my junk on the table’?

Through her work with Justice Fleet, Johnson is on a mission to start a dialogue about radical inclusion and radical forgiveness, going into neighborhoods to engage their communities in discussions about implicit and explicit bias, social identity, and communicating across difference.

Her 2017 MuseumNext talk entitled ”Revolution Requires Forgiveness” focused in on the importance of bringing our social identities with us to our professional work, and what it means to allow those identities to truly impact our work. For Johnson, radical inclusion is a deeply personal act that “requires bringing the whole self to the table, [and] the dirty, nasty questions that nobody wants to answer, ‘Who am I? What matters to me?’” Beyond this level of deep personal reflection, radical inclusion at the institutional level requires a lot of people within an organization bringing their whole selves to the table. Both radical inclusion and radical forgiveness, as Johnson aptly frames them, are vital to museums becoming more human-centered and ensuring that museums are places that understand, support, and value what every individual brings to this work.

So this begs the question: how can we begin to engage in bringing our whole selves to our work on a daily basis? What are some initial strategies you can adopt right now?

Strategies for Change

In his book Museums and the Paradox of Change (2013), scholar and museum activist Robert Janes strongly advocates for museum organizations to connect with the knowledge, experience, and values of individual museum employees and to cultivate personal agency at all levels and departments of an institution. Janes defines personal agency as “the capacity of individual museum workers (not only leaders and managers) to take action in the world.” He outlines some clear, doable strategies for museum leaders and workers at all levels, and I wanted to simply share several of them here:

Ask yourself, your colleagues, your supervisor, and your leaders “why” you are doing what you are doing? This questioning will help to move the museum beyond the “what” and the “how.”
If there is an intractable issue or situation that is adversely affecting your work, speak out. Advise your manager of the difficulty and ways to address it. Have the courage of your convictions to remedy the situation.
Decision-making should be decentralized throughout the museum to the “lowest level” in the organization where the work can be done well. In short, staff should have as much responsibility as possible for decisions which affect their work.
Any person in the museum, irrespective of level or rank, must be free to go directly to any person in the museum for information or assistance needed to perform his or her job.
When appropriate, share aspects of your non-work life, whether it be involvement in an environmental NGO or work as an artist. These seemingly unrelated skills, knowledge, and experience are essential as a museum broadens its awareness and engages in the interests, issues, and aspirations of its community.

Bringing our whole selves into our museum work is vital to developing human-centered museums, and so is cultivating museums as spaces where we can actually do this. Managers and leaders need to break down the rigid expectations of conforming to a corporate culture or institutional branding, and create environments where employees and colleagues can safely bring their personal and social identities into their professional work. This is tied up with breaking down hierarchies within museums as well as building a culture of empathy. As we make decisions in the museum workplace, we should be asking ourselves: what are we prioritizing over the skills, knowledge, experiences, and perspectives of our co-workers and colleagues? When might we be valuing ‘the museum’ over the people who work within it?

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In her widely-watched 2010 TED talk entitled “The Power of Vulnerability,” researcher and author Brené Brown talks about connection as a fundamental human experience. “Connection is why we’re here,” she says. “It’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.” During a time when we are surrounded by an increasingly fragmented society of ‘us versus them,’ museums have the potential to be powerful catalysts for empathy, human connection, and personal empowerment. We just need to truly embrace, value, and celebrate the people that make up museums–staff at all levels, volunteers, visitors, neighbors, community partners, members, donors, and the broader public. These people, more than anything else, give museums their meaning and purpose to become agents of positive change.

Share Your Thoughts

These conversations and actions cannot take place solely behind museum walls or in the isolation of professional conferences. We need to work together to realize the full potential of museums and discover how a human-centered focus on social action can transform your practice, your museum, and your community.

Are you working to cultivate personal agency in your organization? How do you breing your whole self in your practice? What challenges do you face in this work? This conversation deserves to be more complex, and bring in as many perspectives as possible. Add your voice to the comments below or via social media (@murawski27), and share your experiences or questions as part of this effort to make change happen in museums.

Let’s be a part of making this change happen together!

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About the Author

MIKE MURAWSKI: Founding author and editor of ArtMuseumTeaching.com, museum educator, and currently the Director of Education & Public Programs for the Portland Art Museum. Mike earned his MA and PhD in Education from American University in Washington, DC, focusing his research on educational theory and interdisciplinary learning in the arts. Prior to his position at the Portland Art Museum, he served as Director of School Services at the Saint Louis Art Museum as well as coordinator of education and public programs at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University. Mike has been invited to lead workshops, lectures, panels, and training sessions at various institutions, including the Aspen Art Museum, Crocker Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Phoenix Art Museum, among others. He is passionate about how we can come to see museums as agents of change in their communities as well as creative sites for transformative learning and social action. Mike’s postings on this site are his own and don’t represent the Portland Art Museum’s positions, strategies, or opinions.