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 wecan 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.
“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.
There’s a sentence that’s been haunting me lately: “museums are places where people go to think and feel about what it means to be human”(1). It’s a beautiful concept that encompasses the good and the ugly of what museums have been, what they are, and what they could be. It expresses the potential for museums to assert definitions of humanity that are liberatory, healing, and affirmative while leaving room for the essential question “but for who?”
What is our role and responsibility to help people think and feel about what it means to be human in this moment? What does it even mean to be human in this moment? What does it mean to be essential or vulnerable? What does it mean to survive? Who will? I keep thinking about what our actions – as neighbors, colleagues, and culture workers – communicate about what we think it means to be human right now. As to be expected, the impacts of the virus are not being felt equally. Essential workers are still largely low wage workers; access to health care is still restricted and costly; educators are still trying to meet students’ needs with too few resources; the elderly are still disposable; it’s still expensive to be poor. The systems that prop up what “normal” looks like are still pushing folks to the margins.
As the few museum staff left try to creatively adapt to serve the needs of their community, they ultimately express what they think those needs are and what they believe is the museum’s unique position to fill them. What people will be comforted by, what will help them navigate their day, what will help them make sense of their emotions or the news will depend drastically on how the pandemic is affecting their material reality. Content designed for people who are bored is probably not going to resonate (at least not in the same way) with people still riding the bus every day to work or whose loved ones lie in a hospital bed they cannot visit.
Yes, people are looking for history that affirms a sense of self, distractions, or art as a therapeutic process. People are also looking for more mundane balms – to hear someone express a similar feeling, to speak aloud, to know their child is occupied for thirty minutes. People are also in crisis.
Ruminating on life in the pandemic has been a continuous exercise in getting absorbed in and extracting myself from my own isolation, emotions, hardship, and drama. I’ve been generally disappointed with museum leaders (individuals and institutions) who are unable to pull themselves out of their own internal turmoil, who seem unable to instinctually care for others in a time of crisis. You know, the ones who assume their priorities are the top priority, that whatever choices they make will be justified as long as they can save the institution, that if people know just how long and hard these decisions were they will understand them and feel okay. It can feel like asking the world for what in reality is so little – for those who hold the power to consider our experience and let it impact their choices. To take time to listen, or communicate frequently even if incompletely. To put others’ needs before their own or the needs of the institution. As I try to articulate and find examples of the leadership I am looking for within myself, my institution, and my community this is what I’m getting stuck on. Whose humanity is being affirmed through our choices and in the ways we reach out?
EMILY TURNER: Seattle-based museum educator and creative historian who strives to infuse joy and creativity into the museum experience and encourages visitors of all ages to think critically about objects and their stories. Through writing and comix, Emily explores issues of representation and labor in art and history museums. An officer for the Museum Educators of Puget Sound, she is active in her community as a mentor and an advocate for emerging museum professionals.
Reposted from the Museum Education Roundtable blog, a space created to address timely issues that we face in the field of museum work, reflect on member events, and expand upon recent Journal of Museum Education (JME) issues.
Submitted by Michelle Dezember
In a new format aimed at incorporating multiple perspectives on current topics in our field, the Museum Education Roundtable blog introduces “4 x 4” interview, in which they invite four thought leaders to answer four questions related to a chosen theme. This playful approach seeks to navigate pressing topics with the personal touch of a conversation. The first theme features four approaches to “self-care.” Below is the first interview in this series.
Aligning with the transition into the autumn season, Michelle Dezember, Chief Program Officer of the Aspen Art Museum and MER board member, caught up with Mike Murawski, Director of Education & Public Programs for the Portland Art Museum and Founding Editor at ArtMuseumTeaching.com, to talk about their experiences in nature, its restorative benefits, and what we can learn from reconnecting with the natural world.
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Michelle Dezember: Which came first, your love of museums or your love of nature? How do you see these as related?
Mike Murawski: I grew up in St. Louis with my back yard right up next to Laumeier Sculpture Park, so my play in nature as a child also involved sculptures and art. I don’t remember visiting a museum until eighth grade, and so my first real experience with art was outdoors in more uncontrolled, wild spaces where I could run around, unsupervised and certainly not quiet. Maybe as a result, my work within museums has not always accepted the structures of organizational culture that restrict our experiences with art and make them feel like they have to be quiet, untouchable, or clean instead of messy. I do think that something happened for me at the sculpture park as a child that ties together my love of nature and my love of art. It all goes back to me loving being out in open play.
Michelle: A “wild space” is in direct contrast with the “white cube,” isn’t it? Even though you and I might not change museums architecturally, we can certainly engender a wild space through our teaching and programming. I think that happens when we immerse ourselves into that space with deep curiosity. This makes me think about the idea of “forest bathing,” which you introduced me to. Can you talk about what this is and what impact it has on your life and work?
Mike: Across the long history of the human species, we’ve only been sitting at a desk, in front of a screen, walking on pavement, hearing industrial sounds of machines, or even wearing shoes for a tiny fraction of that time. When was the last time you were somewhere that you couldn’t hear the sounds of the human-made world? I honestly can’t remember, because even when you’re in the middle of a national park you might still hear an airplane fly overhead. We just simply don’t connect with nature in slow and intimate ways any more, but a desire for that connection is ingrained in our DNA. Forest bathing allows us to have experience where we take in nature through our sense, not on a hike or anything, but through a slow, immersive, meditative experiences. There’s a lot of interesting research that has been done in the last several years about the positive impact of being in nature on our health and physical well-being. Forest bathing actually even taps into our spiritual well-being and how we identify our whole self by seeing nature as a core part or our being and origin.
This summer I led a brief forest bathing experience at MuseumCamp at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. We gathered in a nearby park and shared a series of meditative, yoga-like experiences that allowed us to be present in the moment and connect with the forest through all of our senses. Going on a hike is about ‘getting there’ but forest bathing is about ‘being here’ and taking in the moment, in the place we are in.
Mike Murawski and Michelle Dezember in Aspen, Colorado in June 2018 during the Aspen Art Museum Sustain retreat. Photo: Michelle Dezember
It can happen in backyards, parks, gardens, anywhere there is some greenery. At the Sustain retreat you hosted at the Aspen Art Museum, we took our shoes off during one of the sessions, and then we did a walking meditation as part of another experience. We should all do that more often, because there’s something in our DNA that responds positively to opening ourselves up to that kind of connection with nature and the world around us.
Back to your question about what we can learn from this connection to nature that could be applied to our work—I think it all starts with slowing down. Through much of the equity, inclusion, and accessibility work we’re doing at the Portland Art Museum, we frequently talk about how much we could achieve if we slow down and trust the process. What’s the worst that can happen if we don’t prioritize the same pace of deadlines and work flow, and we take the time to be in the moment and have the difficult and important conversations we need to be having (but often take time)?
The other thing that has been important to me is tactile, physical engagement with things. How many times have you gone on a hike and maybe not touched anything? We have an idea that getting dirty is bad, but in Santa Cruz I asked people to take their shoes off in the dirt (totally inspired by our walking meditation in Aspen). I invited people to rub the dirt in their hands, smell it, and let your body reconnect with what surrounds us. So often the white cube doesn’t invite that tactile engagement, but as educators we can open up a whole new range of experiences. We’re inviting a much closer relationship with objects and people when we engage in all of our senses, not just sight.
Michelle: You touched on the spirituality of experiences with nature. It seems that feeling humbled or part of something bigger might happen most easily in immersive experiences that disconnect us from our routine. What can people who don’t have easy access to expansive public lands do?
Mike: Living in the Pacific Northwest, I definitely have the privilege of living close to incredible old growth forests, and it’s part of the culture and identity of this place. It’s certainly not like that everywhere. Yet everyone has some sort of green space nearby. Botanical gardens or nearby parks are amazing places to visit and unplug. Go back to a place to watch how it changes through the seasons. One of the exercises in forest bathing is to think of a memory of a tree from your childhood, maybe one you would climb or build forts around. It shows us that all we need is one tree to form a connection. Visit a tree and make a leaf collection, draw some of the leaves, wonder how long that tree has been there, and think about the story it has to tell. Or, can you take your meetings outdoors for a walk around the block? All of these gestures ground us in the moment and provide us with the sense of connection needed to be present.
Michelle: Which is so important! Right now is autumn, which I love for the reminder to embrace change. What symbolism does autumn have for you?
Mike: Autumn has traditionally been the time of things dying, fading, or leaves falling off the trees. But in Portland, the summer is so dry that everything turns brown. When it starts raining in the fall, life comes back with green moss and mushrooms. Re-growth is the best way to describe it. It’s very restorative and powerful.
We had a bad wildfire last year outside of Portland that burned 50,000 acres, including many popular hiking trails. Just a couple of weeks ago, my partner and I took our first hike through the area since it has started to re-open. To walk through the forest and see the scarring of burn marks on the trees and then bright green ferns and moss growing all around them – that reminded me that nature can come back after terrible devastation with new life.
There’s a resilience that nature can teach us if we are paying attention. There is a gift that comes from dramatic change.
Things will grow back, and often even stronger.
Pacific Crest Trail one year after the devastating Eagle Creek Fire. Photo: Mike Murawski.
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Michelle Dezember is the Chief Program Officer of the Aspen Art Museum and serves on the Board of Directors for the Museum Education Roundtable.
Mike Murawski is the Director of Education & Public Programs for the Portland Art Museum and founding author and editor of ArtMuseumTeaching.com. He earned is MA and PhD in Education from American University, focusing his research on educational theory and interdisciplinary learning in the arts. He has also served in education departments at the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, and led workshops, lectures, and trainings at museums across the country. 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.
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.
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of being invited to give the keynote address to begin Day 2 of the MuseumNext conference in New York City. My talk expanded on some of my thinking around the vital importance of empathy, change, and social action in museums, and focused on 5 actions we can take as museum professionals. I’m pasting the video, SlideShare, and extended notes from my talk below. I hope this sparks more conversations within and among museums about the role our institutions play in our communities and in relation to issues of social justice, equity, and inclusion. Please feel free to email me at murawski27@gmail.com with any questions, and add Comments or questions below for a more public exchange around these ideas. I welcome all perspectives, ideas, and voices in this dialogue about museums. And special thanks to Jim Richardson and the team at MuseumNext for putting together a powerful conference in New York!
NOTE: These views are my own and don’t necessarily represent the Portland Art Museum’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
Keynote Address: “Urgency of Empathy and Social Action in Museums”
November 15, 2016, Tribeca Center for Performing Arts, New York, NY
[I began this address by playing an excerpt from Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout,” which I encourage you to listen to by playing the video below. And crank up the volume or pop on some headphones.]
This visceral performance was recorded by Janelle Monae and the Wondaland Arts Society collective. It is a striking protest piece that responds to instances of police violence against minorities in this country, and honors the lives of those lost in a way that boldly confronts indifference.
Janelle Monae said, “Silence is our enemy, and sound is our weapon.” In an interview about her recording “Hell You Talmbout,” she said something that really struck me and made me want to bring this in to begin our day here at MuseumNext: “It’s important that we see each other as human beings. We need to take care of each other.” Her piece stands as a form of art that can connect us all as humans through empathy as well as action.
I want to spend some time talking this morning about the urgency of empathy, social impact, and social action in museums today, focusing on 5 actions—that’s right, I said actions … not ideas, concepts, or principles. 5 actions that we can all get involved in to help museums reach their full potential as meaningful, relevant, human-centered institutions in our communities.
But before I begin, I would like to recognize and honor the indigenous peoples on whose ancestral lands this theatre now stands here in Manhattan, on which our museums stand, and on which we live and work every day.
ACTION 1: Be More Local
It’s so important for museums to be a ‘local’ place intertwined and inseparable from the local realities and issues. We are located in our communities, but we’re also a part of those communities. This idea of community is important to address – we use that word a lot and don’t often think about it. What is community, and what is audience? What do we mean by these words? For me, so much of this idea of “community” is grounded in geography. How do we define our place, our town, our city, our neighborhood; and how do we learn about the people in this place, what connects us, and what brings us together into a community
So what can we do to help museums be more local?
First, I think there is a false binary and divide we have created between ‘museum’ and ‘community’ that is troubling. It’s so ingrained in the way so many of us talk about our work, myself included. We might be feeding this gap, this divide, by simply not addressing it. What if “the museum” included the people in our local community (including our staff and volunteers)? What if, instead of just museums seeing themselves as part of their communities, our communities actually saw themselves as part of our museums? We fight so hard for outreach, but sometimes we just need inreach—a way for us to open our ears and our hearts and let others get involved in new and different ways.
This may sound radical, but I believe it’s also a fact: our community knows more than we do. There is so much expertise and knowledge outside of our institutions that we tend to reject and ignore, but it’s greater than what we hold on to within our institutions. We have got to start breaking down those walls, listen more, and rethink the way we value some knowledge and stories over others. Identify and value the assets of our community — their stories, experiences, creative energies, and knowledges.
One powerful example of this local work is The Laundromat Project. The Laundromat Project brings socially engaged arts programming to laundromats and other everyday community spaces in order to reach as many of our neighbors as possible. The LP’s artists and staff work to amplify the creativity that already exists within communities by using arts and culture to build community networks, and enhance the sense of ownership in the places where we live, work, and grow. Their Kelly Street Initiative was launched in 2015 in the South Bronx, in partnership with Workforce Housing Group, Kelly Street Garden, and Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association, transforming a 2 bedroom-apartment into a thriving creative community hub. I’m looking forward to heading there with a group of conference participants for MuseumNext’s first ever Museum Social Action Project.
ACTION 2: Recognize and Support the Movement for Black Lives
I believe there is a need for us museums to publicly recognize and engage the brave and transformative work of the Movement for Black Lives. The Movement has forged a new national conversation about the legacy of racism, state violence, and state neglect of communities of color in the United States—a conversation grounded in those communities’ own experiences. As stated in their Vision for Black Lives policy statement, the Movement’s vision is to:
“move towards a world in which the full humanity and dignity of all people is recognized.”
I know this is something museums can stand behind unapologetically. We need to engage with and learn from the Movement, help support and expand this community of social justice activists without dictating or distorting the work underway. Supporting this work is not putting museums and its employees in a bubble, but rather it powerfully unifies us in support of basic human rights that have been wrongly politicized since the first colonists stepped ashore some 500 years ago.
Some examples of brave, courageous museums that are putting themselves out there to support this work are:
Science Museum of Minnesota: Back in July 2016, they posted a sign at entrance to RACE: Are We So Different? exhibition after tragic killing of Philando Castille in July, joining their community in mourning. Unfortunately that sign was eventually removed, but I want to acknowledge that courage of those people who sat in a room to make the decision to put that sign up so we can have this conversations about whether museums can do this or not.
New Museum in New York: Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, which began back in July 2016 when a group of more than 100 black women artists began meeting at New Museum. The group took over the Museum for an event in September that included performances, workshops, videos, and a procession. Reflecting on that September event, artist Ariel Jackson recalls: “some of us wanted a space to laugh and celebrate our blackness in the face of trauma. Others wanted a space to scream, cry, and holler. We ultimately agreed that we wanted to express our humanity — both joy and grief”
Smithsonian National Museum for African American History and Culture: Among many other ways that this new Smithsonian Museum is collecting, exhibiting, and recognizing the Movement for Black Lives in historic ways, I wanted to draw attention to their acquisition of the Mirror Casket Project into their collection. The Mirror Casket is a sculpture, performance, and call to action for justice in the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. Created by a team of seven community artists and organizers, the mirrored casket responds to a Ferguson resident’s call for “a work of art that evokes more empathy into this circumstance,” with an aim to evoke reflection. This work will be included in future exhibitions at the NMAAHC.
Portland Art Museum: At the Portland Art Museum, we have recently been partnering with members of Don’t Shoot Portland, one of the main Black Lives Matter groups working for change across the Portland community. On August 9, 2016, the anniversary of Michael Brown’s killing, we were the site for a gathering and community social justice art project organized by Don’t Shoot Portland that involved music and dance performances, speakers, and free admission to the Museum and exhibitions. This was planned, in part, as a result of conversations with our community in conjunction with the opening of two exhibitions which focused on issues of racial violence, police brutality, and social justice activism. Many of us at the Portland Art Museum wanted to be listening to our community and engaged with our community, so we reached out and had these powerful things happening at the museum. It was a space of creation, a space of community and coming together.
I can’t mention these events without mentioning Teressa Raiford, who is one of the most powerful activists in Portland and probably in many of our communities, who’s putting a lot of this together and who has for the past six days been on the streets in Portland with peaceful protestors standing up for basic human rights. Teressa continues to be an inspiring, driving force behind the ways that the Portland Art Museum is beginning to listen to its community and engage in a new dialogue around race and social justice.
Following up the event in the Portland Art Museum on August 9th, we had a panel discussion entitled “Race in America After Ferguson” where Reverend Tracy Blackman from Florissant, Missouri (one of the pastors that’s been involved in the Ferguson Commission with President Obama and also the Federal Government’s faith-based initiatives work) came and spoke with artist Arvie Smith, Teressa Raiford, and Mykia Hernandez, a young activist in Portland. With two or three days’ notice we had an incredible crowd from the community come, including docents and staff from the museum who came out to this conversation. It was really important, internally and externally, for the museum to be having these conversations and be seen as a space for these conversations.
“now is the time to stand by and amplify movements rooted in love, compassion, and dignity for all people.”
ACTION 3: Flip the Script
What does it look like to “flip the script” in museums, to work toward de-centering the traditional power structures of our institution? How can we actually shift away from the old, traditional narratives that got us where we are today, right now, right here? How can our work as museum professionals shift power?
Letting go of these traditional historic notions of museum authority and power relationships is essential but it’s also very challenging, and I’m going to break the rules of conferences and do something that you’re not supposed to do. I’m going to read a text panel from a museum exhibition, and this is not a text panel that is a typical voice of authority, it is not what I call the ‘voice of god’ text panel for a museum. This text panel was the intro panel to our new Center for Contemporary Native Art during our second exhibition in that space, written by indigenous artists Demian DinéYazhi’ and Kali Spitzer and unedited or unimpeded by curatorial voice or museum voice. I think it says something powerful. So, when visitors waked into the gallery during Demian and Kali’s exhibition, they were immediately confronted by this wall text panel:
“By entering this space you have an ethical responsibility to acknowledge that all Indigenous thought, creativity, fantasy, activism, & existence is grounded in continual acts of Survivance. You have agreed to forfeit your misconceptions of Indigenous identity & respect the sacredness of Indigenous traditional practices. You are not stepping into the past or staring into a picture plane void of Indigenous inhabitants. You are not glorifying Western historical inaccuracies or romanticizing the cowboys & Indians narrative. By entering this space you agree to never again place your hand over your mouth in a mock “war cry” or teach your children to be ignorant of the Indigenous peoples whose land you have claimed as your own. From this moment onward you promise to learn the history of the Indigenous ancestral lands that were stolen/continue to be stolen through colonization & genocide. By entering this space you have agreed to become a lifelong agent against humanitarian & environmental injustice.”
It is such a powerful statement. So, flipping the script can mean changing who gets to write these narratives. The Center for Contemporary Native Art at the Portland Art Museum is one of these spaces where we have experimented with decentering traditional museum authority.
The Center for Contemporary Native Art is a space that we have developed dedicated to displaying the work by contemporary indigenous artists at the museum. It’s supported by an IMLS grant currently and it really gets the museum to step out of the way and let Native people tell their stories. Through exhibitions in this Center, we’ve been really privileging native voice, native language, indigenous knowledge, and indigenous perspectives. It has been one of the most powerful things I’ve been able to work on in my work in museums and I have to give a shout out to Deana Dartt who was recently our curator of Native American Art at the Portland Art Museum and whose powerful vision made this possible.
Another example of ‘flipping the script’ is the long-running initiative at the Portland Art Museum called Object Stories, and these images are just some of the examples of the people whose voices have been brought to the center of our museum during this project: from people living with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers, to recent refugees to Portland, and we currently have on view in that gallery a project that highlights the voices of deaf artists and highlights their work in the gallery.
“Until marginalized communities are the storytellers of their experiences, history will be rendered partially complete, but wholly-privilege the knowledges and perspectives of the colonizers.”
These marginalised voices and stories, often rendered completely invisible, need to be brought to the center.
One final example – this is just something I thought was amazing project that I just read about this past week or so – at the Detroit Institute of Art, they’re working on an exhibit for summer 2017 to highlight and reflect on the 50-year anniversary of the summer of 1967 rebellion. It’s a year-long collaborative project to uncover home movies and perspectives from people living in Detroit in 1967, and the project aims to reflect on one of the most painful times in the history of Detroit and spur thoughts on how that region can continue moving forward. What an incredible way of bringing community voices and stories into such a significant museum project, and privileging those stories and knowledge in the museum.
ACTION 4: Have a Personal Vision for Change
Have a personal vision for change, and work to create a personal vision. I think this is something that’s important.
I hope you’ve had your coffee, because I’m going to have you do something for me before we wrap up here. Put your notebooks and devices down just for a second, take a deep breath, and clear your mind. Now I want you to try and think about: what matters most to you right now? Try to boil it down to a word or a phrase. Now, I want you to shout that out. [audience loudly shouts out words at the same time]
Thank you, and not only is that energy that we need to make change happen in museums, but it also illustrates this need for our own personal vision and purpose to help guide this work. What do you care about? What is your high dream? What is the change you’d like to see? Have a personal vision. Write it down. It doesn’t have to be some sort of perfectly crafted, wordsmithed mission statement. Think about what matters to you, write it down, add it to your desktop background, tape it to your wall, share it on social media, wear it on a tee-shirt. Connect with your core values on a daily basis. Stand behind these values. Share them. Don’t be ashamed of them. After all, if we don’t know where we’re going, how in the hell are we ever going to get there?
I’m most recently inspired by De Andrea Nichols, an activist, educator and artist in St Louis. She said in a commencement speech she gave earlier this year at Washington University in St. Louis: “Do what makes you come alive!” Nichols’s “Sticky Note to Self” project is also worth checking out through Tumblr and Instagram.. It is so inspiring to see her inspiration, to see the things that she’s thinking about, done so creatively. She just writes these sticky notes to herself, which is something I’ve been doing more and more. When you’ve got a moment of inspiration, write it down, stick it somewhere, keep it, reflect back on it on a daily basis so we can keep pushing ahead on this work.
Bring your passion with you to work. I think this is important that we stop the unnecessary separation between our work and ourselves and this type of passion. We need to create environments and museums where we, as museum workers, can be our whole selves, can bring our passion. One of the things that I’ve been motivated by in my own practice has been this inspiring quote from James Baldwin, which I added to my email signature as a daily, public reminder:
“not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
ACTION 5: Build Communities of Action and Change
I firmly believe museums are people-centred institutions (something I have written about in more detail). Museums are us. If we don’t bring in other people too, our work cannot grow. We need to identify change agents within our institutions. Invite people to meet with you over coffee. Think about the barriers to your work, and consider how those barriers are they people-based. What people are involved with those barriers? OK, now go have coffee with those people and listen. Listen to what those people are talking about in terms of why those barriers might exist. It is also important to positively recognise when others take steps in the right direction towards this work. We need to build supportive, positive, connected communities of change within and among our organizations.
And I think it’s time that, no matter where you are in your organizations (new employee or seasoned veteran); it’s time for us to stop thinking of ourselves as followers and thinking of ourselves as leaders within our institutions. You can grow a community of change in your organisation and it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been there. Remember, museum are made of us people, and our museums are only as empathetic, connected, and engaged as the people who work for them.
An important aspect of building these communities of action is also recognising the new collective platforms and movements that exist now online. If you are on social media, #MuseumWorkersSpeak and #MuseumsRespondToFerguson are hashtags that are bringing people together to talk about these issues. Also #MuseWomen, #a11y, and the blogs Incluseum, Brown Girls’ Museum blog, Visitors of Color Tumblr site, Queering the Museum Project, Museum of Impact, Museum Hue. And so many more projects that are bringing people together to create these communities of change and communities of action across the field of museums, arts, and culture.
The last slide I want to show is the team of education staff at the Portland Art Museum. We took this photo here last Wednesday morning, which I regretted scheduling that photo the morning after the election here, but we immediately gravitated to this empowering work “Power Up” by artist Corita Kent, who’s been feeding a lot of our souls in Portland with this exhibition on view of her work. I include this photo only to give recognition, honor, and support to this amazing group of educators and to the power that they bring to all of this work at the Portland Art Museum, to our vision for doing good, meaningful, more local work and in building communities of change across our institution. It is not ‘me’; it is a ‘we’ situation, and there is so much power in the people on this team and so many who are not even this photograph.
As we bring on more people to rise to this challenge with us, we can convert ‘aspiring to change’ into ‘real change’. The time has come to move beyond symbolically standing up for social justice. This may often mean breaking the rules but it never involves silence. We need to permanently put to rest the idea that a museum should be a neutral place and that its employees should be dispassionate.
CONCLUSION
Let me wrap up with something a bit more personal. One week ago this morning, I was proud to go turn in my ballot alongside my wife, inspired by her power, energy, and resilience. Just hours later, that night, I found myself in tears, holding my confused 7-year-old son in my arms as I put him to bed. I know I am not alone when I say I felt numb and almost paralyzed.
I want to close by connecting with the words of writer Toni Morrison, who many of us read during recent days and weeks. 12 years ago, she recounted her own election-induced feelings of depression, paralysis, being unable to write, when an artist friend interrupted her and said, “No, no, no. This is precisely the time when artists go to work. That’s our job!”
So I channel the power of Ms. Morrison at this difficult moment, because This is precisely the time when museums go to work. That’s our job!
Thank you.
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.
Editor’s Note:This post is part of a series on ArtMuseumTeaching.com during August that focuses on the recent bookMulticulturalism in Art Museums Today (2014). Find links to additional posts in this series by several of the book’s authors, and please join us for anOnline Book Club via Google Hangout on August 20th.
Written by Keonna Hendrick, Brooklyn Museum
Melissa Crum (Mosaic Education Network) and I came together to develop multicultural critical reflective practice (MCRP) as a protocol because we shared the belief that the decisions museum educators make about our teaching practice — such as the artwork to discuss, language we use, expectations we set for learners — are informed by our willingness to move beyond our individual interpretations and values. When we teach, we may create opportunities for our biases to shape and limit learners’ perspectives on artworks, peers, and themselves. MCRP is a theoretical framework and ongoing practice in which educators identify, analyze, and challenge the cultural beliefs, values, and assumptions that color our interactions with artworks and learners. Leading others through MCRP while writing about the practice has challenged me to re-address my biases while reflecting on how my perspectives and values impact our teaching. I have facilitated practical applications of MCRP with many groups; however, my experience training a small group of emerging educators in a mid-sized art museum in this practice greatly impacted my engagement in the process.
Developing Critical Self-Reflection in Educators
Keonna Hendrick challenges learners to think critically about cultural representations in art. Photo by Jonathan Dorado , Brooklyn Museum
In the first of a two part-session focused on developing critical self-reflection in educators, I asked each educator to write a short autobiography at home, reflecting on a moment of their lives and writing freely for 30 minutes. I met with each of them individually one week later to discuss the process and to consider how their personal narratives might inform their work in museum education. Although they were not asked to share the details of their autobiographies, several chose to tell me about their personal experiences. They explored relationships, events, and expectations that informed the way they saw themselves in the past and present. I knew when I assigned the exercise it might trigger difficult memories, hard feelings, and even trauma that might be challenging for both participants and myself to work through.
As I listened to their stories, I was incredibly aware of the trust they vested in me to receive their personal truths and to guide them as they considered the intersection between their personal and professional lives. They were vulnerable, honest, passionate, and confused. I found it necessary to be present and aware of my own biases and experiences, and to resist responding from the feelings they may evoke. There were some moments when values were expressed that were in direct conflict with my own, and I had to remind myself that no matter how difficult reflections can be to hear, the purpose of exploring MCRP is to identify and address our attitudes (no matter how negative). It took courage for these educators to share their autobiographies — without any certainty of how I might respond — and to challenge themselves to think critically about their experiences. And it challenged me to listen without judgment and to respond with care while encouraging them to engage in deep reflection. While the educators commented on the success of the workshop, I couldn’t help but feel exhausted, wondering how Melissa and I might assist others in preparing to facilitate such delicate discussions.
Promoting Critical Self-Reflection in Our Practice
Facilitating exercises that promote critical self-reflection is hard work but it’s worth it. Just as museum educators should be aware of information, teaching strategies, and audience, facilitators of MCRP should be comfortable with and actively engaged in this practice. Witnessing the courage of the participants and facilitating MCRP with many participants individuals has urged me to delve deeper in my own critical reflective practice and to ask: Why have I been afraid to acknowledge certain aspects of myself and others? Identifying these fears and their origins helps me understand why my progressing self-awareness may have been stifled at times and charges me to take responsibility for working through those fears towards an improved cultural consciousness.
Identifying fear is no small feat. Even taking the first steps of facing those fears while admitting to behaviors and attitudes that negatively impact others can be incredibly difficult. When we offer MCRP as a resource to others for improved pedagogy, we become more accountable for our own failings as educators. Learning from my failures in teaching, forgiving myself for poor decisions, and continuing to engage in the work to address the limitations of my actions and knowledge are challenges I have encountered as a practitioner and facilitator of MCRP. Through journaling, reading both scholarly writings and personal narratives, and engaging in a monthly peer group, I have grown to recognize some prejudices that I had not previously explored as a result of ignorance and limited conversation. Although I am not proud of these prejudices, my ability to acknowledge and work to overcome them has enabled me to be more patient with others and myself. It has helped me engage in an ongoing practice of forgiveness for others and myself. Educators may make poor choices from time to time; however, resisting the temptation to rest complacently in those decisions and repeat them with learners and with artworks disrupts educators’ potential to support learners in becoming self-actualized and expanding our cultural perceptions.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KEONNA HENDRICK: Senior Museum Educator at the Brooklyn Museum, Hendrick oversees the 10-month Museum Education Internship Program, a professional development opportunity for emerging museum educators working with school, youth, family, and adult audiences. She has also worked as a Family Programs Educator at the Museum of Modern Art and served as a board member for New York City Museum Educators Roundtable and Classical Contemporary Ballet Theatre. She holds a B.A. in History and Studio Art from Wake Forest University and a M.A. in Arts Policy and Administration from The Ohio State University. Hendrick is an innovative museum educator and arts administrator who develops practical applications for big picture ideas and issues. She is committed to exploring the transformative nature of art-centered experiences, promoting cultural understanding across communities, and engaging adults, children and adolescents in personally relevant experiences. Keonna’s postings on this site are her own and do not necessarily represent the Brooklyn Museum’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
On August 20th, ArtMuseumTeaching.com brought together a group of authors and editors of the book Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today for a live discussion via Google+ Hangout. Those joining the Hangout included Joni Boyd Acuff, Marianna Adams, Briley Rasmussen, Alicia Viera, and Veronica Betancourt. Please find the video archive of this conversation below, and enjoy!
Don’t Have Your Copy of the Book Yet? No problem. As part of this collaboration with Rowman & Littlefield Publishers through this series of posts about Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today, we are able to offer ArtMuseumTeaching.com readers a special discount. To receive a 25% discount, go towww.rowman.com to order this book and enter the discount code: 4S14ACUEVA
I was recently asked “What are your core values as a teacher?” For a moment I was stumped. I have taught students and colleagues about articulating clear and effective core values and the importance of using these to guide strategies and practices. I referenced established core values and used them in my own work as a museum educator. However, I realized that I had been thinking about institutional core values. What are the core values of your museum? What are the core values of your department? While I felt that I had a strong sense of who I was as a museum professional, it has been a very long time since I thought about and articulated mycore vales, separate from the institution where I worked. This process was eye opening and resulted in something very valuable—knowing my core values.
So what are core values? In their book Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras define core values as “the essential and enduring tenets of an organization—the very small set of guiding principles that have a profound impact on how everyone in the organization thinks and acts.” The National Parks Service further defines core values as foundational values that are “so important to us that through out the changes in society, government, politics, and technology they are STILL the core values we will abide by.” I like to think of core values as:
Those things that you will go to the mat for and defend doing every time.
The things that you will keep doing even if you are penalized for doing so.
They must also have a consciously rejected but equally viable opposite (more on this later).
If we re-draft Collins and Porras’s definition for ourselves, core values are the essential and enduring tenets for our lives—the very small set of guiding principles that have a profound impact on how we think and act.
A key to this definition is the phrase “very small set.” I recently read, “If you have 10 core values, you don’t have core values, you have a shopping list.” Core values should be honed to get at the depths of your guiding principles. You should be able to remember and list your core values on one hand, or may one hand and a thumb, and be able to practice these values everyday, not just on the ideal, perfect once-in-a- lifetime day.
“What do you love to do?” or “How to find your core values?”
I must admit this took me a while. When I had done this work with my own museum colleagues or students it had always been generative group process, but on my own I found myself staring at a blank page. Clearly I had to stand for something, but what? Lots of museum and education jargon floated in and out of my mind. I decided to start making notes throughout the week. I kept an ongoing list on my phone of all the things that I did that were important to me or I felt good about doing, from job tasks, to how I acted in a meeting, to how I taught a program. I also looked for things that I saw in others that I appreciated and respected. In addition, I kept a list of all the things that upset and angered me, both in my own actions and those I saw exhibited in others. The latter I analyzed for what was upsetting me and considered what the opposite might be. From these lists I had a more honed and simplified one, but it was still a shopping list.
The next step was to really get to the core. I took each item on my list and asked a series of questions.
While seemingly silly at the outset, this is a very challenging exercise. Each questions requires deeper soul searching and greater clarity. The process asks us to challenge our assumptions and look deeper at the things that we do and why we do them.
Through this process many of my initial ideas remained on my list of core values, others merged, and some fell off all together because I realized that they were more about my own capacities or an institutional culture, not a personal core value.
The final step was to ask myself what was the viable opposite of each value, and did I consciously reject it. As with many things in life, knowing something’s opposite makes you understand it that much clearer. For example, if I value collaboration, the opposite of that would be to work alone without the help or contributions of anyone else and the belief that a single mind makes the best ideas and products. I consciously reject that idea. By the end I was able to be more articulate about why my personal core values were important to me and why I would be willing to defend them, no matter what.
You are probably asking, “What did you come up with?” I came up with a list of five core values. I share them with you only as an example. You core values must truly be your own.
Listening— It shows care and respect for others and builds trust. When teaching in the art museum trust is essentially to creating dialog around works of art. It enables people to feel safe to share their ideas, leading to greater understanding of each other and works of art.
Reflection—enables us to pause and a look back upon what we have experienced and learned. It is essential for improving our practice as teachers and the experience of our students. It is also critical to aligning our teaching with the goals and values of our programs, our institutions and ourselves.
Collaboration—enables us to create something that is stronger and better as the result of many people contributing to its creation. When teaching in the museum learning becomes a collaborative process in which all participants contribute to the experience, making it stronger and more meaningful than if the teacher solely directed it.
Acknowledging the skills, experiences and contributions of others—When we do this, we show respect for others and value what they bring. Although seemingly simple this is critical to open communication. In the workplace, in our partnerships and in our teaching, this practice can open dialogue, leading to more meaningful interactions, and a greater sense of agency.
Mentoring—mentorship and support can go in all directions, upward to our directors and managers, horizontally to our peers, and forward to a younger generation of practitioners. I am committed to the profession of art museum education and believe that as a practitioner I have a responsibility to contribute to the growth and improvement of the field as a whole. I also believe that I have not made it to where I am today in my career alone. I owe a debt to teachers, advisors, colleagues and the students I have taught. This cycle of mentoring invigorates and improves the field of museum education and thus the experiences of students, the value of works of art and art museums.
Why is THIS important to you?
So why should we do this work. As I said before it isn’t quick and it isn’t easy. But it is valuable.
Core values can help us make decisions. In “Ten Essentials for Getting Value from Values,” Rosebeth Moss Kanter explains that principles guide choices. While she is speaking about for profit businesses, this can also apply to us. When we know our core values, our decisions become clearer and simpler.
Core values can help us be our best selves and guide us in aligning our actions with our values. Rosebeth Moss Kanter also writes, “principles are codified, made explicit, transmitted in writing in many media, and reviewed regularly to make sure people understand and remember them.” While I don’t think you need to scream these from the mountaintop or put them on a t-shirt, I would encourage you to write them down. I keep mine tacked to the wall next to my computer. I see them everyday. As I wrote this I reviewed them and asked myself if they still held true. They guide me day-to-day, project-to-project, and keep me pointed in the right direction. If you are in a safe work environment I encourage you to share your core values with your colleagues. This process can build understanding and generate a discussion about how your shared work embodies the values of your team members.
For me, this process helped me better understand the kind of place I wanted to work and the kind of work that I wanted to be doing. Many of my core values share similar sentiments and ‘lead in a direction.’ Is that the direction that I am going?Is that the direction that this institution is going?Am I living my core values?When we ask ourselves these kinds of questions and live our core values we work smarter and more passionately, our work is more meaningful, and we are better educators.
MIKE MURAWSKI: Founding author and editor of ArtMuseumTeaching.com, museum educator, and currently the Director of Education & Public Programs for the 
Art Museum Teaching 