Museums have long sought a role for themselves in changing our society. For example, art museums once aimed to acculturate the working class by fostering specific ideas about high art and high culture, understanding themselves as “an agency for molding as well as for reflecting public taste and opinion1” intended “to educate and uplift the public and to improve the skills and taste of those who worked with their hands2” .
In the 21st century, museum professionals still hope to impact visitors, just in a different way. Museums are now often places to change narratives and foster dialogue. Sometimes museums work to acquaint visitors with the stories of traditionally overlooked, historically (and often currently) oppressed groups. Sometimes programs are intended to bring different groups into dialogue with each other, in the hopes that shared dialogue and understanding can help us move forward as a society. My recent interview with Johanna Jones about measuring social impact at OCMA highlights one museum’s efforts at “increasing people’s connectedness, their willingness to interact with one another and to take action together, valuing each other, getting to know each other, and enjoying being around each other.”
I’m proud to be part of a professional community with these goals, and also fascinated with the often unexamined tension between ensuring museums tell stories a certain way and make choices that respect the values we espouse, and trying to engage visitors who see the world differently in discussion. To put this bluntly – and having seen this in action as a museum director – when a visitor walks in the door and is offended by an employee wearing a facemask decorated with a pride flag, I’m going to defend that employee’s right to wear the pride flag, but that visitor may turn around and leave. I’m willing to lose that visitor for the sake of doing what I know to be right, but it does shut the door to bridging that divide. Similarly, during a flag making activity when a participant draws a confederate flag I’m going to take it down, not hang it up with the other images made by visitors (more on this story here). But again, I am choosing to take an arguably political stance over engaging a visitor with dramatically different views in dialogue.
Last year I encountered a different model: instead of the museum taking on an activist role, this model teaches people how to be activists for their own causes. This is the model of the Center for Artistic Activism (C4AA), led by Rebecca Bray, who came to C4AA from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where she was the Chief of Experience Design and Evaluation for eight years. Rebecca Bray shared information about what artistic activism is, and how museums can use this model to help visitors become activists.
What is artistic activism?
Artistic activism is best shared through a few examples:
C4AA worked with artists at the contemporary art center in Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, a small country just north of Greece. The museum sent these out into rural areas to bring contemporary art to people. They would go to these places and people would say, “We don’t want your art: We don’t have roads that work. Our schools are falling apart, and our government is so corrupt we can’t do anything about it -when we protest nothing happens”. These artists thought: maybe we can bring our skills as artists to these challenges. They focused on potholes because there are really extraordinary potholes in North Macedonia, potholes people can’t get around — they are a serious, functional problem. So these artists found a huge pothole that was two years old, and they threw a birthday party for it. They brought a cake and streamers and balloons, and made a whole scene which felt joyful. It didn’t feel like a protest, but most of the town showed up and gathered round this pothole, and then the media caught wind of it, and they came and covered it. Within a week the pothole was fixed.
After that these artists went to another town, and they had a fishing contest in the pothole. They brought fish that they put into the pothole, and then fished them out. Again, it generated media. In the end mayors of towns were calling them to say, “Are you going to come to our town? Because if you are, we will fix the things before you come, because we don’t want the press.” Through its interventions, this group ended up getting the equivalent of 12 million Euros worth of infrastructure fixes over the course of a few years.
In Bogota, Columbia, in the early 1990s, a new mayor wanted to address traffic fatalities. At the time, there were numerous car accidents and pedestrians being killed by car. Nothing the government of Bogota had tried (increasing money to the police force, imposing fines) was working. The mayor knew the populace of his city, and he decided to try something totally different. He fired all the police officers, and he hired mimes and clowns to take their place. These mimes and clowns would stand at the intersections and make fun of people who were breaking traffic laws. They would do really silly walks behind them, or make fun of the drivers. And it worked. It turns out that people in Bogota do not like humiliation even more than they don’t like being fined. Within two years, traffic fatalities dropped by 50%.
People have tried to replicate these actions. In one country there are people dressing up as zebras at in the middle of intersections (zebra crossings) and stopping traffic. But it’s important to note that some of this stuff can’t be replicated. If you put mimes at intersections in New York City, the mimes might get run over. It’s about understanding an audience and creating actions that are culturally specific. We we go all over the world with this work, but what we do NOT do is not come in and say, here’s what you should do. Instead, we say, let’s dig into the culture, the stories, the symbols, the spectacles that resonate with people here, in this place.
How can a museum engage visitors in social activism?
Recently, we collaborated with the Anacostia Community Museum, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution, to create The Utopia Project. This temporary exhibit took people on a journey that led to imagining their ideal world, and also taught the principles and the skills behind artistic activism.
In the exhibit, we offered tools and stories for how social change happens effectively, but in no way were we telling people what kind of social change they can or should be doing. We brought the visitors through five steps to artistic activism: engaging emotions; imagining Utopia, or a more perfect world; brainstorming creative approaches to change; prototyping and reflection.
Engaging emotions
Artistic activism understands that change happens because people feel a certain way, because they feel propelled to act because something touches them and an emotional level. It’s not just facts. It’s not just rational. People take action because they feel urgency, hope, connectedness.
When we do trainings, we ask, what is a thing that you feel passionately about? Can you identify these feelings? Often it’s a combination of anger, fear, hope, desire for change. When we see problems in the world we often go to a place of despair or fear and anger, and focus on reacting to things that are bad. But we ask people to take a next step of tapping into the hope that’s in there.
Imagining Utopia
When we ask people to image Utopia, what we’ve found with working with people all over the world is that people’s Utopias look remarkably similar. There’s a lot of really good food. There’s music. There are people who have a lot of leisure time and are helping each other. And these stories of the world that we want to create are so important to tell for ourselves, because one of the problems in activism is burnout and despair. But also, they are important to share with anyone we want to go along with us on the journey. Advertising does this really well – commercials create one idea of a Utopia, and invite us to go along with them. When we invite people take time to think specifically about the better world they want, they’re much more effective at creating it.
Brainstorming creative approaches to change
And then there’s a practical step. You know what you want to change. Let’s say you want to stop bullying in your school system. What are some steps we can take to get there? Who can make this change in your community? You break it down to something that’s really specific and doable around bullying. Maybe you want to get a hundred kids to sign a petition about bullying, or you want to get a new training in your school for everyone around bullying. In the exhibit, we show how to come up with specific objectives, and why that’s important to making change.
Here’s we bring the creativity into it: We brainstorm unusual ways to get to our objective. We bring in elements of theater, elements of visual storytelling, brainstorming how to invite people into a space in a way that makes them excited to be there. These exercises and prompts bring in creativity and strangeness and weirdness and new ideas. In our research on effective and affective activism, we’ve seen how innovative approaches help social change movements achieve results, because they’re not just protesting in the usual ways, but really connecting with people culturally.
Prototyping
At the Anacostia Community Museum we had a space where of visitors could actually prototype their ideas using simple materials. I come from a technology background and think a lot about user experience design and doing iterations and testing to refine your concept through interaction. So we enouraged people to get out there, try something, see how people respond to it and then do it again and again, and see it as a series of experiments. In the exhibit, visitors – adults and children alike – made incredible things that demonstrated how they were thinking about manifesting the change they want to see.
Reflect
The last section of the exhibit invited visitors to reflect on what they experienced, and make concrete plans for how they could bring it into the world outside the museum space. There were take-away cards with information about local advocacy groups and volunteer opportunities. And a space to write down intentions about what to do next.
Teaching artistic activism through an exhibit format helped people understand how they can use their desire for social change and their own creativity to make a difference. A number of visitor comments reflected that the exhibit helped them connect the dots between things they had been thinking and feeling with actions they can take, and expressed feelings of empowerment and relevance to their own lives and things they hope to accomplish.
The work that we’ve done in the museum space on this has been so successful in terms of impact, and we’ve had so many people come to us as a result asking for more like it. Museums and other informal learning spaces can be incredible resources for people to learn not just the results of social movements, but also the tools and principles that visitors themselves can use. We would love to do more with museums and informal learning spaces, which are wonderful spaces for people to explore these ideas and come out at the end feeling transformed and feeling like they have new skills and ideas and inspiration for things that they can do in the world.
See more photos and learn more about the Utopia Exhibit here. Interested in sharing creative activism at your museum? Contact Rebecca Bray at c4aa.org
- Morse A. Cartwright, 1939, cited in Theodore Low, “What is a Museum?” (1942) in Reinventing the Museum
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︎ - Harold Skramstad, “An Agenda for American Museums in the Twenty-First Century,” in “America’s Museums,” Daedalus, Summer 1999
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