A change of heart - Fred Wilson's impact on museums

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• published: 18 May 2010
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Fred Wilson presents his 1992 project Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society and demonstrates how it changed the relationship between the staff and the community, the historical society and other local museums, the professional staff and the support staff, black and white. Wilson's collaborative process has been shown to contribute to a new museum ethics by shaping individual and institutional values and has helped move institutions towards greater diversity, equality and social engagement. This presentation was part of The Sackler Conference for Arts Education - From the Margins to the Core? - An international conference exploring the shifting roles and increasing significance of diversity and equality in contemporary museum and heritage policy and practice held at The Sackler Centre, V&A;, 24 - 26 March 2010. Talk about ‘Drivers for change’, I never learnt how to drive but as I say I’ve been driving and making change in my own way recklessly or not without learning how to drive but anyway, being here with you is just great because the thing about thinking about ‘the margins and the core’ being here with you I feel very much at the core. Some of you have come up to me and told me in one way or another that you know about my work which in some ways was a little surprising, even though it probably shouldn’t be. This is the Maryland Historical Society in case you don’t recognise it, the museum where I did my first project. I was invited by the Contemporary to do that. They had seen my other work and they invited me in to pick any museum in Baltimore to do this project. In fact the curator Lisa Curran had thought of a large vision that maybe I could do this in all the museums in Baltimore. It was the first time working with the museum in this capacity and I said ‘Well maybe not, lets not try to do that.’ However I did interview all the museums with the director of the Contemporary and they didn’t realise they were being interviewed. I just went around speaking to people and the Historical Society which this is (refers to slide) turned out to be the most important sight for me for many reasons. One of the reasons was that it had all the great works of art that the Metropolitan borrowed and all the other museums borrowed, but how they had them on display, it was obvious they hadn’t thought about that in a very long time, and I thought that this was raw material for the kind of thing I’m interested in. In addition when I walked into the space on my own not with the director or curator, just walked in and I met the person at the desk and how should I say?, he wasn’t the friendliest person in the world. And so my whole experience as I went through the museum on my own, I felt very uncomfortable in the space. I felt like I wanted to run out of there screaming in fact. So that was a really large reason why I decided to do the project there because I wanted to understand what my feelings were about. This was a museum and I’d been in museums all my life and so why did I feel so uncomfortable there? I should just backtrack, this was my first project and it couldn’t have been better because the Contemporary, George Sissel and Lisa Curran, Lisa was the curator and George was the director, since they were a museum without walls they had worked with artists for a very long time doing projects all around Baltimore, usually in vacant buildings or other businesses where ever artists wanted to do things. So in order to this in Baltimore which is not a huge city but is a fair size city they had to get communities and business leaders and politicians in line to support the effort of this project. They had huge numbers of volunteers that they always bought together for these projects. So while they had never worked in an art institution they had many, many incredible mechanisms to make things happen in the city. And so when I came along and my site was a museum, they just used all their techniques and systems of doing projects for my project. And I have to say that since then I have developed relationships with communities and the museum on my own I really have to say that George Sissel and Lisa Curran were the people who taught me how to do this. Bought me out of my shell, from a hermetic artist doing my own things in my studio, so I could speak to, because they forced me to in the first instance, to speak to groups I thought I would have nothing in common with. And of course I realised that there was a lot of common ground. And I have to say that as Contemporary didn’t get as much visibility from this project as the Historical Society did because the project was sighted there and the Historic Society had a lot to loose with this project but the Contemporary really were the driving force, talking about drivers for change, they were the driving force behind this project who had been working with communities for a long time. So with that said to do my project there I looked a