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Face lift: the reconfiguration of three North American museums from the outside in

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FACE LIFT:

THE RECONFIGURATION OF THREE NORTH AMERICAN MUSEUMS FROM THE
OUTSIDE IN

By

Storm Bria-Rose Bookhard

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree

MASTER OF ARTS
(CURATORIAL PRACTICES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE)

May 2023

Copyright 2023 Storm Bria-Rose Bookhard
ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Dr. Suzanne Perling Hudson, Dr. Amelia Jones, and Dr. Hector Reyes for your
academic supervision of this project and unwavering support throughout my undergraduate and
graduate career at USC. I am deeply grateful to have matriculated as a part of the inaugural USC
Roski Progressive Degree Program cohort which has enabled me to further my fine art practice
while embarking on my graduate studies. A special thank you to Dr. Karen Moss for your
continued mentorship and profound curatorial contributions and Dr. Selma Holo for being a
pioneer in the field of Museum Studies and encouraging my budding interest in this work during
my early college years.

To my mother, Dorinda Bagwell Angelucci, my grandmother, Dr. Lilly Newman Bagwell, and
my grandfather, Edward Bagwell. Your academic and artistic successes are an inspiration not
only to our family, but to all aspiring Black thinkers and creatives. Thank you for your passion
and resilience.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments........................................................................................................................ii

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………iv

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..…………1

Chapter 1: Modern Acropolis Turned Futurist Amoeba: LACMA’s Architectural
Vision For a “fresh Los Angeles”………………………………………………...………..…....6
Building LACMA……………………………………………………………….9
The New LACMA’s Design Features & Their Implications…………………..14
LACMA Looking Forward…………………………………………………….18

Chapter 2: What Goes Up Must Come Down: Social Adaptability, “New” Curatorial
Approaches, and the Rehanging of the American Art Collection at the Brooklyn
Museum……………………………………………………………………...……………..…...20
“A New Look” at the Brooklyn Museum’s American Art Collection...……….23
“Some New Approaches” (2020-2024)…………………………………………26
The Next Stages of “New Approaches”………………………………………..31

Chapter 3: “Now Is the Time”: Deaccession as an Act of Social Justice at
the Baltimore Museum of Art……………………………………………………….……….….30
The Past and Present of Deaccession…………………………….………..….…31
BMA’s Deaccessed Works and the “Now is The Time” Exhibition…….……..34
The Who Versus the What in Museum Futures…………………………....……43

Conclusion: The Museum as a “Living Organism”……………………………………………..45

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….….48

iv

ABSTRACT

FACE LIFT:
THE RECONFIGURATION OF THREE NORTH AMERICAN MUSEUMS FROM THE
OUTSIDE IN

By Storm Bria-Rose Bookhard

This thesis investigates three case studies of North American, encyclopedic museums that have
employed tactics of architectural, curatorial, and collections-based reform with social justice-
oriented missions. With attention to the political climate of the United States in 2013-2023, this
thesis reflects on how certain museums are working to depart from their colonialist and
Eurocentric histories in pursuit of answering contemporary calls for equity and inclusion. The
discussed initiatives are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) construction of a
single-story building to equitably display their permanent collection (2013-2024), the Brooklyn
Museum’s diversity driven rehang of their American Art collection (2020-2024), and The
Baltimore Museum of Art’s (BMA) deaccession of works by prominent male artists to create an
acquisition fund for works by women and people of color (2018). Collectively, these case studies
speak to the contemporary socio-political consciousness in the national museum landscape and
the departure from the preconceived monolithic museum structure.

1
Introduction

As guardians of objects that span global histories, diverse artistic movements, and cultural
heritages, encyclopedic museums assume the responsibility of representing an expansive scope
of material culture within ever-shifting social climates. Born of the Enlightenment period, an era
characterized by Eurocentric intellectual and historical prosperity, museums of this nature have
material ties to colonialist conquests and imperialist pursuits, leading them to be both meccas of
artistic property and lighting rods in the scope of institutional development.
1
Given their complex
legacies, the objects these museums contain, and methods through which they present them, are
clear signifiers of the audiences and histories they champion as they maintain a distinctive social
status. The ongoing culture wars in the United States - chronologically framed in this paper by
the launch of the Black Lives Matter Movement (2013) and Donald Trump’s controversial
presidency (2017-2021) - have encouraged many cultural institutions, including but not limited
to museums, to assume newfound justice-driven missions in the face of racial strife and
legislative threats to fundamental human rights.

Encyclopedic museums have addressed the consequent demands for equity and inclusion through
various trends including rehanging and historically re-contextualizing objects, as well as the
physical and conceptual act of remodeling the museum space. These shifts speak to the need for
challenging the predominance of European periodization as a categorizing principle and re-
examining “outdated cultural hierarchies” that perpetuate white supremacy and monumentalize
colonial-era Eurocentrism.
2
Opposing these traditions can take the form of de- and re-installing

1
Shimrit Lee, Decolonize Museums (New York, NY: OR Books, 2022), 24.
2
Ibid, 25.
2
portions of a museum!s permanent collections - often to insert more works by marginalized
individuals - though, more drastically, it might extend to the structural demolition of an existing
museum and the resurrection of a post-hierarchical museum anew.

The methods of reshaping museums and case studies explored in this thesis draw reference to
Peter Vergo’s theories on museology as explored in the anthology of essays he edited in 1989,
“The New Museology.” Vergo breaks down the phenomena of the museum industry and claims
that the “old museology” is too focused on museums’ methods and not enough on the purposes
of museums.
3
In contrast, Vergo proposes that examining the social roles of museums is crucial
in critiquing their development.
4
The contemporary practices of museological alteration that I
discuss here work to coalesce the “methods” and “purposes” of museums to which Vergo refers.
Methodology is explicitly tethered to social position in each of the discussed museums.

Seen pessimistically, these reconfigurations can be regarded as a recognition of failure that has
triggered the timely (yet often over-compensatory) disassembling of a cultural centerpiece. Yet,
they can also be seen as characterizing a hopeful and long overdue shift for institutions at large.
Either way, these changes symbolize the quest to repair and augment. Collectively, they speak to
museum’s capabilities to echo the socio-political agendas of contemporary publics, thus
showcasing both museum’s desires to change and their staff members’ views about the urgency
to do so.

3
Peter Vergo, The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 2013).
4
Ibid.
3
This thesis investigates practices of un- and re-doing museum structures through three case
studies of North American, encyclopedic museums that have employed tactics of architectural,
curatorial, and collections-based reform with politically motivated missions. The first and
perhaps most literal example is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art!s (LACMA) current
architectural construction of a single story exhibition space in pursuit of showcasing the
“museum’s diverse [permanent] collection” on an egalitarian plane.
5
The second is the Brooklyn
Museum's ongoing reinstallation of their American Art collection, which began in 2020; the
museum describes it as having been “galvanized by recent calls for racial justice.”
6
And the
third is the Baltimore Museum of Art’s (BMA) 2018 deaccession of works by prominent male
artists to create an acquisition fund for works by women artists and people of color.

Each of these museums are engaging in a process of “renewal,” which Selma Holo and Mari-
Tere Álvarez describe in Remix: Changing Conversations in Museums of the Americas as a
period in which museums reinvent themselves in response to a social condition.
7
Holo and
Álvarez write that “renewal” is a “phase [in which] there is room for a myriad of new
possibilities” and that these adaptations often “follow the phase of uncertainty” and “can only be
described as an act of creative destruction.”
8
Various socio-political happenings make up the
backdrop of national “uncertainty” for the discussed initiatives. One example being the 2013
acquittal of George Zimmerman after his murder of unarmed Black teenager, Trayvon Martin,
which brought attention to the lack of value for Black lives in the United States legal system.

5
“Building LACMA,” LACMA website, accessed February 28, 2023, https://www.lacma.org/support/building-
lacma.
6
“American Art.” Brooklyn Museum website, https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/american_art.
7
Selma Holo and Mari-Tere Álvarez, Remix: Changing Conversations in Museums of the Americas (Oakland, CA:
University of California Press, 2016), 4.
8
Ibid, 160.
4
Another is the 2016 Presidential Election race between Hillary Clinton, the first official female
nominee of the Democratic Party, and businessman, Donald Trump, whose win symbolized a
renaissance of right-wing conservatism and an advent of fascism.
9
And a third being the
consistently disproportionate rates at which Black individuals are killed at the hands of police
officers.
10
Through undergoing processes of “renewal” the museums engage in acts of “creative
destruction” (with varying levels of physical extremity) to display a heightened sensitivity to this
moment and a commitment to political energies.
11

Spanning across the United States, from LACMA in Los Angeles and the Brooklyn Museum in
New York City to the Middle Atlantic Region that houses BMA in Maryland, this text surveys
the ongoing procedures of reconfiguring space and subverting object predominance for the sake
of social change across the country. Selected due to their multi-regional geographic positions,
roles as cultural trailblazers in their respective cities, and histories of pushing museological
boundaries, the discussed museums speak to a contemporary spatial and political consciousness
in the national museum landscape.

These case studies follow an outward-in framework, tracing museum developments from façade-
based alterations to the display of content within the buildings, and lastly to the internal,
administrative practices that determine what objects are most relevant to own (or disown) in the
contemporary moment. The case studies are particularly rooted in museums’ collections, calling

9
Shimrit Lee, Decolonize Museums, 26.
10
GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators, Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA,
1980-2019: a network meta-regression, (October 2, 2021), distributed by National Library of Medicine,
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34600625/.
11
Holo and Álvarez, Remix: Changing Conversations in Museums of the Americas, 4.
5
into question the definition of permanence within museums and addressing the potential for
institutional fluidity, both materially and administratively. Evaluating museums’ attempts to
respond to the cultural uprisings of the present moment serves as a clear determination of who
and what museums care about. Through referencing theories of aesthetics, post-colonial
scholarship, and Museum Studies in addition to press materials, social media debates, and arts
journalism, this writing works to contextualize how these case studies fit into (and challenge) the
academic discourse surrounding museum development and conversely, how the museums frame
themselves and are regarded within popular culture. This thesis considers a contemporary
museum conscience that is representative of the social idealism of the present moment and
speaks to the accountability mechanisms for diversity in art institutions instilled by the public,
and in contrast, the museum itself.

6
Chapter 1:
Modern Acropolis Turned Futurist Amoeba: LACMA’s Architectural Vision
For a “fresh Los Angeles”

As the first free-standing museum in Los Angeles, and largest in the western United States, the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has served as a socio-spatial pinnacle of the
region for over 50 years. Originally founded as the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science,
and Art, in Exposition Park, the museum went on to become an independent, art focused
institution in 1961 and relocated to its current location on Wilshire Boulevard in 1965. Prior to
its opening, the museum’s new site was highly anticipated by the public and national press alike.
Time credited it as a driving force in, “making Los Angeles the artistic capital of the U.S West”
and the building was referred to as a “temple of the tar pits” as it stands on the soil of the
significant fossil locality.
12
Welcoming 47,000 visitors in its opening weekend and 1.5 million
patrons in the first four months, LACMA became an instant symbol of promise for the Los
Angeles arts and culture scene which had previously been deemed inferior to that of other
cosmopolitan hubs like New York City.
13

LACMA’s original Wilshire building was designed by modernist architect, William Pereira,
whose vision opposed the European art museum model, which championed Renaissance
conventions like columns, arches, and domes and instead leaned into the California modernist
aesthetic of the time, a style that reflected the region’s “indoor-outdoor” lifestyle.
14
The space

12
Suzanne Muchnic, LACMA So Far: Portrait of a Museum in The Making (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library,
Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2015), 75.
13
Ibid, 75, 1.
14
Thomas S. Hines, Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970 (New York, NY: Rizzoli, 2010),
661.
7
did so by consisting of three separate pavilions arranged on a raised concrete platform set over
shimmering reflection pools and lined with “gushing fountains.”
15
The three buildings served
different functions: one housing the permanent collection, another used for temporary
exhibitions, and the third containing a multipurpose theatre and education space.
16
As patrons
engaged with different components of the museum’s programming, they would migrate across
the 600 by 200 foot plaza, weaving in and out of the Los Angeles outdoor environment, leading
the building’s design to reflect the aesthetic moment while pushing against conventions of the
traditional museum structure.
17

Despite its well-suited concept and reception by the public, the building was contested by
various critics who commented on the museum’s structural and conceptual deficiencies.
20
The
composite infills between the stabilizing posts on the building’s exterior contributed to the highly
criticized ephemeral quality of the building.
21
Alternately, the interior gallery lighting was
denounced due to it “casting distorting shadows” on artworks.
22
The most disapproving insights
came from John Entenza, editor of Arts & Architecture, a leading American design publication
of the 1940s-60s. Entenza concluded that the complex was, “theatrical rather than
dramatic..[and] seem[ed] to reflect a longing to recreate a world that never existed, except in the
disconnected images of neighboring Hollywood.”
23
Here, Entenza characterizes the museum as
a fantasy of space that fails to authentically reflect the reality of its context. This statement is a
hefty assertion that LACMA is not in fact a triumph for the region, but rather a false promise in

15
Ibid, 698.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
20
Ibid, 700.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid, 701.
23
Ibid, 702.
8
the prosperity of art institutions of the city. The initial hype surrounding LACMA’s Wilshire
campus and the project’s goals of representing a greater Los Angeles ethos in contrast to the
critic opposition it received, foreground the sentiments present in the museum’s later
reconstructions and contextualize the discourse surrounding the museum’s ongoing efforts.

In the contemporary moment, LACMA is making similar, yet far more politically oriented
strides to speak to the region’s culture and keep up with the imperatives of the contemporary arts
sector. In 2013, LACMA announced its plans to undergo a demolition of the last standing
remnants of Pereira's design in order to make room for a structure that represents “their
commitment to increasing access to the arts for the diverse multicultural communities of Los
Angeles.”
25
Comprised of over 149,000 objects that span 6,000 years of global history,
LACMA’s collection consists of a diverse survey of visual and material culture. The currently
under construction building will be dedicated to exhibiting this vast permanent collection.
LACMA’s new design is an amoebic form that will display work without spatial, geographic, or
cultural hierarchy by installing it all on a single floor.
26
On the project specific website,
“Building LACMA,” the structure is described as being “[d]esigned to mirror the diversity of
[the] vast city and, through design and spirit, to advance LACMA’s mission to serve the public
by encouraging profound cultural experiences for the widest array of audiences.”
27
The website
further promotes it as an opportunity to make “the experience of [the] collection richer and more
accessible than ever before.”
28
The language that the museum uses in public relations shows their

25
“Building LACMA.”
26
“Message From The Director,” LACMA website, accessed February 28, 2023,
https://www.lacma.org/support/building-lacma?tab=message-from-the-director#message-from-the-director.
27
"Message From The Director.”
28
Ibid
9
intention of developing alongside the city and creating a space that meets social needs.
29
The
museum draws a clear parallel between a new era for the institution and the vibrant “spirit” of
Los Angeles, a goal like that of the original LACMA building.
30

Out of the three case studies examined in this research, LACMA!s transformation is perhaps the
weightiest encapsulation of the socio-cultural intersections present in museum restructuring. The
"new LACMA” is a proclamation of an alleged urban identity, a physical actualization of
contemporary social justice buzz words, and a correction of the preconceived stagnancy of the
monolithic museum structure. Together, these takeaways propose translations of the museum
form as a materialization of a museum’s position within cultural prerogatives and the politics of
the space as a stakeholder in social movements.

Building LACMA

LACMA’s current plans are in no way the institution’s first attempt to physically reimagine the
museum. For example, when tar from the surrounding La Brea Tar Pits began seeping into
LACMA’s reflection pools, they were filled with concrete in 1986, marking the first occurrence
of the Wilshire campus’s physical alteration.
31
Over the course of the following 40 years, various
structures went up throughout LACMA’s 20-acre campus, creating a constellation of buildings
with various architectural influences and curatorial functions. These additions included the

29
Suzanne MacLeod, Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 2006), 13.
30
Ibid.
31
Hadley Meares, “LACMA Is Beloved. Its Design Never Was.,” Curbed LA (Curbed LA, April 23, 2020),
https://la.curbed.com/2020/4/23/21230153/lacma-museum-los-angeles-history-pereira.
10
notable Robert O. Anderson building, which contained modern and contemporary art, the
Japanese Art pavilion, and LACMA West, a gallery housed in the former May Company
department store building (now The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures) located adjacent to
the main museum complex. In 2001, the LACMA board and Los Angeles County deemed four
of the museum’s buildings structurally unsound, making an eventual rebuild a necessity.
Architect Rem Koolhaus then proposed a design that would have demolished the museum’s three
original buildings and replaced them with a single structure housed under a tent-like roof,
unifying the museum’s “continental” separation.
32
After not being able to adequately fund the
redesign and facing opposition based on the museum having to close for five years in order to
undergo construction, the project was halted. Three years later, the board approved a new plan
spearheaded by architect Renzo Piano, who envisioned a 20,000 square foot entry pavilion and
800-foot pedestrian walkway to connect the buildings, providing a solution to the disjointed
nature of the existing LACMA. Between 2006 and 2010, the museum added the Broad
Contemporary Art Museum (2008) and Resnick Pavilion (2010) creating more opportunity for
rotating exhibitions and more spatial adaptability.
33
In its architectural initiatives, LACMA has
aimed to establish a unified structural identity that has yet to come to fruition. The new LACMA
pushes for this sense of unity, but with a focus on bridging architectural developments with
social messaging.

The 2013 announcement of LACMA’s reconstruction came after six years of design debates,
funding setbacks, and public backlash that has proceeded throughout its construction. The final

32
“LACMA Extension,” OMA, accessed February 28, 2023, https://www.oma.com/projects/lacma-extension.
33
Noelene Clark,“ LACMA's 50 Years on Miracle Mile,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2015),
https://timelines.latimes.com/lacma-through-years/.
11
$750 million plan replaces four buildings and will be owned by the County of Los Angeles,
which has contributed $125 million to the project.
34
The remaining $525 million was raised
through private donations, the most notable being that of entertainment executive, David Geffen,
who gifted the museum $150 million which resulted in the project being named after him.
35
It
was approved unanimously by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in April of 2019
and is set to open in 2024.
36

Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Peter Zumthor, the building boasts a mission of
representing, as the museum’s public relations materials claim, “a fresh, Los Angeles take on a
big art museum.”
37
It is composed of seven semi-transparent concrete and glass pavilions that
support an organically shaped structure with a floor-to-ceiling glass facade.
38
The exhibition
space will extend over Wilshire Boulevard to the Spaulding lot on the other side of Wilshire
Boulevard, leading to 3.5 acres of new public outdoor space (2.5 acres in Hancock Park and 1
acre on the Spaulding lot).
39
Additional features include outdoor landscaped plazas, sculpture
gardens, and native and drought-tolerant vegetation integrated throughout the campus.
40

LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, Michael Govan, explained the concept of the
building’s design, stating:

34
“LACMA's Vision and the Campus Plan,” Building LACMA, accessed February 28, 2023,
https://buildinglacma.org/project.
35
Ibid.
36
Catherine Wagley, “LACMA's $750 Million Renovation Was Once Hailed as a Powerful Vision of What a 21st-
Century Museum Could Be. Now, It's A Lightning Rod,” Artnet News, April 3, 2020,
https://news.artnet.com/market/lacma-expansion-analysis-1822221.
37
“ Building LACMA.”
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid.
12
Glass walls invite museum visitors to look out at the landscape and
light of Los Angeles, and allow passersby to see in. This translucent
exterior visually connects the galleries to everyday life on Wilshire
Boulevard and in the surrounding park and offers spectacular views
of the city and mountains beyond. Zumthor!s design also adds ample
new public outdoor space to create an even more accessible cultural
and social hub for the community.
41

This description of the buildings’ structural elements makes it apparent that the new building is
intended to function as far more than an experimental architectural feat. It’s intended to facilitate
sociability for the community. The design checks every necessary box for a project to be greenlit
in the current socio-political moment. Its mission is one of connection; borders to entry are
dissolved through transparency. It boasts eco-friendly yet chic features. It has curved edges,
departing from the geometrical lines of modernism and signifying fluidity. Despite its
messaging, these intentions have been pulled apart by members of perhaps the most necessary
stakeholders in outward facing institutional advancements: the public.

Groups such as Save LACMA oppose the amount of county funding that the museum received
while the Citizens’ Brigade to Save LACMA protests how Zumthor!s final design features less
gallery space than did previous drafts of the building. After the plans were opposed by the
aforementioned groups - as well as through interventions at city council meetings, the critical
writing of Los Angeles Times contributor, Christopher Knight, and even a resident lead “Call

41
"Message From the Director.”
13
for Ideas” that yielded a list of alternate methods for LACMA’s design - Govan crafted his
response in a letter entitled, “ LACMAs’ New Building is Visionary - and Big Enough.” The
letter begins with, “[t]he design of an ambitious project like LACMA!s newest Wilshire
Boulevard building is always hotly contested…I think key facts about the project have been lost
in the debate about curves versus rectangles, and how big a museum should be.”
42
LACMA’s
defense of the project was furthered by authoritative figures at a Los Angeles City Council
meeting on April 6th of 2019. Concerned citizens gathered with questions while LACMA
figureheads, members of City Council, and celebrities such as Brad Pitt celebrated the project.
Artist and former LACMA employee, Oscar Peña, took the floor to comment on the museum’s
lack of transparency with the public, stating, “[w]hile politically savvy, this shows that the
Director is more interested in preventing criticism than earnestly responding to the needs of the
public.”
43
After he concluded his statement, Board Chair Janice Hahn did not thank Peña for his
comments and moved forward with the vote for funding approval.
44
The rebuttals of the
museum’s senior staff and their focus on high profile support suggests that LACMA!s design
philosophy is an effort to appear at the crux of socio-cultural relevance rather than an earnest
step in the direction of inclusion. These instances of contradictory interfacing with the public
provide an opportunity to consider the relationships that are strained within processes of
museological development. Who are these structural changes truly for: the institution or the
community? And with this question of intentions at stake, when do mission statements become

42
Michael Govan, “Op-Ed: LACMA's New Building Is Visionary - and Big Enough,” Los Angeles Times (Los
Angeles Times, April 7, 2019), https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-govan-lacma-zumthor-final-plan-
20190407-story.html.
43
Catherine Wagley, “A Unanimous Vote-and a Little Help from Brad Pitt-Pushes LACMA's Controversial
Building Plans Forward,” Artnet News, April 10, 2019, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/unanimous-vote-and-brad-
pitt-pushes-lacma-buildingforward-1513090.
44
Ibid.
14
more than a set of idealized promises, but rather true signifiers of change, particularly in an era
that urgently calls for systemic reform and historical reconciliation.

The New LACMA’s Design Features & Their Implications

Specific aspects of Zumthor’s design reveal the theoretical intentions versus the potential
outcomes of the new space in relation to theories of aesthetics as well as structural symbology.
This analysis is crucial in understanding how architecture that is conceptually progressive (or
regressive) qualifies a structure’s position within contemporary cultural agendas. The most
prominent element of the design is its horizontally situated form. LACMA describes the
conceptual reasoning for this shape as offering an “egalitarian experience of LACMA!s diverse
collections.”
45
The museum aims to physically defy the tendency to place certain objects on a
higher level than others, or have specific galleries more easily accessible via the orientation of
the museum. This centerpiece design feature functions congruently with post-colonial museum
theory related to the reinvention of western spatial modernity.
46

Mariangela Palladino, author of The Post Colonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the
Pressures of Histories, defines the postcolonial museum as “a space in which to generate new
narratives and alternative archives, to experiment and re-configure established understandings of
spatiality.”
47
This idea of “re-configuring spatiality” is undoubtedly present in LACMA’s project

45
“ Building LACMA.”
46
Ibid.
47
Iain Chambers et al., The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History (London:
Routledge, 2017), 274.
15
and is a theoretical alignment of which, given their public statements, the administration of
LACMA is seemingly aware. However, there are formal elements of the design that poke holes
in this philosophy and hold similar implications in relation to traditional or classically designed
museums. Rather than the ornate Corinthian columns present at iconic museums like the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA has sleek glass walls lining a futuristic edifice that sits on
a raised plane. These museum exteriors are parallel in their grandeur and lead both types of
museums to be awe-evoking sites, countering notions of accessibility through an intimidating
physicality. Disruptions of historically hierarchical spaces (as aligned with post-colonialism)
have been theorized by scholars such as Colin Graham as rooted in radicalism and a
“confrontation of paradoxes,” both of which are factors that appear overlooked in LACMA’s
initiative.
48
Graham’s “confrontation of paradoxes” calls for a level of self-awareness and a
recognition of the contradictory aspects of institutionalism and strives towards inclusion; these
elements are also absent in the new museum.

A distinctive interior element of the new LACMA that speaks to this is the implementation of
concrete "meander galleries.” These galleries are essentially a series of hallways that will be the
main exhibition spaces for artworks. Their formal quality of concrete references two
architectural conventions that have tangential implications: the Modernist rejection of ornament
as well as the severe and gritty nature of Brutalist architecture.
49
Moreover, the meander galleries
function as a departure from the commonly used "white wall gallery” model and exist on a

48
Colin Graham, “Moderation, The Post Colonial, and The Radical Voice,” Hungarian Journal of English and
American Studies (HJEAS) 7, no. 2 (2001): pp. 43-53, https://doi.org/http://www.jstor.org/stable/41274145, 43.
49
Christopher Beanland, Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings around the World. Frances Lincoln, 2016.

16
similar yet dramatized plane as this form. In the introduction to Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the
White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space, Thomas McEvilley writes about the white walled
art gallery, a form that arose in congruence with modernism. He claims that these galleries
involve a "[c]onstruction of a supposedly unchanging space…or a space where the effects of
change are deliberately disguised and hidden, [which] is sympathetic magic to promote
unchangingness in the real or non-ritual world.”
50
The physical impenetrability of concrete
furthers what McEvilley describes as "disguising” change in that the walls carry the insinuation
of permanence. This context makes it so an artwork is placed within a site of material stagnancy
which diverges from the museum’s attempts to create a conceptually adaptive space.

The landing page of the “Building LACMA” website addresses the need for shifts in museum
structures in relation to changing social contexts and makes a claim that directly contradicts the
implications of the concrete galleries and the previously discussed grandeur of the new building.
The museum claims that, “so much has changed in the world; the art museum must evolve as
well.”
51
The design features of LACMA’s project bring up the question of what a culturally
progressive, post-colonial, or radical museum looks like. This speaks to broader concerns of how
museums work to exist on the cutting edge despite being inherent casualties of the cyclical
nature of aesthetics. While LACMA attempts to tackle how a contemporary and boundary
pushing museum is fabricated, the museum faces recursive growth, a cycle in which tendencies
(that can have harmful effects) repeat themselves against all good intensions. These
contradictions bring to surface a looming question of if the new building will follow through on

50
Thomas McEvilley,”Introduction,” Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space
(San Francisco, CA: The Lapis Press, 1976), p. 9.
51
“ Message From the Director.”
17
the museum’s commitments or end up as an unsatisfactory and merely “politically savy”
architectural fantasy resemblant of Entenza’s views of LACMA at its inception.
52

As a high-profile example of museum development, LACMA’s design plans have been
discussed from both social and architectural standpoints in contemporary media. Art critic,
Christopher Knight, addresses these topics in his series of Pulitzer Prize winning articles on the
museum. In one of his pieces, “LACMA, the Incredible Shrinking Museum: A Critic!s
Lament,” he addresses the new building’s reduction of the museum’s gallery space. He
comments, “[F]rom nearly 42% more gallery space when the Board of Supervisors gave
preliminary approval to the rebuilding plan, there will now be about 8% less than LACMA has
today. Frankly, that!s a disaster for adequate display of the permanent collection.”
53
This aspect
of the new design is notable as the project is an initiative to display the permanent collection.
Furthermore, according to journalist, Catherine Wagley, this issue will lead LACMA to rely
more heavily on rotating exhibitions, hosting shows at satellite museums, and programming
taking place at other buildings they have acquired throughout Los Angeles.
54
This concept of
museological sprawl seems to serve as both a solution to a logistical problem as well as a
proposal for site integration. As LACMA aims to “mirror the city,” the museum no longer will
stand as an isolated symbol of its cultural gravitas, but also as a widely dispersed element within

52
Catherine Wagley, “A Unanimous Vote-and a Little Help from Brad Pitt-Pushes LACMA's Controversial
Building Plans Forward.”
53
“LACMA, The Incredible Shrinking Museum: A Critic's Lament,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles Times, April
2, 2019), https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-lacma-shrinking-20190402-story.html.
54
Catharine Wagley ,“LACMA’s $750 Million Renovation as Once Hailed as a Powerful Vision of What a 21st-
Century Museum Could Be. Now, It's A Lightning Rod,” Artnet News, April 3, 2020,
https://news.artnet.com/market/lacma-expansion-analysis-1822221.
18
Los Angeles.
55
This consequence of the new building signifies a shift in how a museum can
operate within the larger context of the place it inhabits. This integrated model creates the
possibility for a museum to reach broader audiences and to impact more of the population,
tethering museum development to not only the evolution of art spaces, but also that of an urban
landscape.

LACMA Looking Forward

In its subversion of architectural homogeneity and representation of timely goals through
structural practice, LACMA’s new building endeavors to serve as a physical echoing of the
politics of the present moment. LACMA!s initiative nods to a museological future (that arguably
is the present) in which museum’s social capabilities are proved or disproved by their edifice and
the structural contextualization of objects. LACMA’s website describes Zumthor’s design as
“grounded in his commitment to creating an ‘emotional space’,” a statement that encapsulates
this notion. This conversation positions museums as entities with a human consciousness and
complex life cycles that are contingent on them rendering themselves antiquated and undergoing
a reconstructive “face lift.” Rather than serving merely as a vessel for beloved objects, museums
under this framework are themselves the subject and become display sites for the physicality of a
museum!s mission and the materialization of ever-developing social conditions. With site
specificity as well as large-scale cultural missions as factors in LACMA’s project, the building
of the David Geffen Galleries is an experiment that approaches museum development on both
micro and macro scales. LACMA’s new building draws upon similar concepts of reconstruction

55
“ Message From the Director.”
19
as those in the Brooklyn Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art’s initiatives. The project works
to execute social missions of inclusion in an all-encompassing manner, serving as an apt entry
point to the evaluation of museum alterations that bypass the construction of the museum edifice
itself.

20
Chapter 2:
What Goes Up Must Come Down: Social Adaptability, “New” Curatorial Approaches, and the
Rehanging of the American Art Collection at the Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum was founded in 1824 by a group of Brooklyn residents under the name of
the Apprentices’ Library Association, an organization intended to educate and culturally enrich
young tradesmen.
56
Twenty years after the library’s founding, it developed into the Brooklyn
Institute of Arts and Sciences in an attempt to expand its programming and outreach.
57
The
Institute later became the Brooklyn Museum and committed to fine art and natural science as a
subset of a comprehensive plan to open the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn
Botanical Gardens, and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.
58
The museum’s American Art
collection was first established in 1851 upon the commissioning of an Asher B. Durand
landscape painting by one of the museum’s key founders, Augustus Graham.
59
After the turn of
the century, the museum’s collection grew rapidly and its American Art holdings began to
diversify upon the establishment of the Department of Ethnology in 1903, which developed the
museum’s indigenous works with Spanish colonial art to follow in the mid-20th century.
60
The
museum’s collection now stands at roughly 1.5 million objects, making it the second largest in
New York City, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
61
The Brooklyn Museum’s history as

56
“Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences,” Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences - Social Networks and
Archival Context, accessed March 2, 2023, https://snaccooperative.org/view/58251305.
57
Ibid.
58
“Brooklyn Museum: The Museum's Building,” Brooklyn Museum website, accessed March 2, 2023,
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/features/building.
59
“American Identities: A New Look,” Brooklyn Museum website, accessed March 2, 2023,
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/exhibitions/651#:~:text=Founding%20of%20the%20Collections
&text=Among%20the%20organizers%20was%20Augustus,of%20American%20art%20in%201851.
60
Ibid.
61
“Brooklyn Museum: The Museum's Building.”
21
an educational initiative contributes to its distinctive position within the cultural landscape.
There is a civically minded mission at the core of the institution that is apparent in the museum’s
curatorial endeavors and exhibition trajectory to this day.

Robin Porgrebin of the New York Times discussed the Brooklyn Museum’s role claiming that,
“[w]hen you have a collection of this magnitude — art from most parts of the world, often at a
very high level — your responsibility is not just a communal one…. Great museums are not just
for the people who live within 20 miles. You are not the owners. You are the privileged
guardians or custodians of the artistic heritage of all mankind.”
62
The museum seems to have
embraced this responsibility of “guardianship” in a rather rebellious way, departing from
conservative tendencies of the typical encyclopedic museum and instead echoing the activism
present in changing political landscapes.
63
For example, in 1980, the museum opened its
permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974-79), an iconic feminist artwork
that commemorates recognized, sometimes unfamiliar, and mythical woman in history through
38 intricately designed vulvar place settings at a 48 x 48 x 48-foot triangular table, inscribed
porcelain floor tiles, and needlepoint embroidered runners. The piece which debuted at the San
Francisco Museum of Art in 1979 has been a topic of both praise and scrutiny since its unveiling.
In “Experiencing ‘The Dinner Party’” Suzanne Havens Caldwell describes the work as having a
“religious aura” due to its details that can only be fully appreciated by circumambulating the
piece.
64
She claims it to evoke “the sort of chill that only comes from beautiful works of strong

62
Robin Pogrebin, “Sketching a Future for Brooklyn Museum,” The New York Times (The New York Times,
August 5, 2010), https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/arts/design/08museum.html.
63
Ibid.
64
Susan Havens Caldwell, “Experiencing ‘The Dinner Party',” Woman’s Art Journal 1, no. 2 (1980): pp. 35-37,
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2307/1358082, 36.
22
conviction and conception,” and praises its transcendent qualities brought on by it inhabiting a
dimly lit exhibition space.
65
Conversely, Hilton Kramer defined the work as “kitsch” and
“visually stereotypical” in his New York Times article announcing its initial opening at the
Brooklyn Museum.
66
Since 2007, the piece has been housed in the Brooklyn Museum’s
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, making the highly politized work accessible to a
vast, public. Almost two decades later, the museum functioned at the seams of the Culture Wars
of the 1990s, hosting the controversial exhibition, Sensation: Young British Artists from the
Saatchi Collection, a show that traveled from the Royal Academy in London. The exhibition
presented works such as Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), a semi-abstract rendering of
the religious figure surrounded by balls of resin-coated elephant dung. The work in part lead to
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s threatening to cut city funding from the museum as he claimed it
to, “desecrate somebody else’s religion.”
68
This backlash engaged debates surrounding
censorship and the longstanding clashes between religious conservatism and artistic practice.
These boundary pushing exhibitions (amongst various other happenings) lead the museum to be
a hot spot for the challenging of conservative art institutional traditions. This mission is apparent
on a less drastic scale in their repeated practice of re-hanging aspects of their permanent
collection for the sake of re-contextualizing cultures, materials, and historical narratives with
tactics that mirror evolving definitions of equity and inclusion. Outlining the museum’s past
rehangs aids in contextualizing the heightened political sentiments of their ongoing project to

65
Ibid.
66
Hilton Kramer, “Art: Judy Chicago's 'Dinner Party' Comes to Brooklyn Museum,” The New York Times, October
17, 1980, pp. C1.
68
Peter Plagens, “Holy Elephant Dung!: In the Latest Culture-Wars Skirmish, New York's Mayor Giuliani
Threatens to Shut down a Museum,” Newsweek, October 4, 1999, 134 edition, p. 71,
https://www.proquest.com/docview/1895319938/fulltextPDF/25A630FB35444BDEPQ/1?accountid=14749#, 71.
23
reinstall their American Art collection, which soft launched in 2020 under the title, Some New
Approaches to American Art.

“A New Look” at the Brooklyn Museum’s American Art Collection

Many institutions, including the High Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and the Museum
of Modern Art, have recently rehung their collections in instances of institutional
acknowledgment of preexisting hierarchies. In the case of MoMA for example, their 2019
building expansion came hand in hand with the rehang of their seminal modern and
contemporary art collections with a reformed, transatlantic and multi-hemispheric approach,
focusing on inserting works from Africa, Asia, and South America into their previous collections
dominated by works of white, male, and North American artists.
69
The Brooklyn Museum
differentiates itself as it has undergone several re-installations over the past 20 years. Their re-
workings have included a rethinking of their Egyptian Art collection in 2016. This focused on
concretizing Egypt’s formative role in Africa and consisted of removing faux architectural
temples that the museum’s chief historian, Kevin Stayton, defined as producing a “circus
atmosphere.”
70
Another shift occurred in the same year under the leadership of Director Anne
Pasternak. The European galleries were reduced by 20% and took on a salon style hanging which
interchanged paintings with works on paper, breaking the tradition of medium-based

69
Holland Cotter, “Moma Reboots with 'Modernism Plus',” The New York Times (The New York Times, October
10, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/arts/design/moma-rehang-review-art.html.
70
Victoria Stapley-Brown, “Brooklyn Museum's Rehang of Permanent Galleries Allows Collection to Shine,” The
Art Newspaper - International art news and events (The Art Newspaper - International art news and events,
September 28, 2021), https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2016/04/25/brooklyn-museums-rehang-of-permanent-
galleries-allows-collection-to-shine.
24
segregation.
71
The most drastic and diversity-driven adaptations are seen in the museum’s
reinstallation of the American collection entitled, American Identities: A New Look, which stayed
up from 2001 to 2016 and was overseen by curator, Tessa Carbone.
72
A New Look was a
comprehensive reimagining of the museum’s American Art galleries and was a project that was
far ahead of its time in terms of its organizational principles and curatorial mission. The
installation’s main didactic mission was characterized it by its “goal of…[using a] wide array of
objects to tell as rich and layered a story as possible about life and culture in the United States
from the colonial period to the present. In an effort to broaden conventional notions of what
constitutes ‘American’ art, [they] also included Native American objects, as well as fine and
decorative arts of the Spanish colonial era in Mexico and South America.”
73
Featuring over 400
works, on display were materials such as: precontact era ceramics, documentations of eighteenth-
century Inca rulers, Hudson River School landscapes, visual reflections of the American Civil
War, and nineteenth-century decorative arts. The Modern and Contemporary sections presented:
American modernist paintings, mid-century modern furniture, geometric abstractionism,
politically motivated figurative painting, and urban street photography, among various other
forms.

The initiative had a clear educational mission of accessibility, also serving as the first step in the
launch of the museum’s Luce Center for American Art, which now features a public study center
and 5,000 square feet of visible storage, as well as the timelines carried throughout the
exhibition. The press release for the reinstall reads, “American Identities will be thematic and

71
Ibid.
72
Stephanie Sparling Williams, personal communication with author, December 13, 2022.
73
“American Identities: A New Look.”
25
intended to present the concerns of daily life as expressed and reflected in works of art.”
74
The
fourteen sections maintained a clear chronology while speaking to the poignant systemic issues
of the time periods covered. The sections that most exemplified the reinstallation’s inclusion-
based philosophy are: the Orientation Section, an introductory gallery that presented the “racial
diversity in the early 19th century in Brooklyn” ; From Colony to Nation: The Colonial Period,
which examined the American colonialist pursuit of acquiring luxury items for the propose of
obtaining social status; A Nation Divided: The Civil War Era, which surveyed works made both
during and in the aftermath of the Civil War and documented the post-war disarray of American
nationhood as well as the role of anti-slavery prerogatives ; The Centennial Era, 1876-1900:First
Americans, which explored the aftermath of an attack on a Sioux precinct and subsequent defeat
of General George Custer as well as the repression of Indigenous American populations present
at the Centennial fair in 1876 through “scientific displays of Indian artifacts” ; and Modern Life:
Art After 1945, which presented post World War II visual language amidst a climate of cultural
reformation, leading to the artistic exploration of issues such as race and gender.
75

Accompanying these charged themes were critically articulated wall labels that provided
historical context. A pertinent example is the text that described Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 portrait of
George Washington, which read: “ This portrait was owned by the New York merchant William
Kerin Constable, who, like Washington, benefited from the institution of slavery while also
expressing abolitionist sentiments.”
76
The American Identities: A New Look installation brought
the political nature of objects to the forefront of the exhibition, placed context and content on an

74
Ibid.
75
Ibid.
76
“George Washington,” Brooklyn Museum wesbite, accessed March 2, 2023,
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/934.
26
equal plane, and allowed historical narratives to weave in and out of one another. The installation
(in addition to the museum’s other work) establishes the museum’s apparent role in the history of
socially responsive curatorial practice, specifically in relation to pluralistic representations of
American visual culture. These goals are further progressed in the installation Some New
Approaches to American Art, currently on view.

Some New Approaches (2020-2024)

In 2020, the Brooklyn Museum began a multi-year project to reimagine their American Art
collection’s permanent galleries to foreground evolving conversations about Indigeneity, land
ownership and racial discrimination, and persistent power inequities, thus modernizing the
sentiments of A New Look.
77
The first stage of this initiative, Some New Approaches to
American Art spans three galleries and features works from 4000 B.C.E to the present, beginning
with those of the First Peoples of America and extending geographically from the United States
and Canada to Mexico, Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean basin, expanding
the museum’s prior efforts to, “broaden conventional notions of American’ art.”
78
The
installation’s main wall text decisively proclaims the driving mission: “Welcome to the Luce
Center for American Art. We are reexamining what constitutes ‘American’ art…We seek to
highlight the great creativity of American art and the country’s hopes and aspirations, while also
addressing some of the inequities.”
79
Opening in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and

77
Storm Bookhard, “Some New Approaches” Wall Text, Photograph.23 January, 2021.
78
Ibid; “American Identities: A New Look.”
79
Ibid.
27
the subsequent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement, Some New Approaches came at
a moment in which institutional recognition of marginalizing practices and taking steps to reform
them were at the forefront of the sociocultural agenda.

While Some New Approaches borrows some language and driving themes from A New Look, it
differentiates itself in its curatorial self-awareness and in the assertion that it cannot fully
overturn the boundless systemic oppressions in America’s complex history. The wall text
continues: “In the galleries ahead you will encounter some new approaches to the display of
American art as well as some more traditional ones.”
80
Through this statement, the museum
proposes that contemporary curatorial tactics can be used to augment those that have been in
place. Rather than an “all or nothing” philosophy, Some New Approaches embraces the notion
that a preexisting model need not be entirely abandoned, but rather re-configured to address
fraught legacies. A leading aspect of this reinstallation is the apparent role that collaboration with
Indigenous groups played in the formation of the project. The exhibition features displays on the
Lenapehoking people, whose ancestral homeland is now the site of the Brooklyn Museum. These
materials came from a workshop that the museum organized with Lenape representatives in
2019.
81
Additionally on display is information about the ongoing efforts to repatriate scared
belongings to native populations through the Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act.
82
The museum’s “new approaches” are rooted in communication and open
dialogue, a practice that bursts the bubble of the typically “top down” model that excludes
outside, community based individuals and groups from exhibition planning. These methods are

80
Storm Bookhard, “Some New Approaches” Wall Text.
81
Storm Bookhard, “Some New Approaches” Wall Labels. Photograph. 23 January, 2021.
82
Ibid.
28
explicit signifiers of the multi-vocality present in the re-install, which validates the input of
marginalized peoples. This theme of exchange is echoed in the closing lines of the didactic: “At
the Brooklyn Museum we encourage our visitors to have courageous conversations about art. We
invite you to share your stories as we reconfigure and renovate the American Art galleries in the
years to come.”
83
The language that prefaces the re-installed galleries leaves room for correction
and growth as pioneered by members of the public themselves, welcoming a collaborative
evaluation of history between the museum and the audience it serves as well as a reconciliation
with those it previously exploited.

The exhibition is broken up into eight sections: Beyond Borders and Boundaries, From Colonies
to States, 1660-1830, Nations Divided, Painting the Land: Sublime Beauty and Violent Erasure,
The City and the Rise of the Modern Woman, The First Peoples of the America 4000 B.C.E-1521
C.E, The United States on the World Stage, and Visions and Myths of a Nation. The selection of
works present in Some New Approaches are thoughtfully contextualized through their critical
framing and explained through the double ended nature of many of section’s titles. For example,
Painting the Land: Sublime Beauty and Violent Erasure features renown landscape artists such
as founder of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church, as well as
Grafton Tyler Brown, an African American artist credited as the first Black artist to depict the
Pacific West and California, and Robert Seldon Duncanson, another Black landscape painter of
the time. Many of the works featured in other sections also exemplify the museum’s efforts to
engage with overlooked histories in addition to representing the traditional American Art
cannon. On the landing page of the updated American Art collection website is Painted Elk Hide

83
Ibid.
29
(ca. 1900) by Cotsiogo, a benchmark work in Some New Approaches. The piece is displayed in
The First Peoples of the Americas section and was created by a member of the Eastern Shoshone
band who depicted scenes from pre-reservation times to appeal to the tourist economy to sell
art.
84
Vessels, reliefs, and effigies from native Aztec, South, and Central American artists are
also displayed in this section.

Aspects of Indigenous material histories are also present in From Colonies to States, which
exhibits opulent goods that belonged to upper class individuals, portraits of members of high
society and in contrast, tools created by native populations as well as voyeuristic representations
of Indigenous individuals. Examples of this juxtaposition include: Ralph Earl’s 1789 portrait of
Clarissa Seymour, the daughter of a Revolutionary War captain and prominent land owner in
relation to Harry C. Edwards’ portrait Handsome Morning -- A Dakota (1921), a depiction of a
Dakota Sioux woman fashioned in clothes that relate to “conventional portraits of Native
American people made popular by Edward S.Curtis.” The notoriously exploitive ethnographic
photographer is infamous for his primitivization of native peoples in the early twentieth century
through representing them as a disappearing population.
85
Alternately, The Beyond Borders and
Boundaries section takes on an expansive chronological range (1913-2007) and considers
cultural and aesthetic divisions that artists have worked to subvert. A work representative of this
section’s theme is Woman with Bouquet (1940) by Laura Wheeler Waring. The depiction of a
“dignified working-class” Black woman countered the racial stereotypes of the time and aligned

84
“Painted Elk Hide,” Brooklyn Museum website, accessed March 2, 2023,
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/83032.
85
“Handsome Morning -- a Dakota,” Brooklyn Museum website, accessed March 2, 2023,
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/296.; Shannon Egan, “Yet in a Primitive Condition’:
Edward S. Curtis’s North American Indian,” American Art 20, no. 3 (2006): pp. 58-83,
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1086/511095, 59.
30
with the Harlem Renaissance’s reframing of Black cultural production.
87
Also on view is Faith
Ringgold’s For the Women’s House (1971), a mural dedicated to the women incarcerated in the
Correctional Institution for Women on Rikers Island that exemplifies the work of the feminist art
movement of the 1970s. Made in the same year, Wadsworth A. Jarrell’s Revolutionary (Angela
Davis) (1971) renders the iconic activist in vibrant tones and in a triumphant manner at the
height of the Black Arts Movement (1965-1975). These works represent the formal and
conceptual advances brought on by social movements in American history and tether artworks to
their social contexts, a clear goal in Some New Approaches.

One of the most contemporary works in Some New Approaches is Valerie Hegarty’s Fallen
Bierstadt (2007), a piece that functions in direct conversation with and in contradiction to
traditional displays of the American Art cannon. Hung directly next to Albert Bierstadt’s
monumental A Storm in The Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie (1866), Fallen Bierstadt (2007) is a
decaying canvas that features a mutilated Bierstadt rendering. It’s off-kilter orientation criticizes
practices of Manifest Destiny through the iconoclasm of a traditional North American landscape
painting.
88
Hegarty’s work is an encapsulation of what Some New Approaches is working to do
as a first step in the rehang of the museum’s collection. This piece speaks to the exhibition’s
toggling between conventions of the past and the canonical revisionism of the present. In this
installation are distinctive references to the importance of interrogating the past with attention to
critical intersections. Mary Louise Pratt describes such relationships as “contact zones,” which
she defines as, “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in

87
“Woman with Bouquet,” Brooklyn Museum website, accessed March 2, 2023,
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/222525.
88
“Fallen Bierstadt,” Brooklyn Museum website, accessed March 2, 2023,
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/184064.
31
contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their
aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.”
89
In Some New Approaches,
the “clashes” of power structures enable conversations to exist between works, demonstrating
that their connections to one another are just as important as their oppositions to one another.

The Next Stages of “New Approaches”

In a personal interview with the Brooklyn Museum’s newly appointed Andrew W. Mellon
Curator of American Art, Stephanie Sparling Williams, she shared the intentions for the next
stages of the rehang, which is set to open in 2024. Williams described the install as an
examination of American Art through a “Black, feminist framework” and oriented in “de-
prioritizing knowledge production” and “re-prioritizing the experiential” qualities of an
exhibition.
90
These goals support the idea that relatability is more important than the
dissemination of an institutionally fabricated message, implying that curatorial practice should be
rooted in catering to the public rather than operating in accordance with a set of exclusive
intellectual standards. According to Williams, Black joy and having one’s “unique [cultural]
standpoint validated” are also chief concerns in the project, making the installation an effort to
step back from the potentially traumatizing and harmful aspects of this country’s history and
centering lived experiences.
91
This goal echoes the ongoing discourse on the over consumption
of Black trauma and death within the contemporary milieu and situates this curatorial endeavor

89
Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession, 1991, 34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595469.
90
Stephanie Sparling Williams, Zoom call with author, December 13, 2022.
91
Ibid.
32
within conversations on the need for stories of healing and freedom to be present in the historical
narratives of marginalized communities.
92

Williams made it clear that some works that have long been on display in the museum’s
American Art collection will still be present in the forthcoming galleries. She spoke specifically
on the aforementioned Bierstadt work, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt.Rosalie (1866), a
cherished piece in the museum’s collection painted during the Luminism period. The enormous
painting stands at 98 inches high and 158 inches wide, yielding the curatorial challenge of taking
up extensive real estate. Williams expressed the inarguable art historical value of the painting
and her belief that works like the Bierstadt (that have primarily been created by white men) hold
canonical importance but need to be de-emphasized. This re-positioning of an object rather than
resorting to its removal, speak profoundly to the installation’s efforts to reframe historical
surveys through object driven adaptation.

The Brooklyn Museum’s goals are situated within contemporary discourse by virtue of their
references to progressive theoretical frameworks and social movements. The next phase of their
reinstallation adopts aspects of Critical Race Theory, as well as the seminal scholarship like that
of bell hooks having to do with reciprocal education and radical care.
93
The Brooklyn Museum’s
“new approaches” are rooted in examining history across social disciplines and considering how
perspectives of materials are shaped by conceptions of race, identity, and position. Not only is
this endeavor a tactic to uplift underrepresented voices, but it also proposes a revisionist

92
Charles P. Linscott, “Introduction: #BlackLivesMatter and the Mediatic Lives of a Movement,” Black Camera 8,
no. 2 (2017): pp. 75-80, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.8.2.04, 77.
93
bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation (New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group,
2015), 289.
33
curatorial model that is oriented in forging a relationship between objects and practices of the
past and the present. The method of Brooklyn Museum’s rehanging is one of negotiation. It
proposes that historical, material, and verbal connection rests at the backbone of altering
presentations of history in service of an ever-adapting public.

34
Chapter 3: “Now Is the Time”:
Deaccession as an Act of Social Justice at the Baltimore Museum of Art

Many of the actions taken by the museums discussed in the preceding sections are rooted in the
symbolism of a structural organization of objects, whether that be a result of an artwork’s
presence in an exhibition space, or through the organization of the building in which those
objects are presented. By contrast, in 2018, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) launched a
different kind of initiative. Spearheaded by the museum’s former Director, Christopher Bedford,
their former Chief Curator, Asma Naeem, and Senior Program and Research Coordinator, Katy
Seigel, BMA de-accessed seven artworks by prominent male artists in order to create a $16.1
million acquisition fund to collect works solely by underrepresented creators. This fund led to
the acquisition of 125 works by 85 artists that include women, Black, Indigenous, self-trained,
and/or artists who have connections to Baltimore, consequently bringing to light issues such as
the cost disparities in works by marginalized individuals versus their counterparts.
94
Established
artists of the group include Beyte Saar, Benny Andrews, Valerie Maynard, and Mark Bradford,
while amongst the early career artists are Firelei Báez, Laura Ortman, Jerrell Gibbs, and Theresa
Chromati.

Bedford characterized this effort as being “[g]rounded in the belief that the story of art as we
know it is incomplete and includes a much greater number of voices and ideas that have been

94
“The BMA Diversifies Its Collection, Strengthening Its Holdings To Enhance Visitor Experience: Recent
Acquisitions and Deaccessioning Repetitive Works Redefine the Museum’s Contemporary Art Collection,” The
Baltimore Museum of Art, April 13, 2018,
https://s3.amazonaws.com/artbma/documents/press/contemporary.pdf?pdf=contemporary. Press release.
35
obscured by various forms of discrimination.”
95
This consideration of art as an “incomplete
story” articulates the museum’s desire to fill in historical gaps and re-narrate history through the
act of ownership. The decision to alter the museum’s permanent collection as opposed to
proposing a more short-term solution (such as diversifying their temporary exhibition calendar)
further showcases how this plan serves as an overhaul of methodology and symbolizes a new era
for the museum’s collecting practices. The Baltimore Museum is unique amongst the other case
studies as it positions artistic property as a factor in a museum being culturally in touch. As an
institution’s collection is a set of works that they vow to preserve, the curatorial staff at BMA
considers museums’ collections as a representation of an institution’s legacy and moreover, a
vehicle for filling blind spots within that legacy. This can be seen in the differences between
BMA’s deaccessions and others that have occurred at prominent museums, the dissonance
between the works that the museum sold and those that were acquired, as well as the curatorial
methods used to present the acquisitions in the museum’s 2021 exhibition, Now Is the Time:
Recent Acquisitions to the Contemporary Collection.

The Past and Present of Deaccession

BMA’s efforts hold a unique place in the scope of the practice of deaccessioning art, which has a
complicated history of fraught ethics and financial motivation. The definition and guidelines for
deaccession in the United States, Canada, and Mexico were established by the Association of Art
Museum Directors (AAMD), which was founded in 1916 and incorporated in 1969.
96

95
“The BMA Diversifies Its Collection, Strengthening Its Holdings To Enhance Visitor Experience.”
96
Elizabeth Blair, “As Museums Try to Make Ends Meet, 'Deaccession' Is the Art World's Dirty Word,” NPR (NPR,
August 11, 2014), https://www.npr.org/2014/08/11/339532879/as-museums-try-to-make-ends-meet-deaccession-is-
the-art-worlds-dirty-word.
36
Deaccession is defined by AAMD as the “counterpart” of acquisition and the, “practice by which
an art museum formally transfers its ownership of an object to another institution or individuals
by sale, exchange, or grant..”
97
The organization is comprised of directors of member museums
who aid in setting out policies that promote standards for practices like the handling of art from
colonized areas as well as establishing codes of ethics for collections management.
98
The AAMD
has publicly opposed the practice of deaccessioning, which has led to their development of
various policies on the matter. The most recent iterations of their policy (published in 2020 and
2022) are focused on permitting deaccession if the resulting funds are used for the purpose of the
“direct care of the collection.”
99
The organization defines “direct care” as applying to the costs
of "conservation and restoration” as well as the “materials required for storage of all
classifications of works of art.”
100
This restriction proposes practices of deaccession as only
being acceptable in cases of physically tending to objects and does not speak to how an artwork’s
concept relates to their relevance in a collection. Over the past 50-60 years, deaccession has been
implemented in ways that diverge from the AAMD’s convictions and showcase how
individualistic gain and cultural out casting have contributed to the contentious state of
deaccession today.

97
“Art Museums and the Practice of Deaccessioning,” Association of Art Museum Directors (Association of Art
Museum Directors), accessed March 2, 2023,
http://aamd.org/sites/default/files/document/PositionPaperDeaccessioning%2011.07.pdf.
98
“Standards & Practices,” Association of Art Museum Directors, https://aamd.org/standards-and-practices,
Accessed March 2, 2023, http://staging.aamd.org/standards-and-practices.
99
“Membership of AAMD Approves Change to Deaccessioning Rule, Bringing Policy in Line with American
Alliance of Museums (AAM) and Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB),” Association of Art Museum
Directors (Association of Art Museum Directors), accessed March 2, 2023, https://aamd.org/for-the-media/press-
release/membership-of-aamd-approves-change-to-deaccessioning-rule-bringing.
100
Ibid.
37
Leading examples of selling works to create funds for acquisitions date back to the 1970s. One
case in point is the Metropolitan Museum of Art; having received a donation of 200 works from
the estate of Adelaide Milton de Groot, they sold two of the pieces: Henri Rousseau’s The
Tropics (1910) and Vincent Van Gogh’s The Olive Pickers (1889) to acquire a portrait of Juan de
Pareja. The subject was the assistant of Spanish painter Diego Velázquez and was enslaved by
Velázquez at the time of the work being made. Months after this acclaimed portrait was created,
Velázquez freed de Pareja who went on to work as an artist himself. This work represents an
overlooked art historical narrative that broadens the museum’s holdings through its poignant
backstory. Less than a decade after the Met’s sales, the Brooklyn Museum’s former director,
Michael Kan, was sued by the New York attorney general for going against protocol in his sale
of $750,000 worth of “primitive art” from the museum’s Indigenous American holdings.
101

Kan’s endeavors raise critical questions on the ways in which institutional values are not just
made apparent by the works they own, but also by the works they deem unworthy of ownership.
The persistence of culturally exclusive legacies (as seen in Kan’s actions) in relation to the story
behind the Velázquez painting foregrounds the idea that the backstory of artworks is highly
relevant in the rationale for deaccessions which is addressed in a more political sense by BMA’s
initiative.

Other deaccessions have functioned in apparent correlation to the economic boom of the art
market in the 1980s-90s, when more museums began to engage in the deaccession of works that
held high market value. Sales of Wassily Kandisnky’s work by the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation garnered $47 million for the museum’s endowment while the Museum of Modern

101
Ardis E Strong, “Deaccessioning: A Pragmatic Approach,” Journal of Law and Policy 24, no. 1 (2016): p. 252,
https://doi.org/https://www.artnews.com/feature/most-controversial-museum-deaccessioning-plans-1234575019/.
38
Art set an auction record of $7.2 million for a work by surrealist painter, Giorgio de Chirico.
102

In 2005, the New York Public Library controversially sold a painting by Hudson River School
artist, Asher B. Durand, to a private collector rather than a museum, which was contentious due
to the work no longer belonging to a public facing institution, but rather to an individual.
103

Examples of deaccession that speak to alternate institutional prerogatives include the Delaware
Art Museum!s (Del Art) plans to sell William Holman Hunt!s Isabella and the Pot of
Basil (1886-8) for $4.25 million used to help pay off $19.8 million in an expansion related debt
that would have lead the museum to close.
104
The AAMD got involved in the case and
sanctioned the museum, calling for all AAMD members to end collaborations or loan agreements
with Del Art.
105
Whether the above sales were a part of a quest to bolster the high profile works
in a collection, a continuation of culturally reductive practices, or a source of economic capital,
these cases position deaccession as a method of self-perseveration for museums. There are no
direct conceptual or culturally driven motivations for the aforementioned sales (as opposed to the
Met and other examples introduced above) and they appear rooted in serving the museum rather
than the public, artists, or other cultural entities. While BMA’s deaccessions are like many other
institutions’ actions in that they oppose deaccession as strictly conversation oriented, the
museum addresses the principle of “caring for a collection” with a broad socio-cultural

102
Angelica Villa, “The Most Controversial U.S. Museum Deaccessions: Why Do Institutions Sell Art?,”
ARTnews.com (ARTnews.com, October 30, 2020), https://www.artnews.com/feature/most-controversial-museum-
deaccessioning-plans-1234575019/.
103
Ibid.
104
Deborah Vankin, “Delaware Art Museum Sanctioned for Selling Painting at Auction,” Los Angeles Times (Los
Angeles Times, June 18, 2014), https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-aamd-sanctions-
delaware-art-museum-selling-hunt-painting-20140618-story.html.
105
Ibid.
39
perspective. BMA ventures tend to its collection by ridding it of what has been seen and done
before and embedding what has not.

BMA’s Deaccessed Works and the “Now is The Time” Exhibition

The works sold by BMA in comparison to those acquired by the museum are deeply
representative of the museum goals for diversifying their collection. The deaccessed works are
clear products of the art movements during which they were created in both their style and
material properties: Abstract Expressionism in the instance of Franz Kline’s, Green Cross
(1956), Minimalism in Kenneth Noland’s Lapis Lazuli (1963), and Color Field in Jules Olitski’s
Before Darkness (1973). Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Painting (1978), which was made through
his urinating on a metallic painted canvas, presents a hyper-masculine process of artistic
production. Another work of Warhol’s, Hearts (1979), alongside Robert Rauschenberg’s Bank
Job (1979), display the silkscreen tactics present in Pop Art as well as the re-appropriation of
found materials and imagery. Most of these works come from art historical periods largely
associated with the work of white, male artists and, with the exception of Warhol and
Rauchenberg (whose work often contains social commentary) are primarily rooted in formalism
and material experimentation. The additions to BMA’s collection function in blatant opposition
to the sold works, in some cases, through their identity-driven subject matter and in others as a
result of the artist’s background.

40
Twenty-seven highlights of BMA’s acquisitions that epitomized the museum’s messaging were
unveiled to the public in a politically forward exhibition at BMA entitled, Now Is the Time:
Recent Acquisitions to the Contemporary Collection, which was on view from May to July of
2021. Works with distinctive historical provenance include Valerie Maynard’s Rufus (1968),
which draws reference to the Black experience of blues music as a coping mechanism for
suffrage, and Benny Andrews’ The Blacksmith (1988), a commentary on Black individuals
working in blue collar labor.
106
Contemporary works like Sonya Clark’s Unraveling (2015)
speak to similar topics of racial injustice. The piece consists of a confederate flag with a frayed
bottom edge that Clark invites patrons to take apart thread by thread, resulting in the collective
dismantling of the loaded symbol within American history. Other works such as Virginia
Jaramillo’s Untitled (1967) and Ed Clark’s Untitled (2004) hold a critical importance in the
exhibition as they subvert the common misconception that white, male artists were the sole
pioneers of abstract painting, as well as the notion that modernism is devoid of larger conceptual
meaning. Black painter Ed Clark was a trailblazer of the New York School, who is regarded for
his use of household brooms in place of traditional paint brushes and is deemed the first
American painter to exhibit on shaped canvases.
107
Jaramillo’s abstract, modern paintings take
inspiration from her life experience, notably through the darkened color palettes and division of
space present in her works from the 1960s which draw inspiration from her years spent living in
Watts, Los Angeles amidst the Watts riots and racial tensions of the Civil Rights Movement.
108

These two artists are symbolic of BMA’s clear interest in repositioning of art history. The

106
Karen Berisford Getty, “Searching for the Transatlantic Freedom: The Art of Valerie Maynard,” Www.vcu.edu
(dissertation, 2005), https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1846&context=etd, 26.
107
“The Estate of Ed Clark,” Hauser & Wirth wesbite, November 14, 2022,
https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/25334-ed-clark/.
108
“Virginia Jaramillo,” Pace Gallery website, October 11, 2022, https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/virginia-
jaramillo/.
41
concepts present in the works showcased in Now is the Time as well as the entirety of those
collected by the museum lead BMA’s efforts to heavily rely on the message behind artworks and
the identity of those that created them. This brings into question how much weight museums are
placing on the political symbolism of objects versus changing the institution itself within these
revisionist practices.

BMA confronts this dynamic in Now Is the Time by displaying posters showcasing data that
outlines the exclusive practices of museum collecting. A colorful timeline illustrates BMA’s past
of collecting artworks by women and people of color and a different poster reads, “Why consider
a history of purchases?...How a museum spends its money reflects what it values and what it
believed visitors will value.”
109
Through these didactics, BMA is offering a take that directly
acknowledges how collections correspond with their perception of the public’s desires. While
this idea that museums’ values are reflected in their spending may be true, this assertion
welcomes the possibility that museums can be wrong in their read of, “what it believes visitors
will value.”
110
The final didactic in the series takes ownership of the museum’s own
shortcomings and offers their goals moving forward:

Though there are many groups of artists traditionally overlooked in the
canon of contemporary art, the BMA has historically only gathered
statistics on two groups, whose work comprises the majority of this
exhibition: those who identify as African American and/or women…We
are refining our object cataloging system and practice to reflect many

109
Ibid.
110
Ibid.
42
aspects of identity—across race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation,
and gender—to describe artists as they present themselves.
111

Like the sentiments in the Brooklyn Museum’s wall text in Some New Approaches, BMA is
encouraging audiences to question the structures of the museum and engage in critical
conversations about the materials presented to them. Despite their didactic similarities, the
institutional critique present in the Now Is The Time exhibition is vastly different from that of the
Brooklyn Museum’s as well as of LACMA’s initiatives. While the Brooklyn Museum welcomed
members of local, Indigenous communities to participate in the planning of their reinstallation
and supported the public’s inquiry, BMA invites audiences to consider necessary systemic
changes after the fact. Despite showcasing additions to their collection, Now Is The Time is a
temporary exhibition rather than an altering the permanent home of a collection or reinstalling it
for the foreseeable future. BMA’s efforts reconfigure their collection, but grant the public short-
term access to it which counters its ability to reach an expansive audience and possibly have a
long term impact. The Baltimore Museum of Art’s actions exemplify collections as being a key
site for narrative reimagining while bringing up the question of how to display an institution’s
tangible commitments to inclusion driven goals with a lasting influence.

111
“Equity + Data Analysis” graphic from the Now is The Time exhibition, provided to author by the Baltimore
Museum of Art, 2021.
43
The Who versus the What in Museum Futures

While museum development through the lens of object-hood aids in contextualizing the
materiality of change, an equally important consideration is the identity of those responsible for
the objects a museum displays. In February of 2022, Christopher Bedford left BMA to take on
the role of Director of the San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOMA), an occurrence that speaks
to this. Bedford’s move came in the aftermath of the resignation of Gary Garrels, SFMOMA’s
longest tenured curator.
112
Garrels had been accused of various racially tinged indiscretions and
was on called out on social media for his comments on “not believing in any kind of
discrimination,” and defense of collecting works by white, male artists.
113
Despite being a white
man (as is Garrels) Bedford was deemed fit for the role given his exceptional, “track record
around diversity” at BMA.
114
In the case of SFMOMA, it appears that the identity of their new
leader fell secondary to the hope for impact that he would have. The museum championed the
“What” over the “Who,” which is an arguably detrimental decision in the scope of making
strides towards equity. SFMOMA’s hiring of Bedford showcases the concept of consequential
repair through leadership with a possibly short-term efficacy in these diversity focused museum
developments.

112
Carol Pogash, “Its Top Curator Gone, SFMOMA Reviews Its Record on Race,” The New York Times (The New
York Times, July 22, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/arts/design/sfmoma-gary-garrels-
resignation.html.
113
Ibid.
114
Robin Pogrebin, “San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Names New Director,” The New York Times (The New
York Times, February 9, 2022), https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/09/arts/design/san-francisco-museum-
christopher-bedford-baltimore.html.
44
A year after Bedford’s departure, The Baltimore Museum of Art embarked on a new era of
leadership that symbolizes their desires for more sustainable change. In February of 2023, BMA
announced Asma Naeem, the museum’s former Chief Curator as the new Director after a 10-
month nationwide search.
115
As a Pakistani woman, Naeem is the first person of color to oversee
the museum since its founding in 1914.
116
Having been raised in Baltimore, in addition to having
many successes in uplifting marginalized voices at other museums, Naeem serves as a beacon of
progress for the already trailblazing institution and their forthcoming goals.
117
Naeem explained
that she is, “committed to being more relevant as an anchor of [the city]” and promoting local
voices in addition to those neglected by history through the museum’s programs.
118
This
“changing of the guards” at SFMOMA and BMA speaks to the relationship between museum
leadership and the institution’s progress. This fundamentally addresses how the timeliness of a
museum can be determined by those who manage it and cannot rely solely on the socio-political
narratives that objects portray nor the conceptual messages of the sites that house them.

115
Hillarie M Sheets, “Baltimore Museum of Art Taps Its Chief Curator as Its Next Director,” The New York Times
(The New York Times, January 24, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/arts/design/baltimore-museum-
director-asma-naeem.html.
116
Ibid.
117
Ibid.
118
Ibid.
45
Conclusion:
The Museum as a “Living Organism”

The three case studies explored in this thesis collectively bring into question the fixity of the
museum form on physical and metaphysical levels. Whether they are attempting to answer calls
for inclusion through edificial change, revisionist curatorial practice, or collection-based reform,
they show that permanence in museum structures is volatile. Fundamentally, these ongoing
changes assert that nothing can and should last forever and that stagnation deters growth. BMA
leaders, Asma Naeem and Katy Siegel, encapsulate this need in an op-ed that was published by
the Art Newspaper in October of 2020. They write that, "[m]useums are not mausoleums or
treasure houses, they are living organisms, oriented to the present as well as the past.”
119
This
proposition of museums having life cycles personnifies them in relation to the cultural climate
and frames these institution’s changes as reflective of greater social changes.
120

It is crucial to note that these case studies and what they symbolize do not exist within an echo
chamber of institutional development occurring solely in encyclopedic museums. Models of the
“socially conscious museum” have been formulated on differing scales across the museological
landscape. For example, the now closed Underground Museum was notable in its occupancy of a
humble storefront in Arlington Heights, Los Angeles; its mission was to make “world class art”

119
Katy Siegel, “Baltimore Museum of Art Curators Respond to Deaccessioning Criticism,” The Art Newspaper -
International art news and events (The Art Newspaper - International art news and events, September 28, 2021),
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/10/13/baltimore-museum-of-art-curators-respond-to-deaccessioning-
criticism.
120
Holo and Álvarez, Remix: Changing Conversations in Museums of the Americas, 2.
46
accessible to local communities.
121
The space, which prioritized works by Black artists and
working-class individuals, doubled as a gathering space for free classes, fresh food distribution,
and family events.
122
The museum permanently closed in March of 2022 as a result of the
founders need to formally grieve the loss of their co-founder and inspiration, Noah Davis.
Davis’s wife, Karon Davis, further explained the closure stating that, “[i]t is also undeniable that
a great deal has changed since Noah’s passing in 2015: COVID, the movement for Black lives,
and the growth of his legacy have impacted us all individually and as a family. These issues are
affecting how each of us views the museum and our roles within it.”
123
The closing of the
Underground Museum furthers the idea that museums cannot be de-tethered from the personal
and cultural contexts in which they exist.

While encyclopedic museums operate on a much vaster scale than spaces like the Underground
Museum, this example shows that museums rely not only on dynamic exhibition cycles and the
presentation of illustrious objects to stay afloat, but also the people at the core of them and the
cultural backdrop that influences their bandwidth. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
Brooklyn Museum, and The Baltimore Museum of Art are each grappling with how they can
reflect the ebb and flow of political energies, century-long fights for justice, the ethical
consequences of those fights, as well as the need for increased representation of marginalized
narratives. As efforts to contend with museums’ problematic histories, these projects are
reflections of the present moment and are attempts to lengthen the lifespans of museums’
relevance through adopting a sense of the sociopolitcal “now.” Through considering museums

121
“About Us,” theunderground.museum, The Underground Museum wesbite accessed March 2, 2023.
https://theunderground.museum/about/#history.
122
Ibid.
123
Ibid.
47
as entities that must evolve in order to survive, we can both empathize with them and understand
the dangers of their stagnancy.
124
Under this framework, the discussed practices of augmentation
are not necessarily leaps and bounds into an unprecedented future, but rather a natural (though
long overdue) progression in the evolutionary development of museums.

124
Holo and Álvarez, Remix: Changing Conversations in Museums of the Americas, 2.
48
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Creator Bookhard, Storm Bria-Rose (author)

Core Title Face lift: the reconfiguration of three North American museums from the outside in

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Degree Conferral Date 2023-05

Publication Date 04/20/2023

Defense Date 04/20/2023

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