re:mancipation: The end is just the beginning

As the re:mancipation exhibition draws to a close, host Gianofer Fields talks with Chazen Director Amy Gilman  about how the groundbreaking project changed the museum and its staff and how it will live on.

Meet Me at the Chazen is a podcast about the the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Chazen Museum of Art, the largest collecting museum in the Big Ten. As we report what’s happening here, we'll also explore what it means to be an art museum at a public university and how art museums can help enrich and strengthen the communities they serve. Meet Me at the Chazen theme and incidental music is “Swinging at the Pluto Lounge,” composed and performed by Marvin Tate and friends, and is used with permission of the artists.

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Transcript

 Amy Gilman  00:00
 In this particular case, actually the person who needed to have the veil lifted was Lincoln, right?
 
 Gianofer Fields  00:13
 Meet Me at the Chazen. I'm your host, Gianofer Fields. On May 4, the Sanford Biggers sculpture entitled Lifting the Veil made its public debut. June 25 is the last day the re:mancipation project will be on view at the Chazen Museum of Art. It also marks the end of our first season. We'll take a few weeks off before returning for Season Two, with a focus on our new exhibition entitled Insistent Presence. It's hard to believe what took over two years to come to fruition is ending. However, according to director Amy Gilman, that doesn't mean it's over.

Amy Gilman  00:53
 I think that we could have produced the original concept, right, which was in response to Frederick Douglass 's comments at the unveiling of the original sculpture and DC, which was, I want to see a monument where the freed man is standing next to Lincoln as an equal. So that's like the first obvious place to go, right, and we did, and that's on the logo. And we produced the original 3-D printed versions with that in mind. And that was an initial, what I call a first draft. And one of the things that I think has been so marvelous about the length of time we've been in this process, and allowing our thoughts about this, and our understanding of what was going to happen in this process, and the artistic responses to develop, is that that first draft has sort of stuck around, as kind of okay, this is where you go first. And then Sanford, sort of decided, I'm not going to do a response work, we're not going to realize that in marble, we're not going to realize that, and he stepped away from it.
 
 Although I suspect, I believe that he and Mark were still playing around with ideas, they started thinking about the Tuskegee piece of Booker T. Washington, and the piece in Central Park that's a portrait of Frederick Douglass, and sort of thinking about those things. But they were doing that over on the side. And in some ways, it was an exercise that was in dialogue with all of the other artistic things that were happening during the course of everybody's visits, and the recordings and all of that. So by the time we got to summer, last year, so 2020 to the end of the summer, we were really homing in on the exhibition design. So the end of this phase of this project. And that was the moment where the idea came back, that actually there is a work of Sanford's that needs to happen. And that work is not a quote, response piece. It's a sculpture that is in dialogue with and in response to all of the artistic responses that we have been doing over the last several years.
 
 Gianofer Fields  03:46
 So the one of the things that I find I'm finding interesting about this is that when you think about a response, it gives so much value, and so much weight to what would be considered the original. And it feels to me like the further and further I became part of this process, this process unveiled, the less and less weight the Emancipation Group had. It. It's almost to the point now where I walk in the gallery, and I almost don't see it.

Amy Gilman  04:20
 Well, that's really wonderful to think about, because, in some ways, I feel that by going very deep into that object into the emancipation of the original Emancipation Group, and picking it apart, and doing the iconographic analysis, we have both made it more understandable and we have removed some of its aura of power, right? Because if you understand that it is constructed in order to convey a certain kind of message, then you see how that quote writing basically is realized in 3-D. And then you can let it go, right? Or you can riff on it in another way, or you can go in another direction. And it's not so much that you're now responding to the object, you are actually now taking the conversation in a more rich direction, because you actually understand the original object even better. And you can reference without elevating that original object. Does that make sense?

Gianofer Fields  05:33
 It does. And I think that's really, that is really a delicate dance. In order for this to make sense, it has to be there. But it doesn't have to have that overarching overwhelming presence. It doesn't have to be mount on high, and everything else responded to the center, like trying to get up the hill. Right? It's the foundation of the hill. Yeah. But it's no longer the peak.
 
 Amy Gilman  05:57
 Yes. Oh, and, to tell you a little story of that, I think very much demonstrates what you're talking about is, so there are three versions of the Emancipation Group in the exhibition, one, two marbles, and one bronze, small bronze. And we had discussed at one point early on in the exhibition process, the possibility of asking Boston to lend us the outdoor piece that they had taken off view. And we thought there are lots of things would be really interesting about that. But when we started talking about what would happen when you put a whatever, 12- to 14-foot bronze version in the gallery, in this architectural space, is that it, actually, it was almost immediately we thought, oh, no, we can't do it, because it returns the original to an elevated level. And it does it visually, but therefore it does it in your mind. Right? If you were to go into the back space, and have that work there, all of the work we had done in order to both understand and take that object apart and understand it better in order to remove some of the kind of awe factor, like would just be completely restored if the next thing that you saw was this huge bronze version that's above you, right? So actually, the thing that had to be really big, was the projection, right, was the visual and performative and audio responses to the project. Because at this point, they're not all responding to the individual object, we're having a dialogue about what it means to be emancipated, and what it means to portray that in a museum space in a richer way.

Gianofer Fields  08:10
 So Amy, you said something at the [unveiling on May 4.] You mentioned embarrassment. And I was shocked to hear you say that. So I'm really interested in sort of where that came from.
 
 Amy Gilman  08:33
 Sure, so to clarify, I did not use the word embarrassment in relationship to the project. I'm not, there's nothing embarrassing about the project. There's nothing I'm ashamed of about the project. One of the things that I was responding to was, in the New York Times article about the project, the reporter interviewed Sanford, and one of the quotes that is early on in the article is that, you know, he's talking about being here for his exhibition, and having the first conversations about this work, and having sort of acknowledging that the museum didn't know what to do with the object, right? And that's a conversation that happened with me, with the then-curator, with other people on the team. And he said, ‘I sensed that they were almost ashamed of the work of a being in the collection,’ I think, is exactly what he said, I'm paraphrasing, and when I read the article, I was really taken aback by that. And one of the things I have learned about this process and I have learned about myself, not just in this process, but it has really grounded me in this process, in this project is that every time I am uncomfortable, I need to sit with it for a minute.
 
 Because it's really easy to get your back up a bit, right? To be like, ‘Well, I'm not ashamed of this object. It's just, you know, it's an object, I didn't have anything to do with bringing in the collection, I don't have anything to do with its history.’ And oh, wait a minute. And then I realized that I, that he was, of course, he was sensing something that was there. Sanford is an incredibly observant empathic person like he, I knew that he was right, I just didn't know what it was that he was articulating. And after I sat with it for a little bit, I realized that least in my perception, that the thing that he was seeing was my embarrassment. And my actually my shame at the fact that I don't believe that in the museum world, we have any idea what to do with problematic objects in our collections, that we do not have the kinds of tools in our toolbox that would allow us to really not just understand them, but help our audience understand them, and contextualize them in really, really nuanced, thoughtful ways. And I am embarrassed that I have spent more than 20 years in the museum field, and I looked around, and I had no models for what to do. So from my perspective, in that moment, pre-re:mancipation, was, you leave it on view, you take it off, you add a label, or the most radical version is, you invite an artist to respond. Alright, now, here's what I have decided is the problem with the last piece.

Alright, the last choice, which is in the field at this point, since Fred Wilson's exhibition, Mining the Museum, is like the go-to museum response is that I actually believe now, that that abdicates the museum's responsibility of being involved, it actually puts the pressure on the artist to do the work. And to educate the audience, the museum, about something that is actually the museum's responsibility, right? So he was sensing something that was very real. And I didn't know how to solve it.

Gianofer Fields  13:10
 But that's an, Amy, you're looking at a century or so of museum practice, where it's been pretty much white male rich led, that's an awful lot for one person to take on. I mean, that ...
 
 Amy Gilman  13:29
 So, I do actually feel like there's an existential crisis in the museum field around this. And the moment that we started that conversation in 2019, with Sanford and Mark, I didn't know what to do next. And I and I was like, okay, well, we're going to invite Sanford to do a response work, that seems like a good idea. Because that's the only option that felt even remotely progressive to me. And then COVID happens. And then George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the, like summer and fall of COVID, and Black Lives Matter. And this reckoning that we are all coming to about race in this country, and, and about actually what it means to be American, right? And it was an incredibly painful period for everybody. It was the hardest professional period of my life, because I didn't know what was going to happen to the museum, to the university. Right, there was so much unknown, we all lived that, and then they then the then Sanford reappeared, and they had started MASK at that time. And he was like, I want to introduce you to these people. And if you remember the conversation between Mark and I that we did earlier this spring in which it became clear that Mark didn't know how bad things were here during that period. And that I was really struggling. And we didn't know what we were doing going forward. And so like there was this, like, why aren't they replying to us? Why aren't they moving on this? And then I didn't know like that they were basically like, Mark’s been working at home since before working at home was a thing, right? And so they're like, they're wanting to move on something. And I'm stuck in this place where I'm not even sure what's going to happen to the museum or the university, right? So there was this moment where I just took the meeting. And now I look back on that I'm like I was, so I just wanted so badly, to have something that I could reach towards, because I had spent a whole year only being able to plan for the museum, like a week or two out. You know, like, because so much was changing so quickly, that once we started the conversation again, I was like, I didn't actually realize how much I needed that until later. Right. But I like immediately felt this connection with the team, and the conversations were really rich in a way that I had not been able to have for a while. Because when you're in a kind of survival mode, like basically, you know, you're planning on a week-to-week basis.
 
 Gianofer Fields  16:40
 I'm thinking about how important communication is to the point where, when you're working with an unknown and everything is unknown. It's such a human instinct to grab onto something that they believe they can have some sort of saying control over. But this wasn't it, because you really you had a part in it. But you it's not like, I guess will be considered a normal exhibit where you would you when you're curious, you’d decide what happened, who was going to be here. So it was it was literally grabbing on to in a time where everything was in turmoil. And it wasn't even flipped upside down. It was spun and flipped upside down. Because we didn't, so many things were happening that we had not experienced on the level and as fast as they were happening. You're still, you're, the thing that was hope and grounding was an unknown.
 
 Amy Gilman  17:37
 That's a wonderful way of putting it. So I really think that that COVID and that moment, right, early ‘21, was, I'm not sure we could have gotten right to the project if COVID hadn't happened. And if the summer of 2020 hadn't happened the way that it did, because I think it opened up possibilities that didn't exist before. And you're right. Like I actually did immediately brace embrace an unknown, you would have thought I would have gone in the other direction and been like, I need something concrete. But actually COVID had already called into question a lot of assumptions we in the museum field had had about how museums function, how we plan, how we program, and how we do what we do. And we had already been talking about how we didn't want to come back with the same, with exactly the same ideas like, when you go through something traumatic, you don't get to just like fix it and go and like you're like, you're perfect again, right? Like that doesn't work that way. People like to think it works that way. But if you don't let yourself be affected by what's, what's going on around you, then you're not learning. And so by early ‘21, by the time we were really in deep conversations, I was in this very rich learning space. It's still very stressful, but it was this openness to, okay, you know, like half the museum's not open, I have no idea what's going on. So let's just go forward. Trusting that something interesting is going to happen because you have really smart, creative, thoughtful people working on it. And, and I honestly do not think we could have done that If COVID hadn't happened and really had like stopped everything for a bit.
 
 So then it really developed over time because we didn't know in the summer of 2020 when they are summer ‘21 When they made their first visit here where we were going to be in a year and a half, like we didn't know, we didn't know, we were just developing our relationships with each other. We started off in this very technical way by having them scan all the stuff, but we weren't really like, we weren't really thinking about the response stuff at that point. So then it wasn't really until they came back in early April of 22, that we had this week, where there were 15-20 people in town and the, they took over the galleries, and it was this creative explosion of intersection, and also relationship-building, and just like really, really rich in a way that does happen when you get super-creative people together, but doesn't often happen, in the creation of it, in the museum space, right? So creating that kind of community. And, inviting, you know, having Sanford and Mark and Guy inviting people who they have been connected to for many years here, and they came because they, they have relationships with those people. And that is, I mean, it created a community here, that I think Wildcat actually put it really beautifully at the opening in February was that the stuff we're talking about is really tough. But the process is really joyful. And that is a beautiful place to be. And, you know, embedded within that joy is an acknowledgment that there are tears and there's pain, and there's difficulty and there's conflict, and there's all of those things, but the place the community comes together with joy.
 
 Gianofer Fields  22:06
 And it really felt to me, like a funeral for the old museum ways. You know, you how you, you put somebody to rest, if you tell all the stories, joyful sort of cleansing ritual, that even though I was able to witness it, and there was some people in the gallery who were able to witness it, it was almost, not a private event, but a family affair, like a family affair. And like turning the tide, changing the energy of the museum, maybe doing a ritualistic end to the old ways of putting on exhibits. But it was something that was, I have done a whole bunch of stuff, but it's one of the things that I will always remember, not because of any tape or anything, but because of what I witnessed. It was a whole different sort of thing going on, we're titles didn't matter. Age, when none of that stuff mattered. We were all sort of in this thing together, going through something that was incredibly emotional and kind of scary. And nobody wants to ugly cry in the middle of a museum, but it was happening. And there was support for that, and the relationships being formed. So it was this whole sort of paradigm shift, world shift, but definitely something that marked for me, in my head, the end of what traditional museum experiences would be or could be or have been.
 
 Amy Gilman  23:42
 So I could not agree more. And I think that personally, I also feel that one of the things that we are doing from a museum perspective is we are redefining what it means to apply rigor to something. And I have to give Rich Medina the credit for that phrasing and that thinking, because it is the kind of thing that if you were to say to 100 museum professionals, we’re applying a kind of rigor to this that didn't exist before, they would be like ‘What are you talking about? We are the definition of rigor! We know how to, we know how to rigor!’ and again, that is the get-your-back-up response, right? Oh, no, no, that's, ‘Rigor is our business.’ Right? ‘Rigor is our business.’
 
 Gianofer Fields  24:42
 Don’t you go telling me how to rigor!
 
  Amy Gilman  24:43
 Rigor mortis, right? So I do see that this process, and it has been a journey for everybody who has worked, who works at the museum, who has and involved in the project, either large or small, right? some people have dipped in and out, and the project isn't over, there are big parts of this project that are still to come, is that it has really made me think about what, who has gotten to define what it means to be rigorous. And what we're going to do to redefine that term in a way that feels less static. And now, I feel enormous possibilities within the field; I also believe that some of the most innovative groundbreaking work is happening at university art museums. Because it is very difficult to do, to do that institutionally, at really big civic places. It's not that it can't happen, it's that there's a lot of things in place that make, that make status quo, kind of the easy route, right. And because we're within a larger university, than that is dedicated to education, to learning, to research to do all of these things, we have an obligation from my perspective, to apply this new kind of rigor to everything that we do in various ways.

And it's not all going to look like re:mancipation, it's not about duplicating, like, the next project isn't going to look like re:mancipation, it's not going to feel like re:mancipation, but it will be profoundly impacted by the work that we have done here. And, and I do believe that we and a number of other museums around the country are doing things that are already drawing attention from other sector, or not just other sectors, other museums, larger museums, but also, we're not waiting for that. Right? I'm just we're just gonna, like, this is, this is the rest of my career, doing this work. Right? And I hope that that's going to continue to be here, because here is really a vital dynamic, we have a great team of people, and they have gone on their own journey. Right? And that has not been without bumps. And I think, you know, some of the other episodes of the podcasts, I think had been, you know, they had been particularly some of the team had been really vulnerable about their own journey. And I love that, that it actually, it has helped me redefine also the sort of line between personal and professional because there's this either, like you have a hard line and your personal life is over here, and your professional life is over here. Or it's like so imbricated that it's really messy, right. But I do think that doing something groundbreaking and dynamic, in this creative way, has an impact on you as a person and vice versa. And it allows you to be in a richer space. And that is really interesting.

Gianofer Fields  28:40
 I usually don't spend this much time in a setting. I'm like, I'm usually in and out. And it's really interesting to watch people. How can I say this? I've been in places where you know, it's just a job, right? Where you people go in, they do their job they leave, that's it. That's not what happens here. It's a real, it's this, you got to listen to and talk to people who we're dealing with, really, how they look at the world and how they've moved in the world. And you know, what would you call that? When you, accepting their privilege, understanding that they may have been some entitlement, but seeing all these things in themselves while wrestling with these very heavy ideas, revolving around race, enslavement, people being silent. You have George Floyd, you have Breonna Taylor through this like, this emotional upheaval. And instead of having to deal with that, on their own, they could deal with it, move through it by working on this project. Like Kate said something very interesting that, you know, in their youth, they, they could just walk past that sculpture or not think about it, you know, I would walk past it and give it the finger or like, you know, make some of the people in the gallery, especially that guy with that giant five-head, six-head, it was very easy to do that. But that was also a shield to keep me away from having to think about how deep that was. People had to go deep for this, they had to show up at work. And then they had to problem-solve with folks who were challenging that and pulling that out of them. And so it just, I don't even know if this is a question. But it really is like, I don't want to ask you what comes next? Or how there's no idea there's no even language about how do you top that? That's just ridiculous. I kind of want to ask you, but I also kind of just wanted to see it, you know, because I don't imagine that you're approaching the next exhibit and the next exhibit and the next exhibit through this lens in a way where you have to put as we would say the re:mancipation stank on it. You know, it's like, it's like, I kind of want to see how you move through it, and witness that, instead of asking you to tell me because I think in asking you to tell me, it goes right back to that original problem of yeah, this is how you do an exhibit?

Amy Gilman  31:18
 I, well, I don't even have an answer yet. I, one of the most interesting things that's happening right now, is that Alicia, and Mark, and Guy and I are having lots of conversations about the process, right? Like, what did what did we learn from this, all of this, that are actually about, well, what could happen next? Or how are we going, I mean, I am going to work with this crew, for the rest of my career, right, they're stuck with me. I love them, I have developed personal relationships with them, I respect them enormously. I, you know, I want, I want them to go be able to go out into the world and do the kind of world-changing work that I know that they are totally capable of. And if I and the Chazen can continue to be a part of that, then I want that to happen, right. And I don't know exactly what that looks like yet. And I don't think they do either, you would have to ask them. But we're back to the space where we don't know what the next thing is going to be. We've kind of hit a button on a milestone on the re:mancipation project, with the exhibition realization, and it's coming to a close at the end of this month in June. And we are going to finish the documentary and we're going to do the catalog. And that is really the re:mancipation project as it is now conceived, right. But that is not the re:mancipation tentacles that will then go out into the world. And some of that will be re:mancipation-specific, right, there will probably be some of the elements of things that we have produced that will go out into the world in other forms, or be at institutions that help them you know, reinterpret things, and the Mellon-supported curriculum project is still ongoing, they're doing testing with the community center in town, like all of that is going to continue to happen and it's going to have long legs. But we don't actually know yet, what that looks like.

And now I'm back to the, okay, now we're learning, right, and we are in a really different place, because so much of the learning in the beginning was like developing the relationships and developing a way of working together and, you know, in the beginning, right, like MASK, the Chazen is a client of MASK. And over the course of this project like that has very, you know, that has continued to evolve and change, but it's still you know, that is still sort of how we had been working together. And so, additionally, our relationships have changed because they're now more personal. And we have this collective experience together is, I don't know what is going to be the next project we do with Sanford, right, like, is there something next is there something that continues to feed his interests? That is that continues to be different than what he is doing with other institutions? Is this a different outlet? And is, is the Chazen a key part of that? Are we a small part of that? I don't know. And I'm, the I don't know is a pretty powerful place to be. And that's, I think that's really, it's really wonderful because I feel that we did something here. And I don't get to decide what the long-term impact of that is for anybody other than for myself. Right. But it, it is the most important project I've ever done in my career. And it only could be realized, because the right group of people came together at the right moment, and did not let fear or anxiety or status quo stop us from doing what we needed to do.

Gianofer Fields  36:06
 I don't know if you realize how much your face and your demeanor changes. When you talk about the from the original, I don't know, to this I don’t know.
 
 Amy Gilman  36:15
 Really? Oh, that's fascinating.
 
 Gianofer Fields  36:17
 Yeah. It's like the excitement, like when you like, at one point it looked with like, is she gonna cry in the beginning? Because it was just such a, it was from such a tumultuous, shaky, shaky ground. So the I don't know what's like a I don't know, like, I don't know how this is going to turn out. But this is like, I don't know, this new. The second, I don't know what, like, I don't know and this is awesome.
 
 Amy Gilman  36:38
 So alright, so I want to say something about it, because I want to come back to like, where we sort of started this conversation about delving deeply into that original feeling of not having a toolbox and not having tools in the toolbox to be able to do this. And this idea of like, feeling embarrassed and ashamed. So part of what I think you are seeing here is that I don't feel that way anymore. There is a path forward. And I do have tools in the toolbox. And part of that is that we now have I have personal relationships with people who are pushing me in really dynamic ways, and who have helped themselves and us do something that had not happened before.
 
 And is it perfect? No. There's lots to critique. That's okay. But I do feel like I have now added something to the, how do you deal with objects in your collection, and how do you work with artists, without putting all the burden on artists to provide all of the interpretation, right? How do you leverage artistic response without making it their responsibility to respond for the institution? And really, I really do think that that is at the center of this is that part of the reason why the relationships are so robust now is because the institution and I did not abdicate our responsibilities in the project, right? We weren't saying, Okay, I need you as a Black artist to help us as a white institution, just like I need you to do the interpretation for us. Because like, we're not comfortable doing that. And just like putting that burden on, on artists, and instead, the invitation is, we are also going to do some deep work. And Janine is doing all of this amazing research, right? And we're going to put it all out there, and we're going to all talk about it. And we're going to redefine rigor in a very different way. And all of the artistic responses are also going to layer into this space. Right? And so I do feel like no wonder why you're perceiving an excitement as opposed to a trepidation about the ‘I don't know,’ because the I don't know is like, oh, but now I have I have a way forward. I don't know exactly what it looks like. But we have done something that I didn't know that we could do, and we have worked with people who I didn't know before, who I believe will change the world. And I want us to be a part of that.
 
 And I think one of the things that happens, or certainly happened to me in the beginning of COVID and the summer of 2020 is a feeling that I cannot impact, personally the situation, right? That I can do my own work, I can acknowledge my own privilege, I can think about this but in reality like, it just it, you can feel so powerless. But actually, I can affect this institution. This is the thing I can do. This is the thing I have influence over, or control depending on how you look at it. And so this is, really committing to this is part of saying, I'm going to affect my part of the world, right. And museums in 30 years, do I have any control over whether anybody even remembers this project? No. But we are certainly going to make it hard for them to ignore it.
 
 Gianofer Fields  41:10
 You've been listening to Meet Me at the Chazen. Our guest Amy Gilman is the director of UW–Madison’s Chazen Museum of Art. Meet Me at the Chazen is a production of the Chazen Museum of Art on the campus of UW–Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. For more information about the museum, its collections and exhibitions visit chazen.wisc.edu. As I mentioned in the intro, we'll take a few weeks off before returning for season two with a focus on our next exhibition entitled Insistent Presence. Thank you for listening and being a part of our first season.

Editor’s Note: The transcript has been edited to reflect the correct date of the Lifting the Veil debut on May 4.