As I exit the train at 103rd Street in Corona and walk out onto the sunny, open air elevated platform, I hear fast paced music and I feel a sense of anticipation. I descend the metal stairs and exit the station into Corona Plaza where a few hundred people are gathered; some move among the tents of activities and local businesses set up along the perimeter, others talk and laugh, while children play together. A circle of people has formed in the middle of the plaza around the local performance group Danza Azteca Chichimeca who fill the space with the energy of their movements and the rapid drum beats of their music. The performers are dressed in elaborate traditional Aztec costumes adorned with long feathers and beads which jump with them as they dance, creating a blur of color and energy. It is hard not to move along with them as they perform traditional pre-Columbian movements that continue to be practiced across Mexico and by immigrants in the United States. Today the dance has evolved from its indigenous Mesoamerican roots to also embody a political call for civil rights and to decolonize contemporary cultural traditions ( Guerrero, 2010 ). In that moment though, on this sunny late May afternoon, whether or not the audience knows the history of the dance or its contemporary political implications is secondary to the enthusiasm and joy that is shared among the attendees gathered in Corona Plaza for a regular Oye Corona! community art event sponsored by the Queens Museum. While Danza Azteca Chichimeca performs, some families are gathered at a large craft table under a tent making art with a professional artist and a group of children has taken over the remaining free space in the plaza for a game of soccer. Corona residents told me that the small, centrally located Corona Plaza has become “the gateway to our neighborhood” and that “when something happens there, everyone is coming” (Corona Community Member, anonymous interview with author, December 5, 2014; P. Reddy, interview with author, December 5, 2014). This former underused parking lot that became a public plaza through a unique initiative of the Queens Museum is clearly the place to be on Oye Corona! Saturdays, it is abuzz with people coming out to be in community in this active, inclusive commons.
Introduction
Art museums were established as places to collect, preserve, interpret, and study objects of art and to educate people about them. These art objects drove all choices about the design of the building and its galleries that would display them and exhibitions and programs concerning them, as well as admission prices and hours. Art museums have been repositories for historical knowledge, holding the art created by past generations for the fine art education of future generations. Today though, this image of an art museum as an austere encyclopedic archive of fine art objects for audiences to observe is antiquated. Across the world, art museums are challenging the standard of object-driven missions to instead place arts engagement and cooperation with audiences and neighboring communities as core principles which drive their work, encouraging programming that is directly relevant to the daily lives of neighboring communities. This is happening partially in response to new opportunities presented by the art world as socially engaged art becomes codified and supported by institutional gatekeepers. Simultaneously, it is also enabled by shifting policy priorities as funders and city officials recognize the impacts of art through creative placemaking, municipal residencies, and other forms of embedded arts engagement on community development and local policy. As institutions situated at the intersection of the art world and city policymakers, art museums are uniquely positioned to engage art toward lasting change for urban residents and communities.
Fig. 1.1
View of Corona Plaza from the elevated subway platform. Photo by author.
Fig. 1.2
Stairs from Corona Plaza to the 7 train elevated subway platform. Photo by author.
The art world and policy leaders are two seemingly disparate domains, yet both are interested in learning how art museums are collaborating with community organizations and connecting with neighboring communities. This work involves a complex interplay of power and opportunity among artists, museum administrators, city officials, local residents, and others negotiating the shape of an urban neighborhood and what happens there. Because the art world is starting to recognize socially engaged art, and policy leaders have come to value the opportunities created by the use of art as a mechanism for community involvement, partnerships with local individuals and institutions are essential for art museum survival and relevancy. Simultaneously it is important for museums to recognize that residents and local artists are significant initiators of and participants in art projects that can make neighborhood connections which resonate with local issues. Nontraditional, unexpected relationships are fruitful though challenging to build in authentic, mutually beneficial terms. To address these complexities, this book dissects the nuanced relationships between the Queens Museum in New York City with other organizations and its neighboring communities. Together these analyses demonstrate the interplay of multiple actors in achieving impact within one urban neighborhood. The book also addresses cases of collaboration and partnerships throughout the world, discussing the opportunities that arise through these efforts as well as the concomitant interrelated challenges and tensions. The examples in this book are about people coming together, uniting their individual experiences and perspectives in cooperation, a process that is inherently messy and complicated. Yet the interplay of opportunity and creativity in each case has implications for innovation that can be extrapolated to other places, communities, and contexts within their local frameworks.
Today art museums are among the many civic and cultural institutions pulled in conflicting directions as they work to maintain relevance in the shifting social, economic, and political landscape that influences changing priorities among audiences, city officials, funders, and art world gatekeepers while also challenging museum stability. They must address how to continue to serve their missions as art museums within an environment of great upheaval and change in their immediate communities and in the world at large. Outside the art museum, structural inequality is exacerbated among neighboring marginalized residents facing economic and social exclusion making their daily lives difficult, and visiting a museum inconceivable. Other neighbors are challenged as the social and physical infrastructure of their home community changes in unexpected ways and new development often leads to displacement. While cities individually face specific pressures unique to their local social, political, economic, and geographic contexts, collectively all cities are challenged to address core problems recognized at the ninth World Urban forum held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2018. These include: extreme economic disparity, inadequate affordable housing amid increasing evictions, rapid migration leading to issues of economic opportunity and social cohesion, inequitable access to public space and basic city services, aging infrastructure, and need for expansion of public transportation systems (Kuala Lumpur declaration on cities 2030, 2018). These pressures are persistent and globally intersecting while experienced differently within the context of each local place.
Artists have long made artwork in response to social, political, and economic upheaval, tackling pressing subject matter through art in an effort to shift the conversation, call out new perspectives, or serve as reflective places of healing for audiences or even just for themselves. Curators, arts administrators, and others in the cultural industries are finally catching up to artists, finding opportunities to further their audience engagement mission by embracing the conflicted outside world through programming. As museums and other cultural institutions adopt this socially engaged turn in art practice, new forms of engagement with audiences and community organizations become the norm, extending expectations beyond that of tacit viewer and art object to a mutually beneficial, ongoing relationship. The art museum becomes a place where objects and people perform together to create multilayered experiences that are directly relevant to the world beyond the museum walls. This is an art museum dedicated to engagement with people and building relationships over time through art; it is not just about art objects stored in climate controlled environments separated from audiences. Rather, art is the confluence of aesthetic, socio-political, and cooperative impulses that may result in an object but often the practice itself is the lasting artwork. This displaces the power to define what is considered art from certified expert curators and directors to participants and audiences, giving people the power to decide if their community values a project and how to best move it forward. This redefined art museum shares power among museum staff, artistic leadership, artists, and the community in an ongoing relationship that is consistently renegotiated as contexts change and projects evolve. The museum is a linchpin in navigating the divides of culture, race, economics, and political and social difference to impact their local communities.
This book examines the role of art museums, but also includes a broader scope of institutions from art collectives and smaller art organizations to non-art groups such as community centers, civic institutions, and libraries. Each of these institutions plays a part in connecting art practices with communities, and in taking art experience beyond the traditional frame of looking at art in a gallery to deeper, cooperative engagement in public spaces across urban neighborhoods. This book is not a history of museums nor a history of Corona, Queens, where the Queens Museum is located. Instead I examine the Queens Museum in depth along with other cases to analyze the broader trend of art museums working cooperatively with neighboring communities both through programming within the museum space and beyond its walls.
The Socially Engaged Turn in Museums
Museums began as grand collecting institutions that cultivated knowledge through studying and caring for objects into the distant future (Hein, 2006). As keepers of knowledge, museum workers preserved items in the collection, valuing objects and their histories over what the public could gain from them. Throughout the twentieth century, however, museums began to shift their focus to consider visitor experience and education more intentionally to create exhibitions that are both entertaining and provide knowledge. In refocusing on visitor experience, museum leaders recognized that museums can be exclusionary spaces that discourage participation.1 This has been well documented in research studies analyzing the ways in which museums and other cultural institutions are off-putting to people. Grand building facades intimidate entry, barriers cordon off passages, guards closely watch visitors, noise limits are imposed, and admission costs are high; all can be obstacles to participation. If parents do not establish a practice of regular museum visits with their children, it is not likely those children will attend when they become adults (Ostrower, 2005; Wilkening & Chung, 2009). This is particularly true in fine art museums, where a lack of cultural capital or understanding of elite aesthetics makes it difficult to engage with the artwork on view (Bourdieu, 1984; Schwarzer, 2006). Structural exclusion also reinforces museums as exclusive, unwelcoming spaces (Karp, Lavine, & Rockefeller Foundation, 1991), particularly for minorities whose histories and cultures are often left out of the imperial European lineages of art history on view. Such art exhibitions reinforce segregation in the museum and discourage minority families from participating with their children (Falk, 1995). Museums have a history of elitism and exclusion that is reflected in their grand edifices built as monuments to history and culture.
The International Council of Museums defines a museum as “a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment” (International Council of Museums, 2007). While museums are widely seen as permanent, open, and accessible institutions embedded in their cities, they are challenged to maintain art world recognition and foundation interest, while also being relevant to their audiences. They must attract visitors not only to collect admission fees, but also to serve their missions as cultural institutions and fulfill their funder’s objectives. Museums have taken different steps to address these challen...