Opening the Petals of the Museum without Boundaries

Ahead of Conference 2020, Keynote Speaker Andy Lowe sat down virtually with Meaghan Patterson, Executive Director / CEO of the AMA, for a conversation about ‘Museums without Boundaries’ and the big ideas transforming and guiding the work around cultural sustainability at Te Manawa Museum of Art, Science and Heritage in Aotearoa (New Zealand).
 
The interview below has been adapted from their conversation. You can watch the video interview here. Read more about Andy’s Keynote Presentation here.



Kia ora, Andy, and thank you so much for joining us here today. I know that the pandemic situation has been evolving lately in New Zealand, and we appreciate that you’ve taken the time out of your day to have this conversation with us.

What I’d really like to talk about first is your work and your leadership at Te Manawa, and how you have truly embraced transformation at the museum, which I think has strengthened both your institution as well as the community in which you reside. Are you able to give us a bit of an overview of your concept of museum without boundaries, or beyond boundaries, and how that drives the work of your team?

Kia ora. Well, it’s about inviting the community in and breaking down the museum wall, and really thinking about who feels comfortable here and asking if people want to be part of things. Museum without boundaries is about partnering with communities, thought leaders, change makers, and supporters to inspire and broker deeper connections between them and our world’s tangible and intangible treasures so that they, and we, can deliver and create relevant, engaging programs and experiences with, by, and for our communities.

It’s a long way of saying that it’s about opening up space for people to represent themselves the way they want to be represented and to be useful.

In terms of partnering with community members and bringing them into that space, how has that journey progressed for you and for the institution over the years?

Well, it is still evolving: we take a couple of steps forward and then we drop back. We started with thinking about who is not yet part of what we are doing, who is not yet at the table. It’s a journey and it’s really exciting, and while we try to plan well in advance, for some things, we don’t know what’s going to happen day to day.

We developed a strategy with a mission, vision, and values a few years ago to embed the vision and to give it a foundation that we could all work from, that the community and our staff could really buy into. Since then it’s been a matter of working through all of those pieces in different ways with our communities so that they can pick little bits of it up and take them into different realms where they can take over the space and use it in ways that will be useful to them.

So, it hasn’t been a very straightforward or very linear journey at all, and we’re constantly learning. It is like a flower: the petals close up at night again and we open them up and keep opening them up, so that people can constantly feel like they’re being invited in and involved with what we do and included in some part of the thinking for the future.

If you come from a place such as the one I come from, where you have felt possibly outside of the usual or expected, or respected, paradigm or don’t fit into what’s ‘normal’ in whatever way, then it’s a different place to view it all from.

Absolutely. And as you say, you never know what’s going to happen day to day. Museums are undergoing a period of massive transition right now and often struggle in how to approach that. How do you help both the staff at your site as well as community members with managing that change and that fluidity, and responding to the needs of the community?

We’re working in multiple paradigms, and as you know, we’re talking about a colonial environment – these Victorian museum environments – that are often hugely hierarchical, bureaucratic, process- and administration-based, and have a certain way of working that doesn’t necessarily work for communities. We need to be able to accommodate a lot more fluidity and be more responsive to what’s going on outside in the world. Communities need space be heard.

I’m quite speedy, and I kind of go, “Oh! We can do this!” and someone in the community comes up to us and goes, “Oh! Let’s try this in the museum!” And what’s happened sometimes is that we – or I – haven’t spent enough time workshopping or discussing these things within the team, or asking what does self-representation look like, for instance, to me personally as a staff member, so that I can then add in my valuable life experience and contribution.

As an example, Dr. Cat Pause, a Professor of Fat Studies from Massey University, a tertiary institution in the Manawatū, was running a conference on the effects that fat stigma has on people, and we wanted to get this amazing conversation into the community here. One of our program developers – we call them program developers not curators – was in contact with Dr. Pause, and suddenly we had this exhibition happening by the incredible Substantia Jones, a photographer based in New York who runs the Adipositivity Project, which challenges societal perceptions about being fat.

One of the things that I didn’t do was really have those conversations with our staff in ways that they could input into it and see the benefit of it. And when one of the schools was coming through, a staff member covered up some of the photos in the exhibition so that the school group wouldn’t see it.

I think if we had taken more time to work through the ‘why’ of doing this exhibition with the team, there would have been more buy-in. That’s just an example, but I think it’s about really spending time and teasing out these things. I don’t know about Alberta, but here some of the environments are still pretty conservative in our cultural institutions and museums.

It’s really important to get these quite contemporary ways of looking at the world in there, to have these deeper conversations that contribute to social change. And sometimes we just don’t have time because we’re running from project to project, but it’s something that I’m constantly learning about, trying to involve people more, because it’s all very well involving the community, but if we don’t have the staff on board who are crucial to all of this happening, then it’s really hard going and ultimately unsustainable.

That naturally leads into my next question: Te Manawa was participating in the OF/BY/FOR/ALL program, Nina Simon’s new project. That program has a focus on inclusion and accessibility, and many arts organizations across Canada are also keen or already participating in that sort of work.

How has that program influenced the work that you were already doing at the institution, and how do you ensure that these sorts of principles are not only project-based but embedded across the institution and integrated into everybody’s work?

I love Nina, I’ve been following her for years, and we made an application to join the OF/BY/FOR/ALL mentorship program nearly three years ago now. And it turned out that we were the only organization in New Zealand and one of only two in the Southern Hemisphere to be accepted into the first wave of OF/BY/FOR/ALL, and we were really excited. The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History even paid for two of our staff to fly to California to take part in the retreat.

And they said to us during the application process that they were quite surprised about the numbers of communities working with us and associated with us and doing innovative things. And we were just opening this space up: they were driving their own things, and we were helping a bit.

We realized that actually we have these lists of communities that we’re working with, and there’s so much work involved with that. And after that – which may not be the answer you’re hoping for – we realized that we were doing so much, and reacting too fast, and our team were exhausted. And we needed to pull back a bit, because while many of the communities were happy with what we were doing, the staff were getting burnt out and asked for some time to process why we were doing certain projects.

So, we went a bit backwards actually after joining OF/BY/FOR/ALL. We’re getting back into it now, and I think our big challenge is to integrate new thinking and work with communities in a systematic way. I think I was raging against the machine, process not being my favourite space anyway. So now it’s about getting the processes sorted and sticking to them so work is more stable. That way we can embed the vision and the OF/BY/FOR/ALL thinking – which is the total basis of our concept anyway – in a way that’s going to make the staff feel good.

I feel like we’re just getting into that now, building a bit more trust and trying to get the staff involved in the decisions we make rather than the imposition of, “Let’s just do everything with community,” that I think they felt was really hard going and on top of their usual work. What to prioritize?

And they’re amazing, a lot of them have such huge community interest and so many varied connections, so it’s just a matter of trying to involve people in the ways that work for them and that’s a big piece of learning for me.

I know so many people who work in our sector are so keen to take on new projects, or new ways of working with community, or new ideas. We want to help and to do more, but then you do have to be cognizant of where you reach your limit and where you need to pull back and reevaluate and then move forward again when you’re ready.

To shift topics, you told us at the AMA about working with Indigenous communities and how they are running their work in the ways that they best see fit within the museum. And you mentioned the concept of ‘absolute sovereignty’ and how that helps the museum become a really trusted and inclusive anchor in the community. Are you able to talk to us a little bit about what that looks like?

It’s supporting the Māori concept of tino rangatiratanga, which talks about ‘absolute sovereignty,’ meaning in a museum space that the people will represent themselves in ways that they want to be represented. And that has always been tricky, as we know, for museum spaces to actually make that happen, and it’s a work in progress.

I know at Te Papa, the team are hugely invested in the bicultural model so that Māori are totally represented and representing at all levels. I was always hoping that there could be at least 50 percent Māori staff there, and that would go across all levels of the organization. And I think those are things that we constantly think about in museum spaces, here anyway, and how to do that.

The struggle with particularly Māori working in these types of existing organizations is that they are, as we know, colonial, often racist environments that are oppressive and controlling where their taonga, their treasures, were stolen and taken to. And these are places that are still holding these items, so how to move ahead in that area is a really tricky space.

For me, it’s simple, but it doesn’t seem to be that simple for a lot of people, including process and bureaucracy, the idea of handing over or at least opening up the space for tangata whenua to run it in ways they want to run it. The people can do it themselves, and we need to share our resources to make that happen.

When museums create exhibitions or events, there’s a certain template often: this is the way the museum does things, these are the ways we want the exhibition to look. And I think with communities doing things in their own ways, there’s going to be tension between museum staff’s expectations of what that thing will look like and what that community will present. We have to be constantly opening the petals about that idea too because these things are open to hugely different ways of interpreting, to people’s own ways of doing things.

Having these open spaces to do that is constantly challenging museum people – serial museum workers – to recognize that it can be different, we can do this, it can look like this. So that’s kind of exciting, and I think that’s a shift in thinking.

It is about trying to include people. If for instance the tangata whenua have their own space, then we are not absolving ourselves as tangata tiriti from learning, from making sure we’re aware of the Treaty of Waitangi that we have here in New Zealand, from issues around learning Te Reo Māori (Māori language).

Being honest partners, opening up the space, and handing over the space doesn’t mean that we absolve all responsibility for the fact that Pākehā (pale skinned New Zealanders primarily of European descent) stole this land, colonized this country, and caused huge and terrible grievances for the tangata whenua (the original inhabitants) of this land. So we have to take responsibility for that, and museums are in a good place to try and make changes.

You use flowers and petals and openings as analogies, and I think that’s a really great way to talk about the growth in the process. There are so many institutions in Alberta and Canada who are also actively pursuing that kind of work within their own sites in their own communities. As many Alberta museums are also either beginning that journey or well within that, are there any ‘lessons learned’ that you might be able to impart?

Well firstly, I don’t think we have built deep enough connections. I think I’m not hard enough on some of our Pākehā colonial processes. I should have said, “Right, we’re opening this space up, we want to use this space this way, and we need to have 50 percent Māori staff.” I didn’t realize that there was – or still is – so much resistance in the wider community for some of these things I thought were just a given.

We’ve been talking about this for a few years now, and I didn’t realize that there were processes that I should have put in place to ensure that everybody understood that, that Pākehā understood that that actually meant something. It’s clarifying and working with the people who are in power to make sure that they totally get it, that’s where it’s got to be quite detailed so that that’s absolutely concrete.

The question is always, what do the Iwi want, what will the tribes want, in these spaces? Do they want to have their own space? Do they want to be part of it, or not? Do they want to have more of their own peoples in the current museum system, or do they want to have a separate system, or do they want to change the current museum system? It’s about questions, and we need to get better at the questions, because there’s a fear about not knowing things, isn’t there?

Te Manawa has a uniqueness as a home for heritage, science and technology, art, and tangata whenua. It is not just a narrowly cultural place. And, as a Council Controlled Organisation, we have strong support yet substantial independence from the major sponsor, Palmerston North City Council.

I wanted to also mention the traditional community that visits museums, art galleries, and so on. No museum can afford to alienate this core community. So there are the tensions between traditional practice and innovation, outreach to a wider range of communities and to those who don’t feel they really belong to any community. And also tension between online presence (and mantras that this is “the bold new future,” but enforced by COVID-19) and the desire for people to meet face-to-face.

I also need to mention the approximately 75% of the city that does not engage with any community activities, let alone museums, and the challenges of reaching them for building community and community resilience. In terms of the ‘museum without boundaries,’ we take a ‘mini Te Manawa’ to retirement villages and rest homes for people who can no longer easily get to us. That’s harder during COVID-19 as we can’t get there so easily, but online versions of this can happen that can be quite fun, too. 

It is really about inclusion, having people in the conversations, and really opening up the space for them to take over if they want to. And then, too, how to do that while working within a paradigm that is still colonial, Victorian. It’s about asking questions, being concrete, making sure the processes are nailed down, and then you can build trust from there.

Just to bring us back to where we started in our conversation, and recognizing that we are in the middle of a global pandemic and you and I are on opposite sides of the world, we find the museum sector taking a moment to reflect on who they are and who we need to be. What has the last six months brought to the forefront for you or for your institution as something to look critically at, or think differently about, moving forward?

My mind always goes towards imaginative possibilities and how to really bust open the idea of a museum and start again. I keep coming back to the 'communities' ideas, on how they want to make museums useful, for them, their community, for the things they need right now. And that might be human connection, human touch, visibility, social or political action, whatever people are wanting. The UN has been talking about connection being a big thing, and loneliness. They’ve got a ministry of loneliness in England now, that’s incredible.

Some of these spaces are big, some of them are not – ours isn’t particularly big – but the idea that people can still get social distancing and connect with people as they are working on social change, human rights issues, environmental concerns, racism, sexism, gender issues, Indigenous rights, all those things where communities voices often are not, or in spaces that are not so public.

This is our opportunity to use the museum without boundaries concept because it’s all about how people can connect with each other and become more visible. Different sorts of people celebrating that difference and rubbing up against each other in these spaces is such an opportunity. The physical connection is huge, but online you can still do these amazing things where people are feeling listened to and heard and not so invisible.

We run a program called Noa. Tapu is a word for “sacred”, and so noa, the opposite of tapu, means “for everybody.” People with disabilities co-create an arts studio with us at Te Manawa, and they’ve been working on videos of their own experiences during the two months of lockdown we had. So they don’t necessarily have to be physically together but they’ve been connecting with each other, and also us and other people in the communities.

The Manawatū Lesbian & Gay Rights Association, the oldest in the country, is based at Te Manawa. Recently, my partner started working at Inside Out, an organization which works with rainbow LGBTQ communities or young people in schools. And some of the kids at secondary schools are feeling quite anxious about COVID-19 at the moment, so, MALGRA, Inside Out, and us, we ran a tour around the museum, quite spontaneously, for the kids. They needed to be in a public space that was safe, fairly open with good social distancing, and we could bring out these incredible objects, these LGBT rainbow-themed stories, that our amazing collection manager got out of the collection for the group.

We became a useful space for those young kids who are going through some massive things at the moment in terms of their identities, obviously, but also they’re really worried about COVID-19. And they could feel warm, and that they weren’t invisible in this public, fairly conservative place.

So, I think it’s about being useful to people at the moment, whatever they need. It’s all about opening the doors honestly and keep opening them, and being useful right now for your pain and for what you’re going through.

Great examples, great stories, and I think you’re right, it’s about how we as a sector and institutions can be useful to people as they need. Like you said, to be warm welcoming safe spaces for everyone.
 
I’d like to really thank you for taking this time and for sharing so candidly, and to say that we look forward to hearing you speak again in a couple weeks’ time at our conference.

Oh, thank you so much. Kia ora.