SELMA HOLO AND MARI-TERE ÁLVAREZ
We open chapter 1 celebrating origins, the first phase of the panarchic museum loop. Unique as every museum may become, there will always be, at the beginning of its life cycle, a profound desire for meaning-making that can only be fulfilled by the creation of a museum. Nine reflections on this earliest phase of the museums of our time bear witness to that kinship lying at the very heart of the museum enterprise. Characterized by vision, optimism, passion, intelligence, empathy, and energy, as well as an implicit expectation that the museum whose story is being told will be sustainable, these texts convey that kindred desire well. They also reveal the distinct challenges that accompany the origins phase—challenges faced and, to a greater or lesser degree, met. Within each museum’s origin story is a distinct and individuated future, one that will be shaped by a particular set of hard economic, political, psychological, environmental, and/or cultural trials. This first phase of the loop will always, though, be associated with particular kinds of challenges related to accumulation, building, innovation, and growth. These challenges will be met by men and women possessing those very qualities of vision and passion, intelligence, optimism, and energy mentioned above. However, as necessary as these qualities are to give shape and form to a museum’s beginnings, we will see in subsequent chapters that they are not necessarily the qualities that will guarantee its long-term resilience and sustainability. But that is for later; for now, we are celebrating beginnings and the personality types that launch museums. These are museums of many types, of different scales and sizes, and of different imaginations. Being aware of them, as we are doing by reading the nine texts panarchically, by giving them the equal weight of our attention, underlines the infinite variety available to us as we think about the museums we help build, and those that are parts of our lives as museum goers, workers, visitors, and leaders.
First, we become acquainted with a powerful lecture by the former president of Costa Rica, Óscar Arias Sánchez, in which he argues for his museum of peace. This is his foundational statement, directed to a global audience, and it is a passionate plea. President Arias’s clarion call, and the accompanying text a few years later, delivered by Manuel Araya-Incera to the Global Conference of Peace Museums, emphasize that this peace museum would go beyond the usual expectations for this type of museum. More than a mere depository for documents, it would be a dynamic education site promoting peace—a model for other nations. What is unique about the ambitions of Arias and his foundation is that their museum would be a mirror of Costa Rica’s actual cornerstone national policy of peace. It is rare to capture the moment of inception of a museum. Since that moment, Arias’s peace museum has gathered and put in place all of the mechanisms and strategies for fundraising so that this much-needed museum can become a concrete reality. It is appropriate to begin this chapter with passionate advocacy for a museum at the very beginning of its origins phase.
We move in the next section to a museum in southern Mexico that has been in existence for about three years. The battles for its funding and governance were fought and won by the visionary archaeologist Nelly M. Robles García, who, with her commitment to social justice, sought to build an archaeological site museum that the people of the adjacent pueblo would completely own and manage—not just in the spiritual sense, but in the quotidian sense of physical control. With that ultimate desire in mind, Robles began to worry—after she had achieved its full construction—because there was unexpectedly low attendance, even though the people of the pueblo were managing the site. Surprisingly, “local citizens claimed that this early low attendance was because the museum lacked a chapel with its own iconic sacred image. This was rectified and mass was celebrated to a standing-room crowd. . . . The museum now truly reflects the will of its people. . . . Prehistoric and colonial Virgins can now be found in a precinct that struggles every day to survive, and official procedures and proceedings are now made opaque by the enormous force of the present communitarian customs. A great lesson!”1 Robles was able to almost immediately adapt the Community Museum of Atzompa, even in its origins phase, thereby avoiding a crisis of confidence. Her acceptance of the need for a place for the pueblo’s saints quickly endowed the museum with the resilience it needed, and the potential for sustainability.
Of course, Robles’s commitment to achieving social justice for a community via a museum is not exclusive to Mexico. Bernardo Paz in Brumadinho, Brazil, also conceived his contemporary outdoor sculpture museum, Inhotim, with social justice in mind. From its origins phase, Paz imagined Inhotim as a gorgeous space for the most contemporary of art installations, made by artists who appeal to the most demanding members of the contemporary art crowd. But also, “within a scenario characterized by red dust and degradation of the natural landscape, Inhotim offered its employees, through educational activities, a new perspective of looking at their own space. These employees are intended to find at Inhotim an opportunity to reflect on everyday issues and on the environment in which they live and work. Thus, they are able to establish a relationship that goes beyond simple employment . . . and . . . become able to establish a more positive relationship with their own houses, the school, the plaza . . . the city.2 Led by Paz and embodying his vision of creating not only a “cool sculpture park” but also one dedicated to improving the lives of its employees, Inhotim will no doubt be afforded the kind of local loyalty that will endow a longer life to the project than if it only served an elite crowd of one-time international visitors.
Origins histories are not limited to those of single museums. Next, Cuauhtémoc Camarena and Teresa Morales reflect on the origins of not just one museum, but the larger museum system that they created. Pioneers in the communitarian museum movement, their driving impulse was to find a way to help pueblos define and claim their own memory and identity. Morales and Camarena approached the question of communitarian identity differently than it had been before: they listened closely to the voices of members of these tiny communities who wanted museums of their own. Sometimes the resulting museums defied traditional conventions of what a museum should be. They might, for example, eschew the materiality of normal art displays, or they might combine art, anthropology, and performance in a single space, or they might celebrate customs rather than objects. They are all well designed, taking museography seriously, even if with extremely limited resources. Born of a profoundly felt desire to give voice to the pueblos, the Oaxacan communitarian museum system has become a model in the ever enlarging and embracing network of the communitarian museum movement spreading throughout Latin America.3
The origins phase never rests solely on a single person’s shoulders. Héctor Feliciano, both witness to and a principal midwife of the innovative Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, believed that Puerto Rico needed an art museum to display its own creative and cultural identity—an identity that did not depend upon the United States or Europe for its lineage. As a board member, Feliciano gave the then-inchoate project serious intellectual credibility; he was able to ensure that the plans emerged for an authentic institution that, yes, did address, but also transcended identity politics. As our only example of a recently created Caribbean museum, the MAPR is a paean to origins that are dramatic and powerful, energetic and passionate. Its challenges in the future will inevitably relate to the precarious economy of Puerto Rico itself, and will demand vigilance and ever more strategic thinking to stay ahead of that economy. The MAPR’s origins phase was thrilling for its community of artists, intellectuals, and supporters, and for the citizens of that island.
Some museums struggle in the beginning. Mario Vargas Llosa, a Nobel Prize winner in literature from Peru, was an advocate for a museum never before imagined in his native land. He argued, in the face of strong opposition, for the necessity of a museum wherein the nation’s most painful memories of its recent ferocious civil war might be constructively remembered. Origin phases are not always completed without struggle. This institution evolved from a straightforward museum of memory to what is now called a Place for Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion, (Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social). This lugar encourages debate and multiple frames of memory while also still being a center for documentation, photographs, films, and archives. Vargas Llosa’s original argument for the museum developed even beyond his concept into an active tool of memory, but also of education and reconciliation. The lugar had already followed the path of adaptation even before opening, due to a variety of political and social pressures. No doubt this “museum of memory” will continue to adapt to its demanding civic environment. And it will do so in a democratic way, where everyone has his or her say.
Museums are not necessarily begun by museum professionals, collectors, or artists. In 1987, Carlos Tortolero, a Chicago schoolteacher, created the museum presently known as the National Museum of Mexican Art. Tortolero’s vision was unprecedented: he wanted to build his museum to simultaneously function as a traditional, AAM-accredited art museum and also as a community center, a crucible for ethnic identity, a training ground for responsible and responsive citizenship in the United States, and, always, an institutional ambassador for Mexico to the non-Mexican world. Whether curating a stereotype-smashing show on the African presence in Mexico, hosting a community blood drive, offering job training, or overseeing a radio station for youth, the National Museum of Mexican Art embodies that complexity on a daily basis. It was a tall order, and its outcome has been a phenomenon. Tortolero’s museum embraces the newest of immigrants as well as those who are “coming of age” as American. The greatest challenge for this museum in its hopefully long future will be to prepare to carefully transfer leadership to those in the next generation, whenever its founder retires. It will, as all museums do, have to adapt to new realities as it proceeds along its own panarchic life cycle.
It would be remiss, when looking at museums and their origins, to limit our discussion to the standard collecting museum. Lori Starr writes of an imaginative approach she developed for the creation of a Kunstalle—one positioned within a more expansive community center. Her idea was to organize a nomadic experience of art and dialogue that would, paradoxically, “knit together” the constituencies she was serving in Toronto. With that in mind, Starr initiated the original phase of the Koffler Centre of the Arts with satellite spaces. After Starr left the Koffler to run another museum, it followed a different course from the one she had initiated: it ceased being nomadic, but because of her inspired leadership at the beginning, it had adaptability and sustainability built into its fabric. Starr wrote to us in 2015, “The decision to find the Koffler a new home in 2011 so the ‘nomadic’ would cease turned out to be the right decision. It opened in fall 2013 right on schedule and fully funded with a new gallery and offices in Artscape Youngplace in the most vibrant neighborhood.” In this communication we see that there can be life beyond the founder, and that resilience can be built into the origins as long as there is already a disposition toward creative adaptation. How necessary it became to adapt was evident in the face of the recession that accompanied and challenged the Koffler’s beginnings.
All museums begin as an idea, often a utopian one. We end chapter 1 by entertaining a meditation on a very large idea of a museum for a small city. Edward Rothstein, a museum critic, first for the New York Times and now for the Wall Street Journal, writes about the city of Oaxaca as a museum—that is, a museum composed of many museums. Not the first person to imagine a whole city as a single museum, Rothstein takes a leap, somewhat akin to that of the Spanish museologist Santiago Palomero Plaza, who has imagined the city of Toledo, Spain, as a completely integrated museum, another model for our time: “The twenty-first century and the new global world demand a different effort on the part of our museums. . . . We have the warps of appropriate historical buildings and a history to be told that proposes using them as bridges and sinews that crisscross their wefts in the city’s own time and space, its streets and squares.”4
This chapter relates the origin stories behind a number of newer museums in the Americas and suggests certain commonalities about their beginnings, as well as enormous differences as each advances in its own life cycle. We are positioning them all at the beginning of a panarchic life-cycle loop, a loop that promises constant change and the need for adaptive renewal over a museum’s lifetime, right from the start. Every one of these museums or ideas about museums came into the world as a passionately held dream. They were the products of determined, visionary personalities who assumed leadership roles, each in his or her own manner. In the next chapter we examine other museums that have been around longer, and have already entered the next phase of the loop—the more mature phase where a shared issue to be dealt with is “conserving.” It will become clear that after the celebrating is over, the next phase for any museum in the panarchic loop will be more sober and will probably require other personality types to join the leadership team.
1. Letter from Nelly Robles to Selma Holo written two years after the opening of the Community Museum of Atzompa.
2. Email dated March 25, 2014, from Lara Ceres, director of the education program.
3. See also Selma Holo, Oaxaca at the Crossroads (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 2004) for in-depth discussions of the Oaxaca cultural environment.
4. Email correspondence with Santiago Palomero Plaza, director of the Sephardic Museum in Toledo, Spain, December 26, 2013.