Welcome to the Rivers Museums.
Matters of Policy podcast, this is a podcast in which we explore the museum's collections development policy,
speaking with guests from across the globe to delve into the language used and consider what really matters in this policy.
Hi, I'm Yip, and today I'm joining Meghan.
Today, Yip and I will be interviewing Gina Borromeo and Jan Howard, who are both curators at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art.
They are heavily involved in resources decolonisation process and are working to repatriate a benign bronze in resources collection.
And I'd like to do a land acknowledgement as I am on indigenous land today.
So I am a white settler of Celtic and British descent living on Treaty one territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba,
the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe in a new Ojibwe and a new cree ogy, cree DNA and Dakota peoples, as well as the birthplace of the nation.
I acknowledge that our past history of colonialism and genocide continue to deeply harm indigenous communities in the land now called Canada.
I am committed to listening to indigenous people through my work in cultural
institutions and learning as much as I can in order to move forward with truth,
reconciliation and restitution. I guess we'll begin with sort of asking you both to tell us a little bit about your
experiences with both sort of museum decolonisation and policy and most importantly,
what you do. I'm Jan Howard. I'm the curator for prints, drawings and photographs here at the museum.
I'm Gina Armijo. I am the chief curator at the museum, but also the curator of ancient art.
And I would like to offer a land acknowledgement.
The Rhode Island School of Design is built on what is now called College Hill, part of the ancestral homeland of the Narragansett nation.
Indigenous people from many nations near and far live study and work in Providence today.
This museum staff are committed to actively addressing the many violent legacies of colonialism in our daily work.
The amplification of native voices and histories is crucial to rectifying the destructive past,
and we gratefully acknowledge the ongoing critical contributions of indigenous people across our state, region and nation.
So thank you for allowing me to do that. I think it's just important to let people know that we are on the ancestral lands of
people who were in this space long before America became a nation in terms of our work.
Gemini, where actually I would say, pulled into the work of the deaccessioning and restitution eventual restitution of the Oba.
And I think that I'd like to begin by just talking about how we really use our documents
regarding documents like the collection management policy here at the museum to guide our work.
And it's we relied really on two particular passages in our collections management policy to allow us to work towards the exception in the head.
So the first passage in our policy that we cited in deaccessioning yet was under the general considerations affecting all acquisitions.
And it specifically says that the museum will not acquire any object that, to the knowledge of the museum,
has been stolen or illegally exported from its country of modern discovery or the country of most recent legal ownership.
And then our policy further states that if, after subsequent review,
the museum discovers that it has acquired an object in violation of its stated acquisition policy,
then the museum will seek to determine the rightful owner and to pursue appropriate resolution.
And that's the main passage that we went by. And then the second one is relating to special provenance concerns, and this is section two point three.
And this section notes that an object discovered to have the provenance inconsistent with the
museum's policy may be returned to its country of origin or restituted to its former owner,
provided that such action is consistent with Christie's legal and fiduciary duties in the public's interest.
So those are what we apply to the exception of the head of.
So one other thing I wanted to add was that we have slowly like you.
We are in the process of reviewing our collections management policy and.
We are in the process at risk of folding our anti-racist plan or a work document into the collections management policy.
And in fact, item number one in this section,
the session the head of an Oba by the end of twenty twenty was really part of our anti-racist action plan,
so we were really abiding by a written policy in our work here.
More recently, this and I think this is something that I think it's just the past year that we've had this
anti-racist work plan that we actually have on our website and we have it's a fairly long document.
I think ten pages or so of actionable items of work throughout the institution, and there's a kind of check off of what we're getting done.
So we're really held accountable to the work. You know, it's it dovetails really being within an institution within the college as a whole.
And you know, we're all looking at how we can be an institution that is anti-racist.
It's helping all of our work go forward.
And we've always had the support of, I would say, the staff throughout the institution has always been very much behind.
The restitution of the building had been open and has really kept in and accountable along the way as well.
Fantastic. Thanks. Thanks for talking about how how the policies of the Rhode Island School of Design have guided your decolonisation efforts.
I was wondering, could you also say something about how the arised policies compare to those of the very first museum?
If you're aware with those. Yeah, it was interesting to look at your policy, especially as we're reviewing ours at the same time.
And of course, we're both guided by national laws and international treaties and conventions.
And in the United States, we also have standards set out by the American Association of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors.
And as we just noted this policy that we have the work plan for the anti-racist work so both externally and internally.
But we both have people that we speak to. I think it's really wonderful that you started these conversations around your plan to also invite outside
voices to review what you're doing and what you're thinking about for your collections development plan.
I'd say what's changing within our work on this collection management plan is that in the past,
that would have been a plan that we would have reviewed with our curators and our registrars and perhaps our senior staff and,
you know, the oversight committees of the museum.
But today, because of this anti-racist work plan that we have, we have many task force across the institution now looking at various kinds of work.
And the collection management plan is one of these task force.
And within the task force, there are representatives from all departments, maybe not every department in each task force,
but anyone really interested in that particular topic can come to it and bring their point of view.
And so we will have very different kinds of voices brought into this conversation on our own this time, just as you are.
One of the things I noticed that is different about our two policies is that we both talk about,
you know, we can't acquire things that we don't have clear title to that.
But in the Pitt Rivers Museum policy, I didn't notice anything as Gina just referenced that talks about what you would do
when you find something in the collection that should have never been acquired.
So it seems that language like that might be something that is being considered in the future.
You know, we will be looking very closely, you know,
as we go through this development review to find out or to see where we need to be proactive, especially when we're looking at provenance work.
I think, you know, we we have to be proactive today.
And of course, staffing does limit, you know, how much you can do at any one time.
We right now are focussed on our indigenous American collections from the North that,
you know, the polar regions, you know, both of us, everything in between.
But that's a huge task to take on in and of itself.
Those are areas we don't have curators, and so we are focussed right now on Native American work, really looking very closely.
We recently were able to hire a Henry Luce curatorial fellow for Native American art, sending Brown.
She's just been with us a few weeks and in this short time she's been with us.
She's really been reviewing our collections and our policies.
And I would say having a native voice in the museum has already been really a wonderful perspective for us to have,
even though we have talked with many people in the past to have someone working side by side with
us every day is going to make a huge difference than just hearing from her recently and her.
First kind of reflections on the collection has been amazing and so, so valued,
and I would just say one of the thing that we noticed and I think what came to our realisation when we were working on the
restitution of the head of an Oba is that when there was a protest calling for its restitution here in the fall of 2018,
and that really made us understand that the work we do around provenance is something that is typically behind the scenes and invisible,
so people don't know when we are considering these issues and the work that we're doing on them.
You know, and I think in the past we have felt, you know, we were often still working things out, didn't have all the answers.
And so it was hard to put that work forward. But now we realise it's important to have it there, no matter what stage we are in the process.
And so we now have a page on our website that talks about provenance work we're doing.
I mean, we still have more work to do, but at least it's, you know, we're making it more visible now.
No, that is excellent. And of course, we've been thinking a lot with Muranga and the other interns about transparency and
how are people going to know that this work is happening if we don't tell them?
So museums being active voices in the community and also active about what they're
doing is not only helpful to sort of let people know that the museum is on their side,
but it's good for the museum to interact with the community as well.
And I think that's fantastic. And I think also referring back to what you were saying earlier at the beginning of the response,
I think it's really a valid point where you said, like the artist policy seems to be be way more working in retrospect.
While see pyramid policies only future oriented, it's about we will not acquire objects in this way.
But it doesn't say anything about objects that were already acquired in a problematic way.
And I think that's something really interesting to note in rewriting the PRM policies.
So thanks for pointing that out.
No, I think what I noticed as well is that the listing policy is a bit more specific when it comes to reasons for deaccessioning.
Perhaps, you know,
those two passages that I cited to you were things that really was very important to us with that those it would have been difficult to really
deal with colonial era objects because we have nothing specifically in our policy that speaks to objects acquired during the colonial era.
So we talk about things that are important to American museums,
such as NAC rather than Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and also the well-known laws regarding antiquities.
But, you know, art collected in Africa during the colonial period is not something that our that our policy covered in the past,
but thankfully we had these two little sentences that allowed us to pursue its accession.
And sort of the next question that we wanted to talk to you about is a bit similar to this, particularly when it comes to policy.
But what were some of the most significant barriers that you found to restitution and decolonisation?
And particularly, do you find that being an art museum or a university art museum makes this easier at the Pitt Rivers?
Of course, anyone who's going to listen to this from Oxford might correct me,
but sometimes I get the sense that being University Museum at Oxford makes it a little bit more difficult to engage in those processes.
So how do you feel about that in regards to Aristide? Well, I think I'll start first talking about, you know, maybe our internal processes,
and I would say, you know, it was a learning curve for all of us.
And you know, one of the things I think that was helpful to us in the process was to start speaking early
on with our committee that reviews acquisitions and the acquisition and the accessions,
as well as our board of governors. Even before we understood the path that we might need to take.
But just to begin to talk to them because there were a lot of questions, and I think we had to work through those questions together.
And so we spent quite a long time, you know, many, many months thinking through these things.
When we first began these conversations with them,
it was just at the beginning when the Benin Dialogue Group began to announce that they were going to be lending some work slack.
And it was just when the essence of our report came out.
So it wasn't so clear that people were going to be returning things yet.
And so there wasn't a lot of, you know, today there might be more support just in the press, you know, with this kind of work.
I think it might be easier to do at this moment than it was just a few years ago when we started.
So there were a lot of questions that I think we're important for us to talk through
with these committees to all get to a point where we were all comfortable in.
With all the questions being answered, and, you know, even if we didn't know the exact path moving forward for how it would be restituted,
it became clear that it shouldn't be in our collection.
So we were able to at least deaccessioning until we could find the correct path for its repatriation.
And that that is one of the challenges today because it's sometimes not clear exactly how to do that.
Who exactly it should be returned to. And sometimes they're not our questions to answer.
So we have to be patient and let those processes play out.
It's kind of the point we are at that particular point, but you know,
you might want to speak to our role within the institution of Bristol as a whole, the road and the school design.
I think Jan explained our process quite well and the challenges associated with the conversation itself,
really drawing our oversight committees into the discussion and making them aware that these are issues we have to deal with.
But I'd like to turn first to your question about whether being in the University Art Museum makes,
you know, work as repatriation and decolonisation easier.
And in a way, I would say that it does only because there's often a buy in from both in university circles.
It's, I would say, almost a given that people are thinking about these issues in academia and thinking about rectifying practises of the past.
So for example, just to cite a little example,
the reason this the head of a nova has been on view so many times in the past several years is because teachers,
professors at Brown have requested that it be on view for courses they were teaching on global art history
or for discussions that they may have about colonialism and the building of university collections.
And so although we don't have an African art curator on staff or a significant collection of African art,
this one object has made its way to different galleries within the museum.
It's been in the European galleries with other works from the same day.
It's also been, believe it or not, in the Greek and Roman galleries that I curate,
where I have placed it next to other works that were made using the lost wax casting method.
And then it is found its home in a gallery that deals with questions of imperialism and colonialism.
And I think that's where it is most comfortable. But I think that fear is there is something about working in an environment where
people believe strongly in that desired outcome that propels the work forward.
So as Jan mentioned earlier, it was not only the museum staff's desire to excel in this piece,
but it also became an institutional goal for the Rhode Island School of Design itself.
So not only was the museum very happy to take this on,
but it became one of those key projects that the university, the art school itself wanted to do.
And so our staff and people in the university constantly wanted updates, and as Jan said,
they held us accountable and we had to keep doing the work so that I felt was very helpful.
But in terms of challenges, also regarding work with the colonising the museum,
I think that one of the biggest challenges is just speaking from our particular instance is the the quality may be off the record keeping in the past.
I'm sure other museums, which have very old collections,
have the same issue where you essentially have to redo the provenance work because it was never really recorded to begin with.
Right. So there's a lot of backlog that one has to do in the recordkeeping,
but also the enormity of the tasks that are associated with decolonising museum collection.
I mean, there are lots of issues to untangle within the collections, like there's ancient art,
there's indigenous art, there's art acquired during the colonial era, there's Nazi era loot and all this work.
All this provenance work is time consuming,
and small institutions like ours don't have the staffing that is required for all this work or really the budget.
And so we run up against that. Challenge. And then there's also the prison, and it waxes and wanes,
but it's the it's also associated with trying to change or influence long-held views about
what belongs in a museum collection and what constitutes legal acquisition of an object.
So, you know, the legal has to be weighed against the ethical and the moral.
So I think those are those are all challenges and it's all we've been to the worst.
Thanks. I think many of the challenges you've brought up here are also things Typekit River struggles with, such as limited staffing and funds.
You know, from my perspective, the Big Rivers look really big.
But in fact, it is one of the smaller institutions, especially when compared to some of the national museums in the UK.
So it's great to talk to museums facing similar challenges and hear how museums like Christie are responding to such barriers.
Yes, so next, we wants to discuss accessibility of collections and providing access to the public because as you've written a creepy,
it extensively discusses the idea of reaching out to the widest possible public.
We want to ask what it means to you and what providing wide ranging access to objects or belongings and tilting your views,
as well as asking how far museums should go to provide such access.
Yeah, I've always felt risky. I've been here a little over 20 years now.
It took a long time, but I worked in several other museums before and I always felt risky was made
their collections more accessible than any institution I'd been a part of,
only because especially being part of a teaching institution,
I felt curators and educators really bend over backwards to make sure that people have access to not just objects but to records.
And, you know, I think we're very forthcoming that way. But the institution is almost one hundred and fifty years old now,
and from the beginning, it always had a mandate to be accessible to a wide audience.
It was always as much about the community and actually as had community support for its history as it
is about the academic community because it being a school for the education of artists and designers.
It was important that there be an audience who would understand the work that was being produced here.
So to have collections where we could educate the public was was a very important part of its mission from the beginning.
And we, of course, in today's world,
we can try to be accessible to an even greater audience across the world through digital means, and that's something we love.
It can be a more democratic way of getting our collections across to people who can't travel here,
and we'd like to make all of our really knowledge and imagery available as widely
as possible and free and then just to make that as easily accessible as possible.
But we realised that we still have a lot of challenges when it comes to making people in our immediate community welcome in the museum.
It is a very Eurocentric collection. Our displays have been that for its history.
So we are gradually shifting and trying to work in ways that make the presentations in the galleries have narratives that are appealing to
a wider audience who are trying to shift the collections so that we have greater representation of artists who are black or indigenous.
We're artists of colour, more women, more queer artist.
So many different stories that have traditionally been less represented, trying to make them far more visible in our galleries.
So that's something that I think may help as we continue to try to reach new audiences.
But we realise that some things in our art galleries sometimes do offend and we do talk with our audience.
We have conversations Gina may want to talk about the way we have.
Our mummy currently presented is we changed recently to meet the discomfort that was felt by people who are coming into the institution searching.
I don't know if you want to talk about that for a minute. Oh, thanks, Jen. I will just do it a couple of minutes to it.
So, you know, for the longest time, at least in U.S. collections,
having a mummy as part of your collection meant that you were a certain kind of museum
that you had a collection that spanned various cultures and and for the longest time,
also the possession of an Egyptian mummy was considered the one aspect that that showed you had an Egyptian collection.
And so you did have a mummy on view, and it was the mummy of a man named Nazanin, and he had been on view since he was acquired in the late thirties.
But based on a discussion that was held in the gallery by two people, a professor of anthropology and a professor of criminal justice,
actually, he was of Coptic origin and who felt very strongly that Nisman was her ancestor.
We began to think about the various ways in which consent, discomfort, ethical displays of human bodies,
whether a human body was a work of art or not, and whether we wouldn't show whether it was crime to show a human body in the museum.
And we began to ask ourselves questions like we would never show a Native American body in this way what makes an Egyptian mummy different?
So we began to really question the long held views that mummies taught you all about Egyptian burial and every other thing.
So essentially, we came to the conclusion that you can still teach about.
Egyptian religious beliefs without actually showing the mummy continued to be contained in his coffin and still educate us
about preservation and that about making a safe passage to the afterlife by discussing the images from the coffin itself.
Now, ideally, you know, this burial would never have been disturbed and this man would still be resting peacefully in his team in Egypt.
But that is not the case anymore, and he is in providence.
He is enjoying an afterlife that I'm sure he never envisioned. But at least his body is not argue for everyone to see.
He's safely within his his coffin again. So in that one instance, we really did listen to our visitors and listen to them when they said, you know,
it's actually really shocking to come into contact with human remains when you're not expecting them.
And also, it's somewhat disrespectful to come into contact with human remains of someone you feel could be your ancestor.
And so we began to really think about how our displays inadvertently hurt our visitors, and we became very conscious of these questions.
And so I think if I could just move away from that a little bit and had just a little something to what Jan had been
discussing really well regarding our collection and opening up our museum practise to other to other participants.
I think I could speak more specifically about the curatorial practise and how we open that up,
not just to our education staff who know what people want to know about in the course of their teaching from the collections.
But also we we have made checking in with the community during our planning process for exhibitions part of the way we plan exhibitions to begin with.
We also have recently included one of our curators included the Vista Art Circle in
getting them to select or recommend works that would resonate with them when they look.
That works in the Asian collection. These are our teens.
So a young audience, very young, not quite 18 yet, but they felt that their concerns and interests were not really being represented in the museum.
So they worked with the curator to propose objects that they felt spoke to their, to their world and to their worldview.
So I thought that was really good. And then also, we have educator liaisons as part of every exhibition team.
So we we try to work as cross department to lead as possible.
I would say our educators have been very important in driving our work forward in recent years,
and I think we wouldn't be as far along as we are without them because they do have such a close connexion with our audience.
It's been helpful for us as curators to go on tour with them to see the
challenges they face with the kinds of ways we display things in the galleries.
They know the kind of response they're going to get when we install something in a particular way.
So better now that they're telling us that up front instead of waiting until after it's on display.
Now, I think I really have to give them a lot of credit for, you know, helping us move forward.
But accessibility is also something we think about in all ways that people are able not just,
you know, changing our facilities on our website and our materials,
but interpret the collections to be accessible to people of all abilities,
but also beginning to add representations of people of differing abilities to the kinds of artwork that's represented in the gallery.
So those are just some more of the ways that we're trying to really welcome everyone into the museum.
And if I might just add a little thing here, but I really appreciated about the press access policy is section four,
where you talk about the different types of access that you are trying to develop at
the rivers where you talked about physical access and sensory access and cultural,
intellectual, attitudinal and financial,
I think I will make this recommendation when we write and access policies that we consider all of those as carefully as you have
when you do talk about non-traditional visitors and how you had to meet them where they are so that when they come into the museum,
all their beliefs are not challenged and also. The fact that you are free seven days a week is something I think most museums aspire to,
but we are not able to do that because of budgetary concerns.
But the fact that you remove the financial barrier to going into a museum is really significant.
And we do that for specific dates or specific hours in a certain day,
and we are free to all rusty and brown and students and other institutional members.
But it would be so good to be able to be free all the time.
Thank you both so much. In fact, in that discussion, you already pretty well answered our first question,
which was great about communities and working with communities as a museum.
So that is fantastic.
And I guess in light of that, I'll skip right to our first question, which was on section 15 of the collection development policy.
It states that Gore talks about repatriation and restitution of objects and human remains.
So if you've read these policies, of course, they're that they're quite sparse.
They don't have a whole lot of stuff in them beyond what is, of course, mandated by the UK government.
But do you think this is you have a question that's fabulous.
Do you think that policies fifteen point one and to ensure a smooth, adequate and morally responsible repatriation process, if not.
Do you have any suggestions about what we could add in our upcoming rewrite of this policy?
I'll start with one sentence and I'll turn it over to Jen. So first of all,
I really glommed on to your sentence that said council will take decisions on a case by case basis
within its legal position and taking into account all ethical implications and available guidelines.
And so although it addresses the legality first, it does really very quickly veer into ethical guidelines and also a case by case basis,
both of which I think are particularly important when you deal with repatriation issues.
I think the case by case is key no to objects, to a museum the same way.
And if we are guided by ethics, that goes a long way.
But Jen, I think, has specifics that she'd like to address.
Well, I think for both of us, as we consider rewriting our policies,
I think we have to be we have to make some more proactive, you know, in the need for work around provenance,
I think we need some wording that speaks to a commitment to researching the provenance status of works to determine if they were ethically acquired.
I think that's on us as museums to do that.
And I think in the past, we've been too much reliant on someone coming to us to claim something not that we didn't do provenance research.
And certainly we found things that were not, you know, quite recently found something in our collection that had been stolen from another museum and,
you know, had collectors marks change so that it looked like it was something that was legitimate.
And, you know, research had been done recently to where the collectors marks were now known to
be fake collectors so that we could determine that that didn't belong to us.
And of course, we went in to return that to the museum I belong to.
But I think there's just so much more we can do when it comes to taking on that responsibility.
I was also impressed with your strategic plan goal of being part of a process of redress,
social healing and mending of historically difficult relationships through collaborations with stakeholders,
including reconnecting objects to communities of origins.
And I think that kind of language for both of us is helpful in, you know, getting these policies to a place where we need them today.
I think, you know, policies should reflect the practise that we are keeping and sometimes our practises now maybe getting ahead of our policies.
But it's really important for our policies to stay aligned with the work that needs to be done and we need to be updating our policies as needed.
You know, we both have this mandate to review them every five years,
and that's great that to do a full review because sometimes things do change, sometimes are just minor changes.
But I think in today's museum world, things are changing fast and we have to be far more proactive,
as I said, and in looking at these policies and thinking rethinking the way we work.
You know, we have, as was mentioned, that special provenance concerns section of our policy.
And even there, you know, we need to update ours to reflect, you know, how to deal with objects that were acquired from this colonial period.
But I think even a lot of the institutions and organisations that we look to for guidance are still working through this as well.
So we all need to push it forward. And at this point,
what I want to say to is I really commend the Prime for being the platform in which we can do this
because the programmes that you have all recently offered to the public in terms of discussing,
you know, benign issues or even this issues of policy,
your goal to be a platform for museums to discuss issues that museums face today is a good one and needed one.
And I'm so glad you're doing it.
I think we'll pass on the credits to the amazing staff of the British Museum is there may be a final question, if I may.
Oh, sure, sure. Very general question. But also for the sake of the Bosca's name, can there actually be practise without policy?
So do you believe practise should meticulously match policy and social policy more of a guide or should it be more foundational?
Because this podcast is named Matters of Policy, but we were sort of flipping heads around like asking Does policy actually matter?
So we're wondering should it be a guiding document or should it be really a foundational document?
Well, I think it's necessary to have the document for its transparency.
Here's what's guiding your work. But again, as I said, I think it's really important that as your practise is changing,
your policies have to keep up with that, know you have to keep them.
And I think it's better to keep them in alignment so that you have something to fall back on when you need it.
And also, you have something to help guide you when you need it.
But also, as you see the what's necessary for change, you continue to update that policy, you know?
So you may feel differently. No, I would agree with that.
And so I think we are both I think I'm hedging here.
It can both be a guide because you need that when you speak to your constituents about why you're doing the things you're doing,
but it should also reflect your institution's mission.
So it should be fundamental as well. And institutions change with dynamic institutions.
Thank goodness our practises evolve. But so should our policies.
Then, as Jan said,
to reflect this changes innovations better understanding of the past and better ways to make amends for four things not done right in the past.
Thanks so much, Sherry. I think I went a bit beyond what was for this podcast, but I was just really wondering because it sounded so great.
It seems like you've been working so close with policy, and it's really generated benefits in terms of decolonisation.
So that's why I just was wondering what you had to say about it. But thanks so much for the conversation.
Thank you so much for asking us. Thank you so much. Yes.
Thank you both for being so generous with your time.
We so much appreciate you taking the time out to come and speak with us, so we appreciate the work you're doing.
We really do. Thank you all. That was the Rivers Museum's Matters of Policy podcast produced by Darcy Woodhouse.
Yet Boom, Mega Man Alexis Barriere and Bobble Hat Sounds Music by Jack Fawcett,
voiceover Baiju who let a special thank you to Muranga Thompson Offline and the Knowledge Exchange.