Author Archives: Guest Author

How does social change happen?

In the story of the blind men and the elephant, we learn that different people touching different parts of the elephant “see” different things. One touches a leg and surmises it must be a tree. Another touches the trunk and imagines that it must be a snake.  Of course, the elephant is a complex living creature.

Social change, likewise, looks different depending on your vantage point.  So, to explore economics system change from multiple vantage points, this webinar invited panelists who hail from community-based economic development, electoral organizing, and group facilitation to be in conversation with each other. The result is a fascinating discussion uncovering both unexpected intersections and areas of alignment.

Our panelists for this discussion were:

• Sendolo Diaminah, co-director of Carolina Federation, a statewide group that combines electoral work with base-building local grassroots community organizing. In 2020, the group organized its first campaigns in four North Carolina counties.
• Lela Klein, co-executive director of Co-op Dayton, a nonprofit incubator of cooperatives. Klein was part of a team that engaged in a 6-year-long co-op organizing campaign that culminated in May 2021 opening of Gem City Market, a food co-op in West Dayton, a primarily Black neighborhood.
• Tuesday Ryan-Hart, cofounder and system change strategist for The Outside, a social change consultancy that helps build infrastructure for equitable systems change and which works with a wide range of groups across the globe in areas such as employment policy, hunger alleviation, homelessness, and refugee assistance.

Among the questions discussed in this webinar were the following:

• What are leading barriers to changing economic systems, even at the local level? What are some effective techniques for overcoming those barriers?
• How does one go about organizing a facilitated process to engage in equitable systems change? What are some key questions to ask going in?
• What does base-building organizing involve in practice? How does it differ from traditional voter mobilization strategies?
• What are the elements that enable a community to sustain a community economic development campaign over multiple years?
• What are some examples where organizing has led to major economic changes? What are some of the factors that led to those successes?
• What steps can nonprofits and philanthropy take to support economic systems change work?

Resources

Carolina Federation, Carolina Federation DNA, April 2021.

Steve Dubb, “Carolina Rising: Base Building Lessons from North Carolina,” NPQ, December 8, 2020.

Steve Dubb, “In West Dayton, Ohio, a Food Co-op Heralds a “Black Renaissance,” NPQ, June 16, 2021.

Gem City Market, Annual Report 2019-2020. August 2020.

The Outside, The Big Bang of Equity and Systems Change, May 31, 2018.

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This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

This article references the book The Politics of Design

Danielle Coates-Connor: Hello, I’m Danielle Coates-Connor. I am the Chief Creative at Nonprofit Quarterly. I’m here with our Art Director, Devyn Taylor. Good morning, Devyn. How are you? Morning.

Devyn Taylor: Morning, I’m good.

Danielle Coates-Connor: Yeah. How’s the weather in Miami?

Devyn Taylor: It’s, well actually today, it’s rainy. It was beautiful all week, and then I had relatives come to visit, and then it rains. So, great.

Danielle Coates-Connor: Of course. Of course, right?

This is our reflective moment, Devyn. We are especially today talking about design and visionary imagery and what it is actually like when people authentically communicate. And where this is coming from is last week, right before our meeting actually, I really had to pull myself together to come to the meeting. I got a text from my friend Kendra Hicks’ campaign manager. Kendra Hicks is a brilliant visionary politician who’s running for her first City Council seat in Boston, District Six. And the reason I’m involved with this is not because I live there, but it’s because Kendra’s my friend. And I’m part of the care team where we’re really personally supporting Kendra as she goes through this grueling and rigorous process of running for office. And so I get this text from her campaign manager with a PDF that says, ‘this is the mailer that her opponent sent out that hit doorsteps today.

The campaign rebuked and said they had no ill intent with this design, that they’d simply dropped the photo down to black and white to show contrast between the candidates and that the point of the flyer is to contrast them.

I looked at this as a designer and laughed at that, right Devyn? It’s just ridiculous to say that they didn’t alter this image and darken it in any way. But let’s just quickly go through the technical part of that. Devyn, can you walk us through what it would take to create this image of Kendra Hicks as they did in this flyer?

Devyn Taylor: It’s clear that the image wasn’t just desaturated; there was an opacity layer of some sort that was put over in order to create the effect that we see in the flyer. So you know, what the intention was behind that, obviously, I couldn’t speak to, but it’s clear that there was not just a simple desaturation there. There was some extra steps taken to get to the point that we see on the flyer.

Danielle Coates-Connor: And, conscious or subconscious, as you’re pointing to, Devyn, regardless of how they made that decision, the reality is that when we look at the politics of design, that is communicating a lot . I pulled out this book, The Politics of Design this week, and it details the way in which global narratives around the color of people’s skin have long upheld the idea that lighter skin is more pure and darker skin is more evil. This is well documented, and even the history of people describing themselves as white goes back to the slave trade. And so the idea that changing someone’s skin tone in a design piece, especially for a political candidate, especially for a district that has never had a non-white person elected, is extremely significant whether the campaign wants to admit that or not.

Now let’s look at the original photo which  I have seen before when our friends were on a text chain doing a fashion review on a text chain for how amazing Kendra looked on election day when she was out celebrating with communities since she was the person who topped the ticket in the district that day. You can see here, Kendra is in community, she is celebrating, and her face is not shadowed the way it is in this flyer.

Devyn Taylor: There’s so much schema that informs just the way people look at individuals with darker skin. And if you’re going to deliberately make changes to get to the point where the opponent’s skin is darker, then that’s coming from somewhere.

Danielle Coates-Connor: And you, Devyn, have been creating a visionary library of images with all of the branding work that you’ve done at Edge Leadership, with all of the illustration work that you’ve done for Nonprofit Quarterly and for The Voice Lab. And I wonder if you could share a little bit about how it’s been for you to be working with this imagery, this visual language that you’re creating?

Devyn Taylor: Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, it’s been super rewarding. There’s just so much richness in everything that comes out of the people at Nonprofit Quarterly. So it’s really nice to be able to create kind of like these backdrop images to enforce and hopefully enhance everything that people are talking about, everything that people are bringing to the forefront. So it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a lot of fun.

Danielle Coates-Connor: And we have Amy Costello here, who is a producer. The two of you collaborated recently on a piece illustrating a poem by Dr. Dorceta Taylor, who’s one of the leading thinkers in the world on environmental justice. Amy, welcome.

Amy Costello: Thank you, Danielle. It’s good to be here.

Danielle Coates-Connor: This piece that you two collaborated on is stunning, I think. I wonder if you could bring us in to this project, explain what is the poem that you were working with and what you all made? Maybe we’ll start with you, Amy, bring your voice in.

Amy Costello: Thank you. Yeah, our colleague who is in charge of the magazine at NPQ had brought to us a poem that Dr. Dorceta Taylor at Yale University – one of the nation’s leading scholars on environmental justice – had written a few years ago in which she describes the irony of black people in this country being encouraged to kind of go out and enjoy nature. Yet, incredible risks and deadly consequences at times they face when they do go out and try to enjoy nature. This poem illustrates through three kind of case studies, what has happened to certain black men when they’ve gone out into nature.

And as soon as I started listening to it, it was so visual and so powerful that I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to try to illuminate her narrative with some ambient sound, as we call it. And so I’m kind of a radio producer and audio nerd, and I just thought it would be amazing to bring in sounds from the natural environment to accompany her words. And so, you know, that’s what I did. And I had two very specific ideas in mind when I was thinking about the soundtrack to accompany this poem. And the first one was that I wanted it to be really spare, and not to compete with Dr. Taylor’s powerful words. And so I never wanted to compete with her voice but rather just have this quiet undertone beneath her, to kind of convey a sense of space. It was important that any sound we added would add to the experience of the black people profiled in this poem and not the white people that they were interacting with – that this was definitely a poem about the experience of black people out in nature and the dangers they face. And so the sounds I chose—you can hear, for instance, a heartbeat or breathing—an d so what I was trying to do is to bring the viewer in to the perspective of the people being profiled. And I didn’t add sounds to the white people’s perspective, for the most part. It’s not their story. And so those were the two guiding principles I used when doing the soundtrack for this piece.

Danielle Coates-Connor: Powerful, Amy. Thank you. And simultaneously, Devyn, you were working your magic. You had a original recording, you had the what came out of the Yale studio, just the raw recording of Dr. Taylor. And tell us what you went through.

Devyn Taylor: Yeah, I think it’s interesting hearing Amy talk about it, because I think we had a lot of that same experience coming, and it sounds like we’re coming from a lot of the same spaces without even having had this conversation before, so I’m gonna echo some of the things she was saying about really keeping the soundscape quiet. That’s what I wanted to do with the visuals as well is keeping the visuals quiet in a way. So the method I used was line drawing, which is really a medium of drawing that I only recently got into, and I think it has its place, for sure. Line drawings are typically made with one continuous line, or two or three, however many. Very few. And I love them because it does create connection between all of the pieces and the image. They’re usually, it’s one line that’s continuing throughout the entire image, so you pick up the stylus very little. And again, it just kind of creates a spirit, if you will, of continuity throughout what you’re seeing on the screen. And they’re also very yeah, they’re pared down, and they’re not very dense images—you only see the one line, the outline of what’s happening. And so it does create kind of a quietness of visual language. You’re looking at something that is just barely there and there enough to get the point across but isn’t something that’s overpowering. And what I really wanted to make sure of is that the visuals weren’t overpowering everything that Dr. Taylor was saying, because that’s the point is hearing her voice, really feeling what it is she’s talking about, and really putting yourself in that moment. And the visuals are also hard to look at for some of this. There’s a lot of videos out there that exist of a lot of these encounters.

The George Floyd video’s out there, the Christian Cooper video is out there, Ahmaud Arbery’s video’s out there. And whether you’ve seen it or not – some people chose not to see it because they knew what was on those tapes and that it would be a very difficult experience to watch, so—it was about really trying to find the balance of paying homage and giving justice to these stories and bringing that imagery forward, but also not bringing so much through the hard parts of that. So anyone can watch this without feeling like you’re being assaulted with these very violent and brutal images. One thing I did make sure to do was bring the actual outlines and the actual images from these encounters to the forefront. So the image of George Floyd, for instance, is actually from police body cam footage. The image of Ahmaud Arbery, there’s kind of that truck with these three armed men kind of following him, and those three armed men are literally just outlines of some of the video footage from that encounter as well. The pictures of Amy Cooper are cell phone footage of Chris Cooper’s, where she’s calling the police and holding her dog. So they’re really the outlines of these things that really happened, because again, I wanted to serve justice to those moments without bringing in the brutality of the real images themselves.

Another thing I want to echo that Amy also touched on is really bringing in the experience of the people we’re talking about—the black people who are experiencing these moments of microaggressions, macroaggressions, violence, death. So, I wanted to make sure that the stories didn’t become about the aggressors, and I think that that comes through in some of the ways that I don’t draw the features on, for instance, Amy Cooper. We don’t see her face, and it’s not because of—we just don’t have to. It’s not about her. It’s about Chris, right? So I wanted to make sure that the focus stayed where it needed to. And so I can echo Amy in that, in saying that I made a conscious effort to try and keep the stories of the black people in the forefront.

Danielle Coates-Connor: Thank you, Devyn. Amy, you worked with tape from these events as well. What was the thinking that you put into that?

Amy Costello: Well, the one piece of kind of archival tape that we used is the encounter between Christian Cooper and Amy Cooper in Central Park—and for those who aren’t familiar with the story, there was an altercation between Chris Cooper who is a birdwatcher who was trying to watch birds in Central Park, who was then confronted by a white woman with her dog unleashed, which is against rules in Central Park. He asked her to put the dog on a leash, and she refuses and calls the police on him. And I thought it would – and again, this sensitive line that we’re looking at about whose story are we telling? What visuals are we bringing in? What audio are we bringing in to keep this from the perspective of the black people we’re profiling? And I made a decision to, in consultation with you guys as well, of course, to bring in this archival tape, because there  was archival tape of Amy Cooper’s phone call to the police. And I thought it was important to kind of lay bare the egregious behavior and language that she used against Chris Cooper. And so, in this instance, we do hear her, and then we hear a very reasonable Chris Cooper speaking back to her. So I thought it was powerful audio to use. And I think it’s nice to kind of bring in that archival audio.

And the one other thing I want to say—because we’re talking about ethical design, and ethical storytelling in a way—is that I think it is important to note that we were in touch with Dr. Taylor, the author of this poem, throughout our process. And I think that’s so important when you’re using other people’s work or elevating other people’s work as we were doing in this case. With such sensitive and highly personal material to Dr. Taylor, it was a highly personal poem, I thought it was really important that we have her as a partner in this. And so I shared with her before we even started what I was envisioning for this piece—to bring in some audio that would ultimately be an animation—and she was very supportive and really, I think, quite happy that we were doing this with her work. But I just think that’s important to say, that we were in consultation with her throughout the process.

Danielle Coates-Connor: And when we think about capturing and expressing truly authentic voices, it is about that consultation, of saying, we’ve added a layer of meaning to this, did we get it right? And I think what I’ve been noticing at NPQ is that the more space that is created for authentic voices, the more interesting our content becomes. And it’s the same thing I see in Kendra’s campaign—when her opponent is going after her authentic points of view, Kendra is doubling down  with the truth of her lived experience. She’s saying, my policy platform derives from my lived experience in this city, and there are tens of thousands of other people like me. And I think that this kind of storytelling, these kind of ethics that we’re discussing here where we think about all of the different components of a story—from the tone of the visuals to the tone of the sound to whose perspective is truly highlighted, and “is this as authentic as it can possibly be?”—is, I think, a new strategy in storytelling that I’m mostly seeing led by women of color who are speaking truth, and it’s amazing to watch it resonate.

So, with that, these are the deep thoughts from the Creative Department at Nonprofit Quarterly, coming at you live—or not live, as it may be. Thank you, Devyn and Amy, thank you both for the work you’ve been doing, and thank you for sharing your thoughts today. And we want to know from everybody out there, what are you guys talking about? What do you want to hear about from us? What are you thinking about in all of these different layers of how our stories are designed? And what are the stories that we need to shift consciousness in the society and bring about the world that we are all dreaming of? That’s why we’re here. You get a hold of us if you want to talk more. Take care. Bye bye.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Amy Costello: Welcome to Tiny Spark, a podcast of the Nonprofit Quarterly. We focus on what is required to build a more just society—in matters of race, health, the environment, and the economy. I’m Amy Costello. And today, we are going to broadly explore the topic of justice, and we’ll do that by looking closely at the female form.

Macushla Robinson: There have been so many important critiques of the nude in art history.

Costello: That’s Macushla Robinson. She’s a writer, curator, PhD candidate at the New School in New York, and she’s the founder of Interstitial Press. Macushla has spent much of her career as a curator at museums and art collections in the U.S. and in her home country, Australia. Lately, she’s been intrigued—and frankly, disturbed—by something. Namely, the way women’s bodies and experiences have been portrayed and described in arts institutions the world over.

Macushla was inspired to delve into this topic by a group of feminist artists called the Guerilla Girls. They formed back in 1985 and created a poster campaign that targeted the art world. It was a year after the Museum of Modern Art in New York held its International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. The exhibition included the work of 169 artists. Less than ten percent of them were women. Macushla was especially inspired by The Guerilla Girls campaign against the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City—or ‘the Met’ as it’s known—for excluding women and non-white artists from exhibitions and publications.

Robinson: The Guerrilla Girls’ iconic poster, which is currently on display in the Met Museum, is titled, Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into The Met Museum? And then it cites the statistics of how many women artists are collected by the museum in comparison to how many paintings of nude females there are in the museum. And that work, which has been around for decades, and which is just, you know, a really important and provocative question, I think has lived in the back of my head for a long time.

Costello: And so, have some other questions, which we are going to explore in today’s conversation with Macushla. And just a heads-up, some of that will include discussions about sexual violence in particular. Macushla decided to look at the way sexual violence has been publicly displayed and artistically praised even, and also how its depiction is described in museum catalogues. Macushla has aimed her focus on the Met, and her forthcoming book is called, Every Rape at the Met Museum.

Robinson: If you type the word rape into the Met Museum’s collection database, it returns some 181 results. The works range from large paintings and sculptures to print folios, ceramic plates, pocket watches, vases, snuff boxes and other decorative homewares. Only six of the total 181 pieces are made by women artists.

Costello: Macushla is reading a paragraph from the Kickstarter campaign she launched to raise money for her book. She plans to make 181 copies, one for each of the artworks she investigated. This winter, she hopes to stand outside the Met and distribute one of each to visitors who are walking into the Met—an alternative guide, as it were.

Robinson: Art history has traded on stories of rape to create drama, to set up opportunities to paint nude women, and to display the mastery of the artist over his subject. But these images, and the way that we describe them, shape how we think about women’s bodies and what can be done to them. Millions of people visit the Met Museum every year, the way that these images get displayed and talked about matters.

Costello: And while the Guerilla Girls’ campaign launched some 36 years ago, sexism persists in the art world to this day, of course. And that reality caused Macushla to reflect on a related set of questions.

Robinson: I also, I suppose, wanted to think about, perhaps why the art world has not responded, I think, as fast or deeply as it needs to, to the discussions around MeToo. And I think that, at some level, I do want to complicate this question of how women are depicted in these scenes of rape. It started really with noticing the way that a particular extended label, which is the small piece of text that sits beside the artwork in the museum, how that particular label spoke about and lent emphasis to the significance of a painting by Poussin of The Rape of the Sabine Women. It’s a very iconic piece. It illustrates the classical story of the Roman mythological story of the Sabine women being abducted.

Costello: And the first sentence of the label that accompanies this piece of art describes what’s going on. Could you read that first sentence on the label itself?

Robinson: According to Roman mythology, the neighboring Sabines were invited to a festival with the intention of forcibly retaining their young women as wives.

Costello: I mean, it’s incredible to me, this is called a festival when we’re seeing clearly a pretty disturbing image. How would you describe what’s going on? What are we seeing here?

Robinson: What you’re seeing here is an array of men and women in a state of conflict. You see particular women in the foreground who are lifted up by men. They’re very sort of strikingly posed with their arms flailing in the air and their feet off the ground. There is another woman over to the right of the composition who is laying on the ground and being kind of pushed over by a male figure who is holding aloft a knife. There are two babies laying strewn on the ground and an old woman with her hand to her head, who is kind of lamenting and looking on in horror. In the background, there are a lot of men with swords fighting. There’s a man on a horse, and sort of presiding over all of it is this figure of Romulus who has effectively staged this event. He’s, in the story, in the mythology, he has created this festival invitation, this ruse of bringing all these people from the neighboring town over to their space and then abducting the women and taking the women as wives. And it’s really a very orchestrated and political decision. He feels that there are not enough women in his jurisdiction to provide wives to his men. And it’s a kind of planned mass abduction, which is often described in titles as rape, and it’s a scene of incredible violence. When it was taught to me in art history, in several different courses over the years, because it is really an iconic piece, most of what we addressed, most of what was talked about, was the kind of question of what’s often called the Serpentine line. This very, very dynamic quality of the image, the way that the women create these almost S-shapes and the treatment…

Costello: …with their arms, with their bodies…

Robinson: Yeah, you can see the way…

Costello: Yeah, the bodies kind of, please, go on.

Robinson: So, the dynamism of the scene has made this an incredibly beguiling and oft repeated image throughout art history. And the way that the label talks about it, I was particularly struck by this line: This dramatic story gave Poussin the opportunity to display his command of gesture and pose and his knowledge of ancient sculpture and architecture. And you can see in the background to the right there is this very classical, very still building. It lends a kind of structure that foregrounds the kind of violence and motion and movement of the scene that’s going on in the foreground.

Costello: And you point out in your book that this line, the one that speaks directly to the work itself and the artistry of it, does not in any way talk about the violence against the women that’s going on here, but rather talks about his command of gesture and pose and his knowledge of ancient sculpture and architecture. Talk to me about this omission that you saw as you went through these 181 works at the Met. What is not said here, like when we look at this painting, when we read the five-sentence label that accompanies it…

Robinson: Yeah.

Costello: What’s missing here to you?

Robinson: Well, I think what’s missing is the gravity of the scene and the story. It’s really striking to me the ways in which rape is simply taken for granted. And a lot of the labels and the collection database material that I draw on, because this book, apart from my introduction, comprises entirely text from the museum that is searchable on the website. A lot of that material either completely sidelines the gravity of the title and of the scene, or it sort of speaks about this compelling display of mastery of the female body and how these women, they really become sort of ciphers for this idea of pity. And they become tools, not only for the artist to display mastery, but also for, kind of art history and classicism to talk about the ways in which women’s vulnerability of this particular kind has been a political tool. And that, to me, speaks to the ways in which violence against women has a strong political cadence in the way that we tell stories about it. And this isn’t simple, like this is very, very complex, particularly, I think, along racial lines. And perhaps we can get to this in more detail later. It’s not something that I particularly analyze.

Costello: Well talk to me, but I’m interested in that. Talk to me about the racial lines. What are you talking about?

Robinson: So, the first thing that I want to say here is that I’m really indebted to the poet Robin Coste Lewis’s poem and accompanying sort of imaginative essay The Voyage of the Sable Venus. And her poem catalogues, I think she looks at 115 different collecting institutions. So, it’s kind of a different project, and she pulls out all of these texts about the depiction of Black women, and what her poem fundamentally reveals is the ways in which Black women throughout this vast collection of art history have existed in the margins. They’re really, really sidelined. They become things like chair legs. They sit in the background of paintings of, sort of, seductive White women. They live on decorative arts objects. They are invisible-ized and yet present everywhere, and yet not centered, and whose suffering is taken for granted, but not in the heroic way. They are never, or very rarely, cast as the prime subjects. And so, in looking at the word rape, there’s a kind of having your cake and eating it too, with the invisibility in the way that we talk about this violence and what it really means and its gravity. And yet, at the same time, the kind of proclaiming of it in the titles and in the labels, the way that these women and their vulnerability to sexual violence is really centered is incredibly racialized. The vast majority of them are White women, especially in the near classical and classical depictions throughout the museum, and they’re cast as very sympathetic characters and characters for whom you ought to feel pity. And what I can’t help but keep thinking about is the complexity of, the way that imperiled White femininity has been used, especially in America, I think, especially in the context of, of race.

Costello: As visitors to the Met hold your book in their hands and walk through the famous halls there: what, what do you hope they’ll think about differently, what questions do you want to have going through their minds as they walk through the Met with your book in their hands?

Robinson: I think what I hope is that they’ll turn an eye to what has largely been taken for granted. I am not trying to say that we should take these works off display necessarily, in many ways, what I’m trying to say is we should add a lens to how we look at, think about, display, and valorize these works. I do think that museums have an opportunity right now to look at how we contextualize this work for the public—the public broadly conceived—and being of curatorial extraction, I suppose you would say, I’m also really interested in the spatial dynamic, in the way that the museum categorizes and displays things in space, the way that things tend to get grouped by historical period and to a certain extent, materiality. So, you enter the museum, there are American paintings, European paintings, and they tend to be grouped by kind of eras, by time frames. You know, what I’ve always found curating is that a lot of it is about how objects activate and speak to one another and what they draw out of one another. This sounds very esoteric, but I really feel that this is an enormous, unspoken part of curatorial work. When you put things alongside one another in museum spaces, they do draw out different meanings. They activate things in sometimes unexpected ways. And I think that a lot of this work in the museum could mean something very differently and could reflect on the history of how we’ve imagined sexual violence and the ways in which it has changed really productively. The other thing that I just, I think, and I hope, I guess, this is the primary sort of switch in perspective that I hope the book will trigger, which is just simply to say how enormous and ubiquitous this topic is, how it’s everywhere. And I mean this is where the conceit of the work gets tricky because I have titled it Every Rape in the Met Museum and I’ve stuck to that title, but really, all it is is every work that turns up in the search of the word rape, which is a really loaded and complex word. You know, when people have written about this project very kindly, Hyperallergic wrote about it, but it was interesting that they changed the titling subtly. And they talked about sexual assault, not rape. So, there’s also a question around the meaning of that word, how it’s been folded into mythologies and how it’s disappeared in plain sight, you know, these works are boldly claiming a lot of the time, they use the word rape. When in contemporary parlance and discussions of sexual violence happening now to real living people, we tend not to use that word. And that’s partly…

Costello: What does that, what does that tell you?

Robinson: I think that tells us, I’m not entirely sure. I don’t feel qualified as yet to draw a singular, firm conclusion. But I think that part of what it tells you is that we really have complicated productively, and I think powerfully, what the word rape means, and we sort of have these questions around sexual violence, degrees of violence, scales of violence and lines that are not crossed. So, I have to be very careful here, because I suppose if I can reflect on this from a really personal perspective for a moment. As a young woman in the art world and all women, I think to one degree or another, live their lives in acute if often unconscious, internalized awareness of particular kinds of violence. And as a young woman in the art world, it was just commonplace to be harassed and kind of victimized or turned into the butt of jokes. It is an incredibly misogynistic environment, historically. Even though women make up a statistically large portion of people who work in curatorial environments, there’s still this real legacy of a kind of boys’ club that really treats the female body and the young women that work in these environments as a resource of all kinds. I really want to long term complicate the idea of the muse. I’ve started talking about Muse work some years ago, because I think that there’s this complicated way in which, that old line of ‘you should be flattered,’ has been an incredibly pernicious tool in the art world where actually being the subject of leering sexual commentary and a sense of degradation and really constant threat.

Costello: Yeah, I mean, I saw that you wrote about your personal experience, you said, I think we have to complicate how we talk about sexual violence.

Robinson: Yes.

Costello: There is all this ambiguity. History has taught us, has taught me, from when I was a little girl that to be loved, looked like that.

Robinson: Yes. Yeah. And so, from when I was a little girl, it predates the art world, right? It’s everywhere. Like all women, I’ve had my share of detrimental encounters, but I think one thing that has been really striking. I had a particular experience as a teenager with a pretty, relatively famous artist. And then a decade later, in the museum where I was working, his art became the subject of a lot of focus in an exhibition, and it was everywhere. His images were in the, built into the email signatures that I sent every day, reproductions of his work were in bus shelters across from my apartment. And what I found myself struggling with was the contours of the encounter really came into focus in a way that I suppose I hadn’t processed in that time. Immediately when something happened in my own mind, but also in my social world, people just kind of went ‘Don’t talk about this because it will make you a troublemaker. It will affect your future.’ To be clear, I wasn’t sent there by the museum, but what was really striking to me also was the way that I found myself speaking about it in the museum context. I found myself really unable to maintain professionalism. To be honest, I’ve always been a little bit more heart on my sleeve than could be really called professional, but to put that aside for a moment like, to wrestle with that encounter in the professional space really brought out that ambiguity and that complexity because the first sentence that I would bring up, the first thing I would say to anyone, to my boss, to the curator who was working on the show was, ‘It wasn’t rape. Just let me be very clear. It wasn’t rape.’ It was frightening. It had all these consequences. It was orchestrated. There were other men involved who were sort of arranging and facilitating this, the way that is often the case with sort of more privileged men, and men who are considered talented in various ways. And that defensiveness, that kind of mitigating of the experience has really stuck with me. I find myself incredibly anxious talking about this now, incredibly anxious to qualify how I talk about the experience. And that’s partly because, especially in Australia, there’s an incredibly litigious culture around the MeToo movement, but it’s also just this sort of, this sense of self-doubt that comes with it. I don’t have a neat, tidy conclusion for you here. I just have this interest in the way that this language lives in classical art history and lives on the walls of museums. I’m still asking, what does that mean? How do we talk about this now? How do questions of consent function differently, especially since so many of these stories are looking at times when perhaps what was called a rape was also a woman marrying without her father’s permission or her family’s permission. You know, there’s just an enormous amount that we need to unpack. I don’t believe that unpacking is in any way a diminishment of the gravity of the experience. I think it’s a really necessary phase that we’ve reached in being very, very clear about the degrees and cadences of different kinds of coercion and violence and how much they live in everyday experiences. And I think also because, it’s very clear to me that in the art world at least, and I’m assuming in many other professions, but also in the home, which is really the site of statistically the most sexual violence, the complexity of love and the idea of love and the idea of the domestic, gets really tangled up with sexual violence in ways that make it really hard to contend with. It’s an intractable problem, in part because we are told this is a form of love. I mean, that’s what abuse is, right? It’s the complexity of how we imagine forms of coercion as coming from a place of love, and the complexity of human commitments and emotions. It’s really odd to talk about this coming out of like this critique of the museum and Classical Painting and Sculpture, it can seem like a bit…

Costello: Why is it odd?

Robinson: Well, I think it seems like a reach because we treat the museum space kind of like it’s a sequestered, exceptional zone. But I think…

Costello: And I think you’re trying to suggest that it is not.

Robinson: It is not. It is not because these stories are everywhere. These images are everywhere. The earliest, you know, my passion for art and art history is deep. I was really, really invested in art from the earliest age. I remember insisting on museum visits for my 10th birthday visiting Ophelia, the painting by John Everett Millais in the Tate in London. I was very obsessed with and committed to the woman who modeled in that painting. And it’s really extraordinary to me looking back on that, how much I aspired to be the subject in the painting. Now Elizabeth Siddall, who was the model for that painting, got very, very sick. I mean, the candles went out in the bathtub that she was floating in in the winter in England, and as she got really sick, she lay in the bath for 12 hours and she wound up dying. It’s actually kind of hard to tell from consumption or suicide. It’s all contested, but she’s just this, we aspire to be these women. Like, I was really like, ‘That’s, that’s the, that’s the goal, right?’ That’s what it means to be loved and to gain some kind of protection. And this is complicated by family history. It’s complicated by complex intergenerational relationships between women, mothers and daughters. It’s just so telling to me that that was my goal. That was my ambition. To be loved, to be loved, in a way that meant, lying in a bath for twelve hours, to be beautiful in suffering and in retreat. Yeah, sorry, I’m trailing off here, but…

Costello: No, that’s OK.

Robinson: There’s something of…Yeah, I have not yet unpacked it. I would like to emphasize that this book is kind of one phase or stage in a much larger project, long-term of thinking about uncomplicating this, and having a complex relationship to the idea of beauty and to the idea of love. You know, those women led terrible lives…

Costello: Which women?

Robinson: The women who, often the women who were the models for these paintings, but also the women who are the subject of these paintings, fictional, non-fictional, there’s some kind of romance, and they weren’t suffering for their own art, they were suffering for someone else’s.

Costello: In some of your other scholarly work, you have taken a broader view of women in the art world, and in an article you wrote in Runway Journal entitled Labors of Love: Women’s Labor as the Culture Sector’s Invisible Dark Matter, you describe the many ways that women are exploited in the art world, whether through their lack of representation as artists in galleries, whether through the well-documented pay gap that women experience in so many sectors of society, and you also talk about the more hidden ways, what you call the undocumented ways that women are exploited in the art world. You said: ‘It happens in the realm of interpersonal relationships, in the studio, the gallery, or late at night on a laptop in bed. In long unaccounted for hours and work brought home from the office on maternity leave.’ You go on to say: ‘It happens in conversations and meetings where women must appear subtly more humble, more efficient, more dedicated than any of their male counterparts. Such labor cannot be accounted for by statistics alone.’ That was quite a visual, visceral description of women’s work. And I’m wondering, what impact has this invisible labor by women had on the art world? And I’m also just kind of wondering where you think the art world would be without the uncompensated or under-compensated work of women?

Robinson: It would be nowhere. I mean, I hate to sound militant, but it really would be. I don’t know how the art world functions without that labor. And that’s why the title of that piece was taken from a line from a Hito Steyerl essay, The Invisible Dark Matter, that she talked about as women’s labor. It just really struck me when I read that essay, because I don’t know and I didn’t know then, how to measure the kind of work that I was doing, and the kind of work that I was doing was incredibly privileged in some ways. But because incredibly privileged, because there’s this also very complex history of the curatorial class as an upper-class pursuit, it tends to be very underpaid at a certain level, and that old idea of the glass ceiling, it remains in place. So, these really key decision makers, they’ve just not been women, and they make all kinds of decisions about what gets acquired and what gets displayed. And yet underneath them, there’s this enormous infrastructure of women who are really very often curatorial assistants and assistant curators. There were people in the museum where I worked, who were older women who had been assistant curators for decades, they’d never advanced in their careers. Now, I don’t want to make an example of any one person. There’s lots of reasons for that. But the truth of the matter is that we all just worked much longer hours and, wittingly or not, the men who were in power, some of whom I’m incredibly fond personally, had incredibly healthy boundaries with their work that relied entirely on the unhealthy boundaries of the women who worked for them and beneath them. You know, I have memories of waking up in the night, checking my email at 2:00 in the morning, having an email from an international lender, signaling a real crisis in a major exhibition, and just being up all night until it was considered an appropriate time for me to contact my boss. And at this point, I was an assistant curator and he’d been a senior curator, but like the head of a whole portion of the museum for a long, long time. And I simply internalized the idea that his time was valuable, but I had to prep to use his time the most effectively. Now it’s one example among many. The other part of that really is emotional labor, and this is just harder to quantify. How much you internalize things as your fault. How seriously you take certain issues and the interpersonal relationships part of it is complex as well because part of what I was trying to talk about in that essay was not just women who work within the institution in some kind of professional capacity, but also the wives and the long-term girlfriends and the partners of many artists. And we think of this as a very old-world thing, but I’m in my thirties. Many of my contemporary male artists have wives and girlfriends who run their studios, who really like physically make the work. I have physically made the work for men in my life who are seemingly perpetually in crisis. I have seen so many of the women that I love put so much energy into the output of partners. It just eats away at you, you know. It’s not like there’s a singular example, it’s cumulative to see these hidden women. It’s just the normal thing. A studio assistant will often be a woman, somebody who is deeply involved in the production of work, who’s deeply involved in discussion and conceptualization of the work will be a woman. Or somebody who, I suppose I would like to introduce a caveat here about gender rather than sex, and the gendering of particular roles. I mean, I wrote that essay, despite it sounding very, maybe polemical, and distanced, I’ve wrote it from an incredibly personal place at the end of a relationship, where I just felt like I had drained every resource I had and that it had really gone unseen. And I just know so many women whose work and whose practices are diminished in one way or another. And that’s really important. It’s not just important to foreground that experience, and to ask that that experience be changed, but it’s important because of the kinds of stories that are being told, and I suppose that’s how it links back to also the way in which these paintings are displayed, and this history is foregrounded in the museum. The stories that we’re familiar with and that we empathize with still continue to be the stories of men. Now that’s changed a lot in recent years, but the weight of history is enormous. And when you’re in museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that history is the vast majority of what you see. I think I do want to just take a minute to also say that there are women artists in the Met, and there are women artists who I’ve referenced, you know, a very small portion of them, but those women artists have also used the thematic of rape to complicate and speak back to this history, and they speak back to this history from within the museum. It’s just that it’s a really, really small amount of space.

Costello: I think you mentioned five women artists.

Robinson: Yes. Yeah.

Costello: Of the 181 that you critique.

Robinson: Yeah.

Costello: I’m wondering, has the Metropolitan Museum of Art responded to your critique?

Robinson: They did. I believe the journalist who wrote for Hyperallergic, reached out to them for comment, and there was a comment back that was generous in saying: That’s exactly why they’ve made all of this material available. And the Met is, I think, a leader in making this material available. A lot of the images that they have of their collection are available for any kind of use. They don’t use copyright as a way of compressing the kinds of conversations, and I believe the comment was something along the lines of that’s exactly why we’ve made this material available, and we invite this kind of critique. So, I think there is a lot that can happen in the museum space. I do see efforts within that, that are interesting. It remains to be seen how they respond to me showing up out the front with my alternative guide. There’s no simple answer to this. And I also want to just again, perhaps quote actually from the Robin Coste Lewis. This is actually the dedication at the front of my book, she writes, “Instead of the intellectual propaganda we call art history, the more honest, simple and accurate narrative of art, of perception, of projection, in short, the development of our visual subconscious, was hiding right there in plain view, not however, in the imagery, but simply in what the image is called within the signs, within the words.” That’s been taped up above my desk from when I began this project in March of this year. She’s a poet, she’s a wonderful poet and she’s not a museum professional, and I found in some ways it was that little gem of a quote, that little fissure that opened onto the museum space that allowed me also to dislocate from my own visual subconscious, I suppose, and my own museum training and art historical training and training as a really a woman to take certain things for granted and allow them to recede from a site, if that makes sense.

Costello: Macushla Robinson, writer, curator and Ph.D. candidate based at the New School in New York and author of the forthcoming book Every Rape at the Met Museum, I so appreciate our conversation today and your incredibly detailed attention to this very important topic. Thank you so much, and I and I want to thank you for sharing some deeply personal parts of yourself with me today, and for sharing what you did with me about the artist. That’s very painful territory and very highly personal territory, and I’m grateful that you were willing to talk to me a little bit about it today.

Robinson: No, I want to say my pleasure. It’s…pleasure is the wrong word. But I think that it is so ubiquitous and so common and so important to speak about these things. Really that’s the consequence of the idea of the personal being political. Yeah.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

Valentina Di Liscia, “What “All the Rapes in the Met Museum” Tell Us About Sexual Violence in Art History,” Hyperallergic, September 1, 2021.

Macushla Robinson, “Labours of Love: Women’s Labour as the Culture Sector’s Invisible Dark Matter,” Runway Journal, Issue 32.

Guerilla Girls, “Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?,” The Met Collection.

Dan Chiasson, “Rebirth of Venus,” The New Yorker, October 12, 2015.

Katie White, “The Tragic ‘Ophelia’ Epitomized Pre-Raphaelite Beauty. Here Are 3 Facts You Might Not Know About the Mesmerizing Painting,” artnet, October 6, 2020.

Tiny Spark Podcast: “Museums Must Open Doors to Today’s Realities,” October 9, 2018.

On Instagram: macushla_r

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.