Future Memory

The phrase “Museums Are Not Neutral” is both a hashtag and the rallying words of a movement. This mantra has already changed the way museums around the world are visited, curated, and protested. Amplified by our guests Art Worker La Tanya S. Autry and Museum Educator Mike Murawski, the hashtag #MuseumsAreNotNeutral has been engaged more than a million times online by museum curators and educators, and by colleagues in related fields like libraries and archives.

As Autry, who is employed at MOCA Cleveland as the Gund Curatorial Fellow, notes, “I love the expression because it's simple. It's right to the point. I'm actually wearing one of my Museums Are Not Neutral shorts right now and I'm really proud to wear. I do feel like it's in a way a type of armor. It's like this is going to protect me today when I go out there and it lets people know I'm about no nonsense. I'm wearing this message right across my heart and I really mean it.”

Across America and overseas, Museums are Not Neutral is changing the way we think about museums, with tactics that build community and question the traditional role of the museum and museum educators.

Murawski, who is an Independent museum Consultant based in Portland, adds, “Just like La Tanya said, as soon as I see someone with a T-shirt or now with the mug and they're posting online or I come across them at a gathering or event it just feels good because you're connected with at least thousands of people all over the world that are really dedicated to pushing and advocating for change and transformation across museums.”

We speak to Autry and Murawski about the roots of their Museums Are Not Neutral campaign, how they collaborate and build across social media, and how museums can and should transform as spaces of connection.

In Richmond, Virginia, you encounter monuments, old and new – on Monument Avenue one-hundred-year-old Confederate generals stand alongside, since 1996, a statue honoring African American Tennis icon Arthur Ashe. Nearby, Kehinde Wiley’s new statue, Rumours of War, sits outside the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, a new permanent sculpture moved there following its premiere in New York’s Times Square last year.

But the makeup of Monument Avenue may soon change. Just in the last few days, and after years of activism and organizing across the state, Governor Ralph Northam signed a Confederate Monuments Bill. Starting in summer 2020, local municipalities in Virginia can remove, relocate or contextualize monuments as they see fit.

Last year, in anticipation of the shifts at the state level, Richmond’s Mayor Levar Stoney convened a History and Culture Commission. Its chair, Free Egunfemi Bangura, our guest today, is a tactical urbanist who founded Untold RVA. She pursues ways to memorialize beyond bronze and marble. Bangura illuminates the connections between language and power.

“I promised myself I would always become a historian. And so I just feel like that was the earliest part of when I saw that history was going to be controlled by the dominant narrative, and that the dominant narrative was going to do nothing to try to make sure that people had a balanced understanding of their own history, and that you weren't going to learn anything about Richmond or the struggles of Richmond,” says Bangura.

This episode, we speak to Bangura about her work in “Commemorative Justice,” a term she coined. She also breaks down her projects that have left an imprint on Richmond, and how traveling outside of the country has shifted her thinking on her homegrown projects.

Bangura is a Soros Justice Fellow, a bureau chief at the United States Department of Arts and Culture, and 2019 Monument Lab Fellow. We collaborate together, including on an upcoming project called Shaping the Past, a partnership with the Goethe Institute and German Federal Agency for Civic Education.

The Confederate Truce Flag is a little known piece of Americana. It was flown as a white flag of surrender and delivered to the Appomattox Court House, Virginia in April 1865. A piece of it is owned by Smithsonian. It is not as iconic as the Confederate Battle Flag. Artist Sonya Clark wants to change that through her new exhibition Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum.

Ida B. Wells was an investigative journalist, an educator, a suffragist, a truth teller. She was born in Holly Spring, Mississippi in 1862. As an African American woman, she moved to Memphis and then Chicago, as she built a national reputation for her civil rights work. She reported and revealed the horrors of lynching in pamphlets and publications including Southern Horrors and The Red Record. Today, her great-granddaughter, author Michelle Duster, carries on her legacy. She has retraced Wells’ footsteps in the pursuit of justice, including leading efforts in the city of Chicago to dedicate the new Ida B. Wells Drive and to fundraise for a monument to her late great-grandmother in the city’s Bronzeville section.

This week, Duster travels to the University of Mississippi, where scholars and students have organized the Ida B Wells Teach In: A Monument to Justice. We speak with Duster, and two of the organizers, History Professor Garrett Felber and graduate student Beth Kruse. The event was planned in response to an effort to rename the University’s journalism school after Ida B. Wells. It also occurs in the face of a struggle to remove a confederate monument from the heart of campus, all a part of ongoing efforts to seek what they highlight as “reparative justice” for the campus, sparked by Wells’ memory.

We kickoff a new season of the Monument Lab podcast Future Memory with Yolanda Wisher and Trapeta B. Mayson, two renowned former poet laureates of Philadelphia. Wisher and Mayson are the creators of ConsenSIS, a project that summons “sisterly history” to preserve the past and present literary legacy of Black women and femme poets in Philadelphia. ConsenSIS is a part of Monument Lab’s nationwide Re:Generation project, supported by the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project. ​​Co-host Li Sumpter speaks to Wisher and Mayson about ConsenSIS, their upcoming event, The Clearing (inspired by Toni Morrison), and the meaningful historic images and authors that guide their project’s vision.