Abstract
This chapter explores multivocality, when working with refugees, as an approach to challenge and destabilize homogenizing narratives. Museum as Sanctuary is a long-term program at the Tucson Museum of Art that leverages community partnerships to engage refugee audiences through art-making and in-gallery activities. The author will explore how museums can foster multivocal, community-based programs by creating opportunities for participants to share their opinions, observations, and experiences in response to works of art on view and through their own artistic products. The theories of Trinh T. Minh-ha provide a lens for contextualizing the multivocality that emerges from collaborations and that honors difference, builds comfort, supports individual strengths, and welcomes change. Through a methodological blending of critical narrative inquiry and decolonizing theories, the author examines pedagogical strategies that include performance and process in order to unsettle monolithic ideas to make space for multiplicities.
TopIntroduction
As museums begin to reframe themselves as socially responsive institutions attentive to the needs of their audiences, programs have become more focused on collaborating with communities. In order to become more relevant, museums are relying on community-based partnerships to broaden their reach and engage new visitors. As a result, programs and exhibitions are becoming multivocal, reflecting Hooper-Greenhill’s (2000) concept of the post-museum, where “many voices are heard” (p. 144) and “histories that have been hidden away are being brought to light” (p. 145). By incorporating more voices, museums can begin to shed their authoritative and omniscient tone in exhibit and program design, culminating in more complete histories and stories of art objects in the museum.
This chapter highlights excerpts from a multi-year research project focused on a long-term, community-museum partnership called Museum as Sanctuary (MaS), involving the Tucson Museum of Art (TMA), which is a regional art museum in the southwestern US, and a non-profit collaborating organization named Owl & Panther (OP) that specializes in multi-generational, expressive arts programming for refugees affected by torture, trauma, and traumatic dislocation.1 Taking inspiration from Viv Golding and Wayne Modest (2013), MaS situates art museum practice within the realm of social practice, redefining the museum-community relationship as “more than mere consultation and inclusion of diverse perspectives” (p.1). As a result, the program challenges the power dynamics inherent within art museums by problematizing: how objects are displayed; how audiences are positioned within the institution; and how exhibitions are developed. MaS highlights the way in which embracing, displaying, and incorporating diverse narratives from refugees in art museum programming and exhibitions redefines institutional norms so that change is constant, migration is global, and voices from the margins are lauded.
From this point on, rather than referring to myself as author, I will use the first-person perspective in order to combat the false boundaries of the distanced, solitary, and objective researcher. The two-year study that resulted in this chapter hinged on the mingling of voices and perspectives between researcher, or author, and participant. As such what is presented here reflects the belief that “the conditions of research that make such a clinical act possible are also antithetical to the establishment of a genuine two-way dialogue” (Sinha & Black, 2014, p. 473 – 474). Multivocal museums and the nature of community-based programs deconstruct and call into question notions of expertise, a modernist approach to knowledge, and singular truths. Instead, research and by extension museum practice is humanized, personalized, and engaged.
Within this study, perspectives are personal and complicated and to pretend that there is a dissociated author would be counterintuitive to the personal and empathetic approach required to build successful community-based partnerships. Additionally, the term author asserts and reinforces “unequal power relationships” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2009, p. 2), rather than complicating them, which are often the realities of working within collaborative program development. As such, in my practice as a museum professional, I have found that collaboration thrives where voices are multiplied and moments of alignment or overlap are amplified to determine learning objectives and creative projects. In this study, it is important to note that multivocality does not exclude honoring individuality, but rather is an approach to explore and build collaborative networks and activated learning experiences that challenge singular ways of knowing. Within these pedagogical exchanges, process is honored, and performances are enacted in order to engage audiences through community-based programs.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Performance: The enactment of a transformative possibility occurring overtime where there is an unfolding of action. Key to this concept are: a setting for the action to occur; time for the performance to unfold; and actors and audience or perhaps more broadly, individuals, collaborators or communities, to enact and react to events that playout within the performance.
Community Partner/Partner Organization: An on-going and sustained relationship with an organization that often brings new audiences to the museum. Community partnerships should be systemic, strategic, intentional, and thoughtful strategies for reaching traditionally underserved audiences where missions and visions are aligned to ensure success and equity.
Decolonize: An intentional action to destabilize Euro-American dominance and undo or address the legacies of colonial trauma. Within museums this plays out through “truth telling in exhibitions” (Lonetree, 2012, p. 41), diversified expertise, equitable networks of collaboration, and multivocality.
Community-Based Exhibitions: Move away from linear exhibition development, which often relies on a single curatorial voice to conceptualizing exhibitions through collaborative practice that is reflective of partners, audiences, and constituents’ perspectives, ideas, and knowledge.
Edu-Curator: A museum professional who straddles the educational and curatorial disciplines, these individuals value collaboration and visitor-centered practices. For further reading on this interdisciplinary professional see: Villeneuve and Love (Eds.), (2017), Visitor Centered Exhibitions and Edu-Curation in Art Museums .
Community-Based: Communities, or audiences, have an active role in identifying issues that relate and matter to them, which then inform the museum’s approach to program development.
Multivocal: Having many different meanings or interpretations – multivocality speaks to the complexity and multiplicities contained within all individuals and a shifting away from homogenizing narratives.
Community-Based Programs: Are equitable endeavors rooted in collaboration and partnership, which are responsive to partners/audiences needs and leverage each partner’s unique expertise.
Collaboration: The act of entering into equitable relationships, from inception to execution, in order to create programs, exhibitions, or innovative solutions to gaps in services. Collaboration requires transparency, trust, active listening, and shared goals.
Refugee: Someone who has been forced to flee their home country due to war, persecution, and/or violence. Refugees must prove a well-founded fear of persecution due to race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or membership to a particular social group in order to receive refugee status. More often than not, a refugee is unable to return home due to these fears. Note, this differs from immigrant, asylee, and migrant in that must be processed through the United Nations, specifically the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.